While Keir Starmer faces accusations of "appeasing" big tech firms over online safety, Britain has quietly achieved something remarkable in physical safety: making one of the country's most dangerous jobs dramatically safer.

Prison officers today face less violence than any generation since the Second World War. Assaults on prison staff dropped 70.1% between 1942 and 1998, falling from 578 incidents to just 173. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Safety in Custody -- Safety-in-custody-summary-q3-2024_final_table_accessible -- Table_4)

This isn't a recent trend. It's a decades-long transformation of Britain's most volatile workplaces. In 1942, as the country fought a world war, prison staff faced nearly three times more violence than their modern counterparts. By 1998, that figure had collapsed to levels that would have seemed impossible to wartime prison governors.

The contrast is striking. Politicians today debate whether social media platforms do enough to protect users from online harm. Yet prisons, filled with Britain's most violent offenders, became steadily safer places to work across six decades.

What changed? The data doesn't reveal the mechanisms, but the timeline tells a story. Through post-war reconstruction, social upheaval in the 1960s, economic turbulence in the 1980s, and rising crime rates in the 1990s, prison staff violence kept falling.

This matters because prison officers work in conditions most Britons can barely imagine. They're locked inside with murderers, drug dealers, and violent criminals. They break up fights, conduct searches, and maintain order among people with nothing left to lose. Yet somehow, this became a safer job over time.

The numbers challenge assumptions about modern Britain. We're told society is more violent, that respect for authority has collapsed, that institutions are failing. But inside prison walls, where these problems should be most acute, the opposite happened.

Consider what 578 assaults in 1942 meant in practice. That's more than one violent attack on staff every working day, in a smaller prison system with fewer officers. Today's figure of 173 represents a fundamental shift in how Britain's most dangerous workplaces operate.

This transformation happened without fanfare or political credit-claiming. No minister stood up to announce prison officer safety as their signature achievement. The improvement was gradual, sustained, and largely invisible to the public.

While debates rage about online safety and tech regulation, perhaps there are lessons from Britain's quiet success in making physical workplaces safer. Sometimes the most important safety improvements happen not through legislation or headlines, but through decades of careful, unglamorous work.