Elf and safety
I thought that Boris Johnson and Ed Balls were yesterday's blogs until I saw the carping column written by Johnson in today's Daily Telegraph complaining that Balls was shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted on playground safety.
Balls was only acting, said Johnson, "after 10 years of elf and safety lunacy". That's not quite true. The "pirates" game I mentioned here was banned many years ago, banned, possibly before Boris was fitted for his first tailcoat at Eton. Whether it was banned under a Tory or Labour administration, I cannot remember.
The point I'm making is that health and safety concerns have been a creeping trend in schools, playgrounds, workplaces, public places, you name it, for more than a quarter of a century. And it shouldn't all be blamed at the government.
Ask yourself this Boris: Why are you told to put on a safety belt when you climb in to a plane, even when you go for a snooze, when the same doesn't happen on a train? On every flight there's the same routine about emergency exits, life jacket, whistle, drop-down oxygen masks, when we know that our chances of surviving an air crash are pretty slim.
On trains, where crash-survival chances are much better, there is no-one to tell you about the hammer for smashing the windows - you need to work that one out for yourself - and there are no seat belts. Why?
The answer, I believe, has something to do with human irrationality. People are more afraid of flying than they are of train travel and the safety routine has a soothing effect. Air safety has been much better managed with lessons learned from previous disasters. Train safety has improved also, but it has never extended to cocooning individual passengers.
There's a good book called Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, that outlines a theory suggesting that some of the things we do for protection, such as roping up when descending mountains, can be a bad thing because we become overdependent on the safety measure when we should take more care as individuals. It's worth reading.
Where I did agree with Johnson in his column was his point about degree status expected for nursery-school carers. Why should everyone be expected to have a degree today? I don't have one and I've brought up a family of three kids. Mind you, that might explain a few things.
Balls was only acting, said Johnson, "after 10 years of elf and safety lunacy". That's not quite true. The "pirates" game I mentioned here was banned many years ago, banned, possibly before Boris was fitted for his first tailcoat at Eton. Whether it was banned under a Tory or Labour administration, I cannot remember.
The point I'm making is that health and safety concerns have been a creeping trend in schools, playgrounds, workplaces, public places, you name it, for more than a quarter of a century. And it shouldn't all be blamed at the government.
Ask yourself this Boris: Why are you told to put on a safety belt when you climb in to a plane, even when you go for a snooze, when the same doesn't happen on a train? On every flight there's the same routine about emergency exits, life jacket, whistle, drop-down oxygen masks, when we know that our chances of surviving an air crash are pretty slim.
On trains, where crash-survival chances are much better, there is no-one to tell you about the hammer for smashing the windows - you need to work that one out for yourself - and there are no seat belts. Why?
The answer, I believe, has something to do with human irrationality. People are more afraid of flying than they are of train travel and the safety routine has a soothing effect. Air safety has been much better managed with lessons learned from previous disasters. Train safety has improved also, but it has never extended to cocooning individual passengers.
There's a good book called Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, that outlines a theory suggesting that some of the things we do for protection, such as roping up when descending mountains, can be a bad thing because we become overdependent on the safety measure when we should take more care as individuals. It's worth reading.
Where I did agree with Johnson in his column was his point about degree status expected for nursery-school carers. Why should everyone be expected to have a degree today? I don't have one and I've brought up a family of three kids. Mind you, that might explain a few things.
Labels: Boris Johnson, Daily Telegraph, Deep Survival, Ed Balls, elf and safety, health and safety, Laurence Gonzales, life jacket
posted by Richard Donkin at
7:40 AM
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