The missing Subject Access Request (SAR) info has pitched up from Oxfordshire County Council (OCC). A glimpse into OCC tower skedaddling after dropping the secret review bomb on us in March. It still makes no sense to me. This whole secret review business. Or OCC’s apparent inability to understand how we feel. One senior person wrote in an email;
“It feels we allow this desperate lady to shake us all…”
Desperate ladies and faux reviews. We clearly need new words to capture these processes. An ‘independent’ consultant brought in (at what expense?) to work with a public sector body to produce… erm, what? Statements like ‘commissioned an independent consultant/organisation’ are trotted out so readily by these organisations, promising so much, so official. Strip em back and it can simply be dosh passing hands to produce pretty much nothing dressed up as something.
OCC continue to describe the review as an ‘internal review’. Rank dishonesty that no body seems prepared to challenge. No one has stepped up to say ‘You shared LB’s records without telling his family, paid someone to conduct an investigation into what happened without involving his family, and circulated a report to various organisations before his family knew the review existed? What the fuck were you thinking?
Desperate ladies.
We’re increasingly disturbed by the ease in which conjecture, subjective judgement and sweeping statements are made and presented as incontrovertible ‘facts’ by reviewers/public bodies. Untouchable bodies. Untouchable processes. Meanwhile, what families say or do is dismissed or discounted. Individuals derided and discredited. The four Ds. I was given the opportunity to comment on the review so we should stop bleating about it or make an official complaint. Public bodies protected by a veneer of respectability that bears little scrutiny but remains remarkably enduring.
What a old shitty business.
While OCC were posting this latest, late, info, Rich and I were in Chicago. Attending a session dedicated to LB at the Society for the Study of Social Problems annual conference*. Last year, a motion proposed by Mark Sherry was unanimously passed demonstrating SSSP support for how simply wrong what happened to LB was. Sitting in that session, on the other side of the Atlantic, I couldn’t help reflecting on how most people just get this wrongness. People in the audience who knew nothing about LB gasped when they heard what happened. And yet we’ve had over two years of crap thrown at us by public bodies. Crap that has, ironically, according to Mark Sherry in his presentation, contributed to the strength of support for the #JusticeforLB campaign.
Plenty of learning in this. If Sloven and OCC can ever get beyond their positions of prickly defensiveness and refusal to listen and reflect.
*More on this to follow.
mydaftlife 
Very telling really. OCC officials may label your desperation in an attempt to belittle it/paint you as unstable, and yet, despite the attempts to remain omnipotent ‘we allow’, it also reveals something else…. you shake them! Deep within them, behind their glazed over, bureaucratic, trying-to-appear-professional eyes is a human… that is what we seek to connect with!
Once they stop and realise they’re shook because they harmed a human, and that hurts and they’re still harming humans every time they speak of you in this way, then they’ll re-evaluate, but if I’m being generous I’d suggest that they can’t stop and reflect, because they can’t face the awful, painful, human reality, that someone took their eye off the ball and that contributed to the non-caring bureaucracy that killed your beautiful boy. They simply can’t allow themselves to listen and reflect, because the reality is too uncomfortable.
Still, we must keep trying to connect with the human and reminding people that everyone is as worthy, equal and human as they are! Regardless of what badge they wear, what award they hide behind, or what label they adopt. Onwards x
It is not an inability to listen, or, failure of compassion, or morality.
These, to the system are irrelevant.
This is purely a big money making business to them, into which they all feed.
Deaths, suffering , people, are merely the collateral damage.
Their procedures, and systems, have be carefully constructed, over, particularly, the past 20 years, to avoid any liability.
All is designed to whitewash, and cover up.
There can be no blame, as the system is perfect.
Worse still, it is allowed to be perceived as such, as accountability, has been removed.
No one can, or, dare even speak about it.
Thomas Rawnsley’s mother, cannot even blog, about her son’s abusive care, as the MCA, COP has gagged her on threat of prison..
It is all powerful, as, the means of fighting it, the law, lawyers, judges, media, have been removed.
This is the nature of the totalitarian state, in which we now live.
Actually the truth is far more terrifying.
There is no cabal, no totalitarian state, no notions of perfection or deliberate design of systems to avoid accountability.
Instead, the simple truth is that we’re talking about people who consider themselves ‘nice’ and ‘decent’. Hence the shock that George talks about above. We’re talking about something that is a fundamental challenge to their self-image. Never underestimate the ability of ‘nice’ people to make up all kinds of justifications to avoid responsibility – I’ve seen it all too often.
Therefore to dehumanise those that attempt to dehumanise their critics despite the temptation and ease of such actions allows for a dismissal of that which pains them. Instead, Sara, Rich and their family and friends have to continue to stand in the brutal truth and bare their pain and ask for others humanity to connect with them. This has allowed the connections that others feel when hearing Connor’s story – that what happened was wrong.
Everyone gets degraded by this ongoing process of denial. So as George says, we must continue to allow the possibility of human connection for everyone’s sake. Even those who we perceive as being in the wrong. Even now, there is the opportunity for Sloven/OCC to lower their defences and change the dynamics of this situation onto a more human level. I can only hope that they do so.
Professionalism, and, structures now 20 years in the making, would not allow, such a ‘human connection’, even if it were relevant, as this is a systemic.
And, how, in any event, would such a ‘human connection’, and with whom, help, all the many still dying in ATUs, hospitals, and in independent/supported living.
We do not even have central records of the numbers, let alone why they died.
Even the actual number of deaths in St Andrews, Northampton, and why they died is unclear, and, unaccountable
https://finolamoss.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/how-many-deaths-in-st-andrews-northampton-who-is-accountable/
The only thing that is systemic here with Sloven and OCC is that they are populated by people making choices and being influenced by cultural norms otherwise known as people behaving as people. Even now, these people have a choice as to whether to continue to behave as they have. There is nothing systemic about people avoiding accountability for themselves (it is very human behaviour though).
It is clear you have a narrative about what happened over the last twenty years but treating this cohort and their families like shit has gone on for a very long time. What changed in my view was the opportunities to expand that behaviour which came with the massive step-change in NHS funding undertaken by the Blair administration. Part of the largesse saw the expansion of ATU places and allowed empire building by the private/charitable sector through commissioners having money to spend.
There a piece of academic research to be done as to why funding went in this direction for which I suspect there was a systemic problem with how money was introduced into the NHS and that NHS commissioning responded to that structure and allowed the opportunities for commercial expansion that has occurred.
I have a major issue with you describing the behaviour of Sloven/OCC as systemic because it helps the avoidance of accountability. They have a choice here. They can stop the bullshit today if they wish to and accept accountability for their actions. Or they can continue to fight and degrade themselves further. Its their choice. Always has been.
I completely agree with both of John’s comments; I think it’s important we don’t lose sight of the human at every level, it is humans who get up and go to work in these organisations, and make these decisions and judgements and successes and mistakes – there are no excuses, and there really is nothing that’s impossibly difficult, to echo John ‘It’s their choice. Always has been’.
Every day they have a chance to make a new one #JusticeforLB
sometimes the human connection isn’t there, it just is not there, nothing behind the eyes it has to be acknowledged. If you have the power to rubber stamp £30 of tax payer funds for a DP which facilitates a woman to have her hair washed and styled and meet with a fellow human being for one hour a week when she cannot raise her arms from her body, a human connection means you do so right ? What if the lack of humanity means you choose to flippantly scratch the request with the statement ” we would all like a personal hairdresser “
I read it as your being the hurricane identified and named , making land at an hour and place not known to them. Willing you on as I am sure are many likewise described desperate and bizarre (self )ladies and gentlemen who have thus far failed to shake anyone.
It is naive to bellieve this is anything else other than corruption of the highest order. I was told by Mr Justice Ryder, Court of Protection 2007, “this is immoral, unethical, but probably legal” I am told again and again, by solicitors, barristers, judges, social workers, psychiatrists, et al, that there is a conflict of interest between me and my son because I am his mother, The LA’s case against me was 485 pages of what I had done wrong as a mother. A penal notice was put on me “to preclude her from discouraging her son from going to the unit” – this was the person that the Court had decided lacked capacity. We live in a society ruled by power, and money funds the power. A mother is the weakest in the power scale, because she has to defend her child, and not herself. I should have walked out of the Court and said “fuck you” but we all know if I had done that I would been stopped contact with my son. The only answer to this whole problem is to demonstrate in the Courts, the hospitals, the residential homes, the LA……but we haven’t time, we are too busy looking after our sons and daughters.
The old conflict of interest myth, is used to maintain control, throughout the processes. – courts, visitation rights in supported living, and internal investigations.
A parent, will rarely be allowed, to act for their child in the court of protection, instead, at the expense of legal aid, which extends to any experts, and counsel advices and representation, is claimed by an Official Solicitor, appointed by the court to act for your child. He/she will be a stranger to your child, and, may only meet him on one occasion.
The justification for this, will be allegations of spurious ‘neglect’/ abuse, which may even extend to caring too much for your child , or, simply that at 18, your child has to have an independent voice, and, you by trying to prevent this by being that voice are emotionally abusing them. Any tripe is allowed.
The real conflict of interests, as I have said many times, is the policy to profit, from the disabled in private monopoly state commissioned care, adult assessment units and hospitals, and the OS also receives substantial sums in public money, as do the courts, soon to be privatised.
Hence, the obscenity in the UK, that the only people, who care and love, are unpaid, have sacrificed much to keep their loved one safe, and, fought for the best for them all their life, and known them all that time, is the danger .
Fran called round last night, Shirley and we came to that same conclusion. 😦
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