Horizon, maternity, infected blood – what other scandals await corrupt Britain?
Something is rotten in the state of Britain. We all sense it, I think, in interactions with the authorities – where every little thing becomes an anger-management ordeal. We glimpse it when a neighbour, giddy with triumph, reports that they used a public service and it actually worked (shout out to His Majesty’s Passport Office now issuing passports promptly, or so I’m told). The rottenness is blatantly evident in the two fingers stuck up to the general public by allowing net immigration to rocket over 700,000. It is written on the face of the new mother who comes out of hospital after a bloody ordeal in which her baby was lucky to have survived (the birth invariably ends in an emergency C-section which should have been carried out 10 hours before but the midwife had a thing for natural deliveries).
We see it in the way patients are treated (and increasingly not treated) by the NHS. A friend’s mother received a serious cancer diagnosis last week. Clare and her sister asked the doctor to talk them through other treatment options from the one he had just outlined. “You’re getting a free service,” said the doctor, loftily rebuking the frightened daughters. As though simply wondering what else might be available for their mum was somehow heretical, an insult to the all-powerful, magnanimous NHS, before whom we must prostrate ourselves like humble worshippers.
“You get what you’re given and you like it or lump it,” is how Clare described the doctor’s condescending attitude. That’s our rotten, second-world country in a nutshell.
The major scandals which seem to come along with numbing frequency – Hillsborough, BSE, Mid Staffs (where hundreds of patients died from poor care), Grenfell, Shrewsbury and Telford (maternity scandal), Windrush, Morecambe Bay NHS Trust (11 dead babies), East Kent maternity scandal, the ongoing Post Office horror show and now, maybe the worst, the infected blood calamity – all spring fundamentally from that one attitude: ordinary people don’t count.
If people cause a fuss when, say, a young woman says it’s not right that both her parents died of Aids and she was orphaned because the UK imported blood donated by druggies and prisoners which ministers said was the “best treatment available” when that was a lie, then those nuisances must be shut down. Fobbed off. Requests for a public inquiry denied for as long as possible. So the people who do count, who privately run the show, can get away with it. Again.
In a thrillingly good (in both senses; excellently composed and virtue-rich) speech on Monday to victims and relatives of the deceased, Sir Brian Langstaff, the chairman of the Infected Blood Inquiry, came up with a perfect example of that self-serving elite. He quoted one civil servant’s memo complaining that a health minister had started to be too sympathetic to the victims. Can’t have that, can we? I mean, why would 30,000 people poisoned by their own health service, 3,000 of whom have died – with two more dying every week – merit any sympathy from the government that gave them their death sentence in the first place?
(Strong echoes here of Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Sub-postmasters took the rap for the faulty system those in authority had given them, without adequate testing, and then management pretended not to know about its faults to save their skins until the postmasters were dead, in jail or the poor things merely thought they’d lost their minds.)
A slight, almost dainty figure with soft silver hair, Sir Brian looks how vicars used to look when they still believed in God. Turns out he possesses in abundance what the British state lacks: moral courage and a conscience.
“It will be astonishing to anyone who reads this report that these events could have happened in the UK,” Sir Brian writes. “It may also be surprising that the questions why so many deaths and infections occurred have not had answers before now. Those answers cannot be as complete as they might have been 30 years ago… I have no doubt, however, that… the conclusion that wrongs were done on individual, collective and systemic levels is fully justified by the pages that follow; that a level of suffering which it is difficult to comprehend, still less understand, has been caused to so many, and that this harm has, for those who survived long enough to face it and for those who, infected and affected, are now able to read this, been compounded by the reaction of the government, NHS bodies, other public bodies, the medical professions and others.”
Listen to the appalled tenderness in the inquiry chairman’s voice when he describes a one-year-old baby who was given HIV in a blood transfusion (a devastating fact revealed to his parents by the ever-caring NHS in a hospital corridor). The little boy went on to develop full-blown Aids, his father lost his job because of the stigma, the family had to move house after their car was scratched (“Aids Dead”, the graffiti said) until, finally, “this fragile boy, wasting away, died at the age of seven”.
If you find yourself wondering what is the point of trying to get some of the bastards who allowed contaminated blood to be injected into trusting patients arrested and brought to trial, I suggest you keep re-reading Sir Brian’s description of that baby boy.
Hopefully, somewhere in Whitehall, a Sir Tufton Bufton is right this minute banging his puce bonce up against the oak panelling because the Establishment thought Brian Langstaff, a former High Court judge, was one of them. A decent fellow who could be relied upon to deliver a toothless “mistakes having been made, lessons will be learnt” report that would not lift up the carpet under which all the corruption, the collusion, the shredding of medical records, and the experiments on children had been swept. Instead, Sir Brian gave them both barrels for a “chilling cover-up” that hid the truth for more than 40 years, a “tragedy” which, in large part, could have been avoided. No wonder he got a rapturous standing ovation from family members at the event of remembrance.
I have read his entire 2,527-page report and the most shocking section, amid a gallery replete with horrors, focuses on Treloar College, which specialised in treating children with haemophilia. The Hampshire state school’s on-site NHS centre gave children injections of different types of Factor VIII (plasma blood products), with clinicians being “well aware” of the risk of infecting them with HIV and hepatitis.
“The children,” Sir Brian reports, “were often regarded as objects for research rather than, first and foremost, as children whose treatment should be firmly focused on their individual best interests alone. This was unethical and wrong. There were multiple research projects during the 1970s and early 1980s when informed consent for participation was neither sought nor given.”
Surely, any clinician involved in those unauthorised experiments was, at the very least, in breach of the Nuremberg Code? Get police to track them down.
One Treloar pupil, now a grown man, recalled that doctors let his class know who had contracted HIV by pointing at individual boys and saying “You, not you, yes you are HIV positive et cetera… ” Hard to think of a more grotesquely insensitive way to tell a child they have a fatal illness. Only 30 of the 122 pupils with haemophilia at Treloar in the Seventies and Eighties are still alive. It was a state-sponsored massacre.
Meanwhile, as all that was about to be revealed like a never-ending Greek tragedy, on the BBC’s Politics Live, a Conservative MP called Tom Hunt piped up in defence of the NHS. “The British people love the NHS,” this fool explained, and most staff working in the NHS are “wonderful people”.
Are they really, Tom? Presumably, not the ones who injected kids with blood products they knew had a fair chance of giving them HIV and a shortened lifespan? On the very day that the NHS was declared guilty of “indefensible” and “unconscionable” behaviour and, furthermore, of not informing patients of the grave risks of a medical treatment, a politician was still defending our monstrously useless health service.
Only when politicians like Hunt stop this craven, kneejerk deference and are prepared to hold a socialist bureaucracy (which gobbles up more than £160 billion annually) to account, will the public have a chance of being protected against further cover-ups and tragedies.
I would go further. It is all very well the media celebrating interim compensation payments of £210,000 (potentially £2.7 million per person infected with HIV). While that is undoubtedly belated good news for the grieving families – although not for the poor taxpayer who must foot the vast bill for the criminal stupidity and corruption of an elite, untouchable class – we should not be deflected from considering whether there is evidence here for charges of corporate manslaughter, or misconduct in public office, to be brought.
(The awful complacency of the ruling class when it comes to the suffering of ordinary people was revealed when Sir John Major told the inquiry that the infected blood scandal was “incredibly bad luck”. That’s one way of describing the deaths of 3,000 innocent people, John. Tory grandee and former health secretary Ken Clarke was even worse, angering Sir Brian with his “unfairly dismissive and disparaging” attitude towards many who had suffered. Lord Clarke saw no reason why he should give evidence and appeared unrepentant about a misleading statement in which he had claimed there was “no conclusive proof” that Aids could be spread through blood in 1983.)
Other countries dealt with their contaminated blood scandals more than 20 years ago. In France, in 1999, the former socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius, former social affairs minister Georgina Dufoix, and former health minister Edmond Herve were charged with manslaughter. Herve was found guilty (although not jailed) while Fabius and Dufoix were acquitted. Dr M Garretta, the director of the National Blood Centre (Centre National de transfusion sanguine), was sentenced to four years in prison.
Rishi Sunak said that Monday was “a day of shame for the British state”. But those were just words, Prime Minister. France proved that shame actually meant something by bringing criminal charges against key figures. That is what we need here, right now, in the UK. To begin to rebuild shattered public trust as well as putting the fear of God into the high priests of our disgraced national religion, the NHS.
You know, there is only one sentence of Sir Brian’s superb, scathing summary I disagreed with. “It will be astonishing to anyone who reads this report that these events could have happened in the UK,” he wrote. Are we really surprised that such evil was allowed to happen here? Not anymore. As long as the elite gets away with parroting their “Never again” (until the next time) and the ordinary person doesn’t count, there will be something rotten in the state of Britain.
