Nicholson should not resign, he should be put on trial

If a private company were responsible for the deaths of up to 1,200 people there would be a national outcry and demands to jail those responsible.

Yet, after no fewer than five investigations into what happened at Stafford Hospital, no individual has received so much as a slapped wrist.

How can this be?

The police have begun an investigation into what must be the biggest scandal in the history of the NHS.

Years after the event, they have finally stirred themselves.

Matthew Ellis, the police and crime commissioner for Staffordshire, claims they have “information not in the public domain”.

How they came by it should itself be the subject of a public inquiry.

Why do the police have information which has not been declared even to tribunals set up by the Government?

The latest inquiry by Robert Francis QC uncovered years of abuse and neglect at the hospital leading to the unnecessary deaths of between 400 and 1,200 people.

These aren’t statistics, they’re individuals who placed their trust in a system which ended up killing them – horrific for the victims and their loved ones.

This isn’t a case of an individual nurse or doctor. Mr Francis concludes the failings go right to the top of the health service.

The police investigation is no doubt being staged mainly for political reasons.

Everyone from David Cameron down believes scapegoats must be found, heads must roll and someone should pay.

He says: “One of the important points about the Mid-Staffordshire inquiry is to make sure, when a failure like this takes place, there is proper accountability.

"In the report, you can see exactly what happened to the people who were involved. Some of them were allowed to retire, some were allowed to move within the health service. There wasn't proper accountability, there wasn't proper consequences and that is not acceptable."

Actually Dave, some of them didn’t move or retire, they were promoted, given more money, more power and more responsibility.

And it is not too late to insist on “proper accountability and proper consequences”.

It’s highly likely the police will content themselves with digging out a few especially shocking cases of neglect involving a heartless nurse or two.

But let’s hope they are mounting a major prosecution of people at the very top of the NHS on a charge of corporate manslaughter.

The health service as a whole is guilty of causing unnecessary deaths as a result of several layers of mismanagement, indifference and neglect.

The doctors and consultants must take much of the blame. They saw what was going on but “kept their heads down”, according to Mr Francis.

But the real defendants should be among the £200,000-a-year bureaucrats in whom we mistakenly place our trust.

Chief among these is Sir David Nicholson.

In 2003 he was Chief Executive of Birmingham and The Black Country Strategic Health Authority. In 2005 he took on Shropshire and Staffordshire as well, at about the time people started needlessly dying at Stafford Hospital.

He did so well in the West Midlands he became chief executive of the entire NHS in England in 2006.

He is paid over £200,000 a year, claims £50,000 a year in expenses and enjoys benefits-in-kind worth £37,600.

There haven’t been any successful corporate manslaughter prosecutions against individuals.

But the charge was introduced after a series of disasters including the 1987 “Herald of Free Enterprise” tragedy when 193 passengers and crew died and the 1999 Ladbroke Grove rail crash which killed 31 people.

Corporate manslaughter cases usually end up in large fines for the businesses involved.

There’s absolutely no point in similar penalties for the NHS because the whole case would involve the re-cycling of our money.

But where does the buck stop in a scandal like Stafford Hospital? Surely it must stop somewhere.

Or is the health service such a rambling and unwieldy organisation that officially nobody can be held to account for anything? Is the NHS so big it is always someone else’s fault?

That cannot be acceptable.

We rightly condemn top bankers for bringing the nation to the brink of bankruptcy and some of them, like Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS, even had to quit (albeit with hefty pay-offs).

That was only money. When it comes to lives, it seems no individual is to blame – just a “culture”.

The Francis report says: “The negative aspects of culture in the system were identified as including: lack of openness to criticism; lack of consideration for patients; defensiveness; looking inwards not outwards; secrecy; misplaced assumptions about the judgements and actions of others; acceptance of poor standards; a failure to put the patient first in everything that is done.”

And it’s clear the culture is dictated from the top – Sir David’s department “has not always put patients first”.

So where does the buck stop? Who sets the tone for an organisation? Who is responsible for its corporate culture?

It’s time Sir David was made to face up to his personal responsibility for this national tragedy. But he’s probably so lost in NHS bureaucracy he thinks culture is something they grow in a test tube.

Cameron's jam

The result of the Eastleigh by-election leaves UKIP holding a gun to David Cameron’s head. If he refuses a referendum on EU membership before the next General Election then his party will lose.

The choice is simple. Nobody believes Cameron’s promise of jam tomorrow any more than they believe his promised referendum will be a straightforward in-out choice.

The Prime Minister himself is a committed European. He has often said he does not believe Britain should withdraw from the EU so he will do everything in his power to ensure the people never get a straightforward chance to decide the question.

Unless he holds an early referendum, UKIP will scoop up votes at a General Election in constituencies across the country. And that will deprive several Tory MPs – Eurosceptics among them – of their seats and their party of any chance of forming the next Government.

It will allow Ed Miliband to form the next Government, probably without the assistance of his friends among the Liberal Democrats.

That is not an outcome many people would relish but it looks highly probable unless the Tories can neutralise the threat of UKIP.

There is only one way of doing so. Cameron has his fate in his own hands.

Stephanie Flanders is an economics guru

THE GRU SONG

Flanders the Swan

A year ago, last Thursday

I was strolling in the treasury

when I met a man who though he knew the lot.

He was laying down the law about the habits of bankers

And how little spines a politician's got.

So I asked him:

"What's that creature there?"

He answered, "Oh, it's a h'Peston"

I might of gone on thinking that was true 

If the animal in question hadn't put that chap to shame

And remarked, "I h'aint a Peston, I'm a Gru"

"I'm a Gru

I'm a Gru

The g-nicest work of g-nature on TV too.

I'm a Gru

How do you do

You really ought to k-now w-ho's w-ho's

I'm a Gru

A gneconomics Gru

I'm g-not a Peston or a Mason

So let me introduce 

I'm g-neither man or moose

Oh g-no g-no g-no I'm a Gru"

I had taken furnished lodgings down at Rustington-on-Sea

Whence I travelled on to Ashton-under-Lyne it was actually

And the second night I stayed there I was woken from a dream

That I'll tell you all about some other time.

On the flat screen TV on the wall above my bed

Serious and frowning, was a face I thought I knew;

A Paxman? No, it's not a Paxman. 

An Esler? Unlikely, Really. A Osbornebeest?

When I though I heard a voice...

"I'm a Gru

I'm a Gru

A g-neconomics Gru

I wish I could g-nash my teeth at you.

I'm a Gru

How do you do

I really do k-now w-ho's w-ho's.

I'm a Gru

Spelt G-R-U

Call me a Peston or a Mason and I'll sue

G-nor am I the least like that dreadful Osbornebeest.

Oh, g-no, g-no, g-no, 

G-no g-no g-no, I'm a Gru

G-no g-no g-no, I'm a Gru."

Barriers to understanding

I see various Tory MPs are now demanding David Cameron avoids an in-out referendum on the EU mainly on economic grounds.
They say: “Senior business figures don’t want the UK to play a lesser role in the EU. They fear, as we know you do, the danger to British business and jobs of the UK being on the wrong side of a tariff barrier which could fatally undermine our government’s policy of rebalancing the economy so that we boost manufacturing and reduce unemployment.”

Everyone wants free trade between Britain and Europe but we are told escaping the clutches of the Superstate would somehow cause irreparable damage.

Why on earth would our friends across the English Channel want to boycott British goods and provoke a trade war?

Just consider these official HMRC statistics: UK exports to the EU totalled £13.1 billion in November. Imports totalled £18.2 billion. The trade gap was £5.1 billion.

Our trading partners in Europe would lose more than we would if anything stopped the free flow of goods and services. So they have a clear financial interest in working with us, not against us, in ensuring relations between an independent Britain and the EU were unaffected by the re-assertion of our sovereignty.

Today, tomorrow, some time, never

It's all about politics. David Cameron does not want to leave the European Union. He does not want a referendum on the question either.
What he wants is to win the next General Election and even the Euro elections which take place next year.
So, to give himself half a chance while keeping his own Eurosceptics happy and wrong-footing the Labour Party, he is holding out the possibility of a referendum.
Not today, not tomorrow, but sometime or never.
He's got to renegotiate our EU membership and win the next General Election first. Two possibly insurmountable hurdles.
So why all the excitement?
Because at least a Prime Minister is holding out the vague possibility that we can take control of our own destiny.
It is a little odd he is proposing a referendum while at the same time arguing that we must vote Yes to staying in the EU when the time comes.
But it's better than nothing, I suppose, and it is a triumph for those people who have argued for decades that the British people were duped into agreeing to remain in the Common Market and have been ignored ever since.
If it ever comes to an in-out referendum we know all the power, all the money, all the vested interests and all the pressure will be on one side of the argument.

All of it designed to thwart the will of the people which is (despite some dubious polls organised by a company with direct links to the EU Commission) firmly against being swallowed up into a European super-state.

I don’t think we should be fooled into believing this is anything but another ploy to keep Britain inside the European Union.

Cameron's Eurospin

Why are the Americans, the Germans, the CBI, our ex-Ambassador to the US and all the great and good warning David Cameron about the danger to Britain of even the thought that we might pull out of the EU? Because that’s what the Prime Minister wants them to say. He has no intention of offering the voters a way out but he needs to pile pressure on himself to see off his own Eurosceptics and UKIP. It’s all about party politics and has nothing to do with what’s best for Britain.

NHS - No healthy solution

Stafford Hospital isn’t unique, it’s just the most tragic (so far). How anyone can revere the National Health Service is beyond me. It’s a tragic farce. In an ideal world we would dismantle the whole thing and start again. At the very least we should put patients in charge of the way it’s run – instead of the vested interests of doctors, consultants and trade union leaders.

Here’s my latest experience:

e-mail to: Patientexperience@uhb.nhs.uk sent on Sunday, December 30, 2012

My father was sent to the clinical decision unit at about 2pm today and finally saw a doctor at 5.30. This is, I suppose, what you would class as an acceptable standard of service. I would not.

According to the consultant on duty – who I finally tracked down because nobody was interested in examining my father – the doctors were overwhelmed with work because there had been 37 admissions since 9 am and only five doctors on duty.

By my calculations that is one doctor to just over 7 patients admitted in the course of 8 hours. This works out at better than one patient per doctor per hour. I accept there are other patients the doctors also have to see but even so it does not seem an excessive workload to handle.

One patient per doctor per hour is not overwhelmingly demanding.

That being so, and given that the patients do not all arrive together but over an 8 hour period, how is it possible for a newly-admitted patient to be ignored for maybe two and a half hours and finally only see a doctor once a protest has been made about this neglect?

Why is the system so chaotic? For instance, the consultant said they needed to find my father's notes but they didn't - I was able to inform him the notes were already on the ward and the nurse on duty knew exactly where they were. Did he assume the notes were lost? If so, why? Is that what usually happens?

The planning and deployment of nursing staff was completely chaotic. Why does the hospital provide no doubt expensive computers for staff when everything is done on pieces of paper and - to me quite unbelievably - a white board with various notes in different coloured ink?

To add insult to injury, when he was asked if he’d like some food, he said he could manage some soup. So why was the soup delivered to the patient without anybody bothering to mention it to draw it to his attention? It was left beside the bed for some time before anyone noticed. When they did, it had become cold and congealed. No wonder people starve to death on the NHS.

Finally, my elderly mother was with me in the hospital despite the fact that she, too, is unwell. I asked the doctor, when she eventually arrived, if she would mind examining my mother quickly while she was there because I thought she could do with some antibiotics. This was a request too far. She told me she was not allowed to examine patients who had not been officially admitted and that if I was concerned about my mother I should take her to the Accident and Emergency Department next door. Given the waiting time that would involve, I concluded the best thing to do was to take her home and put her to bed. But, whatever the rules and regulations you feel the need to impose, is this really any way to serve patients and the public? 

Having had no reply, I sent another e-mail: 

24 hours on he has been transferred to another ward but in all that time he has not once been seen by a doctor. Is this usual? Is this reasonable? When will someone be bothered to check if he is OK? 

and a third: 

I am looking forward to a response to my e-mails within the next 24 hours. 

On January 2 I got this: 

Good morning Mr Hastilow

Thank you for your e-mail sent to the Patient Experience inbox, I am sorry that you are not happy with the service provided to your father at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham which has given you a need to bring these issues to our attention.

There are several ways in which this can be dealt with, I can forward your concern directly onto our PALS department (Patient Advice and Liaison Services), PALS will be able to look into this issue on your behalf and respond to you once they have obtained information from the relevant management, alternatively, I can pass your information directly onto the manager for that particular ward and department to ask that they feedback to you directly (If you do not require feedback please let me know.)

If you would be kind enough to advise which way forward you would like to go with this that would be most helpful.

I hope the above is satisfactory to you and if we can be of any further assistance in the future please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards

Mrs Sue Higgins

Patient Experience Facilitator 

I replied: I think the PALS department would be appropriate. 

They responded:

Thank you again for your prompt reply and the information that you have provided. I have already forwarded your previous email to the PALS Team who were waiting to hear of your preferred method of communication. I have copied the team into this email so that they will be in contact with as soon as they can.

Mrs. Sue Higgins

Patient Experience Facilitator 

I said: I would prefer to hear from you by e-mail 

They responded: I would like to introduce my self my name is Dawn McKenna and I will be the pals officer looking into your concerns raised by your email on Sunday. I have escalated your original email to the Matron and Ward Managers of CDU, would you be kind enough to let me have a direct contact number for you that I can pass onto Matron who will be wanting to speak to you direct.

Dawn C McKenna
Patient Advice & Liaison Officer  

I sent them a mobile number but said I would prefer communications to be in writing as I was a journalist and may wish to report on the situation in due course. I then got this: 

I am writing in relation to your recent emails regarding the care received by your father. I was sorry to learn of your concerns about the service at QEH. 

The matter has been passed to me as you have requested a response in writing and we will therefore be dealing with this as a formal complaint. We are obliged to seek your father’s consent, both to the complaint and to the sharing of his information with you. Ahead of our writing to him, I would be grateful if you would confirm that he is aware of your contact to us and that our letter will be on its way to him.

Once we have received consent, we will be in a position to complete our review and respond to you. Please let us know if you have any questions regarding this email.

Dave Beech
Patient Services Co-ordinator 

I said: He does not know of my complaint and is far too ill (still) to be bothered with this. Please do not communicate with him and only communicate with me. I am asking for some answers to questions; I cannot believe you need a formal procedure for that. 

They said: Thank you for your reply. In the circumstances you have detailed we will not make contact with your father, although the Trust’s response to you will be limited.

We are dealing with your enquiry through the Complaints Process as it is the Trust’s mechanism for investigating and responding formally to concerns raised about its services. We will contact you again as soon as possible.

Dave Beech
Patient Services Co-ordinator 

I asked how long this would take and so far I haven’t had an answer, though it is amazing that so far three people have been involved in my complaint – two more than the number of doctors who could be bothered to care for my father.

Later... answer arrives:

We are hoping to receive information from the clinical team very shortly, following which there will be a review of the information at a senior level prior to the Trust responding to you. We hope to be able to finalise this matter within the next few weeks, but will contact you if for any reason there is an unforeseen delay

David Beech
Patient Services Co-ordinator

 

They are all honourable men

As I said in October: Why does everyone assume Andrew Mitchell is guilty of calling the police f***ing plebs? Have we reached the point where Cabinet Ministers are automatically assumed to be liars?

Mr Mitchell should not resign as Chief Whip unless he is not telling the truth. But he has declared to the Prime Minister and the public that he did not say the words attributed to him.

Should we not believe him? He is an honourable man.

Petty bureaucrats dog us at every turn. It can be hard to keep your composure when some pathetic jobsworth is bossing you about – often just because he can.

Still, I have always assumed that if you swear at a policeman, you’ll be arrested no matter if you are a king or a clown, and serve you right.

If the police account of Andrew Mitchell’s rant is true, he should lose his job.

But what if it is untrue? What, then, are the police up to? Are they lying? And, if so, why? To undermine the Government?

One side is not telling the truth. It may be Mr Mitchell but equally it could be the police.

And if it is the police, we should be much more worried than we might be if it’s just a grumpy Minister after a long lunch.
Not sure I have anything to add to that at the moment...

Virgin berth

Having said how appalling Chiltern Trains have become, I tried Virgin instead just days after Richard Branson's outfit won a two-year extension to its franchise.

How anyone could travel on this line is beyond me. Quite apart from the fact that all Virgin trains stink because their loos are basically insanitary, the price is beyond comprehension.

Second class return from Birmingham International to Euston (including car parking, admittedly) is a staggering £166.

It's not worth £20.

The outward journey was OK but when we reached Coventry on the way back the five carriages filled up so much it was standing room only for dozens of people.

So crammed was the train that I feared I might not actually get to the exit door in time before the train moved on.

As for everyone trying to get on the train at Birmingham International having been to the Clothes Show at the NEC, they were treated like refugees or Japanese commuters. I'm surprised there wasn't some Virgin operative employed to shove and push them all on board so the doors would close.

Why does anyone love Richard Branson? His rip-off railway is a bad joke.

Chiltern failways

It's standing room only - yet again - on the Chiltern Trains service to London. What happened to this railway? A few years ago it was the best way from Birmingham to London. Now it's overcrowded, expensive and unreliable. 

Today I tried to park at Warwick Parkway's new car park and almost crashed the car because they had not bothered to treat the top floor, which is open to the elements, despite the icy conditions.
 

I slipped across the top floor to the stairs lucky and thankful I didn't come a cropper and then had to pay £101.50 for a return ticket to Marylebone. That's because the train left before 9am. About five minutes before. But it stopped at Leamington Spa, we were all kicked off and told to wait for the next (cheaper, overcrowded) train. 

So here we all are, crammed in like sardines and ripped off to boot. Strangely there is no ticket collector. No doubt they will blame staff shortages but the truth is they don't have the courage to face carriages- full of unhappy passengers.

Leveson's hypocrite's charter

Press freedom is under threat. Politicians, business leaders and a whole host of celebrities are desperate for more laws to bring the beast to heel.

This powerful coalition claims newspapers have run wild for too long.

But, with a few notable exceptions, show me a critic of the press and I will show you a hypocrite with something to hide.

It’s true that what is in the public interest is not necessarily what interests the public. We all like a bit of gossip but that’s not a good defence of press freedom.

Yet there is a fine line between tittle-tattle and holding our governing elite to account.

They may class some of their activities as private – but at what point is it reasonable for a public figure to close the door on “press intrusion”?

Many public figures spend years courting the press, opening up to journalists about the most intimate aspects of their lives, in the hope of selling more CDs, books and films, winning votes or gaining power.

The rich and powerful are always in danger of being carried away by their own publicity and assuming the public interest and their own interests are identical.

When their failings are exposed, they turn on the people they courted for so long.

They blame the press when their marriages break down, they get arrested for breaking the law, they lose an election or they bankrupt one of the biggest banks in the world.

True, newspapers occasionally cross the line between what we have a right to know and what we might like to know.

But sometimes it’s only then that newspapers reveal the deeper truths about those who would command our support, our respect, our attention and our money.

The long list of phone-hacking “victims” who queued up to condemn the press at the Leveson inquiry is a veritable Who’s Who of the rich and famous.

The truth is, though, that phone hacking, like bribing police officers, is illegal. It does not require new legislation to stop it.

All that’s needed is for law enforcers to do their job. Sadly, rather like the watchdogs which failed to regulate the British banking system, they have been caught napping.

There is no reason to destroy the press simply because some people – and it remains to be seen who they might be – have broken the law.

As a nation, we are lucky to enjoy a free press – and by “press” I do mean newspapers.

TV and radio are different. Don’t look to them to expose the next MPs’ expenses fiasco, for instance. And don’t expect them to break news about scandals at your local council or your local hospital.

The press is not free, of course. It is hedged in with laws governing what can and cannot be said, and when.

That’s one reason why you can believe what you read in the papers. We have to tread carefully to make sure we get our facts right.

We have to ensure we are not libelling someone, we’re not in contempt of court or maybe breaking a secret superinjunction.

And there is more to freedom of the press than the ability to delve into the lives of people who would lord it over us.

A free press is the cornerstone of a free society. Once Governments or their placemen decide what you may or may not read, democracy itself is on the slide.

We in Britain take our freedom for granted. We don’t worry about it. We don’t fight for it. Often, we don’t even use it – most of us didn’t vote in the elections for police commissioners, for instance.

Yet it’s no coincidence that this is one of only two countries in Europe which enjoyed uninterrupted democracy for the whole of the 20^th century (the other was Sweden).

Press freedom ensured demagogues and dictators never flourished in Britain. Press freedom exposes crimes and scams. Press freedom keeps bureaucracies honest.

Newspapers hold our rulers to account, dissect their statements and their actions, expose their failings and encourage us to consider the alternatives.

Of course newspapers sometimes go too far. Sometimes they make mistakes. That is not a good enough reason for muzzling them.

Critics complain “they’re only trying to sell papers” as if that’s some sort of crime. Actually it is vital to ensuring a free press survives and prospers.

The press is not beholden to the State. Unlike the BBC or Channel 4, newspapers don’t depend on the taxpayer for their survival. The press is a commercial and highly-competitive animal.

This commercial freedom allows the press to stand up to bullying Governments, out-of-control multi-national corporations and self-serving bureaucracies.

The day Government stooges get the power to censor the press, is the day we all become creatures of the State not free men and women.

 

Leveson and the machine gun of lies

How can anyone seriously think of imposing new regulations on the press when the broadcasting media are out of control and the internet is anarchy?

MPs are queuing up to back a legal body to oversee the press – a form of censorship more common in France or some totalitarian state like China or Nazi Germany.

This they see as their chance for revenge against newspapers which exposed the all-party Parliamentary expenses scandal.

They are rubbing their hands in anticipation that Lord Justice Leveson will call for legal restraints on the alleged freedom of the press.

David Cameron set up the Leveson Inquiry to investigate a non-crime – the supposed hacking of murdered 13-year-old Millie Dowler’s phone by a “News of the World” reporter.

It’s now accepted the offence probably never took place. Yet the inquiry pressed on regardless. Talk about "don't let the facts get in the way of a good story".

In 12 months it cost taxpayers almost £4 million, mostly in lawyers’ fees.

The final bill will much more and will include fees for “participant victims” including Sienna Miller, Max Clifford, Ulrika Jonsson, Abi Titmuss, JK Rowling and Charlotte Church.

Self-righteous “martyrs and victims” like the hilarious Steve Coogan and the clean-living Max Mosley were joined by the versatile Hugh Grant and the peace-loving John Prescott.

They were all given red carpet treatment not just by Lord Justice Leveson but also by the BBC, which revelled in its coverage of how awful the newspapers – especially Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers – really were.

Things took an embarrassing turn when Mr Cameron became personally embroiled through his close friendship with ex-News International boss Rebecca Brooks.

However, recent events have made it abundantly clear how irrelevant Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry really is.
The BBC has not been the same since Alastair Campbell and Lord Hutton crushed it over the Blair Government’s sexed-up dossier used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The Corporation’s editorial independence was bullied and beaten into submission, replaced by a pointless desire to win the ratings war.

Hence the supine abandonment of “Newsnight’s” investigation into Jimmy Savile and the perverse attempt to make up for it by wrongly identifying Lord McAlpine as a paedophile.

You can’t get much more messed-up than the BBC these days – unless, of course, you are ITV’s Phillip Schofield confronting the Prime Minister with a list of alleged paedophiles gleaned from three minutes on the internet.

This desperate stunt on “This Morning” meant some of the names could be read by viewers – talk about “trial by television”.

The point is, though, that both “Newsnight” and Schofield relied on the rumour, gossip, innuendo and nonsense of the internet to do their dirty work for them.

That’s because, on the world wide web, anything goes. Many people who witter and twitter have no idea they are subject to the same laws and limits as newspapers.

They don’t realise they can be sued for libel or fined for naming rape victims – as nine twits discovered the hard way when they were each fined £624.

If a newspaper editor named a rape victim, he would be fined far more and might well get sacked.

Yet we seem to think Twittering about it is less unacceptable.

It shouldn’t be. On the internet, as Phillip Schofield’s little list showed, anything goes.

If you suggest there should be some limits placed on what you can say via the internet, you get accused of supporting censorship.

There is no doubt the web has given us all more opportunity to express opinions, discuss issues and learn from others.

And there’s no need for new regulations affecting the web any more than there is for newspapers.
Existing laws are available to deal with all the abuses found on the internet. They just aren’t enforced.

Passing off rumour and gossip as fact, or drawing other people’s attention to innuendos and suggestions, are not tolerated in print; why are they acceptable on the internet?

Contrary to popular myth, you can believe what you read in the papers. This is because they have gone to great lengths to get their facts right.

If newspapers get it wrong, they’ll be tens of thousands out of pocket, journalists will be out on the streets and their reputation will be trashed.

You cannot possibly trust much of what you find on the internet. Even sites like Wikipedia are distorted, biased, censored or otherwise “cleaned up”, often by celebrities or their PR teams.

Can you trust broadcasters? The BBC used to be the great bastion of truth; it will take years to recover that reputation.

Newspapers are not paragons of virtue. They do get it wrong sometimes. They have been known to over-step the mark, target innocent people, harass politicians and so on.

But their worst excesses pale into insignificance beside the everyday law-breaking on the internet.

Trying to close a few stable doors after the phone-hacking horse has bolted is irrelevant compared with the urgent need to tackle the abuse spreading like a virus across the internet.

Lord Justice Leveson and his band of bitter backers are busily trying to blunt the newspapers’ sword of truth while ignoring the lethal spray from the internet’s machine-gun of lies.

Bellowing for Bellowhead

Went to see The Killers last week at the NEC and they were good. Went to see Bellowhead at the Leamington Spa Assembly Rooms last night and they were great. 

They’re just fantastic fun – an 11-piece folk band with all manner of instruments and invention not to mention energy and enthusiasm. 

The venue is good – standing room only, everyone near enough the stage to see what’s going on (and there’s always lots going on), sound good but not deafening. 

All in all, I would go again tonight if they were on and tomorrow. It’s like listening to a riotous circus in full swing. I don’t care what kind of music you like or how old you are, I defy you not to enjoy an evening of Bellowhead. 

What I think Bellowhead must concentrate on now is a Christmas album. All those traditional festive tunes are perfect for that Bellowhead magic.

Whoops

The trouble is that the disappearance of old-fashioned sub-editors from newspapers and websites - yes I do mean you, Daily Mail - means you get a serious of extremely basic journalistic errors more or less every day. This is getting series.

Parking mad

If you pick the right day for your Christmas shopping, you might be lucky enough to get to park your car for free.

Across the Black Country and further afield, councils are scurrying around trying to come up with special free parking deals to boost their town centres for the festive spending spree.

So if you plan to go late-night shopping in Stourbridge or Walsall, shop around and you might save yourself £2.50 in parking costs.

The same applies for most of the Saturdays in December.

Councils seem to think that cutting the cost of parking on the busiest shopping days of the whole year will somehow keep their ailing town centres in business for another 12 months.

Their attitude is that they are doing us a tremendous favour by suspending charges for a few days.

Councillor Judy Foster, who is responsible for transport in Dudley, pretty much said as much.

"The suspension of car park charges is seen as a goodwill gesture on behalf of the council and an added incentive for shoppers to visit the borough on the run up to Christmas," she declared magnanimously.

A goodwill gesture? "Goodwill towards whom?" you may well ask.

Is this free parking supposed to be a Christmas present to hard-pressed shoppers from their generous local authorities?

Can it really be the case that local authorities still don't realise they are systematically killing off their town centres?

If they had any good sense, never mind goodwill, they would realise their policy of trying to stop us from using our cars was a major factor in the long, slow, painful decline of Britain's High Streets.

Maybe not as short-sighted as giving permission for out-of-town retail parks and superstores but every little helps.

It is no exaggeration to say many town centres are caught in an agonising death spiral. And parking charges are one of the reasons why.

Out-of-town centres with plentiful free parking are obviously a big factor.

So is the internet. Why bother to go to one of the last remaining CD or book shops when you can download the same thing from the comfort of your own home?

Why traipse round clothes shops when you can order what you want on line and send it back if it doesn't fit?

To make matters worse, many shop landlords bought their properties at the height of the boom.

Now they are stuck with half-empty rows of buildings which are declining in value. So they increase the rents.

That, in turn, prices some retailers out of the market altogether. Small shopkeepers and national chains are both caught by declining sales and rising rents.

This madness leads to more and more charity shops, which don’t pay business rates, and boarded-up buildings.

Things have got so bad Britain's shopkeepers have now set up the Distressed Retail Property Taskforce.

The British Council of Shopping Centres, the British Retail Consortium and the Property Bankers’ Forum plan to spend six months trying to find a way out of this crisis.

Councils should be involved as well. For decades they have seen their biggest shopping centres as lucrative, pain-free sources of revenue.

Business rates and car-parking charges have helped fund many a spendthrift local authority.

Yet with so many shopping centres are in terminal decline, the best they can manage is an occasional "goodwill gesture" for a day or two before Christmas.

The true attitude of local councils is summed up in a recent report for Wolverhampton Council.

It says: "The Council also has a responsibility to promote economic development and regeneration in the City Centre and it recognises that the provision of accessible, high quality car parking is an important factor in the economic success of the City."

So far, so good. But then it says: "At the same time, the Council needs to promote the effectiveness and use of public transport to reduce the reliance on cars and to limit the creation of more car parking spaces."

This attitude would be fine if shopping centres were booming. But they are not. Half the time, they're virtually deserted.

Don't be fooled by the pre-Christmas crush. It's not usually like this. Councils should be haunted by the fear that some of their centres are becoming ghost towns.

The "goodwill gesture" of suspending parking charges in the run-up to Christmas clearly shows councils believe these taxes play a part in deciding where people do their shopping.

It proves they think free parking is a key to boosting their town centres and, therefore, that they are aware their charges deter shoppers. Actually, their policies set out deliberately to alienate motorists.

The conclusion is obvious. If they want to save their town centres, councils should invest in plentiful, accessible, free car parking.

On its own this won't reverse the decline but it would help. And it would give councils a chance to cling on to the taxes and jobs lost every time another shop closes. The cost of lost parking revenue is nothing compared with the high price of longer-term decline.

Councils should realise free parking is for life, not just for Christmas.

Vielen Dank

It’s taken a long time but Gisela Stuart has at last come round to the view that we’d be better off out of the EU. For a German-born Labour MP who was a member of the committee which drew up Europe’s constitution, that’s quite a turnaround. Let’s hope some of her colleagues listen to her words of wisdom and experience.

Roads for the rich

Road tolls rear their ugly heads again under a new plan to force motorists to pay more for using motorways. Amazing how one Government’s least popular plans come to be the next Government’s bright idea. Petrol tax – though it’s too high – is already the best way of raising money from motorists because the bigger your car and the further you travel, the more you pay.

What election and why?

Usually I’d support anything which enlarged democracy – but not in the case of the elections for police chiefs. I’ve had two emails from the Home Secretary urging me to vote but not one word through the letterbox about who the candidates actually are. Why is anybody going to bother to vote? Who are the candidates? What are the differences between them? What real power will they have? What good will they do? Who knows? Yes they have manifestos, some represent parties and they all have lots to say. But this is an election nobody wants and nobody cares about. And I don’t blame them. 

 

They know where you live

After Dudley and Birmingham councils are banned from using the DVLA database because of widespread abuse, when are we going to wake up to this fact that Big Brother is watching us at every turn? What chance patient confidentiality once they compete a national NHS database, for instance?

Puffed up

Every year or so, a group of self-appointed experts calls for drug use to be made legal. These self-same do-gooders would outlaw cigarette smoking, ban drink-drivers for life and impose a massive "fat tax" on fast food. I fear they are probably right to say we lost the "war on drugs" years ago. But if you legalise the use of drugs, surely you have to make their supply legal too. And where do you draw the line between "soft" and "hard" drugs? 

Lions and donkeys 

They couldn't run the armed forces. They wasted billions on defence systems we don't need or don't work. Now they are hiring out their services as lobbyists for foreign arms manufacturers. Are there no depths or top brass won't sink to? We lost in Afghanistan years ago. Talk about lions led by donkeys. 

Welcome to the real world 

MPs should be encouraged to have jobs outside Parliament not forced to give them up. A cap or even a ban on outside earnings would mean simply more full-time professional politicians with less and less connection with the real world. So much the worse for the rest of us. 

Yes or no to in or out? 

The Tories can fiddle about all they like with with bits of the EU but the only referendum worth its name would be a simple one: In or out? 

Abandon ship 

If they make that tedious twit Lord Turner, the euro-loving ex-CBI boss, governor of the Bank of England we may as well all abandon ship and move to Greece. 

Do you still need them? 

As we celebrate 50 years of the Beatles and the Stones prepare for more concerts, we should rejoice that John, Paul, George and Ringo gave up while the going was good. Anyone paying a grand to see the Stones must have more money than sense.

 

Wikispin

You can't trust Wikipedia, it’s a PR spinner's playground.

Go no further than the entry about Ofgem, the fatuous politically-correct, utterly toothless watchdog for the gas and electricity industries.

Not a single word of criticism is chronicled - not even Labour's pledge to scrap it, never mind criticism of its abject failure to bark, let alone bite, as our bills go up and up.

 

Check out its entry and you will see it's a bland corporate statement disguised as a reasonable analysis of the quiescent quango.

What if Mitchell is not lying?

Why does everyone assume Andrew Mitchell is guilty of calling the police f***ing plebs? Have we reached the point where Cabinet Ministers are automatically assumed to be liars?

Mr Mitchell should not resign as Chief Whip unless he is not telling the truth. But he has declared to the Prime Minister and the public that he did not say the words attributed to him.

Should we not believe him? He is an honourable man.

Petty bureaucrats dog us at every turn. It can be hard to keep your composure when some pathetic jobsworth is bossing you about – often just because he can.

Still, I have always assumed that if you swear at a policeman, you’ll be arrested no matter if you are a king or a clown, and serve you right.

If the police account of Andrew Mitchell’s rant is true, he should lose his job.

But what if it is untrue? What, then, are the police up to? Are they lying? And, if so, why? To undermine the Government?

One side is not telling the truth. It may be Mr Mitchell but equally it could be the police.

And if it is the police, we should be much more worried than we might be if it’s just a grumpy Minister after a long lunch.

Conservatives and conservation

When 700 people take to the streets in protest at a planning application, you'd think someone in authority might pay attention.
Alas for the residents of Hagley, their campaign is unlikely to make a blind bit of difference.
Hagley is just one of the early victims of the Government's planning free-for-all which will concrete over large swathes of countryside.
What baffles and enrages many people is that while the bulldozers prepare to dig up the Green Belt, nothing is done about the blighted, derelict wastelands we see all over the Black Country.
How can it possibly make sense for green fields to be turned into housing estates when there are hundreds of acres of brownfield land just begging to be reclaimed?
The people of Hagley are right to complain about the 175 houses to built on land sold to Cala homes by Lord Cobham.
Of course the development will put more pressure on schools and doctors and clog up the roads even more. That's what happens whenever and wherever new homes are built.
You can't really blame Lord Cobham for cashing in. It costs a fortune to run Hagley Hall and the family have been flogging off bits of the estate for decades.
The problem is that now, more than at any time since the post-war building boom, the planning system is entirely in favour of new development.
Nobody seems to care any longer where it should be allowed or who it should be for.
In its desperation to get the economy moving again, the Government is bending over backwards to accommodate the demands of property developers.
If they say they stand more chance of turning a profit by developing a green field than reclaiming some bomb site in Bilston then local councils are expected to roll over and play dead.
Indeed, the Government has created an incentive - some might call it a blatant bribe - to make sure local councils do as they are told.
It's called the New Homes Bonus and it was invented to prevent the policy of "localism" undermining Whitehall's plans to concrete over the countryside.
Localism is supposed to mean that decisions are no longer taken by anonymous civil servants and here-today-gone-tomorrow Ministers.
It's supposed to mean decisions are taken by local people for local people, in other words, by councillors.
But Ministers know that, left to their own devices, councillors can't be trusted to turn ploughshares into bulldozers.
Some councillors may get it into their heads that their job is to represent the views of the voters and that would never do.
So, while in theory regional planning policies have been scrapped, the truth is that the Government is pursuing the same old war by other means.
And one of those means is the New Homes Bonus.
Last year, councils trousered £432 million in New Homes Bonuses, which works out at £2,710 per new house built. And there's plenty more where that came from.
Thanks to this scam, Bromsgrove Council, which is responsible for deciding whether to back the Hagley homes plan, will make about £470,000 just for doing what the Government tells it to do.
Do not under-estimate the power of this sort of chicanery. Who knows? Maybe just before the next local elections, they'll announce plans to spend £200,000 on a new children's playground in Hagley and everybody will be suitably grateful.
Ironically, this policy was introduced by Grant Shapps when he was Minister for Housing. He has now been promoted to Chairman of the Conservative Party.
He definitely deserves that job because now he will have to try explaining his ludicrous housing development policies to the very Tories who will be most badly affected by them.
For, as we know, Conservatives tend to live in leafy parts like Hagley and I shouldn't be surprised to find a majority of those who took to the streets last Saturday had voted Tory at the last election.
And, of course, they are hardly unique. All over the West Midlands, Tory-voting settlements face unwanted expansion.
Yet the inner city areas which truly need reviving will continue to be neglected.
It's hardly surprising. If a developer can start with a clean sheet - a green field - it's much easier, quicker and cheaper to build a housing estate than it would be to reclaim the unwanted site of some former factory.
Yet in an era when everyone is supposedly committed to the environment, it's obvious which kind of development is "green".
The Government's job should be to make sure our millions are spent where they can do most good.
Places like Bromsgrove should actually lose money if they approve green-field developments while any bonuses should be devoted to helping developers clean up wasteland to make it suitable for new housing.
And then there are the half a million homes standing empty up and down the country - thousands of them owned by the very councils now succumbing to the Government's bribery.
Why not refurbish them and put them to good use before a single tree gets chopped down?