Health, Safety and being a Good Samaritan

I was reflecting upon health and safety in the workplace  when it occurred to me that the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan has something to say on the matter.  

To remind the reader, it is a story related by Jesus of a traveller who is robbed and beaten on the highway and left half-dead. Two of his own countrymen, one a priest, sees him but passes by on the other side of the road. It is a Samaritan, a person whose nationality would traditionally make him hostile to victim, who takes pity, attends to him, cleans his wounds, brings him to a place of safety and pays for his further treatment.

None of us would ignore an injured or sick work colleague if we came upon them but a lot of the bread and butter of health and safety work is drawing people’s attention to actions and conditions that are hazardous and will, eventually, cause injury or illness. In this matter, I believe that too many of us still act as the countrymen of the crime victim and pass on the other side. Especially the priest, who equates to a manager who is aware of an issue or bad practice and decides to look the other way. Part of our job, every one of us, is to address matters of safety as soon as we become aware of them and not to run the risk of our colleagues ending up like a beaten mess.

It strikes me also that there are applications as far as our health services are concerned. We rely upon the NHS to treat us, to heal our injuries once they occur. There is an excellent culture of health and safety within the health services and the sector is a leader within human factors. Unlike industrial health and safety, most of the huge amount of resources are spent in treatment and not in prevention. Surely if this was turned around, then fewer of us would be sick, lives would be lived more healthily and stress would be reduced upon both staff and resources. It would however mean that the government would have to be more prescriptive. Instead we find examples such as the watering down of the recent sugar tax and another one being the delay to improvements in housing build standards. In putting the lobbyists for the food and housing sectors before the public interest, government is guilty of walking by on the other side. 

The most delicious parallel to the story of the Good Samaritan and the workplace, indeed also to government,  is the person who asks Jesus “And who is my neighbour?” It was a lawyer. 

The parable of the Good Samaritan, and indeed who is one’s neighbour, is a lesson that the current Home Secretary, barrister Sue Braverman, should take onboard. 

The parable of the Good Samaritan is to be found in the New Testament, the Gospel of Luke, Chapter Ten. 

Back to Political Basics. Two: Housing and Poverty

 Interesting fact from last night’s Westminster Hour (BBC Radio4, 22:00hr, 11th of December). Across the UK there are one million planning permissions for new homes that are currently active. There is of course a long-standing housing shortage and has been for many decades. Why is this? It certainly is not because bureaucracy and red tape is standing in the way. 

Housing, whether a flat or house, lies at the root of poverty in the United Kingdom. The condition of one’s home, whether it suffers from damp, how much it cost to heat, whether it is big enough, all feed into a family’s level of health, both mental and physical. It is shocking that a young boy, Awaab Ishak, died this year of mould inhalation, despite his parents putting in multiple appeals for help from the responsible housing association. An extreme case but illustrates the point: a warm, well-insulated dry home supports good health and reduces pressure on local health services. The same is true on the other end of the age range: a well-designed home, with enough space to facilitate walking aids and a wheelchair, help the infirm and those of advanced old-age stay in their homes for longer. 

Important too is the location of a home. The national census aids central government and local authorities allocate necessary services but it is a truism that we all need good local schools, access to health services, and reasonable transport routes for the majority of people who are not able to work from home. Required also is access to supermarkets. While there is often grumbling if a new supermarket goes up in a more affluent area, poorer estates and rural locations are often in desperate need of easy access to the cheaper food that comes with sophisticated supply chains. 

A house is the most expensive purchase for the vast majority of people they will ever make. Whether one owns or rents, the monthly payments we make accounts for a larger part of one’s pay packet, and this is particularly true now interest rates are on the rise. The threat of losing one’s home is a constant pressure because it is easy to see what the outcome is when it goes wrong: people end up on the streets, or families are packed into single rooms of bed-and-breakfast by local authorities, sometimes for years. 

So, my question is this. Since housing is so vital to the health, prosperity and prospects of literally all of us, why is the construction of new homes, and the management of rental accommodation, left largely to market forces? If you can afford it, fine, go out and buy a nice home for yourself. Most people can’t, not without taking on massive amounts of long term debt. That debt may not end with retirement. Either one’s home has to be sold in order to cover the cost of longterm care, or people take out a lifetime mortgage to cover the cost of no longer earning. Either way, it means that increasingly for the next generations, the cycle of struggle to keep a roof over one’s head starts again. 

It is clear that the major house building companies do not act with a view to long term social responsibility. They act to maximise their profits. Which is fine. However, it is a shame that successive governments continue to fail to act to address the injustices that market forces continue to create. It is perfectly feasible for government to all this, as occurred after the end of World War II. The current system that the UK has results in poor and expensive housing outcomes for the majority of people in the UK. 

This cannot, should not, be allowed to continue. 

Back to Political Basics. One: The Environment

In the last couple of years, I have been taking a break from active politics. Unfortunately in life, politics does not return the favour. Predictably, following the hardest possible Brexit introduced by the Conservatives, people in the UK are getting poorer and standards, of regulations, of political ethics and accountability, and of living are getting lower and lower. 

This blog however is not intended to indulge in party politics. Sitting back and viewing the current field, I don’t think any of the UK’s political parties have covered themselves in glory recently. So, I am going to ask the big question: what should we be campaigning about? Both the global and UK contexts will be considered. 

This was meant to be a single blog post but, having started, I realise that it is going to be part of a series. There is too many areas to cover.  The aim though is to focus attention on the things that are the root issues. That is not to say that other things do not matter but in themselves are part of the bigger picture. For instance, when it comes to tackling poverty, education, healthcare, and housing are all part of the issue and solution. 

All the challenges that we face are interdependent but let’s start though with the environment. Without a healthy environment, it will be difficult to sustain human life and civilisation. You may ask why I don't lead with the rise of CO2. It is vital to reduce and reverse CO2 output but again, there is no simple solutions. Each section of these blogs will have this global problem interwoven with the issues being addressed. 

This year has seen the birth of the eighth billion person to be alive on this planet. As many has pointed out and for a long time, the human population of the planet continues to grow. The driving force for this is not increasing birth rates but the elderly lasting longer. None of this is controversial, go and look it up. So if we are as a global society are to preserve the health of the planet, and ultimately our societies and ourselves, biodiversity has to be cherished and the trend in species extinction to be reversed. While there is understandably a lot of focus on the melting ice sheets and warming of the Arctic and Antarctic, the causes are to be found elsewhere. 

1. We must conserve the world’s forests. The major woodlands of the boreal and tropics are both major carbon syncs and the focus of biodiversity on the continents. They continue to be cut down globally. This must stop. In the British Isles, we have over the centuries all but destroyed our natural woodlands, resulting in some of the poorest biodiversity in Europe. There is talk of re-wilding projects and these should go ahead, at all scales. Whether it is the use of micro forests in urban parklands or the replanting of upland woods, long scalped by sheep grazing and grouse moors, these are necessary to returning these islands to environmental health. 

2. Perhaps even more importantly, the global oceans are in deep trouble. Seventy percent of the world’s surface is covered by water and the oceans average a depth of five kilometres. As such, it is a far more important carbon sync than any forest on land, but still is less well understood. Of the global fisheries that have been studied, six percent are under-fished, sixty percent are fished to the maximum limits of sustainability, and the remaining thirty four percent are over-fished. There are studies suggesting that bottom fishing is disturbing carbon sedimentation, releasing CO2 back into the environment. What is worse, few seem to be asking the question how much fossil fuel is the global fishing fleet burning while fishing? For us in the UK, the relatively shallow waters of the North Sea and adjacent Atlantic are an important nursery for many species.

Both woodland and oceans are important carbon syncs and centres of biodiversity. With the UK being an island nation it is vital that we play a major part in regional conservation. Ironically enough, this means further restricting industrial fishing in the surrounding seas. Of the seventy six marine protected areas designated by the UK government, only four of them are currently protected from bottom trawling and dredging. Therefore it can be concluded that the other seventy two marine protected areas are in name only. 

I use the term ironic because the fishing industry was used as a political touchstone to justify Brexit. Sorry about this folks but Brexit probably means, along with restricting our ability to export UK seafood, that the necessary expansion of marine reserves will, in the short term at least, mean even more restrictions on the fishing industry than currently exist. The resetting of our fisheries will ultimately mean more healthy and sustainable fisheries in the longer term and a healthier planet. 

Dragons

Brexit is going as expected. Ruined trade, broken pledges and ongoing assaults on human rights and the rule of law. It has led me to reflect on the root causes, and I mean the real baselines of what is going on.

After the vote to leave but before we actually did in 2020, the British public were promised many things. That we would be free of regulation from Brussels and ‘unelected bureaucrats’; a free nation negotiating exciting and buccaneering trade deals across the globe. Now, let’s take that all at face value. Could this government have predicted Covid19? Well, they were not the only government that missed the warning signs, so let’s be generous and say that a lot of countries were caught with their collective pants down. This blog post will not go further: it is not an attempt  to critique the government’s performance on Covid.

Less forgivable is the current energy crisis. This government has been in power since 2010. Up to 2015, The Conservative / Lib Dem Coalition mainly continued the previous Labour administration policy of encouraging renewable energy development, while mainly relying upon gas-fired power stations to deliver the majority of supply and nuclear power to deliver baseline electricity. While inadequate in many ways, at least there was a continued shift away from fossil fuels. Come the summer of 2015, after the Liberal Democrats were roundly punished by the British public, the Conservatives under Cameron got rid of the ‘green crap’. Support for small and medium scale renewable development was severely curtailed. The emphasis is, to this day, on only promoting large-scale renewable energy, deliverable only by corporations. While there still has been progress, it has been mainly in the area of offshore wind, with some solar. With the continued decline of North Sea oil and gas, any other shortfall is now made up by building electrical interconnectors to neighbouring nations and importing the deficit. In short, Britain is now more firmly plugged into the European energy grid than ever before, and with proportionally the highest level of fossil fuel imports since the 1970s. From 2004, the UK became a net importer of energy and as of 2018, 90% of UK imports has been in the form of oil and gas.  

Where does this all relate to Brexit? Basically, for if there was for any chance of a positive outcome for Brexit, it would rely upon only the UK changing and the rest of the world basically staying the same. So while in terms of a global pandemic, it might be acceptable to give the Brexiters a pass, the same cannot be said of the current energy crisis. Why? Because there are always energy crises: OPEC in the 1970s, Iran and the subsequent Iran-Iraq War, the first Gulf War, Gulf War II, and now Ukraine. Energy crises are unpredictable in timing but like buses, they turn up in the end. In not addressing the issue seriously, in a fundamental sense the negligence of this Conservative government has put the national energy supply at risk and has sentenced us all to the massive price rises that we see today. 

I could end this post right here but that is not what I set out to write. There is another perspective and this is the one which I have proposed since the start: that Brexit is designed to take Britain, us, to our knees. In previous blogs I have described Brexit as a coup, and there is nothing that has happened since that has persuaded me otherwise. The Ukraine crisis is being used by Johnson as a human shield in his very public support for the Zelenskyy regime, and the struggle against the Russian invasion and Putin’s naked aggression. Human rights are being crushed by the Police Bill which basically sets out to outlaw protest, and the assault of refugees by calling them illegals. Universal human rights are just that: universal. To take away human rights of some is an assault upon all. Hence the proposal for the UK to withdraw from the ECHR is a declaration of war by the government against every citizen. Just look at what Gove is proposing with the UK version of GDPR. By allowing the concept of vexatious challenges, and thus allowing corporations to charge individuals each time a person upholds their current rights, privacy basically will become the preserve of the rich. So we come to the point of Brexit: freedom. Freedom for corporations and the extremely rich, not for the masses. 

What do the massively rich want to do with this freedom? This is the nub of the question. The current setup certainly does not inhibit anyone in terms of enjoying luxury. What do they want?

I was watching an old movie from the early Nineties the other week, The Silence of the Lambs. 

Hannibal Lecter:

First principles, Clarice: simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius, "Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?" What does he do, this man you seek?

Clarice Starling:
He kills women.

Hannibal Lecter:
No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does, what needs does he serve by killing?

Clarice Starling:
Anger, social acceptance, and, uh, sexual frustration.

Hannibal Lecter:
No, he covets. That's his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet?

It is the same with the very rich and those who want to be. They covet. And as a society we have allowed this, one of the seven deadly sins, to become a virtue. What is more, the EU put limitations on corporate covetousness. It is true, these limits are not very strict but they exist and to organisations and people that are consumed by covetousness, that is intolerable, or, as former Conservative minister (now Lord) Eric Pickles described it, communism. 

We have so idolised the sin of covetousness that as a nation there are many that are willing to support the destruction of human rights and our standards of living in the hope of benefiting from the current chaos and destruction, and to see destroyed those that stand against this grand project.

In Western mythology, there is a creature that embodies covetousness. They destroy in order to acquire what they desire and once wealth is gained, they do not tolerate challenges to their power and they certainly do not share. 

The United Kingdom is rapidly becoming the abode of dragons.