ON THE last Workers' Memorial Day of the current Parliament, it's worth taking a look at the Con-Dem coalition's record on safety in the workplace.

In any civilised society, everyone who goes to work should expect to come back safe and sound at the end of the working day.

There are jobs which inevitably involve confronting danger - such as firefighting or search and rescue - but those doing them have a right to know their employers are doing all within their power to ensure unnecessary risks are avoided.

It is only when war breaks out that we anticipate death may become likely on a daily basis. Yet as TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady points out in this newspaper, every year more people are killed at work than in wars.

She adds that more than "20,000 people in the UK alone died as a result of illnesses and injuries they suffered at work" last year.

Well, our Prime Minister David Cameron has declared the Tories to be "the party of working people." He must be horrified that thousands are being killed by the jobs they do.

He must be determined to protect people in the workplace.

Is he?

This is the PM who made it his new year's resolution in 2012 to "kill off the health and safety culture for good".

Safety regulations were "pointless time-wasting" and "an albatross around the neck of British businesses," he pontificated.

This criminally irresponsible attitude explains why this government has slashed funding for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) by over 40 per cent and banned unannounced inspections from entire industries.

Savage cuts to local authority budgets combined with ideological pressure to leave businesses alone saw a 93 per cent drop in council inspections between 2010 and 2014.

The coalition forged ahead with a series of "consultations" on how to amend health and safety regulations. The HSE was subjected to a series of reviews.

The "red-tape challenge" called on businesses - but not worker representatives - to come forward with suggestions for "improvement".

Sadly for the Tories, even most employers showed little enthusiasm for hacking away at protections which keep their workforces safer and more productive.

So the Department for Work and Pensions vowed to "go further" than the advice of its own investigators.

The HSE was expected, it announced last year, to meet "a much larger proportion of its costs from commercial activities," to "become more commercial in outlook and delivery" and to respond to "requests from businesses to provide advice on a commercial basis."

So an HSE left at the mercy of the Tories will cease to be a body dedicated to keeping working people face.

It will become a consultancy dependent for funds on providing the advice most appreciated by bosses.

Historically, bosses have not had a great record on ensuring the safety of their workforces.

From the 1888 matchwomen's strike - one key demand of which was a separate room for meals where they would not be contaminated by white phosphorus - to RMT's present-day fight for an inquiry into the safety of helicopters used by offshore rig workers, working people have only secured safe working environments by fighting for them.

Work-related illness and stress can be caused by toxic hazards or workplace accidents, but also by ever-increasing hours and impossible workloads.

At the election our top priority must be the defeat of the Conservatives, who have made it perfectly clear that they wish to return us to the brutal, unregulated norms of the 19th-century industry.

But afterwards we must go further, to defeat the culture that expects workers to be at the beck and call of their employers 24-7 and stretches the physical and mental health of too many to breaking point.

Mourn for the dead, but fight like hell for the living.