This cult of safety has risen inexorably alongside the bloated state, the proliferation of lanyards dangling from corporate necks like talismans or morality nooses, – I mean look at us here, at the Margaret Thatcher Centre all proudly wearing our own blue ropes – and the insidious creep of human resources culture. HR departments, those modern inquisitors, enforce “safe spaces” where dissent is heresy, and risk assessments stifle innovation and free speech goes to die. It’s a world where playgrounds are padded to absurdity, and employees are trained not in skills, but in avoiding offence. This isn’t safeguarding; it’s societal strangulation, a slow garrote on the British spirit.
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Samizdata quote of the day – What is safe?November 22nd, 2025 |
 12 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – What is safe?Leave a Reply |
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I am a T2 diabetic and I do not identify with the offendatrons in this post on the, otherwise excellent, Diabetes Support Forum.
https://forum.diabetes.org.uk/boards/threads/disgusting-christmas-card.120129/
Remembering old ways:
“First, do no harm.”
First.
Safetyism has some old roots.
@bobby b
Safetyism has some old roots.
You aren’t suggesting that it hasn’t gotten a lot worse in the past fifty years, right?
I think something that is missing is that safetyism can sometimes make things worse. I used to have to slog through those anti sexual harassment courses. I did this by not listening and skipping through as best I can. Which is what most people do. But of course sexual harassment is a real thing that many women and homosexuals in the workplace do suffer from. So a course the honestly and simply addressed the issues would I think be useful. Instead we get a huge two hour behemoth of a course filled with so much crap that no person with actual work to do can possibly go through it. So it has the absolute opposite effect than it is intended, at least on the surface. Of course the real reason these courses exist is to check a box to prevent a lawsuit, which is actually the real foundation of most of that safetyism stuff.
In California you will notice on building entrances a notice saying some thing like “The State of California has determined that this building has been constructed with materials that have been shown to cause cancer.” Which, one can imagine, is good information to have. Except that the same notice appears on literally every public building, so it is in fact completely useless.
My favorite example though is that in the Whole Foods I (very, very) occasionally shop at they had this place you could buy peanuts, and they had a machine right there where you can put the peanuts in and it’ll grind them into fresh peanut butter. The sign said “Fresh Georgia Peanuts: Grind them into peanut butter and enjoy that delicious peanut butter taste on your sandwiches. Fresh peanut butter, so much better than the rest!” Then underneath in small type it says “Warning, this product may contain peanuts.”
So the thing to remember is a lot of this safetyism, especially in litigious America is far more to do with protecting the company from lawsuits than it is about actually providing safety, often to the point that the safetyism makes things less safe.
@Fraser Orr
Those California “May Cause Cancer” signs are the result of a particularly stupid Proposition about 30 years that was organized and paid for by a bunch of crank “environmental safety” organizations. I mean even by California crank standards they are total loons. That nuts.
I remember a very funny interview with the guy who invented the standard test for carcinogenicity. He stated that almost every vegetable, fruit, legume, grain etc in the local Whole Foods / “Health Food” store would be found to be “carcinogenic” if tested by the state. As for “health supplements”…
He went on to explain that the human body has evolved over millions of years to deal with a very wide range of potentially carcinogenic agents (such as 95%+ of the ones labeled as “dangerous” by the CA law) and that he developed his test purely to flag novel organic and inorganic molecules that dont occur naturally that might need further monitoring. They might cause problems. But probably wont. Due to the bodies built in protection mechanisms.
So the CA law is total garbage from a scientific point of view. It been considered a joke in California since it was passed. The fact that coffee had to be labeled as “potentially carcinogenic” was the last nail in the coffin.
So just like the misuse of the PCR test for low prevalence scenario testing. Were the results are statistically meaningless. Rather than as a high prevalence scenario confirmation test. Were the results have real statistical meaning. As a confirmation test. Which is how it was used before 2020
Science + Politics always equals Junk Science
There is, unfortunately, no limit to this as no matter how padded we make the environment there are always more ways for someone to get hurt. So unless something is done this will carry on getting worse, with obvious impacts on productivity – both directly and by increasing the overhead costs of safety officers etc..
The notorious ‘they’ put up signs warning of ‘deep water’ or ‘cliff edge’ because that is much cheaper and marginally more sensible than building miles of fencing across and around the country.
I’m waiting for smart cars to display safety messages about the risks of driving – and the warnings must be acknowledged before the car will start. Too absurd? Probably not.
At has old roots – but it has also got worse. And it is not just a matter of “do no harm”.
Even back in 1875 the British government (Prime Minister Disraeli – if he bothered to read the Act of Parliament he pushed) demanded that local authorities undertake about 40 functions – whether local taxpayers wanted to fund them or not, so much for “government responsible to the taxpayers”.
Even further back, in the 1830s, London (Lord Stanley, later the Earl of Derby, and his friend Lord Russell – one a Tory, the other a Whig in party politics) decided (in 1831) that Ireland should have a system of state schools – whether the local people wanted this system or not, and then (in 1838) a Poor Law Tax (which later exploded – in the late 1840s) – again imposed.
But it is not true to say that things have always been awful – things have indeed got worse in recent decades. For example one now needs “license” even to be a nightwatchman (which I was – for years, it would be illegal for me to have such a job now) and to get this “license” one must pass a course – with all the expected DEI excrement (that bovine excrement even got into the Covid Inquiry – because the insane laws say it must go everywhere).
Britain 40 years ago was a much freer country than it is now.
Yes – it is normal in history to say “in some ways we have become less free, but it other ways we are more free”, “on the one hand – but on the other hand”.
But over the last 40 years in the United Kingdom that is NOT true – we have got less free (full stop) there is no “in some ways” or “on the other hand”.
I always thought that really obvious allergy information is there simply because it’s simpler and easier to just label everything rather than have to draw a line somewhere and have someone being responsible in deciding whether something is obvious or not. On egg boxes it says “Allergy information. Contains egg. Similar to how, at my local gym, prior to getting an upgraded filtration system for the pool it was compulsory to wear a swim cap. Much mirth ensued at the end of the masters swim class when I took off my cap to reveal a shaved head. It was just simpler to have everyone wear a cap than to monitor short haircuts for exceptions.
The last major pro liberty move in the United Kingdom was Nigel Lawson’s tax cutting budget of 1988 – and this did NOT lead to the bust of 1989 which was due to monetary policy (Credit Money expansion), not fiscal policy (reducing taxation and government spending as a proportion of the economy).
The vote for independence from the European Union in 2016 COULD have been a pro liberty move – but, tragically, we got “Brexit” rather than independence, European Union laws and policies remained in force – incorporated into British law. Getting “Brexit” rather than independence was one of the worst let-downs of my life, I wish I had not lived to see it – although I was foolish (very foolish) in not understanding that the use of this word “Brexit” rather than independence really meant independence was NOT the objective, that it was all a vast confidence trick. If independence had really been the objective – that is the word that would have been used, I understand that now – but, at the time, I did not really understand. We do not control our borders or anything else – there is no independence, the United Kingdom is not an independent country, it is under the accursed International Community (of which the European Union is also a part).
Still the 1988 budget remains – it was a real pro liberty move, even though such dreadful things as the Single European Act of 1986 (removing the British veto from E.U. legislation) and the so called “deregulation” of the City of London (really a massive INCREASE in government intervention into what had been private clubs, such as the London Stock Exchange, and the replacement of self employed traders and partner owned merchant banks, with international, ownerless, corporations joined-at-the-hip-with-governments) was already under way.
Nigel Lawson also campaigned against the international totalitarian “Climate” agenda – he was a good man. I hope he is in a better place.
Safetyism, and the whoring out of the poor ol’ precautionary principle, are not just bureaucratic phenomena tho, and the mechanism driving them is far more than just fear of liability.
It has to do with the ascendant personality type of wokeness, or the Intersection as I prefer to call it. The Cautious Claras in charge of major institutions these days draw their sense of virtue from ‘protecting’ others. Well, there is virtue in protection — protection of infants, or the frail elderly, for example.
But the Intersection wants, and needs, to do much more protecting than that. Protecting an ever-growing number of individuals and groups is how the commissar gangs increase their power; it’s fuelled by the individuals within ’em needing to feel righteous.
Hypervigilant Harry’s job may be to look out for hikers, or schoolkids, or new drivers; but he’s much more important when he also protects transsexuals, Palestinians, and the obese, isn’t he?
The danger in this line of thinking, and it is very dangerous, is that protecting people from hazards will not long suffice. Free, prosperous societies are hard to predict, but by definition not inimical.
So the ambitious Intersection agent soon must graduate, from merely minimizing material danger, to protecting (some) people from (other) people. Muslims need the Intersection’s protection from Islamophobes, for example, as Pacific Islanders need protecting from oil workers, and migrant lawbreakers from non-migrant law enforcers.
So safetyism’s remit expands and expands. Once-rational societies dissolve as though put in boiling water, as the multiplying beneficiaries of Intersection protectiveness are encouraged to name the danger they face. Which must be the landlords. Or the loggers. Or the whites. The logic of the Intersection proceeds from this, that there can be no victims without persecutors. And if you must live alongside your persecutors, how will you ever be safe?
Earnest Canuck – yes indeed.