Bureaucrats don’t need no lessons …
It’s done: the judge has spoken, Ms Letby will bein prison for the rest of her life, no parole allowed. The Westminster MSM are reporting in unison, with practically identical headlines as so nicely documented here: “Newspaper headlines: Lucy Letby’s ‘final act of wickedness’.” (link). Only the FT and the Star have gone for different ‘stories’. I dunno what that tells us about newspapers, readers and editors, but I’m sure there’s a meaning to be found.
There’s a far more horrendous ‘meaning’ to be found in this tragic affair. It’s not about ‘wickedness’, it is about the callousness of the nursing and medical administrators in that hospital and about the inevitable mantra we hear from those involved in such scandals – always after the fact: that ‘lessons will be learned’. But: are they really?
Clearly, those lessons are quickly forgotten if they have actually been ‘learned’ at all. I cannot be the only one who finds it more than disturbing that murderous scandals, overlooked until it’s too late, seem to involve the most vulnerable of us all: babies and toddlers, that the murderers are female as are those who should have acted to prevent them.
For example, take the murder of Victoria Climbie in 2000. If ‘lessons’ really had been ‘learned’, then why was ‘Baby P’ murdered in 2007? While the huge Stafford Hospital scandal which came to light in 2007 involved ‘only’ normal patients and not little children, it was still symptomatic of a mental attitude which resurfaced in the lockdown years: patients didn’t matter, they were ‘a nuisance’.
No surprise then that the CEO of the Countess of Cheshire NHS Trust – a former nurse himself – and the nursing ‘directors’ of this hospital where Ms Letby murdered neonatal babies regarded the doctors who tried to get this stopped, as ‘nuisance’ to be put in their places.
I don’t need to mention their unbelievable demand of having those doctors write an apology to the murdering nurse, of having to undergo ‘mediation’ with her, having been threatened with accusations of ‘misconduct’ and being hauled to the GMC and the possible withdrawal of the licence. This was reported in the weekend papers.
One other aspect was picked up by Brendan O’Neill in his column for SpikedOnline yesterday: the attitude of the hospital’s board to disregard the early report by their paediatricians because it could damage the reputation of their NHS Trust! More on this below.
Moreover, there’s one other, blatant mass murderess who killed babies with the same ‘method’ as Ms Letby: Beverly Allitt. She was sentenced thirty years ago. If ‘lessons truly had been ‘learned’ then they must clearly have been forgotten during all those years. I find it inexplicable that not even the doctors who looked into the deaths of the tiny babies in their neonatal unit seem to have connected those dots – the ‘medical’ dots, that is.
Clearly, there is no institutional ‘memory’ for ‘lessons learned’, which shouldn’t come as a surprise because nowadays memories, institutional or general, are so deficient that neither administrators nor investigative journalists even know where to look.
And so to Brendan O’Neill ‘s article for SpikedOnline published yesterday evening. He writes:
“If Britain remains a civilised society, it owes it to itself to explain this most morally distorted of acts where managerial elites unwittingly sided with evil over good. Something has gone horribly wrong in the bureaucracy when such a grave moral inversion can occur.” (link)
He describes how the current attitude towards ‘experts’ as purveyors of valid arguments was brushed aside by the hospital administrators as irrelevant because they needed to ‘protect’ the hospital’s ‘reputation’:
“Events at the Countess of Chester speak to a new layer of bureaucratic authority that has no guiding ethic beyond maintaining its own machinery of influence. To a professional managerial elite well-versed in stiff boardroom jargon but bereft of the human instinct to recognise wrong from right.” (link)
I would add that this also speaks to a layer of ‘bureaucratic authority’ which is content to leave a ‘scandal’ uninvestigated because all the boxes have been ticked properly, a ‘managerial elite’ which is more concerned with protecting a ‘victim’ of such accusations while attacking those who have good professional reasons to draw attention to an ongoing, life-and-death issue. O’Neill’s final sentence is devastating:
“This, I believe, is what we saw in Chester: an association, however unwitting, however regretted, between the bureaucratic mind and the evil mind, with goodness silenced.” (link)
Indeed so. This is the modern version of ‘the banality of evil’, described by Hannah Arendt in her book on the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. It is this bureaucratic mindset where evil can flourish, where it becomes banal because it is cloaked by proper bureaucratic procedures.
This is why I despise the repetitive mantra, of ‘lessons will be learned’, offered by the bureaucratic minds, be they in the NSH, the Social Services and the rest. It is a futile, cheap attempt to whitewash themselves when time and again we see that ‘lessons’ clearly cannot have been learned because the institutional memory of the bureaucracy is elephantine when it suits them.
That is all I have for today. Lessons have clearly not been learned. Will they ever be learned under the blanket of an all-encompassing bureaucracy? Have a good day.
I think one of the “lessons to be learned” from this appalling case is that effective screening protocols should be in place throughout the NHS to ensure that ostensible murderous psychopaths like Lucy Letby are never placed in positions of caring for the weak and vulnerable as she was.
Aren’t hospitals supposed employ psychologists to do this essential screening-work? If they aren’t, I think they should be.
What about the management in Rochdale
You Know
The Police
The Local authorities
The Politicians
They were really a management team, they covered it up or took no action or even worse said it was the under age girls own fault
NONE OF THEM HAVE BEEN SACKED
(Oh! didn`t the subsequent Labour MP who commented or wanted to deal with the matter got it in the neck?)
SHAMEFULL, but why should we be surprised, it looks like the default position
Hear Nought, Say Nought, Do Nought.
Perhaps that`s a true reflection of how its always been in this country.
Don`t put your head above the parapet, never volunteer, never apologise
Always admit defeat and compliment the other side on a good game, even when they`ve slaughtered you.
Oh and never speak or identify ENEMIES – that`s aggressive, got to stamp that out in politics
I am sure I remember a similar case at Stepping Hill hospital, Stockport. Nobody seems to have mentioned it. If I am right, another example of lessons not learned.
Who is it that needs to learn the lessons? What lessons and by whom? We are never told; it’s amorphous. And the news cycle moves on and it is forgotten, with the same perps still in their fat salaried jobs on the public purse. And it is a false paradigm because mostly these things are not unfortunate or accidental oversights, that can be patched up. Not like the design of the windows on the Comet that can be studied, failure mechanism understood, and rectified. They are deliberate, callous and wilful blindness by a class of people to protect reputations and jobs. The only lesson, and it won’t be learned, is that the non-clinical managerial class should be summarily removed from hospitals.
Phil O : “…the non-clinical managerial class should be summarily removed from hospitals…”
I agree. apart from a bare minimum. This class really takes the biscuit. I had an operation earlier this year and was really irritated at the constant barrage of emails every time I went for an appointment, boasting about all the things they were doing to “keep us safe” from Covid. Plus posters on the wall saying “stay safe get the flu jab”, and boasts that “nearly all our staff are double jabbed”.
Yet I contracted a very nasty bug in the hospital that landed me in A and E. The admin themselves said that the incubation period was 2 days and thus proved their liability if you did the math. ( I was fine while in hospital and got ill the day after I left hospital).
But they wont admit liability or even apologise .
So they turn everything inside out to tilt at windmills but apparently can’t observe ordinary basic hygiene.
Norman…….my thoughts exactly. I thought throughout this trial, where is the evidence, and that most of it seemed tenuous at best. Without doubt, the defence lawyers will have started the procedure to instigate an appeal which as you have said will last a very long time and which will be very expensive. And as we know the people that will gain the most out of this will be the lawyers themselves with their massive expenses. The evidence threshold bar must be set very low these days.
The phrase ‘lessons will be learned’ is the standard cop out phrase used by managers who have been found to be negligent. Several senior police officers have said it over the years, in addition to local authority chief executives, NHS managers and even government ministers. When they announce the reasons for whatever has gone wrong, one thinks are they are going to come out with that daft meaningless phrase I wonder, and low and behold nine times out of ten it does come out ‘and yes, lessons will be learned’, and half sniggering you think, that old chestnut again. Just who will be learning these lessons, oh yes I forgot it will be the lowliest person down the chain, whilst those in charge absolve themselves of any blame, and even go on to claim another unwarranted promotion. No doubt this ‘lessons will be learned’ daftness has something to do with ‘Common Purpose’. Modern man management training is utter crap and we need to go back to basics. Vetting of staff in any meaningful way seems to have gone out of the window, and minority interests has been allowed to take over. The managers of today are not a patch on those of yesteryear, many of whom served in the armed forces during the First World War and the Second World War where they learned proper leadership skills.
She was a lone wolf. Never been in trouble before. It was not racist or terrorist action. [only mention colour or photos if white]. Police had known about her mental conditions for some two years. [dont mention shouts of Ali’s Snackbar]. Our heart goes out to the loved ones. Lessons shall be learned. [Repeat last line].
Oh, sorry – not a muslin – wrong narrative.
Lord Biscotte………..The lone wolf as you put it, didn’t have any identifiable mental health conditions. If she had of done, upon conviction in all probability she would have been sent to Broadmoor or similar rather than a Prison. However, as it has been reported in the media she will be undergoing a mental health assessment in the hospital wing of the prison that she has been sent to. That is not particular to her, but is a procedure all newly convicted prisoners undergo having been found guilty of certain offences. Life in prison will not be a bed of roses for her and will be at severe risk of harm and be classified as a Rule 43 prisoner isolated from other prisoners in a segregation unit. What a come down it will be from her previous life.
Of course no “lessons will be learned” simply because those who could make changes simply don’t want to; that would require efforts outside their well paid comfort zones.
The ideology of management as a transferrable skill arose in the US and was not long in infecting the UK. Its application to running the NHS created a non-medical elite which in order to justify salaries double or more than that of a consultant with 15+ years of training – search the Daily Mail for stories about NHS fat cats – required the transfer of power from doctors to their non-medical managers. That much of what happens is about power is eloquently described by Theodore Dalrymple, a retired prison doctor, in a story abut the hospital in which his mother died:
“Doctors became almost unimportant in the running of a hospital. This was brought home to me graphically by a large public poster showing the management of the hospital in which my mother died. There was a kind of pyramid composed of six layers, with photos of the people at the various layers of management, more of them as you descended the layers. From looking at the first four of these, you would not have had the faintest idea what kind of institution or organisation the managers were managing, or what the organisation was for: it could have been anything from a nuclear power station to a casino. There were directors of strategic planning and directors of commercial operations; there were assistants to directors of strategic planning and directors of commercial operations.
It was only at the fifth layer that one caught a faint glimpse of what the hospital was for: for here, included among other personages of middling importance, was the medical director – though with no photograph of him. Whether he refused to provide one, whether he was ashamed to provide one, or whether he was to be put in his place by forcibly remaining unrecognisable, I do not know; but the absence was striking.
No doubt there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face, but when I looked at the pictures of the people in the first four layers of the management structure, all smiling broadly and even happily, I could not help but see a large element of triumph in their expression: and they were justified in their sense of triumph. Here were the new masters.”
The ‘new masters’ have even more tools today with which which to reinforce their status and power courtesy of woke HR departments and the cult of victimhood. Thus it was that the whistle blowing doctors had to apologise to the murderer they wanted stopped. Chester Hospital is the latest obscenity from the corrupting nature of power (which is almost always self-serving). Unless and until there is a radical reform of the NHS it won’t be the last.
Management elite or the ‘new masters’ all goes back to Blair and the empowerment of a corrupt political class. Lots of jobs for the right boys and girls. Look at who gets the lucrative part time roles with Health Trusts. Time to scrap 26 years of New Labour.
Ms Letby, evil as she is, is no worse than many of our politicians.
Here is a video clip (1 minute) of a globalist conference – I’m not sure which one – where the fourth President of Malaysia stands up and talks about the genocide of billions of people; they will find “the peace of the grave” as he calls it. All in the name of the globalists desire for population reduction; Letby unfortunately is an amateur.
“The Peace of the Grave”
https://rumble.com/v3a7cdy-nwo.html
It might seem trite to say it but morally there’s no difference between killing newborns, and abortion. One is accepted and sanctioned by law, the other isnt.
I was hoping someone would make that points, Mary! I think it’s the callousness with which abortion is now regarded our society, as something available ‘on demand’, which allowed her to regarding those tiny ones in the same way, as something that can be discarded. A mindset reminiscent of Shipman. But that’s just my opinion, me not being a psychiatrist.
Psychiatry ain’t what it used to be, er, if it ever was. I’d take common sense opinion any day.
Look at this case at University of Pennsylvania, where a trans athlete, 6’4” fully intact male identifying as a female, clearly a psychological illness, was allowed into the girls’ swimming team changing rooms. But it was the girls who objected, all of them, to changing with a naked male 18 times a week who were offered psychological counselling.
https://gettr.com/post/p2omi5c6e1d
Lesson are never ever learned by people in the public sector or often in public life, why should they be they never have to deal with the consequences. There are troubling areas about this conviction though, why did the trial and verdict take so long and according to some writers, there was a disturbing lack of evidence presented. If that was the case, it’s not hard to see that there will be at some point a long and costly appeal.