Elfin Safety

I gather from frothing on Twitter that iDave is talking about reigning in the lunatic madness of Health and Safety regulation. Predictably, tribal lefties are screaming about corporate murderers and how "the workers" will now be electrocuted, thrown into mills, and sacrificed to various frivolous profits.

The Daily Mail tendency are, of course, equally cheered. A triumph over the lunacy of elfin safety will now be won.

The truth is that both sides are wrong. iDave will tinker with the regulations but do nothing substantial.

Why the frothing from the left? Businesses have no particular interest in killing or harming their employees, because dead employees demotivate staff, reduce retention and cost in compensation - at the most cynical and heartless level. And of course, this ignores the fact that employers are human beings as well. So, I don't believe that it's in any way "good business" or profitable not to take a reasonable level of care for your employees.

But the other side of the coin is true as well: do employees not have a duty to take reasonable care of themselves? No person takes a job which says "one of your duties is to stick your arm into this tree shredder", do they? Do employees not have any responsibility in any industrial accident that may happen?

The problem with blindly relying on checkbox regulations is that people assume that they don't have to think about their own safety any more. I would argue that the mere presence of overweening health and safety regulation is that many people assume they don't have to think about their own safety any more.

I don't have a problem with each business clearly articulating the level of risk to each employee and letting them voluntarily transact. Some people have more of an appetite for risk than others. If the risks are crazy, employers won't find staff and will have to do something. But the massive burden of irrelevant, voluminous regulation that applies to all business is just a stupid cost.

Cheeses wept!

This cuntry really is a gutless shit pit of pussywhipped cocksniffers, isn't it?

One of the UK's oldest traditional events has been killed off this year after falling victim to health and safety concerns.

The annual cheese rolling-race, which sees contestants tumble 200 yards down a steep Cotswold hill to try to catch an 8lb Double Gloucester, is to be cancelled for the first time in its 200-year history.

Organisers claim the ancient May Bank Holiday event, held on Cooper’s Hill in Brockworth, Gloucester, has become ‘too popular’ and that the local authorities ‘couldn’t cope’.

Useless cunts.

Who's in charge?

Who's actually running the show here? Because Douglas Carswell, MP, reckons it's not parliament. Most of the rants I've had recently about nanny state interference have involved councils, not government legislators. We have councillors usurping and abusing anti-terrorist laws to spy on made-up rules about waste collection, we have unelected bodies like NICE telling us what drugs we can get out of the huge sums we piss out on the NHS every day, we have elfin safety telling us what kind of goggles we can wear in swimming pools.

And it's not just the egregiously fascist Labour Party that espouses this kind of shit at lower levels. "Call me Dave" is nominally the leader of the Tories, but when Tory-led Cuntcils indulge in this kind of petty fascism, "Call me Dave" just says, "It's got nuffink to do wiv me."

Anybody who thinks things are going to be better under the Tories is sadly mistaken.

Meanwhile, MPs are too busy feathering their own nests and shoring up their gold-plated pensions to give a rat's arse about what happens outside the Westminster Home for the Terminally Feeble. They like to see themselves on telly looking statesmanlike, but they won't expend the slightest effort on stopping the impending train wreck. Meanwhile, further down the devolved (but entirely unaccountable) power chain, unelected organisations, faceless cuntcils, civil servants and charities all vie to see who can fuck the man in the street a) the hardest and b) around the most.

Sooner or later it's going be pitchforks, tapers, piano wire and lamp posts. And these jumped-up little Hitlers better watch out, because we're not going to stop until every single one of the little fuckers is swinging in the breeze. And "just following orders" didn't work in the late 40's, it sure as fuck won't work with us.

Some of us are already angry. When too many of us get angry, you're going to have to hope that what you're doing to us today was worth it.

Rocking back and forth, keening

Jesus wept:

For the past 44-years, villagers in Dymchurch, Kent, have celebrated the character of Dr Syn, a quiet village vicar by day and a smuggler hero by night, who was created by local author Russell Thorndike.

Dr Syn galloped through seven novels, donning a scarecrow disguise to avoid excisemen and soldiers as he and his desperate band of night riders bought food and drink to starving villagers.

On the second August bank holiday of every other year, a resident of Dymchurch has dressed as Dr Syn to gallop along a nearby beach and ride through the streets for a Day of Syn celebrating the hero.

However, this year, his exploits were curtailed after insurers decided it was too dangerous, leaving Dr Syn instead forced to walk.

Ian Hyson, Chairman of the Day of Syn, said: "For 44 years Dr Syn has burst into the festival on horseback. He is the main show and when he makes his entrance people are truly overwhelmed.

"He has been on horseback since 1964, but this year the insurers just did not want to know because they said riding a horse was a 'severe' health and safety risk. Only one insurer would listen and they quoted us £1,000.

How did we get by all these centuries on dangerous horses without the sage advice of elfin safety to protect us, eh?

I am not making this up

?????????

A council allegedly refused to clean up a dustbin that fell into a four inch stream because no-one "qualified" to wear wellington boots was available.

And ...

"I spoke to someone from the department dealing with fly-tipping and he said - and I quote - 'We don't have anyone qualified to wear wellington boots'. I said: 'But it's only four inches deep'.

"Then he said that the problem was that they also needed harnesses and ropes to stop them getting washed away."

Are they all fucking mad in Chichester?

Saving lives is less important than Elfin Safety

There really are days when I wish I hadn't read the papers:

A volunteer coastguard crew face disciplinary action after going to the rescue of a teenage swimmer in a boat that had recently been repaired and was awaiting a seaworthiness inspection.

I'm sorry? They're facing disciplinary action for rescuing a teenager?

The four crewmen were on duty at Hope Cove in South Devon when the 15-year-old girl was swept out to sea by a powerful rip tide. They braved heavy surf to launch their 17ft rigid inflatable.

The girl was rescued by a diver and the coastguard crew brought her ashore. But within hours their boat had been confiscated and the station officer and his crew had been threatened with disciplinary action.

Er, er, er ...

The boat had been out of service since June and the 11-strong crew, fed up with waiting for it to be repaired by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), spent £2,000 of their own money on the work. But the repairs had yet to be approved and the boat - which has rescued more than 120 people since 2000 – was languishing in the boathouse at the pretty fishing village awaiting a further inspection.

What? What the fuck???????????? So these people who voluntarily risk their lives to save people, and voluntarily risked their lives after spending their own fucking money because the cunts who were supposed to do it couldn't be arsed to stick their hands in the till or get off their cunting fat gobshite arseholes to inspect it, are now facing disciplinary action??????????????

Ian Pedrick, 49, the station officer, radioed for permission to launch the boat because the girl was already 150 yards out to sea but the crew lost radio contact with coastguard headquarters at Brixham and went ahead with the rescue.

My guess? The coastguard headquarters spouted this elfin safety shite and Mr Pedrick (more power to his elbow) just decided that saving someone's life was more fucking important. Good for you my son.

Within three hours the boat was towed away by a senior MCA officer and is now locked in a garage at their office five miles away in Kingsbridge.

You fucking what? You can't be arsed to a) pay for it, because that's your job or b) inspect it, because that's your cunting job too, but you're there right sharpish to cart the fucking boat away and leave the place without any kind of rescue option?

Are these fucking cunts mad, or what?

Mr Pedrick, who runs the Hope and Anchor pub near the beach, said that he had been ordered by the MCA not to comment on the incident.

Never mind, Mr Pedrick, I think we can guess how you feel.

Dave Clark, aged 54, a recently retired coastguard, said: “Everyone in the village is very angry. They feel the crew are being punished for trying to save a life.

“The boat at Hope Cove is vital because it takes 25 minutes for the lifeboat to get from Salcombe and a swimmer could easily drown. When the MCA withdrew the boat in June they said it would be for six weeks but the crew wanted it back as soon as possible so they paid for the repairs themselves.

“They were then told it had to stay off service until it was surveyed and that would have taken it out for the whole of the summer season. Anyone would have done the same thing when they saw the girl in trouble.”

A spokesman for the MCA said: “The health and safety of the boat crews and those who they may render assistance to is of paramount importance.”

He added: “Search-and-rescue effectiveness will not be compromised by the suspension of the general purpose boat. These general purpose boats are additional facilities and are not generally used as part of the first response to an incident.

“We have identified serious breaches of health and safety procedures and they are currently being investigated. The boat has been stood down for a further eight weeks while we investigate the possibility of repair or replacement.

I don't have the energy to comment on the rest of this moronic imbecility on a point by point basis. But some points do stand out:

• Why would it take the MCA six weeks to get the boat fixed when the crew could get it fixed quicker?
• Why could the MCA not get someone to inspect the boat after the crew paid to get it fixed?
• Why was a senior MCA official available at short notice to remove the boat, rendering the village at far greater risk of having to cope with the aftermath of a drowning?
• Will the senior MCA official who carted off the boat be the person to explain to the parents of a drowned child why elfin safety box-ticking was more important than their child's life?

I think that any sane person would give the volunteers a medal, string the MCA boat-napper up from a lamp post on the harbour wall and set fire to MCA offices around the country.

Fucking cunts.

Even more from Elfin Safety

Hot on the heels of Ian PJ's post comes this gem from the Telegraph:

A group of pensioners have had to abandon their weekly game of cards after being charged £250 to cover the cost of health and safety.

The 14 whist players - aged between 70 and 90 - met every Friday for almost 10 years in a communal room at a sheltered housing complex in Norfolk.

But officials at Neville Court, in Heacham, told the group they must pay liability insurance for all those who did not live at the complex before they could meet again.

If I were ever in charge of this country, I'd arrange for these nameless "officials" to be left in the stocks for a month with copious quantities of rotten eggs and tomatoes and large stones easily to hand.

Cunts.

More from Elfin Safety

Via Ian PJ:

In the "old days", when God was an Englishman who loved to watch cricket, those who attended church could be sure of a robust sermon promising "fire and brimstone" delivered from the pulpit by a crusty old vicar.

However, in Nanny's Britain, such a verbal ear bashing is now rather unlikely.

For why?

Nanny's chums from the local council's health and safety orifice have decreed that the pulpit in the Church of All Saints, in Wyke Regis Weymouth, presents a clear and present danger to the health of the vicar.

The church has been forced to draw up guidelines after being warned by council officials that the pulpit is "dangerous", and that preachers might be injured while climbing its seven spiral stone steps.

In case you are wondering about the safety record of the church, it was built in 1172 and the pulpit was added in the 16th century; there have been no recorded injuries to any member of the clergy mounting the pulpit during this time.

One wonders quite how mankind has survived before Nanny's health and safety Gestapo were created!

Notwithstanding the unblemished safety record, Nanny insists that a modern handrail be added to the pulpit.

As an alternative, churchwarden Gary Hepburn drew up his own safety guidelines.

These state that no one under the influence of drink or drugs will be allowed to use the pulpit. The steps shall not be approached in dim lighting, by anyone with poor vision or wearing bifocals, or by anyone feeling unwell.

Those entering or leaving the pulpit are advised to make maximum use of the structure itself, and the stone column supporting it to steady themselves.

You will be pleased to know that the inspectors from the environmental health department of Weymouth and Portland Borough Council have been mollified by these guidelines, Mr Hepburn happens to be a health and safety consultant.

He said:

"The issues were raised when a visit was carried out by council officials on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive. They were looking at the building and its use in relation to the dangers that might be present in a workplace, which is not comparing like with like, in my humble opinion.

The most contentious item was the pulpit and there was no way the church authorities were going to allow a horrible plastic and metal handrail to be installed, so we had to try an alternative tack.

In my professional capacity, I knew the type of things that needed to be said to reassure the inspectors and the way in which they should be expressed.

Fortunately my Safe System Of Work pamphlet was successful and normal service has been resumed – although I must admit even my faith was sorely tested at one stage."

What a waste of time and money!

Nanny is determined to destroy our cultural heritage, and the fabric of our society.


For this and hundreds more side splitting examples of how Nanny and her 'elf and safety' Gestapo operate go visit the excellent Nanny Knows Best website.

Nanny really is a comedian, we are sure that all elf and safety operatives must now attend 'diverse comedy courses' before being let loose on the public. Treat them with the contempt they deserve, a real joke.