Dickens Lives! Bullies Rule OK!

Back home from Germany to distressing telly — Paul Kenyon’s BBC Panorama Undercover Care: the Abuse Exposed. Joe Casey spent five weeks undercover as a care assistant at a private hospital for people with learning difficulties seemingly run along similar lines to Guantanamo Bay.

Watching it was not easy, but the film demonstrates exactly what public service investigative journalism is for, and deserves major recognition:

The project was planned after a professional nurse blew the whistle on bullying behaviour among some of the care assistants at Winterbourne View, near Bristol. Particular attention focused on a great bullying bear of a carer who had seemingly built a whole culture of harassing those weaker than himself for his own amusement. Let none be deceived. The assessment of oft very limited service users can be challenging work, involving occasional need for physical restraint. This, however, was simply torture.

What do we learn?

1. About Bullies
   There is deep in some people a need to exploit others' weaknesses for their own gratification — to wind people up until they snap and then bring down the panoply of the rules upon them. There is a cruel, bullying streak in our culture at every level. An archbishop of the last century was told his broadcast on the subject of the abdication of Edward VIII had not gone down well with the public because it had appeared to be kicking a man when he was down. “But what’s the point of kicking him if he isn’t?” mused his Grace. Bullying behaviour, even in Church, happens on various levels, and should always be called out for what it is. Go along with the bully and you create the culture in which such behaviour thrives. Indulge them and you will have hell to pay. Remain silent and you collude.
   
   
2. About Hospitals
   The hospital’s owners had a large chest of what turn out to be fatuous awards and service gongs. You cannot legislate compassion and humanity by guidelines and targets. Whilst it’s good to know Wayne and some of his cohorts are currently helping the police with their inquiries, and shooting the sergeant is a classic response to failure, the systemics of their own operation allowed the owners to ignore clear distress signals from their own whistleblowing employee, employ several wildly unsuitable care workers, remain ignorant about what happens on their own property, ignore several injuries amongst the service users — all of these are management and governance failures, in which Wayne played but a walk-on part.
   
   
3. About Regulation and Safeguarding
   The same whistleblower approached the Care Quality Commission — the Government’s regulatory body — and they also ignored him. This raises profound concerns that, again, transcend one official’s judgment in this case, poor as it obviously was. CQC had inspected Winterbourne View three times in the past two years. How did they miss all evidence of wrongdoing, and how can we know that there is not widespread undetected abuse going on elsewhere?
   

Time to pull up the Drawbridge?

Dresden has been a good place to pursue hot issues that don’t seem to be able to air so openly in the UK. On Friday the Frauenkirche saw one of the world’s leading academic experts on Migration, Professor Klaus Bade, unpack the grounds of the fear some Germans feel about his subject.

This fear, Bade calls it “Hysteria,” finds many forms of expression from skinheads to the NPD, but its most public exponent of late has been former railway administrator and SPD Senator, now Bundesbank board member, Thilo Sarrazin. Last year he published a book called Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany abolishes itself”) claiming that immigrant Muslims don’t want to integrate and habitually depend on social services rather than honest t

oil. He calculates that in a few generations the Muslim population will grow and overwhelm Germany.

But there’s more. Sarrazin dives from

there into a murkier cellar when he suggests that Muslims are in some undefined way genetically less intelligent. The only answer, apart from pulling up the drawbridge, is to take away the social benefits that feed them. Offended? It’s hard not to be, especially if you remember the evolutionary eugenic theory that underpinned twentieth century Anti-Semitism. It cannot be wise to dance on the edge of this particular abyss.

Hysteria is a form of fear, the most powerful drive in the reptile brain that underlies everything we think. So this stuff matters. It is not enough simply to huff and puff about its moral shortcomings, or to draw historical parallels, although those are almost inescapable. We cannot address hysteria by embarrassed shuffling fro

m foot to foot as those who have just realised that our eccentric neighbour at a cocktail party is actually potty. Neither should the concern be suppressed, as that only amplifies it and may even seem to validate its more febrile imaginations. If you awake in the night fearing your brain is being chewed up by space monsters, best wake up. The only answer is a truthful analysis of reality. We need to engage the higher end of the Brain with reality.

In fifty minutes of fast paced German liberally sprinkled with hard facts and figures, Bade analysed the real trends in the German population — falling in many places, and increasingly in need of high capacity intelligence from anywhere in the world it can be got. It turns out that most German Muslims see themselves as German, and very much share the general aspirations them of fellow citizens for their children, but often lack to a greater extent the means to bring them about.

Reflecting on the unpleasant soft racism and Islamophobia that can be found in the English media, it strikes me that quality of analysis is very thin on the ground. Politicians run scared before the wind without the means, courage or resources to shine light into the murky cellar. And as was the case with doing God, the field of play is left to the forces of ignorance and tribalism. The whole up to date picture can be found in the Encyclopedia of European Migration and Minorities: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present, which the professor has co-edited. Cambridge University Press. £106.50. They may want to serialise it in the Daily Mail, but don’t hold your breath...

Doing God in Dresden...

...is very interesting for anyone who grew up with the Simplicissimus (“We were right so everything we did was right.”) English black & white movie narrative of World War 2. But that's another story, best told, perhaps, in resurgent stone Baroque which contrasts strangely with Socialist Realist 1960’s blocks that doughnut the centre.

For the first (and probably last) time in my life, I looked along the row yesterday morning at a Bible Study, to find Dr Christian Wulff (CDU), President of the Bundesrepublik.

So, no name dropping you understand, there was I a few feet along from the head of state of the largest democracy in Europe...

So, it’s OK for politicians to do God in this country, including by a Roman Catholic politician who turns up at a Protestant Bible Study as participant. I wasn’t too wowed by all the childish nonsense in the UK press about Tony Blair and what denomination he could join.

But a further bit of doing God happened slightly later when the President was up on the stage with young people and educators concerned with integration and civil society. As a warm up, the interviewer asked everybody a personal question — “do you pray and, if so, to which God?”

The Christian Wulff answer, for what it’s worth, was that when he is on the road he enjoys some time out in Churches and similar places, and personally, he prays every night as part of his bedtime routine. He prays to “Jesus as described in the Bible.”

But what was interesting was what happened next, or rather what didn’t. Nobody suggested he was a nutter. Nobody suggested his new Economic wheezes were the product of either God or the Devil, being foisted on the public within a secret theocratic agenda. Nobody suggested that he was merely making it up to gain votes.

Indeed, Chicken Licken, the sky did not fall. And that was the difference between the way such a question is handled in the public square our side of the channel and pretty much everywhere else. Where grown-ups live.