Panorama - Inside the Oubliette

Satan and the sociology professor sat perched on a roof in Srebrenica watching a man with a Kalashnikov taking pot shots at the people running away from him. The professor explained the complex causes of the conflict and the culture of brutalisation that had transformed the once peaceful farmer into a cold blooded killer. In the pause that followed, Satan turned to the sociology professor and remarked, “But that doesn’t quite explain the glint in his eye though, does it?”.

Shoesmith - A pox on all your houses

Sharon Shoesmith addressed the assembled media this week fresh from her Court of Appeal success and promptly rammed her foot so far down her throat it’s a wonder she  didn’t knock her teeth out. “I don’t do blame”, she revealed, seconds before blaming the police and health departments for the Baby P scandal. “You cannot stop the death of children”, she told the BBC later, an extraordinary statement from someone whose department was supposed to do exactly that. My personal favourite was “I haven’t thought about compensation”; maybe she was asleep while her barrister and the Court of Appeal discussed damages and remedies before remitting the case back to the Administrative Division of the High Court to settle exactly that question. If she was never “in it for the money” as she assured the Guardian later, presumably we’ll see a whacking donation to Childline or NSPCC. That at least would put a fitting stop to the merry go round of public money behind two lots of High Court hearings, representation of three public bodies and enormous sums in court time.

Superinjunctions

If you asked John Selden back in the 1600s what he thought of super-injunctions he may well have said: ‘Equity is a roguish thing: for law we have a measure, know what to trust to; equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor”. He went onto say that he didn’t know the length of the chancellor’s foot and that’s a bit like an uncertain law. Times change, and with all due respect to Johnny I’m not sure I want to ask our Lord Chancellor, Ken Clarke, what his shoe size is in case he thinks I’m coming onto him. Our modern day answer to Selden came in the form of John Hemming MP yesterday when he revealed Ryan Giggs had secured a super injunction against a former Miss Wales. He justified the intervention on the basis that Giggs’ lawyers were going for the Twitterati and managed to upset the Speaker, Nick Clegg and the High Court in the process. While I would normally describe upsetting Nick Clegg as a noble goal it’s a shame this important constitutional debate is circling round the tabloid drain of “guess who’s sleeping with who this week”. That said, before we walk away from the tabloid sewer with our noses held tightly it’s worth recognising that some serious issues are at stake here.

A Letter from a private Management Health Consultant 10 years from now

Disclaimer: All brand names in this article are fictional, sadly the Health and Social care Bill 2011 is not.

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Whatever next? Coalition selling off blood......

Mosquitoes are hard to love. A flying syringe of an animal profiting from something as fundamental as our blood is revolting. If reports are correct, joining them down this end of the food chain will soon be Capita who are currently having “commercially confidential” discussions with the National Blood and Organ Transfusion Service regarding privatisation of their work. Anne Milton MP is (unsurprisingly) playing her cards close to her chest on this one, though revealingly “competitive tendering” isn’t ruled out according to her correspondence.  That’s right folks, the coalition is seriously considering Capita et al making a buck out of blood. With their impressive track record of numerous IT contract blunders, the collapse of Individual Learning Accounts and chaos at the Criminal Records Bureau, I personally give Round 1 to mosquitoes in the more competent bloodsucker stakes.

Left Wingers should be calling on Clarke to go

It’s 1991, a young and charismatic Bill Clinton indicates he will seek the nomination of the Democrat party for president, the Super Nintendo is launched, the first Gulf War is in full swing and good old Lord Lane in the UK abolishes the “anachronistic and offensive” Marital Rape Exemption in R v R. Shocked? Don’t be. The current rape debate really is taking place in a country where you could quite lawfully rape your wife up until the invention of 16 bit gaming technology. While Bush Snr was threatening to bomb Sadaam back to the stone age, Fred Flinstone sexual values were in full swing over in Blighty. Little surprise then that the backdrop to the latest discussion over rape takes place in a country where around 60,000 women are raped every year - the majority by partners or men they know - and only a tiny fraction, around one in ten, report it to the police. Of these few cases, less than 7% result in conviction according to Rape Crises England and Wales.