A Culture of Fear

I wrote recently about the atrocious case of Stafford Hospital, a place where hundreds of patients are now thought to have died needlessly as a result of mismanagement, negligence and incompetence. Mismanagement, negligence and incompetence seem to have become the three wicked fairies haunting the state-funded British National Health Service (NHS). The scandal caused by their malevolent magic is now all but impossible to disguise.

The attempt has been made, though. The rot here goes high; it goes high as Sir David Nicholson, the former communist who is now Chief Executive of the National Health Service.  He recently made it plain that he had no intention of resigning, despite the damning and damaging report on Stafford Hospital, detailing abuses committed under his watch. But now the dam has burst; now we know of even further abuses that he chose to ignore.

In 2010 Gary Walker was sacked as the chief executive of the United Lincolnshire Hospital Trust in the east of England. The reason given was that he swore openly at meetings, which seems pretty flimsy on the face of it. Swearing or not, he was given a very generous severance package - £500,000 ($775,000) is not to be sworn at. It now appears that this money really was meant to shut his mouth.

The year before Walker was sworn off he raised concerns with Sir David over the standard of care in Lincolnshire hospitals. It seems that close on 700 patients may have died needlessly as a result of poor care. More were at risk. His warnings were ignored by Sir David, allegedly because he was “not interested in patient safety.”

He may not have cared about patient safety but he certainly cared about swearing Walker to silence. As part of his Midas handshake, he pledged to keep his concerns to himself. It was not, perhaps, a commendable choice on his part but his conscience got the better of him. His silence has been broken despite emails from NHS-funded lawyers warning him to keep to the terms of the 2010 agreement.

Speaking to the Daily Mail Walker said “I want David Nicholson to be held to account. I warned him that this was going to happen. I warned him that Lincolnshire was going to become the next Mid Staffordshire. He didn’t investigate those concerns, and now look what’s happened.” He went on to refer to the “culture of fear” within the NHS, something that seems to have been part of Nicholson’s management style.

United Lincolnshire Hospitals is one of fourteen trusts presently under investigation for negligence in the wake of the Mid-Staffordshire revelations about death under care. Gagging is clearly no longer an option. But Walker’s honesty has placed him in an invidious position;

I stand to lose everything if they sue...Now I risk having to repay more than the settlement because I could be liable for the Trust’s legal fees. I face ruin. But if it’s got to the stage where thousands and thousands of patients are dying needlessly in NHS hospitals and the government says no one’s to blame, someone needs to stand up and be counted...I lost my career, my partner of six years and most of my assets challenging my dismissal. But I would not lose my integrity.

Letters have now emerged written by doctors and staff at the Lincolnshire Trust warning that they were being coerced into treating patients in an unsafe environment and thus endangering their safety. High mortality rates were simply ignored and staff told that “targets must be met regardless of demand.”

The recent Francis Report on the Stafford Scandal might useful be subtitled the No One’s to Blame Report; for seemingly no one is to blame for the abuses and the atrocities inflicted on patients, from Nicholson downwards. But at least it recommended an end to gagging orders imposed on whistle-blowers. Gary Walker’s case has now been raised in Parliament. Stephen Dorrell, Chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Health, has said that he will be invited to give evidence. He went on to condemn gagging orders, describing them as “unacceptable in the NHS” and “against the public interest.

But that’s the thing: they clearly were acceptable, a part of a corporate culture that had little concern for the public interest or patient welfare. Speaking to the BBC Walker compounded an already heavy indictment against his former employers;

This is a culture of fear, a culture of oppression - of information that's either going to embarrass a civil servant or embarrass a minister. These are big problems. And if you consider that the people that have been running the NHS have created that culture of fear, they need either to be held to account or new people need to be brought in to change that culture.

On present indicators it seems likely that little will change. The corruption, the complacency and the laziness here go deep. In face of monstrous state bureaucracies like the NHS ordinary people, those who cannot afford private care, are effectively powerless, as much guinea pigs as they were in times past. Rather ironic considering that the whole institution is supported through their taxes. Here, perhaps, we have the true meaning of taxation without representation.

The Echo of Coriolanus

I shared rooms as an undergraduate with a girl from Beecroft in New South Wales. Quite often late at night in her homesickness she would listen to an online broadcast from Sydney, a sort of comedy talk show, earthy harmless stuff hosted by a man and a woman.

Unfortunately I can’t remember their names or the name of the show, but I’m now beginning to wonder if it was Mel Grieg and Michael Christian, the two radio hosts responsible for the prank call to Edward VII Hospital last week, asking about the health of the Duchess of Cambridge. If it was them I can only say that they are about as far removed from ‘shock jocks’ as is possible to imagine. The latter – I’m thinking of some American presenters - are really nasty, usually indulging in vicious political invective verging on total character assassination.

The nurse business is truly tragic. Who could not feel sorry for Jacinth Saldanha and her family? But the reaction to her ‘apparent’ suicide – this word keeps being stressed – I find shockingly out of proportion. It was a childish prank but childish pranks have been the small change of radio and television for years. What is Candid Camera, or more recently Fonejacker, but a series of childish pranks?

This one, which was directed at the Royal Family, not the nurse, went horribly wrong but the vicious mob calling for the immolation of the two presenters quite frankly disgusts me. I imagine it includes lots who took delight in previous pranks, laughing at one moment, snarling at the next.  These are the canaille, the people that Mark Antony manipulated from one state of mind to another with consummate ease.  In their stupidity they shock me far more than any shock jock. 

It wasn’t the paparazzi who drove Princess Diana to her death but those who lapped up publicity, no matter how the story and the pictures were obtained.  I was only eleven years old when Diana died but even then I felt disquiet that evening her body returned to London, a grim procession through the dark, punctuated by the flash of countless cameras.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing more ghastly than the passions of the mob.  

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
as the dead carcases of unburied men
That do corrupt the air - I banish you...

Ignorance is Strength

 What should happen, do you think, when a crime has been committed?  For me the answer is simple: the offenders should be brought to account; justice should be done and be seen to be done; the law should be applied.  No, that’s wrong; if the law is broken it’s far better to spend heaps of money thinking up new laws, legislating for more legislation, laying rules upon rules.  That’s the way to do it; that’s the British way.

We’re having a Public Inquiry here at the moment into the ethics of the press.  Headed by Lord Justice Leveson, it was set up in a panic by Prime Minister David Cameron last year in the wake of the News International phone hacking scandal.  Panic, I say, because it was a way of distancing himself from people with whom he was altogether too cosy. 

Oh, how we love Public Inquiries in this country.  It’s a way of ensuring that resources are well spent, not on the trivialities of life like decent public services but on truly important things like legal fees.  So far Leveson has soaked up £5.6million, that’s about $8.9million. Just think of all the golf club bashes that will cover.  

Some people think it might have been possible to short-circuit this legal circus.  After all, the various crimes of the less savoury hacks are all covered by existing law: phone hacking is illegal; prejudicing issues to be tested in the courts is illegal; publishing unfounded accusations against the innocent is covered by the law of libel.  Forget all that nonsense; let Leveson dance. 

The issue itself is unsavoury enough.  No grand principle of freedom was being defended.  The hacking hacks at News International were not looking into issues of great public interest.  There was no Woodward and Bernstein fearlessly exposing political corruption.  No; there was a lot of slimy slugs breaking into the private conversations of celebrities and crime victims, a practice that gives muckraking an altogether new meaning.  The law would have done well to follow its natural course.

Instead we have the Leveson sledgehammer bashing a few nuts; instead we are likely to get new regulators challenging the freedom of the press.  We may very well be about to see a process of even more intimidation by those powerful enough to have genuine matters of public interest hidden from the public.  In the baleful atmosphere created by Leveson it’s already happening.  I note that one journalist even received a complaint from a foreign despot, the King of Bahrain, irritated by her coverage of the death of forty of his benighted subjects in anti-government protests.

I have no interest at all in knowing that a seedy and sordid little man like Max Mosley, one of the driving forces behind the move to gag the press, likes to have his bare backside spanked by prostitutes dressed as Nazis.  But I do have an interest in defending free expression; so surely do all of us who blog and tweet, all of us journalists in a sense, all threatened by regulation and intimidation. 

Are we really going to have to re-fight battles that we thought won in ages past because of few untypical arses were interested in celebrity arses?  We may soon have occasion to feel the full truth of William Wordsworth’s poem London, 1802, which opens with some particularly memorable lines;

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. 

If Leveson follows the anticipated trajectory into statutory press regulation then the pen will indeed be stagnant.  We may have need of a new John Milton precisely because he was the first great defender of a free press.  In Areopagitica, a pamphlet published in 1644 during the height of the English Civil War, he argued for free expression and against licensing and censorship.  “Give me the liberty”, he wrote, “to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

I also call to mind John Wilkes, another champion of press freedom, who over two centuries ago argued in North Britain that “The liberty of the press is the birthright of a Briton, and is justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country.” 

But my favourite quote about press freedom is an observation by George Orwell: “Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.”  It’s a bit like two plus two equals four: if that is granted all else follows. But we may about to find that a Ministry of Truth has emerged post-Leveson, with powers of regulation and interference far in excess of anything that exists at present. 

Between Leveson and Freedom there is no third way.  David Cameron would do well to be mindful of that simple truth.  But for some Ignorance is Strength.  

Sympathy for the Devil

Earlier this month I wrote about the crisis besetting News International which led to the closure of the News of the World, clearly a cynical exercise in damage limitation which has not limited the damage (The Decline and Fall of the News of the Screws). I think people, particularly British people, are probably sick of this story by now, which looks like running, and running interminably.

The sudden death of Sean Hoare, the journalist who first revealed details of the phone hacking culture on the News of the World, has added to the fevered speculation; oh, sorry, not so much fevered as stupid, the usual evidence-free conspiracy theory that the imaginative love. I met murder on the way – he had a mask like, well, anybody you like really - the Devil, Miss Jones…or Rupert Murdoch.

Things have gone far too far, so much so that I now have to express some sympathy for the Devil, to praise Caesar, not to bury him. I won’t be the first. William Shawcross recently said a word or two in his defence in the Spectator, as did Roger Cohen in the latest issue of Prospect. With the wretched Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, attempting to whip up a lynch mob against Murdoch and all his works, now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of the party, to speak of the positive contribution that the old Devil has made to British journalism and broadcasting in general.

My view here was already beginning to alter, especially in the light of Miliband’s clownish antics. But it was Gordon Brown’s intervention against Murdoch in Parliament, an act of unbelievable hypocrisy, that made the alteration all the faster.

Then there is the BBC, which has behaved with a nauseating lack of partiality in reporting this story. Its monopoly was threatened by Murdoch’s bid for a controlling share in British Sky Broadcasting, so all the poisons that lurked in the mud hatched out, one presenter on the Today programme going so far as to describe Murdoch as the “most evil man in the world.”

Let’s have a closer look at the Devil, ‘the most evil man in the world.’ Writing before the current crisis, Simon Jenkins, now a columnist in the ultra-Liberal Guardian, said that Murdoch was the “best thing that ever happened to the British media and they hate him for it.”

Yes, the best think that ever happened, and yes, they really do hate him for it; the socialists, the liberals, the pseudo-journalists, bad writers aplenty. By taking on the antediluvian print unions in the 1980s, wedded to practices that would have been thought too restrictive even by medieval guilds, he breathed fresh life into a medium that was effectively dying. He stood by the Times at the most difficult point in that paper’s history, for which alone he deserves praise, not calumny.

He continues to subsidise this journalistic flagship, subsidising the losses it makes from the profits of the Sun, rather an irony considering the differences between the two publications. Our newspaper industry is better and more diverse because Murdoch was prepared to make the bold moves, the moves Anthony Hopkins said in the movie Nixon that make history. As Shawcross says, if Murdoch’s business is destroyed the diversity of the British media will suffer seriously. We will all be the poorer for that.

The thing I can admire most about Murdoch is that he is a great risk-taker, that he plays the long shots with an almost intuitive understanding of what will work and what will not. So far as this country is concerned he is an outsider, a ‘colonial’, but he represents a buccaneering spirit that took Britain so far in the nineteenth century. He stands, in other words, in the tradition of the great innovators and entrepreneurs, a spirit that has just about been bled out of this land.

So much of the comment being made at present is based on petty-spite and envy, when it is not simply motivated by baser political considerations. Murdoch is a modern Citizen Kane, Cohen says, and resentment follows people like him as closely as success. It will take a lot for News International to withstand the pressures that it is presently under. I sincerely hope it does.

However, in the end, Murdoch may quit this country, now little more than an outpost of his international media empire, may quit the various media and broadcasting interests he now holds. In the end excellent papers like the Times, by far the best for foreign coverage, and the Sunday Times may disappear altogether, either that or they will fall into the hands of some Russian gas giant or other rather like a football club, a prospect I personally do not welcome. If I have to have a Devil I would rather have the Devil I know.

The Dawkins Delusion

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine…

Actually, no, I couldn’t but I can a tale unfold that might make you smile, perhaps even laugh. It concerns atheist, rationalist, feminist, progressive and sceptic folk; it concerns people not noted for their wit or their humour; it concerns, most particularly, Richard Dawkins, an atheist god and his fall from grace into disgrace.

Before going a step further I have to thank Michael Ezra, a friend and fellow tweeter, who drew this delightful brouhaha to my attention, with links to all sorts of places and rational forums that I would never have visited, places where oh so liberal folk are busy tearing Dawkins apart, yea, even so far as the New Statesman (when is this sexist publication going to be renamed the New Statesperson?) So, Michael, thanks!

Let’s begin at the beginning, let’s begin at the Dublin conference of atheists and sceptics last month, addressed by Holy Dawkins. But as man – and women – shall not live by doubt and dismissal alone, one of the participants, in a mood of romantic timeout, thought he would try his chances. Indeed he did.

Let me set the scene for you. It’s late, four o’clock in the morning to be exact. Dog-tired after a day of doubt, debunking and drinking, a woman leaves a hotel bar and gets on the elevator, making her way to her room, bed and a godless rest.

Before the doors are fully closed a chap jumps on board. A bit nervous and a bit awkward, he says to the woman “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?” He just wanted a spot more scepticism but she assumed that his mind was on another topic beginning with the letter s and did take it the wrong way. No, she would not, a lame proposition put down by a quick rebuff. And that, as they say is that. I know; I’m an expert in the art of the cutting brush off!

No it was not, because the woman Randy Roger the Sceptic tried to inveigle with offers of coffee was a certain Rebecca Watson, apparently, as I now know, a leading American sceptic (forgive the k-less spelling) who runs the excellent Skepchick site. It has to be; the New Statesman says so.

Now Rebecca, rather than brushing the whole thing off, goes home and posts a video on the excellent Skepchick site, saying, amongst other things, that she does not welcome chat-ups from sex-starved sceptics on the elevators of foreign hotels. It makes her uncomfortable, you see, when men sexualise her in that manner. I rather expect it makes Rebecca permanently uncomfortable to be seen as an object of sexual desire, anywhere, anytime. She most certainly does not want a bash from other God-bashers. It creeps her out. These guys creep me out, too, but that’s by the by.

So, that’s that, you might think, but no; enter Dawkins on a donkey, riding in to the comments section of the excellent Skepchick site, rather sceptical about dear Rebecca’s sexual scepticism. He expresses his view in a letter to an imaginary Muslim woman;

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so …

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

Talk about the God that failed! At once his adoring acolytes were not quite so full of adoration; at once they gathered together with cries of “Crucify him!” “Crucify him!” And, my, how they have, in an explosion of blogosphere outrage made worse by his cack-handed attempts at further explanation. Those nails, how they must have hurt going in, judging by this sharp example;

It makes me want to cry a little when you live up to the stereotype of a well-off, 70 year old, white, British, ivory tower academic. But let me spell it out for you instead of just getting mad (though I'll do that too):

Words matter. You don't get that because you've never been called a cunt, a faggot, a nigger, a kike. You don't have people constantly explaining that you're subhuman, or have the intellect of an animal. You don't have people saying you shouldn't have rights. You don't have people constantly sexually harassing you. You don't live in fear of rape, knowing that one wrong misinterpretation of a couple words could lead down that road.

Well, I’ve referred to Dawkins as a prat, a four letter word; does that not count?

And so it went on, blah, blah, with Watson chipping in, saying her own piece in hyper-feminist mood;

To have my concerns—and more so the concerns of other women who have survived rape and sexual assault—dismissed thanks to a rich white man comparing them to the plight of women who are mutilated, is insulting to all of us. Feminists in the west have been staunch allies of the women being brutalized elsewhere, and they've done a hell of a lot more than Richard Dawkins when it comes to making a difference in their lives.

Sceptic chick (chick? My goodness!) turned by degrees from angry chick to furious chick to vengeful chick, so much so that she called for a boycott of Dawkins' books. Perhaps there should be a public burning of The God Delusion? My, what a delicious irony there would be in this immolation of the atheists’ bible!

Scepticism grew by the hour as more and more people raised doubts about the existence of Richard Dawkins. Where is the evidence? Perhaps it’s all a delusion? Perhaps someone could write a book and organise a conference. No sex, please; we’re sceptics.

Doubts were raised about the Dawkins, verily, so far as the New Statesman, where one David Allen Green weighed-in in the pompously sanctimonious style I associate with that publication: “Can Richard Dawkins still credibly pose as champion of rational thinking and the evidence-based approach? In my opinion he certainly cannot, at least in the way he did before.” How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of scepticism perished!

So, bang goes Richard as the high priest of rational thinking and the evidence-based approach! All this, all this pointless and petty fuss because some stupid guy had the temerity to approach a humourless frump. I think God must have set it up just to have a good laugh at these clowns. It’s simply wonderful to see the rationalists descended into such risible irrationality. This is a tale worthy of an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

The Pig Princess

I try to avoid passing comment on the activities of the royal family. But the story about Sarah Fergusson, Duchess of York, spread across the British press today, really does demand some kind of response. After I read the report in The Daily Telegraph at lunchtime, detailing her attempts to sell access to Prince Andrew, her former husband, in a shady business deal, I felt the overwhelming urge to Tweet. “The Duchess of York is a high class pimp”, I wrote “and Prince Andrew, her ex-husband, the most expensive rent boy in history.”

My tweet was ‘funny serious’, if I can put it like that. But, my, oh, my, how grotesque this appalling woman is, how cheap for all her expense. Lynne Featherstone, a Home Office Minister, was quite right to break with the convention that no criticism should be offered of the royal family, saying that “It’s really quite depressing. Lord knows what the Queen thinks waking up this morning.”

I think I can guess. I saw the television coverage of Fergie’s interview with the undercover reporter, who caught her in a perfect sting, a sting she had not the wit or the intelligence to penetrate. What struck me most was the cheap vulgarity of the whole thing, this fifty-year-old woman, living well beyond her means, trying to rent access to her former partner because she has “not got a pot to piss in.” She said to the reporter “Look after me and I’ll look after you…you’ll get it back tenfold. I can open any door you want.” In the half-million dollar deal she was hoping to swing she might as well have said “Make me an offer I can’t refuse.”

I just wonder now if there were others, people who did buy access to Andrew in his capacity as business ambassador. As far as Fat Fergie is concerned it just goes to show that decent schooling and a privileged upbringing does not necessarily bring class and style. With her it was just the contrary. Why was she ever allowed to attach herself to the royal family in the first place; why was she allowed to cling on to them long after her divorce, milking them, and her connections, in an altogether crass manner? What shame she brought on the Firm, this wretched parvenu. She is the princess who was always a pig.