Listen / Read
I thought I’d watch Panorama before writing today’s Afterthought. Why has Panorama turned into Tonight Without Trevor McDonald? Tense music, shady reconstructions, inappropriately elaborate camera work? A ‘big name’ presenter freezing his nips off in the bitter cold to do a 30 second intro/outro? Why not fully embrace mediocrity and get Tim Vine on to do a few gags as well?
It was informative too, but didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t read in the papers already. It reinforces the cynical and depressing impression that management exist solely to stop people from DOING THEIR FUCKING JOBS. And perhaps also to negotiate inadequate, infeasible and incompetently implemented information technology systems at immense cost, while cutting corners when it comes to preventing child abuse and infanticide.
Diatribes aside, it’s impossible not to be angered by what we know so far. There seem to have been so many opportunities to prevent this from happening, and they were all missed. And now a child is dead. People on the ground, social workers and police officers doing their jobs, had wanted to take action which would have prevented this from happening, but were overruled by bureaucrats.
While I agree with the overall gist of Winter’s reading today, that we are all responsible for the well-being of the children in our lives, I’m troubled by his final point. Of course the happiness and well-being of children should, in the end, depend on us. It should. But it sometimes does not. In the end it sometimes does come down to procedures and national strategies. In the end procedures and national strategies are all some children have left to save them from abuse, and the untimely ending of their lives.
If we are to expect society at large to take personal responsibilities seriously then the managers of public services must also take responsibility for decisions they have made which have, in the end, failed our children.