Health and safety is used as a tool by reactionaries who lie about what it is and what it means in order to avoid thinking about how they may be harming other p

Health and safety is used as a tool by reactionaries who lie about what it is and what it means in order to avoid thinking about how they may be harming other people. > What I suggested in my post last week, was that Safety is not a thing to be “ranked,” but rather, a state of mind, to be applied as needed to a myriad of situations in varying amounts. But if we were to rank it, it would rarely be “first.” Were safety truly “first,” no level of risk would ever be encouraged or permitted, and no work would ever get done. Or play, for that matter. I work in healthcare safety. I speak to many people with a legal, professional, regulatory duty around safety in English NHS settings. Every single one of them describes the problems with people who assume health and safety in the workplace is about banning unsafe practice, instead of being aware of and assessing risk. A healthcare professional wants to set up a group activity (for example, a gardening group) for patients. They ask someone in their management chain and they get told "no, we can't do that, because health and safety. Don't let people touch mud. All those sharp tools! Too risky". They ask someone with a health and safety role and they got told "yep, go ahead. You might want to aware of these things, and it's probably a good idea to get people to wash their hands afterwards, and you'll want to count out the tools and count them back in again at the end, but we have no problems". Here he destroys his own argument: > On Dirty Jobs, I was struck by the number of safety professionals who repeatedly insisted that nothing was more important to them, than my personal safety. “Your safety,” they said, over and over again, “is our top priority.” > I usually heard these words moments before I was invited to walk up the cable of a suspension bridge, or field test a stainless-steel shark suit, or climb into a bosuns chair to wash windows at the top of a high-rise. I still hear them today from pilots who invite me to strap myself in as they attempt to defy gravity in a pressurized aluminum tube that travels through the air at 600mph. And now Roger, I’m hearing them from you. You’re telling me safety must always be first, no matter the cost. So people told him safety was their main priority, and then they strapped him into PPE and allowed him to do dangerous things, because we assess risk and do things that are risky but as safely as we can. He'd have a point if he talked about faulty assessment of risk.