Elf and Safety culture comes home to roost

Throughout my adult life in the UK, Health and Safety has risen up the agenda like far faster than the banal topic ever deserved to.

It did so for two reasons:

1) The British attitude of jobsworthiness has long been a core part of our working and middle class culture. Health and Safety fits nicely with this approach to life, allowing people to skive and do naff all on some rubbish pretext they made up on the spot. Only now with added local Government regulation and some unhelpful EU regulation handily gold plated in Whitehall, which enables them to justify whatever fancy has taken them.

2) It is part of the left-wing approach to society, everyone must be 100% safe at all times and if they are not then you are a bastard Tory who is wishing them dead. Subtle, it ain't - but it has been a great platform for common purpose on the left. Allowing huge swathes of pointless bureaucracy to be created and thousands of non-jobs created, which the left always think is the same a real jobs being created, but there we go.

So why do I get on my high horse now? Well over the weekend polls came out suggesting the UK is  the most conservative country when it comes to ending the lockdown. As one of the hardest hit globally, it is not that surprising, but that does not make it a good thing.

Not only do people not want to come out and play again, but the Left Wing unions are using HSE excuses to stop their, um, 'workers' from having to actually drive a train or sell a ticket again. The same is true across a swathe of the economy, including teaching Unions pulling the same trick to keep schools closed and their teachers safely at home (at least teachers can distance educate for older kids). We all can see the business models of restaurants won't work with half the table capacity but that is what is being floated as the obvious course to take.

Whilst the true threat of the virus is real, the day to day threat even now is far, far less than when we started lockdown. Undoing lockdown is tricky to keep opening whilst keeping the pandemic manageable. However, the whoel HSE approach to life is going to keep us living more more seperate and less exciting lives than nescessary due to its ability to let jobsworths indulge their favourite pastime of work avoidance and Unions the power to stop school re-opening or buses and trains running.