The Last Ditch

Compare and contrast

Sir David Nicholson admits failings over Mid Staffs but refuses to resign - Telegraph.

Sir David Nicholson, were our society organised as the defunct British Communist Party to which he once belonged might desire, would now be put up against a wall and shot. In our wet British version of Soviet Healthcare, however, he avoids all responsibility for the NHS's lethal failures. After all, there are plenty more patients where those came from.

Compare and contrast with one Andrew Mason, who wrote to his staff before leaving;

After four-and-a-half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding, I was fired today ... As CEO I'm accountable.

I rather suspect that Mason has put more efficient and vigorous effort into the success of Groupon than Nicholson has to that of the NHS. Yet he was held accountable by his board on behalf of his shareholders and accepted it with grace. Good for him. He failed this time, but with an attitude like that, I am sure he will yet do great things. I would hire him, if I owned a suitable company. I wouldn't employ Nicholson to clean my boots.

So is the success or failure of a company that organises online discounts more important than that of a whole nation's healthcare system? Should the bosses of an internet start-up be stricter with their CEO than Parliament is with the head of the NHS? What other conclusion, exactly, could a man from Mars infer from these two items of news?

Incidentally, Nicholson claimed expenses of over £50,000 a year on top of a basic salary of £200,000 and benefits in kind of £37,600 at a time when he was in charge of health service "cuts". His current wife, twenty years his junior and a former graduate intern in his office, is the £155,000 a year chief executive of Birmingham Children's Hospital. He wrote references for her during her meteoric rise through the NHS management ranks. Ain't life grand in the public service?

The NHS may not have adopted the iron discipline of the Soviet system, but it seems to have all the other elements. Generally, I prefer gentler market systems of accountability, but for aparatchiks like Nicholson, I could make an exception.

An ideological train crash

Mentally disabled actors are victims of modern 'blacking-up', says campaigner | Society | The Observer.

Nicola Clark, mother of an actress with Asperger's, thinks its "offensive" that healthy actors should play the parts of the mentally ill. When did Britons become so prone to take offence? Ah yes, that would be when they worked out that the left was prepared to frame laws to prevent their "offence." Laws that privilege them vis-a-vis the dwindling "communities" of the independent-minded, the contented and the brave. Mrs Clark's daughter comments;

It is not just mentally disabled actors who lose out when non-disabled people are employed to act them. Audiences think they are getting an authentic portrayal of a mentally disabled person, but they're not. It's not like putting on a different accent or learning what it was like to be raised in a different era. You can't understand what it is like to have a mental disability unless you've really lived with it. When non-disabled people try to portray us, they tend to fall back on stereotypes that have done our community so much harm in the past.

That, dear girl, is called acting. It is an art that requires, above all, empathy; the ability to put yourself, in imagination, inside another personality. Acting is not about the audience "learning what it was like to be raised in a different era" or indeed, necessarily, about learning anything. Acting is an art and, like all art, is about the human condition. You don't have to be authentically fey to play Tinkerbell or to have experienced Auschwitz to portray a victim of the Shoah. As someone suffering with an illness of which a key symptom is "limited empathy", you can be forgiven. Your mother however, by your own logic can't understand your point and is, therefore, merely on the make.

That it is now considered offensive for a white actor to "black up" is ridiculous. Acting is about portraying artistic truths about humanity. Only the simple minded, or the craftily malicious exploiting the simple minded, could confuse that with banal truths about the actor. Olivier's Othello was a triumph;  a triumph these idiots would have prevented. Having killed those opportunities for artistic expression they are now determined to ensure there is no repetition of my favourite performance in the history of cinema; Al Pacino as blind ex-serviceman Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman. Not to mention Dustin Hoffman's performance in Rain Man.

As always, when you have accepted one piece of leftist pseudo-logic (perhaps out of kindly, if sickeningly condescending, concern for some group or other's hurt feelings) they stuff more down your gentle, kindly throats. Wake up people! They will not stop until your every thought is bound like Gulliver in Lilliput. Stir now, before myriad threads of insubstantial logic allow them to restrain your every action.

There is no idiocy the Guardian would not advance if only slotted into their banal template of "X-ism giving offence to the X community." It gets worse.

In another sign that Clark has launched her campaign at a turning point, Channel 4 will next week launch Cast Offs, a comedy drama about the making of a Survivor-type reality TV programme featuring physically disabled characters. Created by Jack Thorne, who has written for Shameless and Skins, Tony Roche, who has written for The Thick Of It, and Alex Bulmer, the programme features thalidomide victims, dwarfism and the face-disfiguring cherubism, a rare genetic disorder.

Well done, the British left. You have revived the freak show. I am sure the participants will feel the same gratitude their predecessors had for those kindly Victorian entrepreneurs. At least, when turning their misfortunes to profit, they didn't ghettoise them as a separate "community".

A degraded nation

Baby P's father to sue Haringey Council - Telegraph.

The natural father of Peter Connelly, "Baby P", with no apparent sense of irony, is suing Haringey Council for negligence in the discharge of its duties. The council's social workers, he says, failed to protect his son. For shame.

Relationships end, of course. Fathers often have to leave their children in the care of their ex-partners. Indeed, due to what Harriet Harman might (if she were at least consistent in her foolishness) call "institutional sexism" on the part of the family courts, men can seldom obtain custody. Yet if ever a father could have done so, it was this man. If there exists a mother less fitted to the care of her child than Tracey Connelly, I hope never to meet her. His father must have known the true character of Peter's mother. Knowing it, how could he leave his son in her care?

Peter's parents lived together for the first three months of his tragic life. After their relationship ended, and the monsters who killed Peter moved in, the father had continued access to his son. Given what we know now, it is hard to conceive that a loving parent could have failed to notice his distress. A loving father with occasional sole charge of the boy had more opportunity to clean off the chocolate smeared on Peter's injuries than a social worker. We are told that Peter reached out to him, screaming "Daddy, Daddy!" when handed back to his tormentors shortly before he died. The best that can be said for this hopeful litigant is that Peter thought him a better carer than his mum. It's hard to think him more than slightly better.

So, the more true his accusations against Haringey's social services, the greater his own guilt. If he is innocent because he was deceived by Ms Connelly (who would have to be considerably more cunning than she looks), so much more so (given their lesser knowledge of her and access to the child) are the social workers.

If I were him, I would be too tormented with guilt to function, let alone to calculate the monetary value of my loss. But this product of the Welfare State is made of sterner stuff than me. He confidently denies all suggestions that he might be to blame. He believed his ex's explanation for Peter's injuries; that the child was "clumsy," though he had opportunities to observe Peter himself. Are we to believe he didn't know his son was on the child protection register? Are we to believe he could not discern the true nature of the brutes who lived with Peter and his mother?

I am sure he is as sincere in his claim as in his desire for £400,000 in damages. It makes sense in the warped logic of underclass Britain. How could he think himself to blame when the Welfare State denies the very notion of  personal responsibility? The "caring" apparatus of the "progressive" British state deplores the concept, as witness the agonising over the cruel fate, not of the dead child, but of his killers. After all, they are not responsible either. They are the products of their social environment; mere automata to be successfully reprogrammed if only the taxpayers would not be so mean about employing enough social workers. Haringey Social Services may not like being sued on this occasion, but they share Peter's father's underlying objective; to supplant the responsibility of the parent with that of the state. If he wins his claim, they will soon realise they have been given a stick with which to beat the ungenerous taxpayers.

Not only the jobs, but the ideological integrity of its employees depends upon the notion that the citizen is a passive product of his environment; that he can't take care of himself, can't educate his children, can't look after his family without their benevolent intervention. By their own logic, as they are the only truly responsible people, this man's claim should succeed. But by the same logic, since in truth the health and welfare of every human depends on self-reliance and the loving support of family and friends, we are all damned to some (let's hope lesser) variant of Peter's fate.

Children "need emotional support" shock

Link: Britain's children 'need emotional support' says NCH - Telegraph.

Since man first evolved, have any decent parents doubted that their offspring needed "emotional support?" Isn't that, inter alia, what parents are for?

If Britain really has the unhappiest children in the developed world, perhaps it has something to do with the need, in many cases, for both parents to have at least one job? How else, these days, are ordinary mortals to service a typical mortgage and pay the taxes which have doubled under Labour? Perhaps it has something to do with the incessant messages of doom (war on terror, climate change, paedophile scares, identity theft) used by this Government to make the governed docile? It might even have something to do with most of our children attending indoctrination centres schools where the teachers struggle to maintain the merest pretence of order. In short, it might have much to do with the failings of the British State. So who does NCH think should provide "emotional support?" Go on, guess.

It's not news that children (or indeed any humans) need emotional support. That's why we have families and friends. It IS news that there is still someone dumb enough to suggest the State Apparatus might provide it.

I googled "NCH governance" to find who runs this charity. To my initial surprise the "chair" is not one of the great and the good of the NuLab Scottish Raj. She is (if I have the right Pam Chesters) an Englishwoman on the Conservative candidates list. She was formerly a CEO of a BP subsidiary; is on the board of the Royal Free Hampstead Hospital Trust; chairs the English Churches Housing Group,  a social (as opposed, presumably, to an antisocial) landlord and is on the board of the Riverside Housing Group.

Why does such a woman lend her name to such piffle?

NCH had a proud history, but is now an independent charity in name only. It gets more than 70% of its income from the State. While Chesters is the figurehead, it is actually run by a model of Statist "virtue", Clare Tickell, who consistently backs the Government line. And why not? It pays her wages.

Comrade Tickell has

...held many non-executive and advisory positions in the voluntary and housing sectors, as well as in the Social Exclusion Unit, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Department of Health and the Audit Commission...

Just how big is the British State? Its paid agents are everywhere. The official statistics as to state employees merely scratch the surface, even before you consider how many people in "private" employment serve the government, rather than their employers (collecting VAT, serving as "compliance officers" etc.). When next you read an article in the Guardian about an "independent" figure from a charity headed by a Tory mug promoting the role of the Socialist State, please consider whether she is, in practice, an apparatchik on the State payroll.

Who Really Cares?

Link: RealClearPolitics - Articles - Who Really Cares?.

The findings would be similar if this study were to be repeated in Britain. Leftists think of themselves as "caring" and concerned for the "most vulnerable members of society." In practice, this comes down to not trusting people to look after themselves and to forcing strangers to pay for this supposed inadequacy.

Growing up in Britain, with the then-young Welfare State merging into the everyday scene, I often heard it used as an excuse for not taking personal responsibility for others; in short for meanness. This was not just a matter of people passing beggars in the street. Ordinary families rapidly lost their natural sense of responsibility for each other, in ways that would be utterly shocking to those from "less civilised" countries.

Just as Scrooge asked those seeking a charitable contribution "Are there no workhouses?", so Leftists feel absolved from reaching into their own pockets by the fact that - at their instigation - the Government forcibly reaches into everyones'.

In a recent interview, Gordon Brown said he can't understand how people can know how little it costs to educate an African child and yet not want to do it. Of course, many who know do something about it. They reach into their pockets and give of their own earnings. Brown's instinct as a Socialist, however, is to be "generous" with the money of others. His apparent belief that giving taxpayers' money to Africa makes him a good person is a perversion of the idea of charity. By any rational analysis he is not a kind man, but a thief. The Robin Hood myth has a lot to answer for.

Nor is the finding that American Leftists have higher-than-average incomes surprising. John Kerry is America's typical Leftist, just as Polly Toynbee is Britain's. Neither has the remotest understanding of life as an ordinary working Joe. Those who grew up among the working classes are far less likely to see them as weaklings in need of lifelong care. They know ordinary working people are as strong and capable of looking after their families as anyone else. When you do find a working-class Socialist, you will find a cynic on the make; a Stalin, a Prescott. All the true believers are from the upper echelons of society.

So appalling is British public education, working class people are often just as intelligent as the middle and upper classes. As the first member of my family ever to reach higher education, I have been shocked by the stupidity of many in my own "learned" profession, who would never have made it if they had been born into ordinary families. Men I worked with on building sites and in factories when I was a student would, intellectually, knock many of them into a cocked hat.

If there is any sensible class-distinction to be made in Britain (which is doubtful) perhaps it is that those who grow up isolated from economic reality by wealth and privilege are more likely to struggle to cope with life's inevitable misfortunes. They project their own fears of falling off life's tight-rope onto others, who don't actually share them at all.

More often than not, Leftism is driven by mere condescension based on ignorance.

h/t PrestoPundit