Spokesman Books

Dave Putson, Spokesman, 183 pages, paperback, £15 How many times have the tabloid headlines screamed: ‘Health and safety gone mad!’ The idea that the rules governing our health and safety are an ‘albatross around the neck of British businesses’, as David Cameron announced recently, gives a clue to the reasoning behind the media offensive. Dave Putson’s book, Safe at Work? is a welcome riposte. Putson, a health and safety rep for London courts, traces the development of health and safety legislation, from the campaign to eradicate ‘phossy jaw’ suffered by Victorian match women and legal disputes over compensation, to the role of factory inspectors. Before the comprehensive 1974 health and safety legislation, there was carnage across industry, with death and serious injury at work commonplace. The new laws were an important breakthrough, yet the number of people who still lose their lives or contract serious illness is frighteningly high – in 2012-13 some 148 people died at...

The Spokesman 110 Edited by Tony Simpson ‘Whilst still in opposition, in August 2009, the then Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, argued for what he called ‘progressive’ and ‘fundamental’ reform of public services. The alternative, according to the Chancellor in waiting, was ‘deep cuts in the quality of those services’. Praying in aid Tony Blair and Alan Milburn, who were by then advocating something similar, he said that what was true ‘in the years of plenty’ was doubly true in an age of austerity. Now installed, Chancellor Osborne has set about his austere task with a will. As the comprehensive spending review looks to slice further tens of billions from departmental budgets, the cuts are already scything through public services round the country. Local government workers in their tens of thousands have received Section 118 redundancy notices, as have their counterparts in the Civil Service and sundry quangos. Public service, and all its outworks, is being chopped hard. Osborne shows...