How to Deceive Your Fans in One Easy Step

No doubt you all know of the furore over the Mail on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph reporting that IOSH (the Chartered body for health and safety professionals) advice over clearing snow from your drive. If you don’t, Anton Vowl and uksceptic cover it well.

As you can see on Anton’s first post, Richard Madeley sent forth the notion that this was another case of health and safety gone mad. When IOSH printed a correction on their site, I tweeted the link to Richard, asking him:

@richardm56 Any chance you could tell your followers that the Mail & Telegraph got it wrong over gritting? Ta. http://tinyurl.com/ybtdjch

I didn’t hear anything from him (not that I was really expecting it) and he didn’t tweet anything about how the papers had got it wrong. To be fair to him, he has got over 11,000 followers, so probably gets a number of comments a day. He may have missed it. So on Wednesday I tried again:

@Richardm56 Richard, can you tell your followers that the gritting stories were wrong please? Thanks. http://tinyurl.com/ybtdjch

Again, nothing from his twitter feed, except some nonsense about him taking his Christmas tree down a week late. So on Thursday, I tried another tack:

Asked @Richardm56 twice if he can tweet the correct facts re http://tinyurl.com/ydea78y. Nowt from him. Obviously likes spreading ignorance.

This antagonistic post didn’t raise anything either. Now, this isn’t supposed to be a post about how I can’t get a reaction from a celebrity, but some clarification from him would be nice. As I said earlier, Richard Madeley has over 11,000 followers. The Richard and Judy book club can propel books to the top of the bestseller lists. A lot of people listen to him. If he’s propagating myths, then I believe he has a responsibility to also let people know when he is wrong. Other people on Twitter are only to happy to issue corrections when they have got something wrong, Graham Linehan for example.

In a way, it’s not really about Richard Madeley either. All sorts of celebs make stupid claims that are taken as read by people. Look at Jenny McCarthy and the furore over her anti-vaccination claims. Imagine if someone like Robert Pattison or Jonas Brothers came out with something like that – I’m willing to bet that the vaccination rates amongst teenage girls would fall dramatically. If you know that what you say will be read by thousands of people, surely you have a responsibility to make sure what you are saying is correct? This is why promoting critical thinking is important - so people know that they shouldn't just trust what they read in the papers, or what somebody else tells them, but they should investigate these claims, and make up their own minds.

Conkers Head sends readers goggle-eyed

An interesting piece in the Comment is Free part of the Guardian today, as Shaun Halfpenny, head of Cummersdale Primary School in Carlisle, tells the truth about the "Schoolchildren wear goggles to play conkers" story that, frankly, spawned a monster. Mr Halfpenny, it turns out, was the man who initiated the wearing of goggles whilst playing conkers. Unfortunately, thanks to some digging by Guardian readers, developed in the comments section, it turns out that what he's actually writing is, at best, poorly remembered, and at worst an attempt to completely revise the whole history of the event.

In the Guardian piece, Mr Halfpenny says "It was a child who actually asked if they could wear goggles". This, however, is not what was reported at the time. The BBC covered the story by quoting Mr Halfpenny as saying "I said they would have to wear goggles to play, mainly because they could get bits of conker in the eye. They thought it was a great idea."The Cumberland News also reported that "Mr Halfpenny said he had no choice because of health and safety rules...'The children asked to play conkers in school and I thought it would be really mean if I said no. These days you cannot be too careful, especially when health and safety inspectors are watching.'"

"What are they doing?" "They're playing conkers, without wearing goggles." "Fuck it, that's too dangerous. We're going in."

The BBC also quotes Mr Halfpenny as saying "It's just being sensible", to which the only correct reply is "No it fucking isn't". A few people have said to me "Oh, Health and Safety is just common sense", which is fine, until you spend 30 seconds thinking of some of the idiotic things your workmates do, and then realise that you may have to rely on their "common sense".

The thing that really baffles me about this Guardian piece though is that after having kids wear goggles, Mr Halfpenny then went to the media and told them about it. The "Health and Safety has gone completely over the top" attitude was well underway by then, as shown by this article by Jeremy Clarkson. How the Head didn't realise that the story was going to run and run is frankly, remarkable. It seems in this case, the Head didn't use his, well, head.

Tories go after health and safety, brick by brick

In the time that has passed since I last updated this blog (apologies for that), I turned 28. Time to start getting respectable, stop dressing like a student and acting like a proper grown-up and everything. Well, no. As exhibited by my choice of advent calender, which this year is Lego Pirates (I suppose technically the fact I have an advent calender at all is really an indication that I haven't really grown up yet, but there you go). Honestly, it's great, you get a few bits of Lego each day that make up a character or some Pirate furniture or something. Behind the first window was a cheery Pirate captain. I noticed that the stud at the top of the head of the character was open, presumably so that if a child swallowed it, they wouldn't choke (as much) on it as air would pass through the head. I mentioned this at work, which was obviously a mistake, as people started off on the "Oh, how did we survive all when we were kids" bollocks, before someone launched into an anecdote about how they were in a shop that wasn't allowing anyone under the age of 21 to buy crackers because there's a bit of gunpowder in them and how health and safety has gone too far nowadays. I said it was probably something that the shop had bought in itself, and wasn't part of actual law, a bit like when it was claimed that "Health and Safety" (by which most people mean the Health and Safety Executive) had banned kids in school playing conkers, when that hadn't happened and it was the head of one school that had made children wear goggles when playing conkers until someone had said to him "Don't you think that's a bit daft?" Unfortunately it seemed like the only words of my explanation my work colleagues heard were "goggles" and "conkers" and they went away now believing that all schools had to put kids in some sort of protective coccoon before they went outside, and I was left banging my head against my desk in frustration (metaphorically speaking, obviously).

With ignorance like that, it's no wonder newspapers spray the "Health and Safety gone mad" routine all over their print and web editions. It's so much easier to believe the lie or exageration than to actually find out the truth. What's even more depressing is that the Tories have swallowed all those lies and are now using them to try and win votes. The anecdotes used by Cameron in his speech (and, as uksceptic once said to me, "remember, anecdotes ain't worth shit) are a mixture of half-truths and some rare, slightly over-officious people. But just because a few people are a bit over the top shouldn't taint the whole health and safety industry - you wouldn't say that the guy that you got in to do your bathroom, who made a right mess of it is an example of "plumbing gone mad".

Cameron goes on to say:

The Health and Safety Executive enforces 202 statutory instruments – or regulations: two thirds of these were passed in the ninety-nine years before Labour came to power...

...a third of them in the twelve years since.

Some of these over-officious, bereaucratic nonsense regulations bought are to do with (list from the IOSH website):

Control of asbestos
Decommissioning of nuclear reactors
Offshore safety
Control of lead
Pipelines safety
Control of major accident hazards
Control of noise at work
Export/import of dangerous chemicals

According to IOSH, 180 people died last year in accidents at work. 180. The Health and Safety Executive lists some of them here. That is the real work of the HSE, preventing those deaths and injuries that are all too easy to stop. But Cameron has decided to focus instead on lies and media exaggeration instead.

Buckingham Palace goes Health and Safety Mad

No idea how I missed this one, but a few days ago, the Daily Mail, among others was aghast over Buckingham Palace discarding one of the traditions relating to the Royal Family. So, what tradition was this that has ended up on the scrapheap due to our Politically Correct Loony Left overlords? Maybe the rising cost of stamps has led to the Queen scrapping the sending of letters to people who are celebrating their Hundredth birthday? Have those bonkers bureaucrats in Brussels killed off the changing of the guard due to the Working Time Directive? Are animal welfare groups demanding that Ravens be allowed to leave the Tower of London?

Well, no. The tradition that is being scrapped is the tradition of walking backwards away from the Queen. It's Health and Safety gone mad! Well, maybe. The Mail states that the tradition has become "the latest victim of Health and Safety regulations". Now, it's probably apt for me to admit my interest here. I work as a Health and Safety Officer. As part of my job I have to keep an eye out for any new regulations that may affect the company I work for and make sure we act on them. The best place to find them tends to be here. Although meeting the Queen doesn't really fall under my remit, I'm sure I would have noticed regulations coming through mentioning not walking backwards away from the Queen. So it's not a regulation then. It's a recommendation. Possibly. There's no direct quote anywhere in the piece from anyone described as being involved in the decision, except for a Buckingham Palace "spokesman", who states that "there was no major decision made...the tradition just melted away".

The decision to stop the practice is apparently to stop people bumping into things as they exit and suing the Palace if they get injured or something. Now, I would think that you've got to have balls the size of the Commonwealth to sue Buckingham Palace, but let's be fair, meeting the Queen isn't something that happens to you every day. No matter if you're a fervent royalist, or a republican, you're going to be quite nervous about meeting the Queen. There's a possibility that you may be concentrating so much on walking backwards, you could crash into something and break the antique vase that was a gift to George II from Louis XV. Which would obviously be quite embarassing. So I can see why it might be thought sensible to do away with it.

As any seasoned Daily Mail reader will know, the last couple of paragraphs of a story will often contain the kernels of truth following the foaming hyperbole of Mail reporting. As is the case here. Robin Cracroft-Brennan, from the Heraldry Society, states

"The present Queen has always hinted that she's not particularly fussed by it... I think she takes the view that it's far better for someone to walk normally than to fall over."

Which sort of makes you wonder why the Mail gets that bothered, really.