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Playing by the Rules

On sale

31st March 2016

Price: £8.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780751564952

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Does an airline pilot really need to surrender his tweezers at airport security when he’s about to board an aircraft equipped with an axe on the back of the cockpit door?
Can a mobile phone really cause a major explosion at a gas station?
And is there really a good reason why you should be be prevented from swimming in a lake more than a foot deep?

These rules exist, and they exist in the name of our own protection. But in this engrossing dissection of global health, safety and security regulations, authors Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon dig a little deeper to discover the real reasons behind many of the instructions we obey without questioning their creators’ motives. Their conclusions range from the startling to the staggering, and in presenting them the authors seek to empower readers to question the people and organisations who come up with them in the first place.

Previously published as In the Interests of Safety.

Reviews

Jane Moore, The Sun
In the Interests of Safety has debunked some of the myths that blight our lives
The Times
[In the Interests of Safety] tells you how to stand up to a jobsworth with knowledge, courtesy and common sense
BBC Focus
[An] excellent, sceptical take on safety culture
Michael Bywater, Literary Review
In this book Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon take on the large, profitable and growing 'security industry' and expose its foolishness, its impotence and, most worryingly, its tendency to inflict unintended consequences . . . In the Interests of Safety challenges innumerable assumptions and foolishnesses