UPDATE: Hello to all those visiting this site on 29th May 2008.  On this date 55 years previous Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

What truly annoys me about this article in the Times though is that at the bottom they give a list of the evils of the nanny state entitled “cotton-wool culture” in which the happily reel off a load of tripe:

— Pantomime artists told not to throw sweets to children in the audience for fear of causing injury

— Children told to wear goggles to play conkers at school

— Teachers told not to hand out plasters in case of allergic reactions

— Hanging baskets banned in case they fall on people

— Parents asked not to bring homemade cakes to school fêtes

— Flowers banned at a hospital in attempt to stop spread of MRSA

— Manufacturers stamp bags of peanuts with warning that they “may contain nuts”

— Children banned from using egg boxes in art class in case they catch salmonella

— Children forced to ride inflatable sheep at a Welsh Donkey Derby

— Gloucestershire cheese-rolling banned for a year

Source: Times database

This is the usual crap spat out during these discussions but even a cursory search shows that most of it is crude.  Bury St Edmunds did not ban hanging baskets and Gloucestershire did not ban cheese rolling.  The stories about the pantomime, the welsh donkey derby, the conker goggles, the homemade cakes and the banning of egg boxes are all cases of individual people or groups deciding for themselves to ban these things with no intervention from the HSE.  In the case of the salmonella egg boxes, the school was told it would be fine as long as they were clean so essentially the children were banned from using raw-egg encrusted egg boxes in art class.  The others are insurance problems. With regards to flowers in hospitals, the NHS has no policy and leaves each trust to decide for itself whether manky water and rotting flowers are a good idea and with the plasters, again a misunderstanding, plasters aren’t banned by any central bureaucracy - the teacher just has to ask if the child has an allergy to plasters before trying to send him/her into anaphylaxis. So that leaves the peanuts containing nuts, although technically a peanut is a pea so really they are mislabeled.

The problem here is not the government, nor is it actually really the insurance companies who are usually said to be at fault in the compensation culture.  The fault lays with the Times and her ilk.  The media prints these stories which just don’t stand up and then they become self-fulfilling prophecies. People read that a kid in Berwick made a conker out of egg boxes during a summer fete and he was run over by a giant wheel of cheese which wasn’t labeled “may contain cheese” and then think “Oh, that must be true, it said so in the Mail.” so don’t go and have fun themselves, and then write into the Times and blame it on the HSE, who write a story about them and blah, blah, blah…

Hopefully, this Risk and Regulation Advisory Council will turn the other way and educate people about real risk in society as perhaps its mum, the Better Regulation Commission intended, unfortunately though I think it will pander to the idiots.

Free Burma

This is my first blog.  It is in support of the Burmese under oppression.

www.free-burma.org