Six of the worst

Scandals, that is: Windrush; Contaminated Blood; Post Office Horizon; WASPI Women; Grenfell Victims and Carers' Allowance - quite a list.*

One could also add the emerging NHS maternity, HM Prisons, policing and asylum backlog scandals. But, for now, let's concentrate on those six. Many of them pre-date 2010, but none has yet been resolved in the fourteen years of Tory rule since then, nor is likely to be in the time remaining to Rishi Sunak - quite a legacy.

It is a legacy - a poisoned chalice rather - most likely to be inherited by a Labour government which, to resolve satisfactorily, will require hundreds of billions of pounds to be spent - money which the Treasury currently doesn't appear to have. 

This gargantuan task, on top of all the other urgent priorities for fixing a broken Britain, is going to present a massive headache for an incoming Labour government, which could seriously undermine, if not entirely derail, its economic plans. It will be a daunting challenge for the UK's first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer, though Rachel Reeves shows every sign of being up to it. We must hope so.

What rankles most, more almost than the original injustice inherent in all these scandals, is the obduracy and obstructiveness of government agencies when it comes to rectifying them. All have been characterised by denial, obfuscation and delay. But, most of all, delay. Deliberate and unconscionable delay.

Justice delayed is justice denied, they say, and hundreds of thousands of victims have had this insult added to their original injury. Meanwhile, of course, victims are dying. It takes a pretty callous system to factor this into its equations but you can bet in some dingy Whitehall back office, the actuarial tables have been pored over in the hope of saving money. 

There will always be muddle and inefficiency in any system but, on this scale, delay can only be deliberate. Quite apart from being immoral, it must be counterproductive in its own terms. How much have the seemingly interminable public enquiries and official reports cost? Would it not have been cheaper in the long run (and it has been a marathon, with Windrush, for example, going back to the 1940s) to pay out compensation promptly, learn the lessons and move on?

Instead, goverments do everything in their power (which is considerable) to block, frustrate and refuse justice. It is a shocking indictment of a democratic system which treats its people in this way but it is sadly typical of a top-down model of governance. The 'little people' don't matter.

Of course, this is hardly a new phenomenon. Shakespeare writes in Hamlet of "the law's delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes". Even the great Roman legal mind, Cicero, found it difficult to reconcile the roles of law, rhetoric and philosophy with his roles as a politician and advocate, famously saying "the more the law, the less the justice". But the final word must go to Dr Martin Luther King:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

* Not forgetting the Hillsborough disaster.

Popular posts from this blog

Looking to Africa - long read

As I sit here on an island just off the coast of North-West Africa I can't help pondering the future of that vast and seemingly unknowable continent, so near and yet so far. I'm writing this in Tenerife, one of the eight Canary Islands forming an archipelago off the coast of Morocco and Western Sahara - tantilisingly close and yet a world away from the 'mainland' of continental Africa. As an Autonomous Community of Spain, the Canaries form an outpost of the European Union (EU). Yet, despite their proximity to Africa, their outlook, politically, culturally and economically, is resolutely European. Africa may as well be Mars, though only a narrow gulf of the Atlantic Ocean separates these offshore islands from their continent. I say resolutely European but that resolve may, little by little, be weakening. There is a growing sentiment, especially, though not exclusively, amongst young Canarians, that they have been sold a pup. True, the economy is superficially buoyant, du
Read more

On old age

"The fact is that when I come to think it over, I find that there are four reasons for old age being thought unhappy: First, that it withdraws us from active employments; second, that it enfeebles the body; third, that it deprives us of nearly all physical pleasures; fourth, that it is the next step to death."  Writing his essay,  De Senectute (On Old Age), in 44 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero went on to refute these four supposed reasons in characteristically robust and forthright manner. Cicero wasn't one to sit about moping in his own old age; he remained actively engaged in the political life of the Republic whose survival, in the face of tyranny, he championed so fiercely.  Cicero was nine years younger than I am now when he met his untimely end yet he considered himself already an old man; or, rather, his society judged him to be so. His second point about age enfeebling is more germane. Physical decline had not yet impacted him but, six years on from my retirement, I
Read more

Born to rule

When, ten days ago, I posted my piece about the manipulated image of Catherine, Princess of Wales, and her children (see Snap Judgment) I didn't know of her cancer treatment. Had I known, I would have adopted a gentler, though I hope no less critical, tone. But I didn't know, and nor did any of us outside the immediate royal circle, which rather goes to strengthen the case against the monarchy. For Kate and her family the diagnosis of cancer (as yet unspecified) will have been a devastating blow, as will the chemotherapy she is currently undergoing. On a human level, of course I sympathise and extend my best wishes for a full recovery as, indeed, I did at the time of her father-in-law's diagnosis. It is particularly cruel, then, that on top of all this she has been obliged to record a video statement to reassure the public. As if she didn't have enough to contend with already. But such is the unpalatable obligation placed upon any royal personage - noblesse oblige. Whic
Read more