As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. So wrote William Shakespeare, adding: They kill us for their sport.

How about "They kill us for their share prices" - the gods in question here being the corporate beings who make decisions on public safety based on nothing but the profit motive, writes George Frew.

Harsh words? What's harsher than a child left without a parent?

Offensive? What's more offensive than people dead before their time in yet another accident that could have been prevented for a few pounds more? It emerged this week that more than half of Railtrack staff questioned believe safety on the railways has declined dramatically since privatisation. One worker even went as far as to state that we take our lives in our hands every time we catch a train.

That's every time we leave Banbury, Kingham, Charlbury, Long Hanborough, Bicester - or Didcot.

And this, remember, is from a company which announced a £428m profit last year. When it comes to being able to afford to implement safety measures, cash should not be an issue - and yet, incredibly, it is. No-one will come straight out and say so, of course, but money comes first. Money doesn't just talk, it screams with a hellish persistence.

Men, women and children - the passengers, the people who generate the money - come far, far down the list of priorities.

At the close of business on Monday, October 4, the day before First Great Western Express 0603 rolled out of Cheltenham and the Thames Turbo left Paddington station, it would have cost you £13.31 to buy a single Railtrack share. Even at the time of writing, they can be obtained for £11.55 each, and have been known to reach £17.68. What price a life, then? How much is a person worth? What's the going rate for a human being these days?

Well, when the hearts have been broken and the tears shed, when the words have been spoken over the graves and the awful, roaring grief has been muted but never completely silenced, the price of a life pretty much depends on the going rate of compensation. This varies. It can go up or down. Just like the price of shares. These, though, are the dividends of death. To stand among the shattered at Ladbroke Grove was to be almost struck dumb with the incredulity of it all. How, in one of the world's most modern, civilised, technically advanced nations, in the last tumbling days of the 20th century, could something like what has come to be called the Paddington disaster happen?

How could this have been allowed to occur, in the wake of Clapham and after Southall?

How, in the name of God, will they ever explain to the child who left a note at the scene pleading "Please come home, Daddy", that her father will never be coming home again, although he might have done if only some more money had been spent making the trains safer? "You expect this sort of thing to happen in Third World countries, but not in Britain," an Australian surgeon told me. He had crossed the globe, only to find primitive, preventable death in the country of Lister and Fleming.

At Ladbroke Grove, members of exhausted emergency crews sat down and wept. I watched them bring in the first relatives of the dead and felt choked at the passing of people I had never known - although whether from sadness or anger I could not truthfully say. The cold, persistent anger of individuals frustrated by their lone voices led directly to the formation of the Disaster Action Group, a charity whose members come from families drawn from a lexicon of grief - Hillsborough, the Herald of Free Enterprise, Kings Cross, Kegworth, Lockerbie, Dunblane, Clapham and Southall - entries in a dictionary of disaster and tragedy to which the words Ladbroke Grove must now be added.

In 1995, a Bill was drafted which, if made law, would have created new offences of reckless killing, killing by gross carelessness and corporate killing, replacing the offence of manslaughter in cases where death is caused without intention. In parliamentary procedure, a Bill has three readings in the House of Commons and three in the House of Lords. A private member's Bill has virtually no chance of becoming law without the consent of the Government.

The average Bill will take between two and six months to go through Parliament, although it is possible for a Bill to become the law of the land in the course of a single day.

And legislation which clearly dealt with the charge of corporate killing would have the whole-hearted endorsement of the Disaster Action Group, whose spokesman is Pamela Dix. "We are not looking for scapegoats," she said. "But we lobby for changes in the law which would ensure that companies did not take matters of safety lightly."

Pamela, whose brother was killed when Pan-Am Flight 103 exploded in the skies over Lockerbie, explained that Disaster Action was founded in 1991 after the Herald of Free Enterprise horror.

"Some of the relatives tried to prosecute P&O Ferries, but it was a prosecution that failed. People don't get redress from the law after disasters. It just doesn't happen. But united, as a group, they are far more likely to get noticed. "Between 1966 and 1996, 20,000 people have died in disasters and accidents arising from corporate activities, yet there has been just one successful prosecution, at Lyme Bay in 1993, when the buck stopped easily within a small company."

In the Dorset tragedy, four teenagers died after their canoes became swamped and they spent hours in the sea off Lyme Regis.

Two men were later charged with manslaughter and one was jailed for three years - a sentence which was later reduced on appeal by a year. Pamela said: "In big companies, directors can hide behind claims of not knowing what goes on from day to day. We have been active in campaigning against this and have made a submission to the Law Commission because we believe we need new legislation to cover this as a matter of urgency.

"We understand that this is under consideration and further input from groups like us has been asked for by the Home Office.

"We strongly feel that a change in the law needs to be made. If company directors faced possible imprisonment, it might make a difference. "At the moment, there has to be sufficient evidence against an individual before a prosecution can take place. We think that it should be possible to prosecute a company.

"We are also of the view that duties should be allocated to each director, giving them clear responsibilities."

As things stand, there is little doubt that the law is nothing short of a messy tangle.

Over the years, the media in this country - and the printed press in particular - have been accused practically non-stop of intruding into people's private grief. Yet when the Ladbroke Grove story broke and it was discovered that Anthony Beaton, an aide of Mo Mowlam's in the Northern Ireland Office, had been not only one of the tragic victims but a relatively high-profile local victim, this newspaper respected Mr Beaton's family privacy.

No 'doorstepping' was ordered, and no 'juicy quotes or pictures of devastation' required.

We speak out today on behalf of those whose voices are limited, because we are part of the Oxfordshire community and part of this country. Part of the people who depend on public transport to take us from one place in the reasonable expectation that we might still be alive at the other end. Disaster Action says it is not looking for scapegoats, and neither is the Oxford Mail. But we demand that those responsible should be aware that they will be called to account the next time disaster strikes.

But until the law is changed and a Government finally has the courage to tweak the whiskers of the fat cats of big business, on whom they so depend, another disaster like Ladbroke Grove is only a matter of time. To use a common phrase of commuters everywhere, there will doubtless be another one along soon.

All the public inquiries and fine, sincere words in the world will not change that.

For as the law currently stands, we remain "like flies to wanton (boardroom) boys"...

*e-mail George Frew on gfrew@nqo.com

Story date: Thursday 14 October

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.