What is history but a fable agreed upon? - Napoleon Bonaparte

In thr past few weeks, Paul Anderson has twice had good cause to take Oliver ‘I’ve got a book out, y’know’ Kamm to task for his poor grasp of historical facts - here and here.

Kamm, it appears, is no more immune to the central conceit of many a poor historian in seeking to fit the facts to his personal theses rather his theses to the facts.

Appearing in the Thunderer column in today’s Times, Kamm again displays this tendency in no uncertain terms in criticising General Sir Michael Rose’s call for the impeachment of Tony Blair over the Iraq War.

In all this article seems fairly typical of Kamm’s - and the War Party’s - tendency towards obvious economies of fact in their analysis of conditions leading to the invasion of Iraq. The matter of Tony Blair’s case for war, as presented to the House of Commons, being fundamentally incorrect in every material fact presented in relation to Iraq’s capabilities in the area of WMDs is dismissed as a mere conventional argument as if to suggest that its lacks any factual base.

One Rose’s own performance as UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia, Kamm asserts that this:

caused the greatest rift in transatlantic relations since Suez

While neglecting to mention the fundamental disagreements in policy between the US and UN as regards arming Bosnian Muslim forces - the US, unsurprisingly, were in favour of providing such armaments - whcih lay at the heart of this dispute.

Kamm also charges Rose with what he purports to be a ‘conventional ommission’ - a failure to give due deference to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon as a determinent of policymaker’s perception of strategic risk. Kamm, of course, omits to make any reference to the question of whether such perceptions had any basis or justification in fact, a conventional omission of his own.

Kamm then counter’s Rose’s criticism of Blair’s failure to put the flawed intelligence used in making the case for the Iraq War with the charge that he ‘played down’ intelligence reports that Gorazde was about to fall in 1994 with disasterous consequences. Except that Gorazde did not fall in 1994 - it was the only Muslim enclave under UNPROFOR protection not to fall to Bosnian Serb forces or suffer ethnic cleansing - at least that what NATO says. - nor was Rose alone in, perhaps, taking an over cautious view of Serbian intentions:

Quite naturally, Gorazde came first. The leadership of the Bosnian Serbs, as it seems, believed that the west will understand this change in orientation and that it will not strain the situation too much. In this, they probably relied on the need for the soonest possible establishment of peace, hoping that Goraze, taken or surrounded by a strong circle, could be exchanged for some other region, for example, a part of Sarjevo. The fact is that at the very outset of the Serbian offensive against this area, the competent authorities from the international community were rather reserved. The UNPROFOR Commander for Bosnia, general lt. Michael Rose, for example, relatively easily agreed with the suggestion of the Serbian leadership that he should not go to Gorazde, although it is hard to believe that he had no information on what was going on there. The American administration also showed some reservations at the beginning , which only convinced the Serbs even more that they were doing “the right thing”.

Surely enough, the Moslem side either knew or anticipated such Serbian plans. Aware that it had no sufficient forces to resist the Serbian offensive it, as confirmed by the UNPROFOR sources, expedited the whole affair, by attacking first. The Moslems, rightfully as it turned out, counted on the international community not to allow a safe area to get into the Serbian hands so easily, hoping for that finally, the West would intervene with military forces. In this, they had enough strength to forestall the “blitz action” of the opposite side and prevent it to take the region of Gorazde with military force in just a few days, thus leaving UN and NATO sufficient time for the organization and preparations.

Rose, at least, was prepared to mount a defence of Gorazde, which is rather more than can be said of commanders a year later…

UN and U.S. officials were also publicly predicting the town [Zepa] would fall within forty-eight hours. But [General] Janvier went further and also ruled out defending Gorazde, the third and largest enclave in eastern Bosnia, which was home to 60,000 people. “The BH has 6,000 soldiers [in Gorazde],” Janvier said, using a slightly inflated figure. “They are perfectly capable of defending Gorazde against the BSA. The Bosnian government can do something now if they want.” The UN was only strong enough to act in Sarajevo.

The French general was still pushing the proposal he had made to the UN Security Council in May: that the UN withdraw from Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde. Unless Janvier was receiving secret instructions, he was apparently doing everything in his power to abandon the safe areas without the permission of the Security Council.

The outcome of this failure to consider humanitarian needs was, of course, the ethnic cleansing of Srebrenica.

Finaly Kamm arrives at a series of unqualified economies that would have done credit to the most blinkered of dossier compilers in advance of the invasion of Iraq.

Saddam, so Kamm contends, ‘welcomed 9/11′, as if delight in the face of seeing an enemy humiliated on their own soil is grounds for war. He ’sought a WMD capability in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions’ and - pausing only to concede that the inbtelligence about Iraq’s, then, current capabilities was wrong (is that also a conventional view?) - nots that according to “Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group, could quickly have produced chemical and biological weapons”.

Again, Kamm offers up unqualified statements as matters of fact without their necessary corollaries as the main points of Duelfer’s report were:

Iraq’s main goal was to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute WMD production.

Iraq’s WMD programs had decayed significantly since the end of the first Gulf War.

No senior Iraqi official interviewed by the ISG believed that Saddam had forsaken WMD forever.

Iraq had no deployable WMD of any kind as of March 2003 and had no production since 1991.

The ISG judged that in March 2003, Iraq would have had the ability to produce large quantities of Sulfur Mustard in 3-6 months, and large quantities of nerve agent in 2 years.

There was no proof of any biological weapons stocks since 1991.

Iraq’s nuclear program was terminated in 1991, at which point micrograms of enriched uranium had been produced from a single test gas centrifuge.

Iraq had intended to restart all banned weapons programs as soon as multilateral sanctions against it had been dropped, a prospect that the Iraqi government saw coming soon.

Smuggling was used by Iraq to rebuild as much of its WMD program as could be hidden from U.N. weapons inspectors.

Iraq had an effective system for the procurement of items banned by sanctions.

Until March 2003, Saddam Hussein convinced his top military commanders that Iraq did indeed possess WMD that could be used against any U.S. invasion force, in order to prevent a coup over the prospects of fighting the U.S.-led Coalition without these weapons.

Kamm offers an interesting defintion of ‘quickly’ here - three to six months to drag his chemical weapons capabilities up to 19th century standards and produce mustard gas and a whole two years to produce nerve agents…

…provided that sanctions were lifted and the whole world were to look the other way for two years and not notice what he was up to.

Saddam was, in addition, a sponsor of terrorism - but only ever is support of his regional ambitions, backing mainly left-wing secular Iranian and Palestinian terrorist groups in addition to left-wing Kurdish separatists in Turkey.

On the matter of US Government claims of links to Al-Qaeda used to support the case for war in the US, the US 9/11 Commission, CIA, FBI, DIA and NSA, together with the Senate report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq, all concluded that there was never any substantive evidence for such a link.

How to weigh all this evidence is, in Kamm’s estimation, a matter of political judgement, not a perfidious wangle - as if to suggest that there can be no accountability when such political judgements result in unlawful actions based on erroneous assumptions derived from evidence that simply did not exist.

Kamm concludes in thinly veiled ad hominem fashion by nothing that:

The military mind in politics, from Cromwell to Douglas MacArthur and beyond, is notoriously insensitive to uncertainty. Sir Michael’s advice should be treated with the respect due to him.

To which it seem only fair to reply in similar fashion by noting the applicability to Kamm’s efforts as a historian of George Santayana’s comment that:

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

Apropos of my previous comments on bureaucracy, accountability and the Rochdale ‘Satanic Abuse’ case we come to an article in today’s Times by Camilla Cavendish, ‘Innocent but presumed guilty’, includes this quite staggering passage:

A mother (I shall call her Sarah) entered this world voluntarily, when she began to suspect that her daughter was being abused by her former partner, father of the girl. She approached social services for help. But they ended up taking her daughter away from her, and placing her with the very man she had accused. I have heard only her side of the extraordinary story. The expert psychiatrist appointed by the court decided that Sarah had coached her daughter to make false allegations — something that is not unknown. But he did so without ever having met Sarah, her daughter or the boyfriend her daughter accused. He never appeared in court to be cross-examined. He merely watched the police video of her daughter’s interview and posted his report. Yet the judge apparently considered this a sufficient basis on which to take Sarah’s daughter away.

If the account given of the part played, in this case, by ‘expert’ witness testimony is true, which is difficult to evaluate due to the obsessive secrecy that surrounds the proceedings of family courts, then I would strongly contend that a clear miscarriage of justice has taken place here.

The question of whether there is any truth in the assertion that ‘Sarah’ had indeed coached her daughter to make false allegations is not immaterial to the ultimate outcome of the case and requires careful consideration in the long-term, but that is an issue for future proceedings - the miscarriage of justice lies not in the ruling of the court to hand custody of her daughter to the father but in the abject failure of the court to adhere to a fundamental principle of both legal process and scientific methodology; that evidence should be tested in order to assess its veracity.

It is, I suspect, not uncommon for psychiatrists to offer opinions based solely on video evidence of interviews, in the manner indicated here; nor is there anything essentially wrong with such a practice in its proper context. Such opinions are, at best, advisory and may indicate promising lines of further inquiry.

But they are not statements of fact.

This is true of all scientific evidence and ‘expert’ testimony placed before a court of law by virtue, simply, of their being founded upon science.

It is a rare occurrence, indeed, for science to deal in absolutes, in total certainties, for rarely if ever do such absolutes exist.

There have been four great scientific theories in the last 150 years; Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory, all of which share one thing in common; the all propound a view of reality in which there is an absence of absolutes, a universe of infinite and ever increasing complexity. It is the very nature of scientific enquiry that the more we consider a particular question, the more we study, research and examine, the more we find answers to questions the more those answers raise further questions. The closely we look, the more complex the world becomes.

That is why these are all scientific theories, because the complexity they reveals defies reduction to absolutes, to scientific laws - and even what we call scientific laws are, more often than not, no more than strong approximations - and it why it is axiomatic in scientific enquiry that all such theories must be put to the test; that our understanding of reality must constantly be evaluated, re-evaluated and validated with evidence to support that understanding. That or be revised in light of evidence that contradicts that understanding.

This is true for all natural sciences - only in the abstract realms of pure mathematics do absolutes come into play; reality too messy, too complex and too disorderly to be rendered into a series of absolute and unquestionable facts.

This is particularly true of evidence relating to the working of the human mind, to the evidence of psychiatrists and psychologists working in branch of science which is about as from empirical as it is possible to get and still be thought a science. In seeking to understand the workings of the human mind there are no facts; the mind is too complex and too irreducible in complexity to be rendered into facts; there are no facts in psychology, only theories, hypotheses and conjectures; things to be tested and evaluated with evidence.

Nothing in psychology is ever definitive.

A court of law, in Britain, works in much the same way. Legal proceedings begin with an allegation of some sort which, at the outset of proceedings, has the status of a theory or hypothesis. Evidence which supports or contradicts this theory is presented to the court and subjected to test by cross-examination - this is the basis of our adversarial system of justice and a process which, for all its flaws, I think infinitely superior to the inquisitorial system of investigating judges that is common in continental Europe.

In a court of law in this country, as in a research paper published in a scientific journal, a theory is proposed, evidence is presented and weighed, conclusions are proposed and considered rationally for their veracity and then a judgement is made and rendered. As a system, a simple methodology for administering justice, it is as near perfect as can reasonably be envisage - what flaws there are in the judicial process are the product of human artifice, of badly framed laws, misinterpretations, poor evidence, incompetent advocacy and simple human prejudice. Courts are not perfect because they involve people and people are intrinsically imperfect, flawed and complex in nature.

In this particular case, this methodology appears not been followed. The evidence of the ‘expert’ witness was not derived in an appropriately scientific manner, in fact, from the manner in which was produced one can barely consider it to have been evidence at all; although that is not necessarily a criticism of the psychiatrist in question as their report may not have been intended for use as evidence, but merely to suggest possibilities and line of enquiry.

Nevertheless, this report was introduced into evidence, whether by agreement of the psychiatrist in question or merely as a result of it being seized upon on by an over zealous ‘prosecutor’, unqualified to assess its merit, merely because it appeared unequivocally to support their hypothesis in this case.

That is failure number one.

It was then, seemingly, accepted as evidence by the court without it having been appropriately tested - the psychiatrist who wrote this report was not called to give personal testimony nor subjected to cross-examination.

That is failure number two.

Finally, if the brief account given by the Times is accurate, an inordinate degree of weight was accorded by the judge to this untested evidence in rendering his/her judgement; with the result that a sketchy and distinctly unscientific opinion, barely an interim hypothesis, was accepted as a statement of fact for, seemingly, no better reason than that the court considered the author of that report an ‘expert’ while failing to test that assumption.

That is failure number three.

We’ve been here before all too recently in the case of Sir Roy Meadow, the significant difference being that the miscarriages of justice arising from his failings as a scientist took place in the full glare of the public gaze and were subjected to public - and scientific - scrutiny and not under the obsessive secrecy of a family court.

It is undoubtedly right that proceedings in family courts should be handled under conditions of utmost confidentiality, where that confidentiality serves to protect children and families from unwarranted and potentially damaging public scrutiny. It is wrong, however, that such confidentiality should extend also to social workers, health care professionals and ‘expert’ witnesses as it does at present, where it serves all too often to prevent their role in proceedings being subjected to anything approaching and appropriate level of scrutiny.

It is right that we protect the innocent.

It is wrong, however, when miscarriages of justice occur in family court as they do in other courts, that the system we put in place to protect the innocent also serves to protect those who fail in their professional duties through incompetence, negligence or, in the most egregious of cases, malfeasance - particularly when, in doing so, we too often collude with them, also, in preventing such miscarriages from coming to light and their victims receiving appropriate, proper and, most importantly of all, speedy redress.

In the case of Sir Roy Meadow, those wrongly convicted on the basis of his flawed and unscientific evidence did obtain justice through both the Court of Appeal and, ultimately when Meadow was struck off by the GMC for serious professional misconduct - a decision he is currently appealing.

There was, however, no public inquiry into those cases in which Meadow’s evidence was instrumental in sending innocent women to prison - worse still it seems the Criminal Cases Review Committee seems now to be advocating a ban on juries testing key scientific evidence in open court.

Such a suggestion is not merely unjust and inequitable but, in the light of seemingly case upon case in which the innocent are condemned on basis of little more than professional zealotry, incompetence and an unjustified and untested faith in ‘experts’, quite frankly obscene.

Not every case in which such failures as occurred in those in which Sir Roy Meadow gave evidence, of the Rochdale case or even the case of ‘Sarah’ featured by the Times, necessarily merits a public inquiry. In dealing with many kinds of individual, human, failings the scrutiny and redress offered by a court of law is sufficient for the purpose of setting matters to rights and pursuing the interests of justice.

There are two occasions, however, in which a public inquiry is not merely merited but positively demanded.

The first is when the failures in a particular case are so manifestly egregious and the consequences of those failures so severe that justice may only be served by the full light of public scrutiny. Cases such as the Soham murders and that of Victoria Climbie clearly fall into that category. The Rochdale case, in my opinion, does as well.

The second is when successive and persistent failures, over a series of cases point clearly to the presence of systemic failings, as increasingly appears to be case in relation to the role of ‘expert’ witnesses in all courts and of professionals and ‘experts’ in family courts, in particular the undue and excessive weight seemingly being placed on such testimony in cases where it has not been adequately tested and the extent to which confidentiality hinders and, sometimes, prevents justice taking its right and proper course, particularly in situations where the competence of professionals is at issue.

By any reasonable measure I would contend that not only is a full and wide-ranging public inquiry merited by these cases but that such an inquiry should not be confined in its deliberations to an individual case but should consider in total the operation of the courts and in particular, the family courts, and the role of experts and professionals as witnesses across the broad spectrum of criminal and civil proceedings.

This may require not merely a full, and public, judicial inquiry but a full Royal Commission working to brief which, in taking in the role of family courts and their interactions with the state and the bureaucratic machinery of state, in particular, should give due regard to the right and proper nature of the separation of judicial and executive/legislative powers necessary to ensure that the interests of justice are given paramount importance and that the state and its various functionaries operate within a framework which supports rather than prevents accountability.

Of course, this is a pipe-dream and I make no apologies for identifying it as such.

In reality this separation of judicial and executive/legislative powers exists under near constant threat from stream after stream of flagrantly statist and managerialist legislation, not just from the present government but from preceding governments as well; and any inquiry or Royal Commission into such would be as near useless as makes no difference.

Why?

Because the same people, the same political and bureaucratic elite, that are carrying out the current systematic assault on our hard-won freedoms, civil liberties and on the constitutional separation of powers are also those who would define the terms of any such inquiry.

So what, if anything, can we do?

For the moment I’m not entirely sure either than anything can be done or, if it can, just how to go about it.

But I am giving this some thought, and so should we all.

The problem with trying to maintain an inconsistent position it that eventually you’ll make a slip up.

So it is that Norman Geras, in trying to defend Blair from Sir Michael Rose’s charge that he should be impeached by seeking refute Rose’s claim that:

Before the invasion, regime change was never cited as a reason for going to war. Indeed, Mr Blair insisted that regime change was not, nor ever could be, a reason for going to war.

…ends up citing no less that three clear pieces of evidence which demostrate the basic illegality of the invasion.

It seems Norm has had his own bout of political amnesia having forgotten about the legal opinion given by Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, to Blair as cited below:

Proportionality

36. Finally, I must stress that the lawfulness of military action depends not only on the existence of a legal basis, but also on the question of proportionality. Any force used pursuant to the authorisation in resolution 678 (whether or not there is a second resolution):
– must have as its objective the enforcement the terms of the cease-fire contained in resolution 687 (1990) and subsequent relevant resolutions;
– be limited to what is necessary to achieve that objective; and
– must be a proportionate response to that objective, ie securing compliance with Iraq’s disarmament obligations.
That is not to say that action may not be taken to remove Saddam Hussein from power if it can be demonstrated that such action is a necessary and proportionate measure to secure the disarmament of Iraq. But regime change cannot be the objective of military action. This should be borne in mind in considering the list of military targets and in making public statements about any campaign.

Let’s just restate that for the record.

Regime change CANNOT be the objective of military action.

Oops.

Does the name Chris Huhne not remind you of Steve Martin’s character in the ‘The Man With Two Brains’; Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr…

and if so does that mean that he’ll be working closely with David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts.

And as Charles Kennedy has again claimed that he’s a social drinker not a solo drinker, should we be told just who else has been getting shitfaced with him at the Commons?

Having read one passage in Robin Cook’s ‘The Point of Departure’ where he describes an encounter with a rather tired and emotional former Health Secretary, I know who my money’s on.

Not my beer money, perhaps, but certainly my fag money.

I’ve spent much of my working life dealing with, and sometimes working in, bureaucratic institutions in the Public, Private and Voluntary Sectors and, if truth be told, there is often little to choose between them.

Anyone who believes that the private sector is somehow the ultimate antidote to bureaucracy has either never worked for a multi-national corporation or never read Dilbert. Work for any sizeable NGO, even a local one, and you rapidly find yourself working for a self-conscious homunculous of the Public Sector populated largely by people with too little talent to merit a decent paycheck and too many qualifications do a real job; and then, of course, there is the Public Sector, itself, the evolutionary apex of beadledom that sits atop the bureaucratic food chain and bestrides the realm of officialdom like a Collosus.

In all these years of tangling with bureaucracy I have, admittedly, learned many useful things. I know, for example, that micro-management is the surest possible indicator of incompetence known to man and that the primary purpose of strategy meetings is to make decision-making processes so diffuse and incomprehensible that it is impossible to attribute blame to any particular individual when things go pear-shaped.

I’ve learned enough over the years to have even formulated my own universal law of bureaucracy:

In a bureaucracy, any given question has three possible answers:

1. the right answer,

2. the wrong answer, and

3. the answer that best covers the arse of the person to whom the question is put.

The actual answer given is always number 3.

Yet there is no facet of bureaucracy more loathesome than the attitude of of its multitudinous functionaries towards the concept accountability. Put simple accountability is something that happens to other people, or more rarely still, to a carefully chosen sacrificial scapegoat chosen by the bureaucratic hivemind to carry the can on those rare occasions where it cannot shake off the consequences of a really major fuck-up.

Today brings us two examples of just such a thing, both of which beggar belief.

The first, is of course, the little matter of discovering that being placed on the sex offenders register for accessing child pronography does not automatically, as most people reasonably assumed, result in the offenders being added to the DfEE’s ‘List 99′ and, therefore, being prohibited from working with children as a teacher.

Instead we now discover that where offenders are merely cautioned, such a ban is in the discretion of the DfEE under powers granted to the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly - who, unfortunately, seems as bemused as everyone else as to how this could have happened.

So it is we get all the usual platitudes. Kelly has, naturally, taken ‘full responsibility’; there will, of course, be a review - and not
just any old review but an immediate review. The law may even be ‘tightened’ (yawn) and from now on she will personally consider any cases where a ministerial decision is needed to include people an offender on the list - which is, of course, what she should have been doing in the first place.

But on the matter of the single, patently obvious question that this issue raises; that of just exactly who the total fuckwit was who actually decided that man who had been cautioned for accessing child porn was fit to work as a PE teacher - nothing.

Just a lot of staring at the ceiling, shuffling from foot to foot and tuneless whistling - say nothing, admit nothing and hope it will all fade quietly in the background.

(Totally O/T BTW, but has anyone else noticed the similarity between the way bureaucrats act when put on the spot and asked awkward questions and public urinal etiquette amongst heterosexual males?)

It is thought that it may have been a junior minister who made this decision - although former MP Stephen Twigg who was the relevant junior minister at the time has denied all knowledge of this case - or maybe a civil servant. Whoever it actually was, the one thing we can we can be sure of is that they will not be brought publicly to account for the screw-up. In fact, unless this whole business blows up into a shitstorm of biblical proportions and Kelly, herself, is forced out of office then the worst that may happen to the actual culprit is that they may get a private bollocking for ‘letting the side down’, but that’s about as bad a sanction the hivemind will usually countenance.

Although the issue is serious, the consequences on this occasion seem thankfully very limited. The problem has, hopefully, been identified before any serious damage has been done and, with luck, the worst fallout there will be will be a few discrete dismissals as other similar offenders who may have slipped through the net of official scrutiny are identified and traced.

The second example is far more serious; that of the Rochdale ‘Satantic Abuse’ scandal - and scandal is the only word for it - highlighted by the BBC’s ‘Real Story’ documentary, which aired tonight.

If you missed the programme, the short-run version events is that back in 1990 - at the height of a media-driven moral panic about ’satanic child abuse’ which had started in the US - social workers in Rochdale descended on a number of poor families living on a run down estate in the town and summarily removed their children into care, convinced that they had uncovered the first case of systematic ritual Satanic child abuse in Britain.

They had no evidence to support this idea.

They spent the next few months, interviewing these children - initially there were four from a single family but as the investigation progressed other families were dragged into it, and their children removed into care, on the strength of nothing more than their children knowing or having played with the children at the centre of this case.

These children, of which there were twenty in total by the end, were interviewed repeatedly by two social workers - the programme showed film of these interviews which demonstrated clearly, even to the untrained eye, that they were, im my personal opinion, simply not competent at the time to conduct such an investigation.

There is more I would say, as a psychologist, having seen the interviews with the children, carried out by these social workers, included in the programme but on this rare occasion an understanding of the pernicious nature libel laws cautions discretion - suffice to say if you do manage to see the programme, then I’m firmly behind the expert witnesses in their opinion, which is stronger than that expressed by the family court judge at the time

At first, Rochadale Social Services tried to bring criminal charges against these families, spinning lurid and whole ficitious tales of animal and human sacrifice, of babies being microwaved and eaten and of children having fingers amputated, to the Police, stories which came rather unstuck when the Police, as they are wont to do, raised the trivial little matter of corroborating evidence.

There was, of course, none.

Still, undeterred, the social workers proceeded to take the matter to family court in an effort to have these children permanantly removed from their families - only for their case to be systematically destroyed in court.

If this all carries with it a sense of horrific familiarty, then yes, it does resemble the basic plot of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’.

This was, of course, accompanied by the usual media furore, which the same newspapers that had stirred the moral panic in the first place, regaling Rochdale Council with every ounce of hypocritical venom they could muster. There was the obligatory sacrifical scapegoat - the Director of Social Services resigned - children were returned to their families, internal inquiries were held and training policies and good practice guidelines revised.

And the bureacratic hivemind did what it does best - closed ranks, battened down ther hatches and waited for it all to be forgotten.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Not all the children were returned were returned to their families.

Instead the, first family to be investigated; to have their children taken away by Police and social services in dawn raids, were left in limbo. They weren’t abusers - and certainly not Satanic abusers - so now, in the eyes of the same Social Services department, they had ‘poor parenting skills’ and ‘too much debt’; they were just too poor and too stupid to be trusted to care for their own children and so those children remained in care - in the case of one of them for 10 years during which time access visits from his family were reduced from one hour a month to one hour a year. This was ‘justified’ by social services on the grounds that these visits were distressing and difficult for the child.

If you’ve dealt with bureaucracies for long enough you’ll recognise instantly what happened here. Bureaucracies are never wrong and never make mistakes. Even if proven wrong, there is always some other reason, some other set of grounds on which they are right, something that the people who proved them wrong missed or didn’t take into account, something which justifies them continuing on a course of action that, once set, brooks no deviation.

Nearly 16 years on, 12 of the 20 children who were snatched from their parents by officialdom in 1990 are taking legal action against Rochdale Council.

Why? Damages, yes - and who can blame them. But with that they also want an apology from Rochdale Council - a straightforward, formal apology, something that the council has never once, in 16 years, had the courtesy to offer to the children. To the parents, yes, but not the kids whose lives were blighted by bureaucratic and professional incompetence.

In fact, Rochdale Council, together with the two social workers whose blind zeal created this whole sorry mess in the first place, even went to court to try to prevent the programme being shown, the main body of the injuction sought being based primarily on the objections of the two social workers on the grounds that:

1. Social workers as public servants working in a confidential environment should be protected by a cloak of anonymity save where there has been dishonesty or bad faith;

2. They support open public debate and do not oppose the making of the documentary;

3. They left the local authority’s employment as a matter of personal choice not in consequence of the judgment and have both in their different ways gone on to considerable professional success elsewhere;

4. Their professional competence has not been called into question since the judgment;

5. Their Article 8 rights are engaged and having regard to the nature and extent of the agreed disclosure the maintenance of their anonymity is a proportionate restraint whereas the publication of their identities would add so little of value that it would be a disproportionate interference;

6. They both fear:

a) A negative impact on their professional standing with colleagues and families with whom they now work;

b) A negative impact on future career prospects (I deliberately do not enlarge on this issue because it would tend to identify the social workers present professional activities and the BBC has undertaken not to reveal their present employments but I stress that I have considered the detail of that which is set out in the affidavits that have been sworn);

c) The possibility of an unfair or inaccurate portrayal of them including by any failure to consider the actions of others with whom it is asserted they acted at the time (e.g. management representatives);

d) Intrusive media interest;

e) Harassment and/or behaviour from others towards themselves or their families that they would regard as threatening;

f) A seriously detrimental emotional impact (described as enormous) upon their closest relatives, including children who do not know of their past involvement with this case and parents who are elderly.

The full ruling in the case can be found here and is well worth reading out of general interest in human right law and practice even if you have no real interest in the specifics of this case.

There are two points in the application and grounds for injunction stated by the two social workers that I specifically want to address.

First there is this:

1. Social workers as public servants working in a confidential environment should be protected by a cloak of anonymity save where there has been dishonesty or bad faith;

Save where there is dishonesty or bad faith? So the public has the right, in their opinion, to know if a public servant is dishonest, deceitful or wilfully negligent but not if they are merely incompetent, irrespective of the consequences of that incompetence.

No. That cannot be correct. not when there are matters of professional competence at stake.

This leads, however, naturally to this:

3. They left the local authority’s employment as a matter of personal choice not in consequence of the judgment and have both in their different ways gone on to considerable professional success elsewhere;

Indeed both are still social workers and both, according the programme, still work in child protection.

Now while they may well have learned, and learned well from their mistakes of 16 years ago and may be all the better professionals for it, to find that they left Rochdale Council by choice and for reasons unrelated to this case, to continue and develop their respective careers elsewhere seems to me to be the clearest possible evidence that there has been no real accountability, and therefore no real justice in this matter.

There may have been the obligatory scapegoating of the Director of Social Services at the time, but if these two social workers, whose actions were central to this case, can apparently walk away and continue their lives without having been subject - it appears - to any substantive sanctions - let alone others whose failings in this matter may be manifest but whose identities remain a secret - then justice has not been done.

Because accountability, ultimately, is just a function of justice, which is why it is something that the bureaucratic hivemind is so keen to avoid at all costs.

—

Oops, almost forgot.

The two social workers - their names are Jill France and Susan Hammersley.

UPDATE:

Further to my cautionary note on libel, The Times helpfully notes the opinions of Professor Elizabeth Newson (second page), one of the expert witnesses in this case:

Elizabeth Newson, a professor of developmental psychology, was drafted in as an expert witness for the court case. She quickly noted the “poor standards� of the social workers’ interviews and observations, the way they interpreted dreams as reality. The crucial first interview with Daniel, in which he was alleged to have made long statements about ghosts, was not videotaped. The judge did accept that the social workers were motivated by zeal rather than malice, saying: “I do not question the good faith or good intentions of the social workers, who I acknowledge were working under considerable pressure.�

But Professor Newson believes that they were obsessional and had convinced themselves that the ritual abuse was happening. “I thought there was another ingredient to this as well as concern for the children,� she says. “There was an unhealthy excitement about it which we also saw in Cleveland (another notorious child ‘abuse’ case) . . . They had begun to believe that they were experts.�

Yep, that’s about the size of it.

The Times also publishes Rochdale Council’s response to the programme - they declined to take part for the usual ‘legal reasons’.

“I cannot see how the interests of today’s challenges of protecting children will be served by re-examining past cases that are 15 years old.

“The business of investigating allegations of child abuse can be highly traumatic for all those involved and recent cases show that terrible harm is being caused to children both through deliberate abuse and neglect.

“Society needs able and committed social workers to protect children, and media coverage that makes the recruitment of them even more difficult than it is already should be a concern for all of us.�

What about the interests of justice? What about the interests of the families who were abused by the council’s social workers 15 years ago - for having seen the programme abuse is the only appropriate terms I can find to describe the manner in which those families were treated.

Just when you thought you’d got bureaucrats taped they come up with something new, eh? It’s the Lion King defence - it’s in the past, hakuna matata - now fuck off.

If all Rochdale Council gives a shit about its recruitment policies for social workers then fuck the lot of them.