No justice for dead workers

So the Government have conceded defeat and published an amendment to extend the scope of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill to allow Prisons and police authorities to be prosecuted over deaths of people held in custody.

This is indeed a right decision (arm up the back or not), but it is really an amendment to a proposed law that falls well short of holding the real criminals responsible - the directors and senior management who pocket the dosh whilst workers are mutilated and killed.

Lets take a look at the reality.

Firstly, the bill proposes criminalizing a firm as opposed to the managers or directors. We’ll see massive fines and public humiliation. What a load of tripe!

If you are a doctor or driver, or indeed the ordinary 5’8” in the street, you can be held personally liable for causing a death by doing something otherwise lawful so badly as to come under the legal definition of manslaughter. If this is the case, then why not someone like the head of an oil company who could be said to have run the company so badly as to be liable for deaths caused by his firm when they cut the safety budget?

If you are looking for logic in this proposed law, then you are looking in the wrong place. Try a glance toward who really holds the power – big business.

They wield power unimaginable to the ordinary citizen – they get what they want, when they want. Just look at the bribes scandals; the cash for honours; and now this poor cousin to the original quest and desire for justice.

Blair leaves office wealthy beyond the means of the combined wealth of thousands in the poverty trap and he lets his big business friends off the hook.

RIP all those who will never see justice, and those yet to die who will leave families in the same situation because our MPs were spineless.