UK Politics Thread (Part 3)

Funny that the insult “gammon” is allowed on here.

But hey hey, I’m used to it.

Play the fucking ball, if you can.

I don’t know what your city is. I’m guessing Nottingham?

Risk assessment? Me? In my industry?

Nah, It will be fine……

No, I prod the fuckers up chimneys.

An absolute shit hole. Good god.

RA’s are completely necessary where the situation dictates.
But, the amount of productive time lost performing unnecessary RA’s for repetitive tasks, many of which have been performed only a few hours earlier is eye watering.

HSE in my industry is a monster out of control.
The majority of HSE advisors are either failures in other disciplines, or taking the feet up career route, creating constant operational delays to justify the numbers and their mere existence.

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Yes. We’ve just lost three lives this week, with another in critical care, to someone with severe mental health issues. There are people like this staggering round the city all the time clearly in a state of distress, and there is no money to care for them. Social care has been gutted. Tuesday morning was absolutely inevitable, sadly. We do these young lives a disservice if we frame this as a random attack by a one off nutcase, and not the end result of deliberate policy decisions to defund essential care.

And on gammon, I apologise for the offense. I use the word gammon to refer to the kind of right wing diatribe than you often embark on, in much the same way as you would often use perjorative terms to refer to my left wing ranting.

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Not been to Nottingham for a few years but did go 2 Christmases on the bounce. For reasons we ended up watching a panto at the big theatre and it was bloody wonderful. Helps when you’ve been at the Christmas market all day :wink: Didn’t see any real social issues / problems but maybe we saw the place in good times. Marco Pierre White’s restaurant was shite though.

Well, the Christmas market takes up the whole of Market Square and largely hides the lost souls, but go down on a normal day and the scale of the issues are apparent.

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As we’re so far apart on this, I’ll leave it.

True, but its working. You’re in the oil industry right? Reportable injury rate is down 20% and no deaths for the 5th year running.

I think we’re still in that transition period where we’re still finding our feet but more importantly changing attitudes to Health and Safety. Fundamentally everyone wants to go home every evening and if you can build that philosophy into everyone’s thinking then we’d be in a better place. It’s also in our nature to do stupid things so its overcoming that.

But yes I agree that the processes in place do often need streamlining at the very least but not at the risk of becoming complacent which is where it goes when you start to ease off.

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The missus, only yesterday told me she has three clients who are suicidal. She is their HAIR DRESSER and they feel the only person they can turn to.

I honestly sat there in disbelief.

Would you say this is better or worse than any other major city? I used to volunteer with the Salvation Army in Glasgow (I’m not religious but my cousin was a SA minister and encouraged me to help out).

One of the problems we found with the main social care was that they would turn people away if they were on drink or drugs or if they had been violent or aggressive towards staff. The problem was that this covered most of the “Jakies” that were in the town centre. (Jakey = Glasgow slang for homeless alcoholics)

I think general social deprivation is a major factor but a lot of the people that dropped through the system were ex-servicemen. Some had untreated PTSD but many simply had no family or support structure and failed to cope with civvy street. The Royal Legion could help with social support but many needed proper ongoing treatment.

I’m not sure how this compares with Nottingham.

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Does she know how to deal with it? Just asking because I’ve just come off a suicide prevention course, and there are keys things that can help.

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To her credit, probably better than most but she is considering some formal training now.
It’s often been a little bit of a little joke between us that many of her Clients come for counselling but this is another, darker level all together. Its gone beyond discussing trivial life challenges, holidays to having to deal with some really challenging things like dementia, some real health issues and mental health as mentioned. Sometimes its like walking a tightrope too.

Some of these people have sought help but they aren’t getting it, so they “unload” while in a chair with a hot chocolate and a trim.

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Hairdressers are often confidantes for men and women, they have to have excellent social skills in order to do their work.
My Mum has had the same hairdresser for over 30 years and she’s witnessed her go through a divorce and bring up her daughter from baby to university student. They probably know things about each other that close family members don’t even know.
It really wouldn’t be a bad idea if hairdressers were given training in counselling as it is a necessary part of the job.

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Don’t be fooled by available statistics.
I’ve worked on installations all over the world, claiming to have X amount of years since the last LTI, when the reality is that many incidents that should be recordable are downgraded to first aid cases.
And in my experience, 99% of incidents are down to individual stupidity.
But the HSE culture is so blinkered that individuals cannot be deemed at fault, the system has failed, then lo & behold we’ve another set of ridiculous and unnecessary processes to adhere to.

True story from Baku.
Operator of a piece of equipment made a mistake.
Potential for injury from this mistake was high, although no-one was hurt.
Operator repeatedly lied about mistake, despite said equipment displaying no faults.
HSE got involved and my company had to fork out $300k for an upgrade which wasn’t needed.

Yeah, the missus has always maintained that her skills are ok, (I’m not convinced, I think she’s far better than that) but she listens. Firstly that means clients get what they want but also that other side discussed above. So much so that when she set up on her own she didn’t tell her clients what she was going to do when leaving her old place of work. That wasn’t fair on that business. Practically every one of them has hunted her down over a period of 6 months. It was kind of disturbing to watch. She is now practically fully booked until Christmas.

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I don’t deny that figures are massaged, I’ve seen it. However you cannot massage a number when someone is killed.

I don’t think that’s right with the HSE. The power they have, and what they do is honestly scary. Not something I ever want to be involved in. I’ve seen it once, don’t want to go there again.

Yes people do stupid things but they are often allowed to, which is worse.

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Agreed.
Thankfully those instances are extremely rare these days.
No coincidence that things in the North Sea got better once we’d sent our friendly Americans back home BTW.

When people can’t be trusted to not put their arm/leg/body in there or it could be crushed if x, y or z happens, despite being told multiple times, then they need to be got rid of.
Sadly they generally can’t, citing employees rights despite being fucking loose cannons.