Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Cameron panders to bollocks tabloid mythology

I'm not someone who has particular hopes for David Cameron or a Tory Government, but those dwindling hopes diminish all the further when he comes out with complete crap, as he has done today with his apparent attack on health and safety*.

Because he's not attacking health and safety at all:

In recent years, he added, children had been told to wear goggles to play conkers and trainee hairdressers had been banned from using scissors...
"...When office workers are banned from moving a chair without expert supervision. When staff at a railway station don't help a young mum carry her baby son's buggy because they are not insured.
"When village fetes are cancelled because residents can't face jumping through all the bureaucratic hoops."

So what David Cameron - the leader of the Conservative Party and someone who really ought to know better - has done there, is either deliberately conflate health & safety with a compensation culture and the fear of being sued; or he doesn't know the difference. I think he's intelligent enough to know the difference, and so is pandering to the bollocks tabloid mythology of there being a spectral 'health and safety' brigade who are telling us we can't wipe our arses nowadays without someone telling us not to. The truth, of course, is that some people are too cautious, not because the health & safety bogeyman will come and get them, but because they're too cautious. Sometimes there aren't rules that force children to wear bubblewrap when going ice-skating or make babies wear crash helmets when being pushed in a buggy near a dandelion. Sometimes these stories are stories about well-meaning people just getting things wrong or being over-protective; it's not the Godzilla-like Nanny State here to loom over the buildings and threaten us.

Why go ticking off the tabloid checklist of strawmen? I hope this isn't the standard of campaigning that we're going to see in the general election. It'll be health & safety this week, PC gone mad next week, bloody immigrants coming over here and going straight to the front of the housing queue the week after... is that really what we want? Is that what we deserve? Are we really too thick that we don't
understand slightly more complicated concepts than the myths the tabloids dish out to us?

There's only one way in which it could be worse - if Cameron started taking his agenda from the Express, rather than the Sun or Mail. Then we'd be hearing speeches about the dangers of evil eggs and demanding that everyone should have the right to mushrooms on toast and a bowl of cereal. It's not reached that low. Not yet anyway.

* Note, not 'elf'n'safety'. Littlejohnian fernetick spellings are the mark of a twat. Unless I'm doing them, of course, in which case they're tremendously clever.

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