From Mid Staffordshire Hospital, to the Libor scandal...David Philpott wonders where the morality has gone.
Well, I seem to have got away with it. This month I step down from being a county chairman of that rather grand business body – the Institute of Directors – and nobody seems to have noticed that at most points along the way my political instincts were – to put it mildly – somewhat at odds with the lobbying coming out of the well-oiled Pall Mall public relations machine.
The IoD is of a course a non-political organisation but with the vast majority of its forty odd thousand members being business owners, it is inevitable I suppose that it lurches to the right a bit - in people’s minds, if not in practice.
Mention of political instincts causes me to reflect on some of the strange goings on aboard the good ship Britannia in the past few weeks. The Tories squeezed into third place in the Eastleigh by-election by UKIP grabbed all the headlines, but not it seems, the fact that polling was necessitated by an erstwhile cabinet minister having perjured himself.
And what about the Great British public’s apparent love affair with Mr Farage et al? A temporary infatuation methinks, occasioned by fear of mass immigration from Bulgaria and Romania. The flirting will be over I predict come the general election, although I suspect UKIP will provide a safe haven (oh sweet tautology) for the Home Counties protest vote at the European elections.
Even the most casual observer of the political scene could be forgiven for wondering if they were experiencing a case of déjà vu the other day when Sir David Nicholson gave his evidence to the Health Select Committee. As he dodged questions and ducked assertions – all to the effect that as head of the NHS he needed to accept responsibility for all the avoidable deaths at Mid Staffordshire Hospital (a suggestion that he strenuously denies by the way) - was a scene reminiscent of former BBC Director General George Entwistle during his last days in office, as he made a last ditch attempt to save his job in front of the Commons Culture committee last autumn.
The enemy within
Reflecting on some of these public sector scandals, I have to say that it is not the prospect of mass immigration from Transylvania that worries me; it is the enemy within. It is the deep rooted culture of cover-up and corruption at the highest levels in our most trusted of institutions that is a much greater cause for concern. We now know for example, that many police officers told lies in the original Hillsborough inquiry; that certain officers at Scotland Yard could be bought by News International; that officialdom turned a blind eye to the exploitation of young girls in Rochdale; that the banks miss sold billions of pounds worth of payment protection insurance whilst some of them at the same time illegally fixed the Libor rate; and that at Winterbourne View, vulnerable residents with learning difficulties were systematically abused by those who were entrusted to care for them. And then of course there is the issue of banker’s bonuses. Add to this the little matter of many of our Members of Parliament having been fiddling their expenses for years and it all makes Italian politics seem positively enlightened and Silvio’s Bunga Bunga parties a mere tremor on the seismograph of political earthquakes.
This contemptible stomach-turning catalogue of national failure – were it to be found in a person - would describe a character of dubious principles, morals and ethics, a liar, cheat and deviant and certainly not someone you would want to employ.
The scandal at Mid Staffordshire should change our view of the NHS. If I had a shilling for every time a hospital manager has told me that the NHS is ‘the envy of the world’ and a penny for every time an overseas doctor has laughed out loud at such a preposterous assertion, I would be a rich man. Thanks to Robert Francis and his enquiry into Mid Staffordshire, we are now all allowed to say out loud that the NHS is broken in pretty much every department. Those of us who have worked in and alongside it over the past decade have always known this – but those who dared to speak – to blow the whistle as it were - have at best been ostracised and at worst lost their jobs and in many cases careers.
Working as we do in the not for profit sector, we see day in and day out, incredibly dedicated people working with politically unpopular causes - whether that is homelessness, substance misuse, mental health, international development – to name but a few. Oh that some of that ethos of servanthood would return to our hitherto trusteed institutions, be that the police, Parliament or the NHS.
If the State cannot be trusted to deliver vital services to our most vulnerable in society, then for heaven’s sake Mr Cameron, let those social enterprises and voluntary organisations that can do it. After all, you rarely hear about a badly run hospice do you?
