I find I don't live in the country I thought I did as I grew up.
Not due to immigration, though how one cannot be concerned at the remarkable numbers of people still arriving and claiming asylum puzzles me. Blair and Brown were culpable for engaging in a deliberate experiment with open borders but Boris Johnson lost all semblance of any control. However, that argument seems to have been won, with 56% of people saying in a recent poll that it was their biggest concern and most political parties trying to outdo each other with tough statements, though not much sign of any practicable solutions to back them up.
Rather, I always tended to think that we lived in a basically decent country where one could trust that public officials would be efficient and honest rather than being self serving and engaging in cover ups when things go wrong while leaving a trail of wrecked lives in their wake.
This specific thought occurred to me after belatedly watching the wonderful ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. I didn't feel the need to watch the series at first as I've followed the story in the Sunday Times for over a decade after they picked up on the original Computer Weekly item from 2008. It's been like watching a slow motion disaster movie for most of that time. The lead characters and villains, specifically Paula Vennells and the Post Office's ability to bring prosecutions seemingly at a whim were all well known to me, as was the damage it had caused to so many innocent individuals. I'd been horrified by the saga for so long why watch the programme? But the reviews and the continued dragging of heels in resolving the claims caused us to watch. It was well worthwhile, from the opening scenes at Mr Bates's Post Office at Craig-y-don, just two and a half miles down the road from us. Indeed here it is:
As you can see it's a charity shop, now not a post office, though the post box is still in use on the pavement. Here's how they made it look for the TV drama:
Awful as the Post Office scandal was - and still is - it's far from the only sorry tale of the UK's uniformly useless response to it's seemingly institutionalised inability to do the right thing by its people.
I give you as further examples the contaminated blood scandal, the numerous health trust scandals involving maternity care in particular and the poor regulation that allowed crooked businesses to create the Grenfell Tower inferno followed by the totally inadequate response that has also left many individuals all over the country suffering prolonged consequences.
There's also the sodium valproate issue, another slow burn problem with evidence emerging in the 1980s and 1990s that the anti-epilepsy drug could cause problems for foetuses. It was downgraded as a first line treatment for women of child bearing age in 2004 but children continued to be born disabled and mothers were denied the truth. In 2018 Jeremy Hunt, then Health Secretary, commissioned a report by Baroness Cumberlege to examine valproate and two other health scandals. Her report, published in July 2020, found that patients had been "dismissed, overlooked and ignored", in some cases for decades. The government accepted some recommendations but rejected compensation. In 2022 Hunt, then chairman of the Health Select Committee, called the scandal "the most egregious injustice" and said it was time "the British state faced up to its responsibilities". England's patient safety commissioner, Dr Henrietta Hughes, was asked to examine redress and how it would work. See reported 18 months ago since which silence.
One of the points I cannot get my head around is the poor safety and accountability culture in the health service revealed time after time by the various health trust scandals. I don't begin to understand how the NHS can be so dysfunctional at escalating what we used to call "unusual occurrences" in the nuclear industry, learning from events whether they caused actual damage, constituted a "near miss" or just struck someone as possibly being "not quite right". All employees and contractors were actively encouraged to report what we called UNORs (unusual occurrences) and they were all investigated appropriately with feedback provided. The culture was "if in doubt, report it", whereas the NHS seems to adopt "if in doubt keep your bloody mouth shut". To be fair, I later found that the UK rail industry had more of a climate of fear, with contractors reluctant to report issues in case they count against their companies in future bids for work. Perhaps nuclear, chemicals and aviation which also have strong safety cultures, are the outliers. In many other fields of endeavour whistleblowers are not encouraged or actively bullied into silence.
Most of these industries - don't kid yourself the health service is an industry, after all it's England's biggest employer by a street* - act in silos, pretending but not actually spreading best practice within but ignoring anything "not invented here".
Grenfell is a more complex story with an interplay between ineffective regulation and dishonest pactices by private developers and suppliers but the awfully inadequate and painfully slow response is from the same playbook.
It seems we just cannot trust that our political leaders have the know how, willpower and common decency to sort these things out.
Paula Vennells eventually returned her CBE, a few weeks before the King revoked it. But that is unusual. The majority of the culprits of that scandal and all the others just seem to sail on. The lack of accountability is concerning, but not as concerning as knowing that the culture all remains in place. So the scandals will continue.
I used to be horrified by these scandals, but now I feel ashamed as we just get empty words from empty suits who seem capable of belated apologies but never willing or able to actually fix anything.
As I said, not my country, or at least it's one a long way from the one I thought it was.
* The NHS employs around 1.5 or 1.6 million people in the UK depending which source you believe. If you add together the next nine largest employers in the UK (in order Tesco, Sainsbury's, The British Army, the DWP, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Defence, HSBC, the Metropolitan Police and Barclays Network Rail you still don't get to much more than a million. You could add HMRC (which I suspect should be in that top 10) the RAF, the Royal Navy, the BBC, the Home Office, the Scottish and Welsh governments and the UK Parliament and still get nowhere near the NHS total.
PS Jeremy Hunt seems to be one of the few good guys in all of this, pushing for reparations for contaminated blood as Health Sec but being frustrated by the Treasury - until he went there.
PPS I only just realised that Craig-y-Don means rocks and waves, very apposite for its location near the Little Orme.
Abandoned. Five years after a report called for payouts - and 100 parliamentary questions - the families of children born diabled as a result of an anti-epilepsy drug await justice. Sunday Times 17 August 2025
Who are the UK's top 10 employers in 2024? https://ukvisajobs.com/blog-detail/87
https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=post-office-whistleblowers-former-shop-llandudno
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