The Guardian doesn't seem to be concerned about the insidious culture of creeping health and safety. Zoe Williams attacks Cameron's "elf'n'safety" speech delivered at Policy Exchange, Reducing the burden and impact of health and safety. Williams describes Cameron's speech about "conkers" and "village fetes" as "dim-witted" and a "saloon-bar argument". Her critique of the speech is the same as Simon Hoggart's in his sketch and TUC general secretary Brendan Barber's.
Williams and Cameron in fact agree on the key issue, which has been overlooked in much of the coverage. Williams writes, "it's not legislators who are behind it but day-to-day killjoys, over-interpreting the law because they are desperately cautious". Cameron said, "everyone's so worried about being sued that they invent lots of their own rules on top of the regulations that already exist". Cameron goes on to complain about the "culture" that "stifles judgment, personal initiative and responsibility".
We are in the midst of the rise of experts, inspectors and evaluators who work on the basis that the entire population should be considered irresponsible and devoid of judgment. Safety, hygiene, risk management are apolitical and non-ideological yet the culture it endangers is one that relies on fear – specific and non-specific threats drawing our attention to lurking dangers that we might have been unaware of.
We have become wary of our neighbours, anxious about crime, concerned about sexual deviancy, suspicious of strangers and plausible fraudsters, we do not trust what is put into our food or the safety of the products we buy. No sacrifice is too great to defend our family.
Ben Wilson in his seminal book What price liberty? How freedom was won and is being lost, makes the point that greater social and market freedoms in the modern world exasperate a sense of danger. Today society seeks a "managed/safe freedom", one purged of downsides – offensiveness, accidents, cheating etc.
The sadness of managed freedom is that in the end it reduces our freedom as we no longer feel fully independent or trusted. Cameron put his finger on it when he said at the party conference in Manchester, "we've got to stop treating children like adults and adults like children".
The most pernicious effects of health and safety are not the rules but the mindset manifested in the nanny state. Our tolerance for risk has decreased as we drown in a sea of anxieties and suspicions. In this context it beggars belief that Williams describes Cameron as "crowd-pleasing".
