COMMENT
It is what it is, but it shouldn’t be
O
ne of the things that you quickly learn as a journalist with a remit to write the occasional opinion piece is that, whatever you write, no matter how eruditely you express yourself, on any given topic, there will be some amongst your readership that agree with you, and others who don’t.
It’s also a given that, if you slag off the incumbent Government - whether true blue, rabid red or that interesting shade of brown that you got when you mixed the Coalition colours - there will always be someone that agrees with you.
Those of you who follow the Editor’s Blog on our website will know that I have been doing way more than my share of slagging off the incumbents of Downing Street of late. Sorry – but not sorry – they just make it so easy.
The latest thing to break at the time of writing is that there are Conservative MPs that are claiming the Prime Minister has been in a ‘unique situation’ because No 10 Downing Street is both his workplace and his home and that, therefore, the rules about workplace entertaining which appear to have been broken (so many times), are harder to apply. Harder to apply to a man who stood at that podium and told us ‘You MUST work from home where you can’. The irony (or, if you prefer, sheer bloody cheek) of that, when so many people spent so long working from kitchen tables, living room sofas and balancing laptops on the end of the bed, is breath-taking. It seems that there is a collective eye-roll with every new revelation, a nation muttering ‘here we go again’ under its breath. Does this mean that we are now at the stage where we simply can’t care anymore? Has it all been too much? Are we all now suffering from outrage-fatigue?
In Sir John Major’s excoriating take-down of the Prime Minister last week, he said something along the lines of the voters’ trust in the government – all
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EDITORIAL Group Managing Editor: Fiona Russell Horne 01622 699101 07721 841382
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governments – was being eroded by the current actions - and inactions - of Number 10. When so many things go wrong in so many places and no-one in charge seems ever to take responsibility or suffer any consequences, is there a risk that we all just shrug our shoulders and think that that is the way it is.
Are we eroding trust in the very offices of government that we need, as part of the modern functioning democracy, to be holding dear? It’s not just about Whitehall mandarins knocking back Tesco prosecco over the mince pies. The Post Office scandal, where, thanks to a computer error, hundreds of people were accused of stealing, were jailed and then exonerated, too late for some. The refusal of the top tier of management to accept that anything could be wrong with the Horizon IT system and that, therefore, hundreds of previously up-standing citizens had turned into thieves was criminal. No-one in charge at the time has had to take full responsibility for that. Yet. The public inquiry started on February 14. There have been countless cases where the NHS has failed its patients with catastrophic results for both those patients and their families, and yet we all simply have to shrug and accept that maybe ‘lessons will be learned’. The Grenfell fire: how many of us followed the inquiry, aghast at the revelations of the deliberate obfuscation of test results in order to win the contracts. So far, no-one has had to take full responsibility.
With all the Party-gate nonsense, it’s not the cake- eating, or the fizz-swilling that grate so much. It’s the absolute refusal to accept responsibility for actions, or to exhibit an ounce of empathy. And.... breathe. BMJ
Fiona Russell-Horne Group Managing Editor - BMJ
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February 2022
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