It has been over 10 years since the publication of the Independent Inquiry into organised Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE), also known as the Jay Report, carried out by gangs of mainly Pakistani heritage men in the borough of Rotherham. The Jay report estimated that over 1,400 children and young people, predominantly female and white British, were victims of the gangs and failed by a range of public services including the police, social workers and local councils. This scandal shares similar features to other public sector failures but also has its own unique factors which are worthy of further analysis.
Concurrent themes were found in the Jay Report and the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust investigations of 2010 and 2013 into excess mortality rates at the hospital. Crucial to understanding both is the role that new managerialism played especially in relation to performance management targets. Essentially, frontline services were redirected to meet these targets and frontline staff faced resource cuts and managerial pressure to prioritise organisational goals rather than serve their client group. Police officers were directed to solve car crime and burglary, which counted towards targets, instead of CSE which did not. Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) declined to take forward prosecutions of CSE because in an adversarial court system, victims that have been repeatedly drugged, traumatised and intimidated did not make effective prosecutorial witnesses.
Similarly, at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust where hundreds of patients suffered poor care and neglect, frontline staff particularly in the Emergency Department (ED) were bullied and coerced into prioritising the four-hour admission or discharge target rather than deliver effective care. The NHS trust board, which did not include a single registered health professional, cut frontline resources including nursing staff and the vital equipment they relied upon to dangerous levels and tasked non-clinical receptionists to carry out triage of patients – a role that should be conducted by experienced nurses with additional training.
New managerialism also fostered bullying cultures and saw whistleblowers intimidated as the status of bureaucrats and non-professional managers was elevated because of their role in the production and curation of quantitative evidence. This led to the ‘McDonaldisation’ of policing, nursing and social work and saw professionals’ role become ever more fragmented and task focused, eroding their professional autonomy, creativity, discretion and compassion. In the clutches of bureaucratised public services, those in need of care were put at greater risk of dehumanisation. The traumatised victim of CSE who required holistic care and support, as well as protection from further intimidation and abuse, is blamed by police officers and social workers for ‘putting themselves at risk’ or ‘consenting to their own abuse’. The patient suffering from dementia lying in an unchanged bed becomes further dehumanised through the failure to deliver the fundamentals of care by exhausted and demoralised nurses.
However, unique to the scandal of CSE is the attempts to silence witnesses, whistleblowers, journalists and politicians to hide away the failures of multiculturalism and protect political power bases. At Rotherham efforts were made, and were largely successful, in undermining Risky Business, an independent organisation which advocated on behalf of and supported victims but was later brought under local authority control.
What perhaps has received little attention is the vulnerability of white British families in a modern high trust society, according to Giddens’s sociologically inspired definition of trust. The Pakistani heritage community has more in common with pre-modern societies based on kinship relations, local community ties, religious faith and tradition compared to white British society based on personal relationships, abstract systems and a future-oriented perspective. This enabled abusers to use their family networks, including children enrolled in local schools and older men working in taxi services, restaurants and public services, to identify, target and abuse their victims. Meanwhile, white British families placed their trust in public servants such as police officers and social workers for protection but when these failed, they were left uniquely vulnerable. Bauman explained how modern citizens, who had given up the right to use violence in their course of their daily affairs, were uniquely vulnerable when the state turned its violence against them. The Jay Report detailed how one family left the U.K. because they had no confidence that the local authorities would protect their child who was being repeatedly targeted by gangs.
A discussion needs to be had about the continued atomisation of white British society and the destruction of the family, including marriage and communities, which has such profound implications for the well-being of children and resilience to external threats. Social workers used the wrong model of child protection at Rotherham, based on familiar patterns of abuse, and removed children from the protective environment of the family and placed them in residential accommodation. This accommodation had been infiltrated already by perpetrators and consequently estrangement from family became a feature of this grooming strategy, along with intoxication through drugs, violent threats and intimidation and trafficking.
Since these scandals came to public attention, little has been done to prevent further harm to the public because there has been no accountability for failings that implicated all the regulatory bodies involved with the protection of the public as well as political leaders. Consequently, highly ranking professionals, senior leaders and politicians continue to oversee further public scandals such as the Post Office miscarriage of justice and the COVID-19 pandemic response. There is now a profound disconnect between democratically-elected politicians, who continue to fail upwards, and the public, leading to the destruction of a previously high trust society. Moreover, until the problem of ‘immoral authority’ is addressed, further scandals associated with multiculturalism, new managerialism and pharmaceutical egress will emerge, and the continued atomisation of our society will leave us and our children more vulnerable to abuse of all kinds.
Dr. Rowena Slope is a Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing at Bournemouth University and author of Corporate Totalitarianism: Freedom, Power and Technology in the Modern Era and Care in the Iron Cage: A Weberian Analysis of Failings in Care. Subscribe to her Substack.
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Whenever the NHS is mentioned on here, or outlets such as the Telegraph and Spectator, people pile in about the wasteful bureaucracy, useless managers, pen-pushers, etc.
But almost no one says anything about doctors.
This article: doctors, of all types, must have known that the withdrawal of non-covid health treatment would be an absolute disaster. Anyone with a functioning brain knew it.
And yet, with a very few exceptions, doctors said and did nothing. Ditto the stabbings.
There is something very, very wrong with the medical profession. I don’t know exactly what, but I do know something is very wrong.
Karol Sikora was one of the exceptions.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/12/called-killer-warning-lockdown-harms/
Yes, but even he was content to go along with lockdowns in the early days, although eager to get out of them in ‘small steps’, while accepting the necessity to ‘carefully monitor for any second wave’. See from 8 April 2020:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-find-a-safe-way-out-of-the-coronavirus-lockdown/#comments-container
As I recall, I made a couple of comments btl, as well as our very own Will Jones. Interesting to see now, nearly three years later, how such posts have stood the test of time.
A lot of people now posing as radically anti-lockdown were a lot more equivocal back in those early days.
Well, to be fair, in April 20 I was content to go along with lockdowns. I had bought the three weeks to flatten the curve lie. I didn’t wake up until July 20 after tracking the numbers over the summer using Worldometer and the re-imposition of restrictions on the people of Leicester. I did some research and realised from NHS 111 triage data the first wave had peaked before the lockdown could have had any affect. At the same time I found this site. I have maximum respect for you and others who were opposed to lockdowns from the start.
Many thanks. March/April 2020 were heady days, and to criticise lockdowns was to go right out on a limb, on your own. This site didn’t exist, and there was no focal point of resistance. Peter Hitchens perhaps, and perhaps the Spectator, Spiked, Lord Sumption (a pivotal intervention, right at the start; shame he blemished himself over the stabs, likewise Spiked, and even Mr Hitchens) but right now I can’t think of much else. To question lockdown was to be dubbed a cynically selfish murderer.
As I re-read that Spectator threat, from early April 2020, I see I wrote:
We can’t stay in lockdown for months or years until a vaccine is found (AND implemented). It seems that the only other way the spread can be contained is through herd immunity. But that means a great many people must be exposed to the virus. Implicit in this argument is that there needs to be a (possibly quite large) background level of transmission.
So WHY ON EARTH are low-risk people being instructed not to go outside??
I can understand why the number of cases needs to be kept at a level at which the NHS can cope. Hence I can understand the need for some level of social distancing, and especially the need for vulnerable people to isolate. But lockdown??
Lockdown means destroying the economy (with all the concomitant health damage) and the destruction of our civil liberties. …
Not a lot I’d change 3 years later, except that I probably over-estimated the degree to which ‘social distancing’ would slow infection rates, and I was naive about how corrupt and evil the vaccine developers actually are. It’s worth pointing out that even now, nearly three years later, there is no effective vaccine (quite apart from a safe one).
They are highly educated, over-domesticated humans that have little capability or even desire to think for themselves.
In an interesting inteview, Eckhart Tolle explained quite well how it is that intelligent people very often do very stupid things. Not occasionally, but constantly and persistently.
He draws a distinction between intelligence, which is related to performing specific tasks with competence and wisdom, which is related with making good decisions, usually of a complex nature.
The key to wisdom is not intelligence but awareness. You can be very intelligent but lack awareness. In fact, the more absorbed you are into something, as intelligent people often are, the less aware you can become.
You can also lack awareness because you refuse to see things out of convenience or fear.
So, lack of awareness, lack of wisdom. And lack of wisdom makes you do stupid things.
I found that explanation very enlightening.
Brilliantly put. I’ve heard it out this way: there are stupid people who are clever and clever people who are stupid.
Indeed, I’ve thought about those explanations too. Also that it appears the medical profession is extremely hierarchical, with an ethos of almost blind deference to authority imbued at every level.
But even so, even after allowing or all this, how can doctors be so apparently stupid?
In my view they can’t be. But that points to a whole load of other very uncomfortable questions.
My guess is that one problem is, despite their arrogance, doctors are actually very reluctant to take responsibility – and thus hide in the group so as to avoid responsibility. A hypothesis that imv deserves investigation – I can’t do it, asI’m not in the profession.
Anyone else got any ideas?
As I say, there is something very, very wrong here, which if we want a decent society we need to understand and correct.
WTF is up with doctors?
The obvious explanation is two-fold. 1) being paid £15/shot creates a huge conflict of interest 2) they’re now in it so deep they can’t possibly do a reverse ferret – that would make them a target for all manner of law suits.
Other professional institutions are quite similar, that is to say, hierarchical. They don’t want to be on the wrong side of the fence – after all, their personal balance sheet could be under attack.
42 years in the profession has taught me that it is blind deference to authority that causes doctors to be so “stupid”.
From succeeding at school and university, which requires memorising huge quantities of information and regurgitating it without analysis, to being coerced into following edicts from the medical colleges, health departments, etc.
Medical practitioners are great at rote learning but lousy at engaging their right brain, meaning they are unable to see nuance or context in their algorithms.
Many thanks for this – as I suspected. Yet does it really fully explain their inability to recognise what is starring them in the face??
As I write, I suspect it may well be in part owing to a reluctance to take responsibility, to stand up and go against the grain. Those fearful of responsibility will always take refuge in the crowd, and move with the crowd where they feel safe.
These are topics I believe need to be explored more fully – nice if it could be done ATL here. But I can’t do it, as I have no medical background. All I can do is stand on the outside, look in, and make observations. Any proper discussion would have to come from someone within or close to the profession.
But it seems to me that this is a very important subject. As I say, something is very wrong with the medical profession, and like it or not that’s bad news or all of us.
When I get past the security to actually see my GP, I intend to ask these questions directly to his face.
Good one! Please let us know how you get on.
The medical profession has changed in the 35 years I’ve been working alongside it. Increasingly doctors are political actors and have become much more collectivist in their outlook.
A year ago I witnessed one brave doctor asking pertinent sceptical questions about the Covid jab about to become mandatory. She was monstered by her colleagues whose arguments amounted to little more than emotional spasms and appeals to authority.
I think a generation ago doctors were more individualist, more patient focused, and more prepared to challenge conventional wisdom.
Good to hear a view from near to the profession.
She was monstered by her colleagues whose arguments amounted to little more than emotional spasms and appeals to authority.
That’s a terrifying statement, but one which rings oh so true.
As I say, wtf is wrong with doctors?
Genuine question. Any views welcome.
Just to state the obvious but…it’s going to get a lot worse as T cell production in boosted populations result in increased cancer across the board.
Gotta address the obvious elephant here…Doctors and pathologists ( Ryan Cole, Dr Hoffe, Ute Kruger etc ) have been warning of this for a while now and Dr Hoffe has been struck by how he’s seeing many significantly accelerated cancers in his Canadian practice. He talks about seeing tumours grow several inches in so many months, which is unheard of, and the common denominator is these patients have all been jabbed. They’re presenting with stage 4 cancers too, which means the prognosis is bleak. There’s videos of him talking about this and showing case studies. Here’s a short article describing the mechanism of how the jabs can accelerate cancers, so-called ”turbo cancers”;
https://www.newstarget.com/2022-11-15-t-cell-lymphoma-progress-rapidly-mrna-booster-shot.html
I don’t think this paper has myself as a reader in mind, well except when they are painting me as a ‘literal Naz!’.
“From Italy to Sweden, Hungary to France, the far right is once again a force to be reckoned with. Its hostility towards immigrants encourages xenophobes everywhere, including in the UK. Its social conservatism threatens hard-won LGBTQ+ rights. Its euroscepticism has already upset the dynamics of the EU.
The normalisation of far right rhetoric has gone far enough. For decades, Guardian journalism has challenged populists like this, and the divisions that they sow.”
Indeed
Loving the downvotes!
Suppression of the cancer control gene P53. – and on the immune system generally
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869152200206X
See Ss. 2 and 4
Sent this to the bloody Guardian.
And the BBC.
They’re sure to take notice.
Not the impact of Covid, just of the folly & evil perpetrated by the state etc.
Nobody could have predicted this….
Well almost no one in the highly rained medical community that is.
I know 4 people who have been “suddenly” diagnosed with terminal cancer in the past year. One has already died; two others have months to live. The fourth is in Stage 4 but they’re planning to operate in a week’s time although the prognosis is still very poor. She’s considering cancelling the op and just letting nature take it’s course.
To put this into context, a year ago I only knew one person who had received a (bowel) cancer diagnosis (10 years ago) and she was successfully treated.
Ah of course Guardian, it was ‘a virus’ that caused this.
Seeing the Gates and Globalist funded Guardian report on the catastrophic effects of crushing a society and its health service for two years is like reading a forensic fire investigation report from the arsonist.
In August 15 months ago I noticed a penny sized black patch of skin on my back. My GP, a locum with no facemask who I didn’t know advised me not to bother with the NHS and gave me a phone number for a private consultant, while referring me on to my local NHS hospital. I saw the private consultant 2 weeks later, and she rearranged her list on the spot and removed the lesion (she said it was ‘striking’) which was subsequently confirmed as a malignant melanoma at a very early stage. A further operation was required just to be sure. The NHS after acknowledging receipt of my referral eventually offered my an appointment dated 16 weeks after the initial referral, a lead time of which they were aware but hadn’t bothered to tell me.
I wrote to the UK prime minister with the receipts asking to be refunded, he referred me to my regional assembly.
I wrote to the First Minister of my regional assembly. I received a response from the head of the civil service cancer strategy unit, by email. The letter was unsigned, not cc’d to the original addressee and had the wrong street address, and a total of 27 errors of fact, spelling or convention. And the blame was placed firmly on Covid-19.
I wrote to the head of my regional NHS Trust. After a second letter threatening legal action and requesting a copy of the risk assessment leading to the shutting down of the hospital, she responded and blamed high patient volumes. She foolishly told me that they knew how long the 16 week wait would be, but declined to say why I wasn’t told. And an apology along with a several paragraphs of meaningless word salad was offered, and rejected by me in my unanswered response. The NHS, and our political system has failed us. I struggle to see how things will change without a violent confrontation with the subsequent winners and losers.
Is it just the missed appointments? The bodies immune system is key in suppressing cancer cells (which pop up all the time). A widespread reduction in the immune system’s effectiveness could cause a cancer epidemic.
There’s me thinking it woz the jabs wot dun it !!..
Doctors are also highly controlled by their professional bodies. Their license can easily and quickly be removed, as has been shown many times over the last 3 years. Without their license they cannot work or feed their family. They cannot easily travel between countries since they are required to get licensed in that country. This power also extends to big pharma who can easily restrict access to medicins required for the Doctor to function. And we cannot ignore the fact the whole world was going mad. There was a great wave of insanity sweeping the world. Nothing they could do as an individual could make any difference, as was shown by those imminent Doctors who did speak up.