Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit
IF there is one overriding purpose of a trade union, one might imagine that it is to stand up for the right to work. But not as far as the Transport and General Workers' Union is concerned. It has called on the government to ban the employment on a farm of anyone below the age of 16.
Farmers' children would no longer be allowed to help their fathers round up the sheep, and teenagers would no longer be allowed to seek holiday employment picking fruit. According to the union, it is sad but necessary because of a report by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) revealing that 44 children have been killed on farms over the past ten years.
Concerning though the figures are, closer inspection shows that they do not relate specifically to children who were working at the time of their death: in fact, half of them were under five, which makes it highly unlikely that they were working. The figures include children who were drowned, asphyxiated or killed in falls while playing in places they ought not to have been — a far more hazardous occupation than working under supervision in a lambing shed.
Until the second world war, it was traditional for virtually all children in rural areas to spend August helping with the harvest, without evidence of mass slaughter as a result. If children are to be banned from working, they will presumably have to spend their time playing instead — though they won't be playing conkers in Norwich, since the city council has decided to fell a street's horse chestnuts in the interests of child safety. Perhaps children will end up obliged to play in a padded environment where they cannot possibly hurt themselves — the bouncy castle. Or can they? The HSE's report also says that an average of 204 children a year are taken to hospital after accidents involving bouncy castles.
Ross Clark Ross Clark
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