Peter Rhodes on scandals, tragedies and how blaming politicians has replaced Acts of God
The scandal over botched operations at GOSH, Great Ormond Street Hospital, will inevitably lead to that great British institution, a public inquiry. Yet we can already guess the findings. A culture of fear and deference. Junior staff terrified of reporting their fears. Management preferring to look the other way. Why not scrap an inquiry and save a few million?
Meanwhile, Tony Blair was interviewed recently by Sophie Ridge who asked whether tragedies such as Grenfell Tower, the Post Office scandal and the national disgrace of contaminated blood indicated “a failure of leadership” in government.
Blair replied: “This is a difficult thing to say, but . . . however good your system is and however well-intentioned it is, and however hard people work, they're going to make mistakes.” For this moment of blinding frankness and common sense, Blair has been denounced as “despicable” by the Fire Brigades Union. But he's right and they're wrong.
When any big scandal breaks these days, there is always a witch-hunt to pin the blame on someone right at the top, preferably a government minister. It is a strange reaction, possibly based on the old idea of an Act of God. In these agnostic times, if we can't blame God we can at least blame those who wield god-like powers - politicians. Our forbears would find this very odd. When RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and went to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1912, nobody dreamed of trying to pin it on prime minister Herbert Asquith.
And the lesson of history is that catastrophes tend to be caused by low-level decisions by lesser players. Just because something goes wrong on a prime minister's watch, it doesn't mean that prime minister is culpable.
If we could stop looking for people in the highest places to blame for every scandal, we could concentrate on the things for which they clearly are responsible. Iraq, perhaps?
Anyway, the good news at GOSH is the promise that lessons will be learned. (Except they won't be, because they never are.)
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