Public fury as emergency workers display a sense of their own mortality

This article first appeared on the Counterfire website and was written by 'The Third Estate'. It was reprinted here for the interest of readers.

It has become so boringly familiar. “Emergency services held back by red tape”, runs the typical headline in the press. Usually this refers to an incident in which the emergency services have been halted in their duties by serious concerns about their own safety. This, in turn, will upset a great many people, who appear to believe that firefighters and ambulance staff should behave more like the ones they see in action movies. Indeed, on the silver screen such heroes will invariably hurtle in with no regard for their own wellbeing – shielded only by the knowledge that, as fictional characters, they won’t actually be leaving a family behind to suffer the impact of their demise.

The latest incident to provoke the ire of the press is a rather sad one. A woman named Caren Patterson was left brain damaged after paramedics took 2 hours to come to her aid. Her address had been “red-flagged” as “high risk” for paramedics, and as such they demanded a police escort. This in turn took a great deal of time to arrive, leaving the ambulance crew waiting as Patterson’s brain was starved of Oxygen.

There certainly appear to be questions about whether the address was “red flagged” by mistake, and the ambulance service have admitted liability. But the basic principle, that paramedics should have a right to require police back up when enterring known high risk addresses, is sound. Every year there are around 3,000 attacks on paramedics. They are not armed with batons, or trained in public order – and if they are to be made into quasi-police officers, this too could compromise their ability to do their job.

The Mail recently reported on the apparently scandalous decision of ambulance staff to hold back while Raul Moat was on his rampage, and offered us a list of other “Victims of risk avoiders”. Amongst them was Phil Surridge, who died after fire crews refused to rescue him from a frozen lake, on account of the fact tat they weren’t trained to do so. They quote his mother’s assertion that fire crews had “condemned him to death”.

Now, perhaps I am missing something here, but running onto a frozen lake, in which one person is already drowning, strikes me as a uniquely dangerous activity for which one would need specialist training. It also occurs to me that just because somebody is trained to rescue people from burning buildings, it doesn’t mean they know how to how to deal with frozen lakes. Perhaps there was some bad bureaucracy in sending a crew with the wrong training, but cowardice is neither here nor there.

Since serfdom came to an end, the basic idea has been that workers sell their labour power but not themselves.While some jobs inevitably involve risk, it is ridiculous to expect the workers who keep our emergency services going to behave like they are completely dispensable. When the grand age of robots dawns, we can perhaps disregard such considerations. But until then our emergency services will need to be staffed by human beings.