David Whyte

An independent review of British health and safety regulation? From common sense to non-sense

The view that regulatory provisions protecting the employment conditions of workers need to be minimised in order to protect the business needs of employers has been an ongoing theme in British governmental policy discourse over the past three decades. For the present Coalition government, the assumption that current levels of regulation are unduly burdensome on employers and hence harmful to the economy has continued to be enthusiastically voiced, most notably in respect of the regulation of workplace health and safety. Against this backcloth, this paper develops a critical examination of the conclusions of an ‘independent’ review of health and safety regulations commissioned by the present UK Government to shed light on the way in which a deregulatory policy agenda is being furthered. The paper commences by locating the recent review of health and safety regulations, the ‘Löfstedt review’, in the context of other recent government initiatives aimed at alleviating the burden of health and safety regulation from the shoulders of employers. It then moves on to outline the nature of this review and its main conclusions and recommendations, before considering in turn its use of evidence, deployment of the notion of ‘low risk’ and lack of attention to the issue of enforcement. Finally, a concluding section draws together the key points to emerge from the preceding analysis and highlights how the Löfstedt review can be seen to form an integral part of a misleading deregulatory discourse that threatens to engender the wholesale undermining of workplace health and safety protections.

How corrupt is Britain

We are in the midst of a sustained moment of exposure for the British state. In the past two years, we have been fed a daily media diet of stories of ‘corruption’ scandals: reports of major newspapers getting involved in phone tapping and pay offs to police officers, the seemingly endless examples of the falsification of police statements in some of our highest profile cases, all of the largest British companies using hidden offshore locations to avoid tax, personal protection insurance mis-selling, horsemeat sold as ‘beef’ by most of our high street supermarkets, arms companies bribing foreign governments, drug companies illegally paying other drug companies to keep accessible medicines off the market, politicians being paid to ask questions and fixing expenses claims and so on and on.

Counter-insurgency goes to university: the militarisation of policing in the Puerto Rico student strikes

This article presents a case study of the recent student strike at the University of Puerto Rico (held between 2010 and 2011) and the militarisation of the campus that followed. The strike has been a significant site of resistance to the imposition of neo-liberal structural adjustment in Puerto Rico (PR). The response to the strike by the Government of Puerto Rico and the university administration has been characterised by a range of highly repressive techniques of state violence, delivered under the guise of ‘counter-insurgency’. In other words, the ‘war on terror’ has been brought to the campus. Rather than this presenting an isolated case, more generally, counter-insurgency doctrine and practice has been central to the defence of neo-liberal structural adjustment in PR. There is an enduring tendency in counter-insurgency and counterterrorism strategies to depoliticise conflicts and deal with them in highly technicist/managerial terms. Yet, rather than representing a depoliticised struggle, the student strike has its origins in a deeply contested politics, and its outcome will shape the politics of future colonial-neo-liberal conflicts in PR.

Policing for Whom

This article presents an analysis of recent evidence emerging from the building industry about British state tolerance, and encouragement, of an illegal ‘blacklist’ of workers in the industry. As part of this process, the article argues that the form of policing/regulation that is observable in the case of the blacklisted workers is one that ultimately seeks to guarantee as its primary concern, not the rule of law, but the orderly reproduction of surplus value in the building industry. The article does not suggest that the latter purpose is all that concerns policing/regulation, but it does suggest that it is the principal effect of a combination of various policing and regulatory techniques. In order to achieve orderly reproduction of surplus value, it is argued that building workers are confronted by a form of economic force which is given shape by, and ultimately underpinned by, the system of policing/regulation that at the same time, claims to protect them.

Researching the Powerful: A Call for the Reconstruction of Research Ethics:

This article analyses the contradictions that arise when the widely accepted ethical principles we use as social researchers are applied in the context of researching the powerful. It does so in order to encourage a debate about how we might reconstruct a workable ethical framework in the context of ‘studying up’. This article draws on prolonged debates on the relevance and appropriateness of ethical codes, exploring how the concepts and the guidelines that codify them might be reframed. The people thus analyses the dominant ethical principles adopted in professional codes of conduct, foregrounding a twin obsession with professional (the social scientist) and institutional (the university) autonomy that hampers the development of a research ethics that meaningfully contributes to enhancing the public or common interest. Instead, we argue for a reconstruction of social science research ethics based on a collectivist understanding of the ‘public interest’ that is not exclusively defined for and by the academy but connects to all groups interested in knowing about the closed-off worlds of the powerful.

Grenfell, Austerity and Institutional Violence

The complex chains of decisions that produce disasters like the Grenfell Tower fire are not readily described as ‘violence’. ‘Violence’ is something that remains largely understood in popular consc...

The Autonomous Corporation: The Acceptable Mask of Capitalism

In January 2018, responding to the collapse of the construction giant Carillion, UK Prime Minister Theresa May promised: ‘for the first time, businesses will have to demonstrate that they have taken into account the long-term consequences of their decisions...Our best businesses know that is not a responsible way to run a company and those who do so will be forced to explain themselves.’ The May government is yet to announce exactly who will be ‘forced’ to explain themselves, and how. And we are becoming very used to a long line of Prime Ministers issuing empty threats to business. Indeed, even the most significant reforms that have sought to encourage corporate responsibility in recent years are widely criticised for having had little effect. The Companies Act 2006 and the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 were introduced more than a decade ago and both were heralded by the Labour government of the day as marking a major shift in the legal responsibilities of corporations. The former contained a series of revised measures on a wide range of issues, including a new provision clarifying the duties of directors to ensure they can have regard to a range of

Critical Pedagogy and assessment in higher education: The ideal of ‘authenticity’ in learning:

Current forms of marketisation in university systems create pressures towards purely ends-focused expectations among students and have implications for learning and assessment processes. The potential harm that these trends have on ‘learning’ should be resisted by educators and students alike. Critical Pedagogy approaches offer one way of conceptualising and implementing such resistance in the interests of ‘authenticity’ in learning. However, the issue becomes sharpest at the point of assessment. Here, the ideals of Critical Pedagogy can collide with student expectations of final degree success. By addressing the question of ‘authenticity’ for assessment in relation to Critical Pedagogy, this article explores the challenges posed by this conundrum and draws upon interviews conducted with module leaders who apply recognisably (although not explicitly) Critical Pedagogy principles in their teaching and in the types of assessment they use. The themes that emerged present a picture of the kinds of potential that Critical Pedagogy influenced forms of assessment have for supporting authenticity in learning, as well as the difficulties involved in its application. It also helps to trace out the possible boundaries for further inquiry.

Australia: Critical Scholarship in a Hostile Climate: Academics and the Public

Corporations are involved in every area of our lives. In our education, health, welfare and criminal justice systems, they are ever-present.

The great British summer of corruption

If it was the riots across English cities that defined the British summer of 2011, then the summer of 2012 – featuring a Royal Jubilee and the London Olympics – was meant to showcase a thoroughly more stable and law-abiding Britain. Yet by June it seemed as if the Great British Summer of 2012 would be remembered for a remarkable and seemingly unending series of cases that exposed the corruption rotting at the core of the British establishment.