The extent of David Cameron's antipathy to rules protecting people from sometimes deadly injuries and diseases at work has been exposed this week. Campaigners have accused the prime minister of being 'crass and insulting' after he claimed 'health and safety' bore some of the responsibility for last week's riots. He used a 15 August speech to attack what he claimed was the 'obsession with health and safety that has eroded people's willingness to act according to common sense.' Cameron added that 'as we urgently review the work we're doing on the broken society, judging whether it's ambitious enough - I want to make it clear that there will be no holds barred... and that most definitely includes the human rights and health and safety culture.' Hazards Campaign spokesperson Hilda Palmer said the prime minister's attempt to link social unrest to health and safety rules 'is not only complete rubbish but completely crass and scraping the bottom of the daft ideas barrel.' Citing the case of a satellite dish firm Foxtel Ltd, which was fined £1 this week after the death of employee Noel Corbin, she said: 'Noel's employers went into liquidation therefore avoiding any accountability or paying the penalty for the crime. There's not a get-out clause available to rioters, so why should it be available to killer employers?' She said company safety failings cost society billions each year, adding: 'The government's answer to this is to let employers get away with even more killing, injuring and making workers ill, as well as looting our economy by attacking and cutting health and safety provisions.' Stirling University regulatory policy expert Professor Andy Watterson was also critical of the prime minister. 'It's the lack of a safety culture, as espoused by failing unfettered market principles, that does so much damage, year after year, to public health in the UK, not health and safety,' he wrote in a letter to The Guardian. 'This is particularly disturbing as evidence rolls in week by week about the health and safety failures of deregulated workplaces and the successes of regulated ones.'
