When laughing matters

EVERY age has things you are not allowed to joke about. In the Middle Ages it was the King. During the Reformation it was God. Under Queen Victoria it was sex. Now, it seems, the new taboo is women. I deduce this from the astonishing outbreak of humourlessness which has engulfed the unlikely topic of industrial safety.

The problem started a couple of weeks ago when the Labour Department, as part of the continuing struggle against workplace injuries, unveiled some new posters.

Now I have not seen these posters. It seems they depict lady workers wearing sundry industrial safety items . . . and not much else. It is also suggested that the ladies are in ''suggestive poses'', whatever that means. My possibly primitive view is that a model wearing nothing but a safety belt, a hard hat and a pair of reinforced toe-cap Doc Marten's would be hard put to find a pose which could not be described as suggestive, but perhaps I am over-sensitive.

The posters were the subject of a public protest outside the Labour Department last week, organised by the Association for the Rights of Industrial Accident Victims of all people. I would have thought that most industrial accident victims had more important needs than the expulsion of sexual suggestions from the walls of the places where they might once have worked, but there we are.

Copies of the offending posters were torn up, and a petition was handed in. Whether it was handed in by the victim of an industrial accident caused by a sexist poster we were not told.

With this week's instalment of the story we are on more solid ground, because it comes with a copy of the poster. The guilty party is the Hong Kong Construction Association and the poster is another variation on the theme.