The dearth of regulation

 
Subject: A dearth of regulation.


You can pinpoint the fault line virtually to the year and certainly to the party in office, 1979 to 1990 and Margret Thatchers tenure coincided with on the one hand a bonfire of regulation and the wholesale privatisation of many sections of industry and commerce.
Listening to a program about the shocking state, not only of the building industry but of the regulatory bodies who are supposed to oversee and insure that building regulations are met was demoralising, but the real crime and crime it is, is that the regulations governing what the builder can do including the materials used have either been abandoned, or changed to accept a cheaper versions.  Grenfeld Tower was the most dramatic and shocking outcome of poor choices and a totally inadequate system governing the regulations when it came to installing cladding designed to insulate and improve the looks of the tower block.
Slowly the peeling back of good sensible regulation had been allowed to happen because of the building industries ability to lobby government, ministers and the civil servants, who's job it is to protect the detail of what can and can't be done was so impervious to reason and restraint.
With the increasing pressure from a largely privatised industry, who's focus is as much on pleasing the shareholders as on engineering practice with engineers fulfilling their professional charter of corporate and technical responsibility.
Engineers, like surgeons know when the conditions are right, we place our faith in the engineer to do his work properly. The aspect of profit before safety should never be allowed to happen and I am of the firm belief that the executive of these firms should be held criminally responsible for any attempt to short cut the purchasing of any materials in a buildings construction which are found to be inadequate or, in the case of the cladding which should have been non combustible. Stiff fines levied on the company are not enough, there should be prison sentences enforced if loss of life can be tied to the choice of knowingly using dangerous materials.
I believe 'Privatisation' can be traced to the decline in standards within the building industry and its ialso the cause of the massive rise in the use of drugs in medicine.
The GP today is as likely to be faced with a pharmaceutical  rep as a patient and the pressure on the consortium GP to prescribe new drugs is immense.
The GPs reliance on the medical regulator to protect the patient is also under scrutiny for just the same reason as in the building industry. The pressure and leverage of money by the immensely wealthy pharmaceutical and building construction bodies on government has seen a widening of the gap between public safety and the profit motive.
In the case of the highly contentious child vaccination program. The increase in the USA, in only a couple of decades, has seen the rise from 3 vaccines, (Polio, Smallpox and Diphtheria) in 1964 with a total of 5 doses given to each child, to 1983, when 24 doses per child were recommended for a longer list of  diseases. The figures for 2018 are 72 doses for each baby, with a list which includes vaccination for diseases which you would only expect to encounter in some third world country, and a vaccine which you would only need if you intended to travel there.
72 does of marginally toxic vaccine which is supposed to stimulate the child's immune system and create the antibodies if a disease were to strike. 72 immunity stimulants for a newly functioning immunity system, 72 stimulants given as one multiple inoculation. Is it any wonder increasing numbers of mothers are hesitant to allow the doctors come anywhere near their child.
In my day, one inoculation for Smallpox was given and allowed time to work its way through the system before giving another for Diphtheria and yet another, later on for Polio. We all had some sort of reaction and a slightly unpleasant incubation period whilst our young bodies coped with each disease in turn.
The multiple injection must cause considerable trauma to the child's immunity system as it copes with the onslaught of multiple low level virus infection and who can say, with any surety, that some children will not be permanently effected by side effects.
Never the less, private enterprise, which now makes up most of the pharmaceutical industry in the US, and a path which we in the UK are being slyly coaxed into by various Tory Heath Ministers who seem to have sympathy with the profit motive emanating from   the new vaccination methodology and soon it will be mandatory for mothers to bring their child into the surgery to receive this questionable cocktail.
On the one side regulations the mothers don't want and on the other regulations the people need. Each going in the wrong direction, each at the behest of powerful interests each with a profit motive, where profit should be secondary.