It was all going so well…and then those chickens started coming home to roost.

Leveson has been ‘disastrous’ says Guardian legal chief

The Guardian’s director of editorial legal services Gill Phillips has said the outcome of Leveson Inquiry has been “disastrous”.

Phillips told delegates: “What Leveson has come up with is the worst of all worlds.

“His attempt to please everybody and avoid being a dusty footnote on a shelf somewhere has led him down a road that has proved to be pretty disastrous.

“We don’t have anything that could be perceived as effective or credible by either side of the debate.”

I imagine that when an inquiry, supposedly wideranging, is actually predicated upon the sole intention of reining in one man and his supposed ’empire’ (it’s all relative….see below) things get distorted and that old law of unintended consequences rears its ugly but inevitable head.

From the Guardian:

Media plurality is now about much more than curbing Rupert Murdoch

The BBC, and online media, are included in the government’s consultation on plurality in the industry. And about time, too

The BBC, notes the DCMS, spends £430m a year on news provision – more than all other UK broadcasting put together. It reaches 86% of the population and accounts for 73% of TV news-watching. How, for plurality purposes, can you pretend it doesn’t exist?

Of course it operates under a pall of officially prescribed fairness and balance. But that, in itself, limits its plurality role. It can’t (see the latest contentious BBC Trust verdict) let John Humphrys loose for an individually crafted report on welfare dependency. It demands facts, figures and equivalencies, not personal perceptions. And the BBC is held to account for what it reports, not for what it leaves out. Sometimes it picks up a newspaper story and runs hard with it. Sometimes not. Sometimes Edward Snowden may as well not exist.

It’s often a negative power, but it is power. You can’t calculate pluralism without it. It’s the same online, as bbc.co.uk scoops up 40 million or so unique visitors in Britain alone. What’s the point of counting paper copies when the Telegraph can boast a combined monthly reach of 10.7 million? When the Guardian notches 12.4 million and the Mail 18.8 million. Even the Sun, at 16.9 million, doesn’t seem such a winner in company like this – and, as the consultation adds, that’s before you drop in the Huffington Post, Google News and more in a market place that obeys few conventional rules.

Guess the BBC didn’t forgive Blair for the Iraq War and Dyke having to fall on his sword, and Blair still relying on Murdoch to get his message across:

From the Guardian…emails in 2006 from Labour during in-fighting over leadership between Brown and Blair camps:

1.58pm from Ruth Turner (Blair’s  director of government relations at No 10):

So BBC chose [MPs] Sarah McCarthy-Fry, Julie Morgan and George Mudie who are hostile rather than Mike Gapes, Ann Clwyd and Karen Buck [who] are reasonable and supportive. This is a campaign organisation and not a news outlet!

3.36pm from Jonathan Powell [Blair’s long-serving chief of staff]:

Did we publish his three foreign policy speeches as a pamphlet? TB wants to send to Murdoch.

Make of that what you will….this is yet another open thread to take you into the  weekend….

BBC Newsreader holds the history of the NHS in his hands…it’s blank just for now….but he’ll soon think of something to fill all those pages. Behind him, he tells us, is a picture of Mrs Thatcher as she wept for what she has done to the country.

I have frequently commented on the BBC’s reluctance to mention Labour by name when talking about the deaths at the Mid Staffs Hospital in many of its articles and discussions about this scandal.

I have now learnt why….Labour was not to blame. Who was responsible for all those deaths?

Mrs Thatcher.

I kid you not.

The BBC, in the shape of their Business reporter, Lesley Curwen, concludes that the enormous number of deaths at Mid Staffs happened because Thatcher imposed ‘management’ upon the NHS and that management failed to speak up and stand up to government when Blair and Labour imposed its reign of ‘targets and terror’ upon them or taking self serving decisions designed to protect their career, therefore…Thatcher is to blame for the deaths at Mid Staffs.

Curwen seems determined to find ways to excuse Labour and plants the blame firmly in management’s lap…and therefore the person who introduced ‘management’.

The programme missed out important, relevant information and seemed intent on ‘proving’ something that it had already decided was ‘fact’.

Curwen repeatedly states her position:

‘For me it wasn’t questions about just what happened on the wards but in the boardrooms and executive offices of the trusts…I want to pick apart the part played by the managers and leaders of the NHS in these failing cultures.’

‘Wards’ and ‘Boardrooms’….what’s missing?  No 10 Dowing Street 1997-2010.　

She wanted to look at….

‘How the modern NHS manager came into being and how the flaws in that long evolution may have played a part in today’s cultural failings.’

Targets produced a culture of bullying and fear. It is clear that management were intimidated and cowed by targets but can this alone explain how they lost touch with the organisation they were supposed to be leading.

I’ve been looking for any clue that might explain senior management failures….a split developed , a fault line between management and the clinicians.

That sowed the seeds in what happened at Mid Staffs where staff expressing concerns were ignored.

So there you go…Thatcher sowed the seeds for what happened at Mid Staffs.

Curwen brings it all bang up to date with a warning about current reforms:

‘Right now the NHS is undergoing its most far reaching change for decades and at the same time is facing an unprecedented financial squeeze.’

An ‘unprecedented financial squeeze’?

What? The government is putting in money not merely ring fencing the NHS.

What planet is the BBC on?

Let’s remember what the Labour politician, Aneurin Bevan, Labour Health Minister, said:

‘Administration will be the biggest headache for years to come.’

So not quite as simple as some like to portray.

The programme is a mixed bag of messages which confuse and contradict….for instance she tells us that managers are to blame…and yet ‘ultimately Ministers pull the strings….maybe that’s why managers hold staff’s feet to the fire to get the performance they want.’

But she rapidly disassociates Labour’s era of ‘Targets and terror’ from management decisions.

She tells us of the introduction of ‘Consensus management’ in 1973 by the then Tory government…this had boards of doctors, nurses and administrators all making the decisions for hospitals….and all having a veto on any decision.

There was in fact too much bureaucracy…to many tiers of administration.

What happened was that often no agreement could be met on what might be the best probable practise so they plumped for the ‘lowest denominator’…the system was ‘deeply flawed’ but the BMA liked it.

It of course involved the very clinicians, the frontline staff that Curwen is now saying should be involved in management….but paradoxically she tells us resulted in something that ‘truly was a monster’ in the 1970‘s.

Curwen then skips over Labour’s stewardship of the NHS during the 70’s…which is odd…as Thatcher based her policy upon that of Wilson and Callaghan…who …em…advocated a ‘value for money’ policy.

The irony of Thatcher’s introduction of management, based upon the ’Griffith’s Report’, was that it was implemented as a consequence of the failures of the ‘management consensus’ regime and 20 deaths at Stanley Royal Hospital due to food poisoning for which no one would take responsibility.

Curwen blames Mid Staffs on Thatcher but the introduction of ‘management’ was supposed to prevent such occurrences…..and might have if it hadn’t been for the ‘era of targets and terror’.

Curwen tells us a ‘them and us’ attitude developed when non-clinical management came in……what she didn’t say was that it was the managers who were ‘demonised’, indeed the RCN ran a massive advertising campaign against them being introduced.

Were nurses and doctors involved in management? Curwen gives the impression that there were very few at all.

However there were certainly many nurses taking on management roles…though that was slow to begin with:

“One old style consultant was heard to say, ‘She used to be our matron, now she’s come back as our boss’.”

Eventually organisations revised the initial management structures that had excluded nurses.

“So to a degree the RCN campaign was successful,” says Mr Rowden, who became a general manager in 1986 after hearing a speech by health minister Kenneth Clarke. “He said, ‘Stop whingeing – anyone can go into general management.’ In three years there were more than 100 nurses in unit and district general manager posts.”

And the doctors and consultants wielded huge power and authority still:

He was quick to grasp the importance of getting on with the “power broker medics” who could block change. “I was told it was impossible to deal with inefficient or lazy doctors directly. If I took on a doctor directly, that would be the end. We did get rid of several, but not by the direct method.”

Ultimately doctors and consultants didn’t want to manage….and even Christine Hancock, originally a nurse and someone who has served in various senior roles in the NHS, including head of the RCN said:

‘In my experience we are the only country where doctors don’t manage the health service….doctors don’t want to manage.’

 Curwen, though interviewing Hancock, didn’t manage to winkle that out of her.

I don’t think Curwen can have read much of what is written about Griffith’s Report judging by her incomplete take on events and the ultimate overall effectiveness of the new management regime.

This is an indepth look at the report with those involved from politicians, civil servants and NHS staff: The Griffith’s NHS Management inquiry: Its origins, nature and impact

And from the Health Service Journal look at Griffiths after 25 years:

Yet no one suggests the NHS should abandon general management, nor even that any viable alternative exists. It has enabled the NHS to attract high calibre chief executives, rationalise management structures and sharpen accountability for how it uses taxpayers’ billions.

“Management is much more an advocate of the patient and public voice than clinicians, because managers play a neutral role in services. They are not a vested professional interest,” says King’s Fund director of leadership development Karen Lynas.

“The NHS is better now at responding to what the public want, and a lot of that is to do with general management.”

The blame for Mid Staffs lies squarely at Labour’s door…staff shortages, not mentioned by Curwen, and the imposition of the ‘Targets and terror’ regime that forced management to take certain actions.

It was not a failure of the concept of management but the distortion of its implementation by politicians out to win the PR war in the studios of the BBC or on the front pages of the news papers with headlines about ever shorter queues and more money going into the NHS…..all based on highly suspect statistics as management was forced to massage the figures to meet the targets…so in fact they didn’t meet those targets and treatment, as we see from Mid Staffs, in reality got worse.

And patients died as a result.

It seems that the BBC not only are intent on continuing to hide Labour’s part in that but seek to spread the blame, or shift the blame,  to the ‘usual suspect’.

Wonder what you make of the BBC coverage of the gathering of the Libdems in Scotland this past few days? It struck me as being remarkably sympathetic to Clegg and the gang. I suspect Cameron will NOT be getting such benign coverage!

Here you go. This is a Selfridges approved Vince Cable endorsed open thread for your attention.

Wonder what you make of the BBC’s coverage of Aaron Alexis’s rampage at the Washington DC Dockyard? They seemed awfully excited when the initial news seemed that it was a WHITE shooter but now the jury is in we must ponder if Obama thinks that Alexis “could have been me.:”

Here you go, a new Monday thread to complete.

This winter is possibly make or break for the BBC’s pro-AGW stance.  If the winter is harsh it would take a remarkably brass neck and lack of ethics to continue pressing ahead, Al Gore-like regardless of facts, with its global warming propaganda.

The time would come when it would have to reconsider that and start to take seriously the likelihood that things aren’t panning out the way the climate alarmists have told us, backed up by their ‘science’ and computer models.

A relatively mild winter of course would allow them to shrug off criticism and carry on regardless telling one and all that the stalling of temperature rises is merely a blip…’natural variation’.

At present the BBC are ignoring the ongoing debates and the questions being raised by people like David Rose in the Mail:

Global warming is just HALF what we said: World’s top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong

We had the recent reports of a 60% increase in ice in the Arctic this year, ignored by the BBC….but they did rush this story out at the same time as the increases were being reported:

Esa’s Cryosat mission observes continuing Arctic winter ice decline

Can’t help thinking that was a ‘spoiler’ intended to cast doubt onto the reports of Arctic ice increasing.

The BBC can wait out the doubt and in the mean time we are paying for the doubling up of our energy industry and the commensurate fuel bill increases that come with that.

The poor being the hardest hit of course….not that the BBC seems concerned about them in these circumstances…’Bedroom’ taxes hitting the poor, yes that BBC is on the frontline…Quantitative Easing transferring wealth from the poorest to the already rich…the BBC is on the case,  but fuel poverty, caused by climate change policies…not so much….guess it’s that old Leninist attitude….sacrificing the present for the future at whatever the cost.

Consider the road tax….many new cars are now very fuel efficient and have low emissions…and therefore attract no tax or very little tax….a 2.4 litre Volvo V60 doesn’t cost the earth…a mere £30 road tax a year, first year free of course. 

So once again those wealthy enough to afford these new, efficient models get the benefits, the double benefit…of fuel efficiency and low road tax…whilst the poorest are stuck with their old gas guzzling smokers…and having to pay far more than the better off.

Curious that the BBC isn’t haranguing good old Ed Davey over that…or who gets the benefits of the wind turbine subsidies, or solar panels…how many ‘social houses’ have the benefit of that?  Most people I know who have the most ‘tax efficient’ cars or solar panels or even a wind turbine in a field know how to work the sytem,  have the money to help them take advantage of whatever is on offer and are quite happy to milk that system for their own advantage.

They are, you might say, upmarket benefit scroungers.  But the BBC can’t rock the climate change boat….the planet is warming, they say, and something must be done….and we’ve all got to pay…just it seems some pay relatively vastly more than others and see little to no benefit from it…and all potentially to no effect other than to line the pockets of the already well off if AGW proves a damp, cold squib.

BBC staff, underpaid as they are, as we all know, are having trouble making ends meet.

In order to keep body and soul together they have been forced to take second jobs.  A bit of baby sitting, bar work at the local tavern, stacking shelves on the night shift at Tescos you might think.

Not a bit of it…they are running large scale corporate enterprises whilst at the same time carrying out their duties at the BBC….at least you would hope so.

Commons to probe BBC second jobs: Fury over the £270,000-a-year corporate boss who somehow found the time to set up a coffee chain

But all that makes reporting and challenging something like this rather difficult for any BBC journo when taking to task a politician for the same doubling up of jobs.

Labour has called for a ban on MPs holding paid directorships and consultancies during an opposition debate – but the government dismissed the party’s motion as “chaff”.

Shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett said there should be no doubt in the public’s mind that MPs are there to serve them, “and not diverted into defending their own private personal interests”.

 You might remember this from a while back: 

The BBC executive responsible for an IT debacle which has ‘wasted’ more than £100 million of licence fee-payers’ money has been allowed to hold down a second job while working for the corporation.

John Linwood, currently suspended from his £280,000-a-year post as BBC head of technology, became a non executive director of a private technology firm called DRS in January last year. He was paid £28,000 by the firm in 2012.

Sure he never took his eye off the ball once.

Nothing new of course to the BBC’s double standards and conflicts of interest when their own chaotic management suddenly finds itself in the spot light and held up for comparison to the very thing they have been castigating for example on the Today programme…such as government employees being paid as private companies with all the possible tax advantages that might have…only to find that the BBC had forced its own stars to use exactly the same format…but of course the BBC insisted there were absolutely no tax benefits for its staff….which makes you wonder what all the fuss was about then…from the very same BBC.

 Just hope the new coffee chain enterprise, ‘Here’,  pays its corporate taxes.

Perhaps the BBCers can get some tips from their colleagues at the Guardian on how to run a coffee based enterprise:

Oh…perhaps not as Guido tells us:

At the time of going to pixel, before Guardian Coffee sadly removed their data infographic from the internet, on their big opening day they had sold just 60 coffees. Another Guardian financial success…

They came from fort William, with murder in mind,
the Campbell had orders, King William had signed,
put all to the sword, these words underlined,
leave no one alive called MacDonald.

In 1692 the Campbells, in cahoots with the English, set upon the MacDonald clan in an attempt to massacre them in an infamous moment in Scottish history….a ‘murder under trust’.

Thirty eight men were slaughtered and forty women and children died of exposure when their homes were burnt to the ground.

Nicky Campbell likes to remind us of past infamy and point the finger of blame however unjustly.

On Friday Campbell was discussing the arms trade (25 mins ) and had on Labour MP Fabian Hamilton who wanted to stop all arms exports.

Campbell suggested a cunning plan:

‘Would you like to do to the arms industry what people say Mrs Thatcher did to the coal mining industry, would you like to phase it out and close it down?’

 It’s a small but significant comment, a telling comment, that illustrates the mindset of many of those inside the BBC bubble.

Hard to know how such a highly educated, intelligent and scrupulously fair minded journalist, backed by the extensive resources of the BBC, and Google, could make such a schoolboy error….in 1990 there were still 50,000 miners toiling down pit.

The ‘Untold history’ indeed.

We all know that Labour has closed more mines that Thatcher ever did and put more miners on the dole than she did:

Wilson closed more coal mines than Thatcher

“…there is the charge that it was Margaret Thatcher who ‘destroyed’ the coal mines and the mining communities. How many times have the BBC broadcast that claim without refutation? Yet the facts show that far more coal mines closed under the Labour prime ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.”

(However many times you can add one more thanks to Campbell.)

Perhaps Campbell utilised the data mining services of ‘Left Foot Forward’ who tell us that:

Tory spin on coal masks fact that 80 per cent of coal jobs were lost under Thatcher

 The historical data shows that while 212,000 coal mining jobs were lost under the 1964-1970 Labour Government, under Mrs. Thatcher’s 1979-1990 government, the percentage decline in jobs was actually double that.

43 per cent of mining jobs went in the 1960s under Wilson while 80 per cent were lost under Thatcher.

That’s perfectly true….but..

Unfortunately when there is a change from hard figures to percentages you know you are being sold a pup.

Under Thatcher 193,000 miners found themselves without work…..that’s less than 212,000 by anyone’s reckoning…and all for ‘the good and safety of the country’.

Not only that but under New Labour 60% of miners lost their jobs….8,000 of the remaining 14,000 left in 1997.

The MacDonald’s were ‘murdered under trust’  by the Campbell’s,  and Campbell has murdered the truth under the aegis of the BBC Trust…as do his fellow BBC journalists who like to propagate this anti-Thatcher propaganda whenever they get the chance.

Ironic that in the aftermath of the Glencoe Massacre it was ‘campaigning journalism’ that resulted in an official inquiry about events which were sensationally publicised and became part of the politics of the time.

However it’s not all bad for the Campbells…..‘just think for a moment of the great gifts our clan has bestowed upon the universe – Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy; Naomi Campbell’s beauty and diamonds; Ming Campbell’s sprints and liberalism; Sir Malcolm Campbell’s land-speed records; Campbell’s soup; and Alastair Campbell’s spin-doctoring.

The name Campbell is derived from combining two Gaelic words – Cam, meaning crooked and Beul meaning mouth. Which possibly explains why Alastair became such a fine modern exponent of the dark arts of – but sadly not even he could put a positive spin on the name.

History has judged us and I don’t suppose that all the soup in the whole world will redeem it.’

You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels, the McDonalds of Glenco, and put all to the sword under seventy. You are to have a special care that the old Fox and his sons doe upon no account escape your hands, you are to secure all the avenues that no man escape. This you are to putt in execution at fyve of the clock precisely; and by that time, or very shortly after it, I’ll strive to be att you with a stronger party: if I doe not come to you att fyve, you are not to tarry for me, but to fall on. This is by the Kings speciall command, for the good & safety of the Country, that these miscreants be cutt off root and branch. See that this be putt in execution without feud or favour, else you may expect to be dealt with as one not true to King nor Government, nor a man fitt to carry Commissione in the Kings service. Expecting you will not faill in the fulfilling hereof, as you love your selfe, I subscribe these with my hand  att Balicholis  Feb: 12, 1692

For their Majesties service

To Capt. Robert Campbell

of Glenlyon
(signed) R. Duncanson