Too late, minister

Andrew Lansley, the Secretary of State for Health, is all over the media today criticising findings by the Care Quality Commission that has found 20% of NHS hospitals mistreating the elderly and failing to feed and hydrate patients properly. The minister speaks as if it's a bit of a shock to him.

And yet, last February I made a film for Channel 4's Dispatches that highlighted this problem. After the programme was shown I sent the minister a petition signed by 4000 people asking him to do something about the issue. I did not receive even the courtesy of a reply from Mr Lansley. And yet, today, the minister claims he wants to encourage whistleblowers and to stop patients being starved when in the care of the NHS. Incredible.

Only now that the minister's position is threatened is he willing to do anything. It's shameful behaviour.

On yer bike!

Yesterday I was watching a rerun of Francesco’s Italy, a charming programme following the journey of Francesco da Mosta around his home country. Last night he reached Naples. The busy streets were packed with mopeds and pushbikes. No one was wearing a crash helmet and often there were three to a bike or even young children riding on the crossbar of the pushbikes. As far as I could tell, no one was injured and the population of Naples hasn’t been decimated by this cavalier attitude to road safety.

Contrast this with the news that a father of a two-year-old boy was fined £200 for carrying his son on a crossbar seat on his bicycle in Burton, Staffordshire. The seat was bolted to the crossbar and further fastened using duct tape. The child was wearing a cycle helmet. Ghulam Murtza was handed a fixed-penalty notice by a police officer for the offence which he duly ripped up and threw on the floor in disgust. He was then handed another fixed penalty notice for littering.

Technically Ghulam was in the wrong as, according to the Highway Code, the bicycle hadn’t been adapted to carry a passenger, although one could argue that as the seat was bolted to the cycle frame, it was an adaptation. At court Ghulam was fined £100 for the cycling offence, £85 costs and the pathetic £15 victim surcharge that automatically gets slapped on any fine in this country, just so a bunch of quangocrats can enjoy fat pensions and gilded salaries by pretending to care about crime.

Meanwhile, cycling groups throughout the country are supportive of people being able to carry children on bicycles, as we’re all supposed to be going green and reducing our carbon footprints by using cars less.

However, the most chilling aspect of the story for me was the Orwellian weaselspeak from Chief Inspector Phil Fortun, commander of East Staffordshire Local Policing Team, which covers Burton. He said: 'It is our duty to protect people and ensure the safety of the communities we serve.

‘The bicycle was not made to carry a child in that way and officers took action to protect the young child from potential injury or worse, should the bike have been involved in a collision. The bike's owner was well-meaning in his efforts, but misguided with regards to the safety of himself and his son. Road safety is a priority for Staffordshire Police and we will continue to take the necessary action to keep all road users safe.’

They're only doing it to keep us safe. They could have had a quiet word with Ghulam if they really felt it was their business, but no... far easier to get the fixed-penalty ticket book out.

Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it? Which way is Naples?

Make your mind up

Barely more than a week ago the liberal-minded citizens of Hampstead and other leafy enclaves of progressive thinking were demanding that rubber bullets and tear gas be used to quell rioters and stop total anarchy sweeping the nation. Fast forward a week and some 3000 miscreants have been arrested and hauled up before the beak. Exemplary sentences are being handed down in order to show how serious society takes the matter of civil disorder. The courts have been sitting around the clock and magistrates have discovered that they do in fact have a backbone if the Department of Justice tells them they can impose tough sentences.

The latest hardline sentence to be handed down from the Crown Courts is a prison term of four years for two boneheaded youths who posted details of a riot they wanted to start, using Facebook. The riot which never happened thanks to the apathy of the good people of Northwich, was advertised on Facebook by the two youths with a time and a place for the mayhem being suggested. The two chaps who clearly are a little bit short changed in the intelligence department didn't even disguise their identity and so plod was able to track them down after members of the public became alarmed at a mob uprising in the commuter belt of Cheshire.

So now the two young men are starting a four-year sentence for inciting riot and already the good people of Hampstead are wringing their hands and muttering that the courts have been too harsh and that this is wholly disproportionate. The depressing thing is the inability of the liberal elite to make the connection with their softness and unwillingness to make examples of wrongdoers with the riots that broke out a week before. They seem totally unable to connect the two. It's no wonder we have so many problems when the great and the good that still largely run this country are so prone to panic and so quick to reverse their hardline views once the moment of danger has passed. No wonder our young people are confused about what behaviour is and isn't acceptable.

Yobbery knows no age or class

There's a marvellous piece in today's Telegraph by Peter Oborne pointing out how moral decay has set in to our society at its so-called top end as much as at the bottom. The article perfectly captures the sod-you attitude that seems to pervade our sick society. I got a taste of this for myself on Wednesday during a routine visit to the hospital...

I was due for an appointment at my local hospital's physiotherapy department. Fortunately there's a car park for people who are disabled and who can't walk very far to get to the hospital. As you'd expect, many of the people who visit the hospital are disabled and have a disabled parking badge. They vary in the severity of their disability and the demand for spaces is high. For this reason I set off early and arrived with at least 35 minutes to spare before my appointment.

I joined the queue of cars waiting for a space and turned my engine off. A couple of minutes later a car drove past me and the car in front and took a space that was being vacated. As you can imagine, I was incensed. I wasn't bothered about waiting I was just really angry that someone should  jump the queue... let's face it, until recently, jumping a queue is just about the worst thing you can do in Britain.

I got out of my car and walked with some effort over to the car driver who had just stuck two fingers up at the rest of us waiting for a space.

"Excuse me... What do you think you're doing?" I asked the rather prim and austere-looking woman who was doing her utmost to avoid my gaze as she rooted around for a wheelchair in the back of her car.

"I'm late for my mother's appointment," she said as if that was some sort of an explanation. I looked at the woman to try to see whether it was worth reasoning with her. She wasn't tattoed or pierced; she didn't look like she was a member of the much maligned underclass. She was (and I'd bet at least £200 on this) a retired school teacher in her late 50s.

"We're all waiting for a space and we all have appointments," I said.

"Well I had nowhere to park and I was blocking the road waiting for a space," she reasoned with a hefty helping of irritation in her voice.

I tried to explain that what she'd done was unfair and she just huffed and puffed and kept repeating that she was late and hadn't been willing to wait in the queue. I got nowhere with her and, in the end, just told her she was no better than a rioter.

"Oh get over it!" she snapped at me before marching off, pushing her mother in a wheelchair that she'd just pulled out from the car.

That woman was the epitome of the nasty, snarling and snappy middle class sense of entitlement that's every bit as ugly and selfish as the looters of London. Is it any wonder that the young look at the selfish ways of some of the baby boomer generation and take their cue from them?

Cruel to be kind?

It’s becoming quite clear that our country’s problems are deep rooted and have probably been simmering for the past 50 years or so… about the time when our welfare state decided it was going to be a cradle-to-grave affair proposing to fulfil every citizen’s needs.

That well-meaning project now not only looks misplaced and idealistic, but has morphed into a toxic culture of social dependency which has seen our country top the league tables for single parents and divorce rates. The very system that was supposed to support and nurture family life has actually turned out to be its undoing. We’ve literally destroyed our society with kindness and hand-outs. In some parts of the country there are families where a lifetime of idleness has now spanned three generations. This isn’t going to be an easy problem to fix.

Since the riots began we’ve all become amateur sociologists with our own theories of what’s gone wrong. There’s a good reason for this… most of us have experience of these things and can draw our own conclusions of what’s wrong. For example, a friend of mine runs a café in the city in which I live. He employs three staff for most days of the week. Surprise, surprise… they’re all foreign! This isn’t because they are cheaper to employ than British workers as they are all employed legally paying £6 an hour and with full National Insurance contributions. The reason my friend discriminates against British workers is that he has problem finding any. Young British people don’t want to work in catering. The thought of standing at a sink and washing up for four hours is more than they can bear. Many of the British applicants he has interviewed for a job and taken on then fail to turn up for work, or turn up late, looking dishevelled, hung over or scruffy. There seems to be little pride in their appearance or even a wish to work. The Polish and Spanish workers he employs (and he has employed many) are without exception: hardworking, smart, well-educated, willing to learn and reliable.

Now, why is this? What makes a Polish or Spanish worker more willing to put in the effort? In a word: welfare. It would seem that the absence of comprehensive welfare support has meant that these foreign workers have grown up with role models who they have seen going out to work to support their family. Working is seen as normal. Also, the fact that those two countries are nominally Catholic nations with lower divorce rates also makes a difference. Whatever it is, we need to look at what those countries are doing differently to us and then adopt some of those practices. Welfare it seems is quite simply killing our children’s initiative and offering them nothing better than a life of idleness and boredom.

If we are to cut back on the welfare state that has severed the ties of interdependence between generations and family members, we also need to be certain that we offer the chance of an excellent education in the form of grammar schools as well as technical and vocational educations for those who don’t like or want to follow the academic route. We need to encourage businesses so that there are employment prospects for these kids. It’s a two-way contract and we need to completely rewrite the deal between the state and the individual. Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms don’t go nearly far enough. A wholesale rethink is required if we’re ever to get ourselves out of this dreadful mess.