the slaughter bench of capital

"In the first five years of New Labour rule there have been over 2,500 deaths at work, with the official figures for the number of deaths rising by 32 per cent in 2001. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has estimated that at least 40 per cent and possibly as many as 70 per cent of these deaths were due to corporate failings. Note that these figures do not include deaths that are widely suspected to be work-related: in the last five years of the 1990s, for example, over 6,000 people – most of whom had been workers in construction and insulation industries – died of mesothelioma, a disease resulting almost exclusively from inhaling asbestos. In addition to deaths at work, in the last fifteen years at least 1,000 members of the public in Britain have died in incidents suggesting corporate failing of some sort (including, for example, 193 at Zeebrugge, 31 in the King’s Cross fire, 35 in the Clapham train crash, 51 in the sinking of the Marchioness, 96 at Hillsborough stadium, 7 in the Southall rail crash, 31 in the Ladbroke Grove rail crash, and 4 in the Hatfield rail crash). Add these figures together and tally them with figures from across the world, including the thousands killed in single ‘accidents’ such as Bhopal in 1984 (in which approximately 6–7,000 people were killed immediately with an estimated 22,000 dying in directly related deaths up to 1999), and it soon becomes clear that history is indeed a slaughter bench, with capital its most active participant."

Mark Neocleous, via radical philosophy