Accidents will happen

Over on Spiked, Frank Furedi writes about the decision to remove the word "accident" from the Highway Code:

Critics of the Highway Code’s cleansing of the A-word have rightly raised concerns about the encouragement of a ‘blame agenda’. Nigel Humphries of the Association of British Drivers says the change will ‘encourage a blame culture instead of a prevention culture’. It is no doubt true that the removal of the word accident will give rise to more litigiousness – but there are also profound cultural issues at stake here.

I also like his observation that:

In Stalinist Russia the phrase ‘it is no accident…’ was routinely used to imply that every negative event was really an act of collusion amongst hostile forces.