NHS officials hoped Lucy Letby case would go away. It never does
IN many ways it’s quite straight-forward.
The murders of those seven babies by Lucy Letby was a case of individual wickedness.
There are wicked people among us, capable of such things.
She was one of them.
But the inquiry into those murders must ask why repeated warnings to the NHS Trust were routinely brushed away.
A doctor at the Countess of Chester Hospital, Stephen Brearey, was one of SEVEN consultants who tried to alert the hospital authorities about Letby.
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He explained his concerns on multiple occasions.
Each time he was told, effectively, to get lost.
He worries that the bosses were not accountable, and flitted between one trust and another.
That’s certainly a problem.
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But he also said it was the consultants who were seen as the problem by the administrators, not Letby.
That accusation rings a bell, doesn’t it?
This is the problem with bureaucracy and with bureaucrats.
We see it in our NHS Trusts, we’ve seen it plenty of times in another enormous behemoth, the BBC.
It is in the nature of bureaucracies to cover up, to hide and to dissemble. They want a quiet life.
They are averse to dealing with change, and have no time whatsoever for whistleblowers.
Better to just carry on smoothly as we’re doing, even if things are going badly wrong, than open ourselves up to a possible scandal.
And so when whistleblowers come forward, they’re listened to politely — and then told to sod off and nothing gets down.
Blow that whistle several times and they have you marked down as a troublemaker.
Then they hide behind fashionable speech.
In Letby’s case, they described her as “vulnerable”.
And thus the consultants who were worried were guilty of bullying.
We saw all this business with the BBC over the case of the revolting Jimmy Savile.
Insiders raised concerns.
But the managers looked in the other direction.
Took no action until it was way, way too late.
And Savile was dead.
But that’s the problem. These things DON’T go away.
After Dr Stephen Brearey made his views known about Letby and was brushed off, two more babies were killed. And more were injured.
These were lives which perhaps could have been saved.
If the hospital and trust authorities had acted as any normal human being would expect them to have acted, instead of seemingly closing their eyes and crossing their fingers.
Never-say-die Lionesses are pride of Britain
The England Lionesses deserve all the praise they got.
In truth, they were comprehensively outplayed by Spain.
And the referee wasn’t very helpful – no change there then.
But they fought, and fought.
There’s no doubt the standard of play has come on incredibly in the last five to ten years.
A decade ago any men’s pub side could have beaten the women’s national team.
You couldn’t say that now.
And the number of girls playing football has increased dramatically.
Remarkably, it is now the most-played sport by girls.
Good, because it is the most glorious of sports and should be open to all.
MANCHESTER UNITED have shown all the compassion and morality of a bent king cobra in dealing with Mason Greenwood.
Charges of attempted rape, coercive control and assault against him were dropped.
But enough of his horrible lifestyle made it abundantly clear that he shouldn’t be playing for the Mancs.
Yet United dithered and dithered.
They weren’t really concerned about Greenwood, only about themselves.
And then when it became obvious they’d cop a packet of abuse for taking him back, they got shot of him.
Lovely people.
Time to outlaw snares
THE Scottish government plans to ban the snaring of wild animals.
A snare is a loop of metal which captures the animal and chokes it to death. It is a terrible, agonising way to die.
The Welsh government is also banning snares.
So what about England?
Neither the Conservatives nor Labour have any intention of stopping gamekeepers effectively torturing wild animals to death.
Despite relentless campaigning from organisations such as the League Against Cruel Sports.
Campaign group SnareWatch says more than a million animals every year are caught in snares in England.
THE sun has got a bad case of acne.
There’s a huge spot on its surface.
Probably been eating too much fast food and chocolate.
This spot could cause us problems.
Big power outages and the like.
Let’s hope it gets some Clearasil sharpish.
There are a number of very complex technical reasons as to why the sun gets sunspots, say the scientists.
But I prefer to think that our star is at last in its adolescence.
Soon it will stop shining and spend all day indoors on TikTok with the curtains closed.
Might be a bit of a cold winter.
Comedy a joke
THE award for funniest joke at the Edinburgh Fringe went to a woman called Lorna Rose Treen.
It was: “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.”
Come on, pick yourself up off the floor.
Bandage those broken ribs.
Sheesh – I’ve read funnier death certificates.
But then that’s the way comedy is going these days.
In making humour offensive to nobody at all, they’ve also made it staggeringly dull and unfunny.
You can expect to see Lorna with her own show some time soon.
How we all look forward to that.
Vivek a Trump card
CLEVER young Vivek Ramaswamy is shooting up in the polls in the US.
He’s a massively anti-woke entrepreneur with an Indian background – as you probably guessed from his name.
He’s a libertarian Republican and is well on his way to winning over his party.
Let’s hope he makes it.
The only Republican that senile old scrote Joe Biden could defeat is Donald Trump.
And Trump is STILL, somehow, the favourite among Republicans.
I hope they grasp, soon, that the orange-faced loon can’t win.
A POLITICIAN is in trouble for telling the truth, once again.
Tory London mayoral candidate Susan Hall was speaking about the Notting Hill Carnival.
She asked for it to be moved because of the criminality that occurs – the stabbings, fights, gun crime, drugs stuff and sexual assaults.
She also said how “every year residents go through hell” when the carnival is in their streets.
Needless to say, her remarks have been called offensive by people like that intellectual titan David Lammy.
But what has she said that isn’t, actually, true?
Law's frock tactic
MORE evidence that wokery is tearing this country apart.
A report from the Institute for Economic Affairs suggests people could soon face prosecution for MISGENDERING somebody.
Meaning that if there’s some bloke with a beard and big biceps but he’s wearing a frock, you must under the law call him “her”.
Listen, nobody owns their own pronouns.
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Pronouns are owned by the person who uses them.
If this ever becomes law, I might press to make it illegal to use my name without the correct adjectives: “The Bloody Marvellous Rod Liddle.”