Johann Hari: The killers in pin-striped suits

This year, the Prime Minister has taken a hat-trick of decisions soft on corporate crime

After religious fanatics massacred 52 people in central London, Tony Blair's mantra for action was simple and compelling: "The greatest responsibility of any prime minister is to ensure the safety of the British people from killers." But it turns out there is a silent clause to his statement, a neat little loophole he forgot to mention. The Prime Minister will act relentlessly against people who might kill you - unless they are smart-suited corporate killers, in which case he will bend and twist the law according to their whims.

This year, the Prime Minister has taken a hat-trick of decisions that are soft on corporate crime and soft on the causes of corporate crime. The first, and most startling, emerged in the past week as a bitter Christmas present for the British people. In three successive manifestos, Blair has promised to introduce laws to hold companies that kill people criminally responsible. You just need to glance at the death tolls to see why this law is needed. Last year, 220 workers and 361 members of the public were killed in the workplace. Some were, of course, just accidents - but the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) found that 70 percent of these deaths were due to managers cutting corners, knowingly gambling with human life. If you want a human face to slap on these statistics, picture Simon Jones, a 24-year-old who was sent to unload cargo on board a ship - one of the most dangerous jobs in the country - with just a few minutes "training", and was crushed to death within two hours.

So, a Prime Minister committed to our safety above all else, a Prime Minister armed with three electoral mandates to act from the British people, will be rushing to the statute book, surely? Not quite. After intensive corporate lobbying, he prevaricated for eight years, publishing glacial "consultation papers" and "inquiries". Then, at last, this April, a draft Corporate Manslaughter Bill was published.

But if you pick through the Bill's provisions, it becomes clear it is a deliberately dud piece of legislation, with more loopholes than a rollercoaster. The Transport and General Workers' Union - which has been at the forefront of this campaign - warned that "convictions will be as hard, or perhaps even harder, to obtain than at present".

And then, just before Christmas, even this lame, limping Bill was judged to be too much and put down. A flotilla of carefully-placed leaks in the right-wing press have revealed that the Cabinet has decided the Corporate Manslaughter Bill should be buried along with all the British people the government refused to protect in 2005.

But - wait! - what is this sitting under the Christmas tree, next to the rotting Bill? Why, it's a lovely chunk of asbestos! The government is about to beat back regulations protecting us from exposure to a deadly poison. From next month, unlicensed contractors will be allowed to handle textured wall and asbestos ceiling coatings. Or, to be more precise: hundreds of minimum-wage painters and decorators will be required to by their employers. So far, only 60 Labour MPs have rebelled. Yet the death toll from asbestos makes even the massacres of the suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan and his jihadist friends look like a grazed knee: more than 2,000 people die every year in this country of asbestos-induced mesothelioma, a disease that agonisingly destroys your lungs.

And this triple-bill of corporate treats is topped off with Tony Blair's refusal to deal with the dozens of toxins washing through your bloodstream as you read this. This year, the World Wildlife Fund checked the blood of British volunteers for traces of chemical pollution, and found something startling: the average Brit has 27 different hazardous substances in their blood. This matches the findings of the Standing Committee of European Doctors, who warn that the Europe-wide rise in asthma, cancers, infertility and birth defects appears to be directly linked to the chemical pollution in our flesh.

That's why the European Union has proposed over the past 12 years to bring the huge amount of untested chemicals all around us into some sort of safety framework. The proposals were very basic: the 30,000 untested chemicals in everyday items should be logged and investigated, and the potential undiscovered DDTs and asbestoses subject to tough restrictions. This process was supposed to reach a crescendo this month, when the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals (Reach) was established.

But , you guessed it, Blair has been a fierce critic of the original Reach proposals. He claimed they would be "too costly" - yet when it comes to jihadi bombers, he says "you can't take risks with safety, no matter what the cost". Why can we haggle over the lives of one set of victims, but not the other? Even Blair's premise is flawed: the Reach proposals would save money in the long term. Researchers at University College London found that while the regulations will cost industry at most £3.5bn, they will save us £191bn in healthcare costs and added productivity over the next 30 years because fewer will be sick.

But the calm voices advocating the long-term public good have been drowned out by the well-resourced, super-slick salesmen of the rich. Corporations can always afford swish lobbyists and quasi-scientific studies to make it look as if they are being perfectly reasonable in whittling down asbestos regulations or corporate killing laws. It is the government's job to see through this - but even under Labour, this no longer seems to be happening. They cannot see the difference between corporate interests and the public interest.

In the case of Reach, Blair has been lobbied mainly at one remove, via his friends in the Bush administration. The US chemicals industry sells more than $20bn (£11.5bn) worth of chemicals to Europe every year, and they use these profits in part to grease the palms (and psalms) of Republican politicians to the tune of £9.3m a year. In return for the cash, the White House has been fighting Reach and the costs it would impose on their chemical paymasters. A leaked memo last year revealed the Bushies planned to "target the UK" as a weak link in the EU chain. It worked: the Reach deal signed this month is a skeletal parody of the original. As the Spanish Green MEP David Hammerstein-Mintz explains: "The health of millions of children is being sacrificed for a few per cents of company profits."

Next time Blair talks tough about protecting the British people, don't just picture a suicide-murderer: picture a 24-year-old crushed to death, a painter hacking out his asbestos-scarred lungs, and the chemical cocktail washing around your own guts.

j.hari@independent.co.uk