A child of our time
From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter. One of the many ghastly lessons to be drawn from the tragic case of Baby P is that this is a bogus distinction. As recession bites and social breakdown is compounded by the spread of indigence and its foul sibling, hopelessness, many more such children will be at risk.
What has been conspicuously lacking at every stage of this terrible story has been a sense of urgency. This is not to be confused with panic. Where the welfare of children is concerned, society and the state have duties of care which far exceed the routine implementation of bureaucratic and legal procedure. The workaday language and methods of officialdom are not equal to the task.
This week a dossier shown to the jury during the Old Bailey trial of Baby P’s mother was made public, cataloguing 78 separate occasions on which the child was seen by health visitors, doctors and social workers in Haringey, north London (a total of 28 experts). It is particularly extraordinary that a paediatrician (allegedly) could have failed to notice that this wretched infant had eight broken ribs and a broken spine only days before his death.
Moral outrage at this saga is not only legitimate but the only appropriate response. Those who insist that this is a moment for cool heads and something called ‘perspective’ miss the point spectacularly. The whole problem in this case was the disinclination of the professionals involved to do anything which smacked of ‘over-reaction’. On 30 July 2007, four days before the 999 call that led to Baby P being pronounced dead, the social worker Maria Ward was still taking the mother’s side, recording that ‘she is feeling stressed by accusations of harming the baby’. In that short sentence one sees one of the most deplorable pathologies of modern life: namely, that the avoidance of ‘stress’ to an adult takes primacy over all else, including, as it turned out, the survival of a child.
Why did it take the leader of Haringey council, Councillor George Meehan, until Tuesday to issue a ‘heartfelt and unreserved’ apology? The government’s response, too, has been generally and disappointingly antiseptic. In the Commons this week Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, was asked by his Conservative shadow, Michael Gove, about Nevres Kemal, the whistleblower who warned ministers of the failures of Haringey’s Children Service’s Department six months before Baby P’s death. Mr Balls’s response is worth quoting at length: ‘A letter came from a lawyer for a former employee of Haringey, which went to the Department of Health. It was passed to the former Department for Education and Skills. It was not seen by Ministers. It was handled in the normal way through official channels. At that time, a reply was written to the lawyer to say that Ministers could not be involved in a particular employment case and that the right way to take the matter forward was through the social care inspectorate. That was done by the lawyer, and that process was followed up by a meeting in which the inspectorate confirmed that it was content that things had been done properly by Haringey in that case. On the wider issue of Haringey social services, there was a review in 2006, and a further review by Ofsted in 2007, which gave a good report.’ Mr Balls is a decent and humane man, but this answer was a depressing litany of political evasion, cold bureaucratic language and ministerial buck-passing. There was no sense whatsoever of collective contrition or the abject failure of those that govern us, at national and local level, to perform their most fundamental duty: the protection of the most vulnerable.
Still more objectionable are the protests of those who argue that this case can only be properly understood in statistical context. In Tuesday’s Guardian, Polly Toynbee attacked the supposed ‘frenzy of media hate’ which, she said, verged on ‘lynch mob incitement’. She urged readers to take comfort that ‘surprisingly few children are murdered’ and ‘the number of children killed has fallen steadily — down 50 per cent in England and Wales since the 1970s... Britain was fourth-worst among Western nations in the 1970s. Now it is among the best: only four countries have fewer child murders per million. Compare America, where child murders have risen by 17 per cent since the 1970s.’ The recitation of such numbers is not consoling, but the opposite. It is a classic instance of the public sector mindset, in which statistics and targets so often conceal more than they reveal. Haringey Council is obsessed by ‘measuring impacts’. But none of its procedures made a jot of difference to the short and agonised life of Baby P.
At Prime Minister’s Questions last week, Gordon Brown accused David Cameron of ‘making a party political issue of this matter’. In fact, the Conservative leader, visibly shaken and outraged by the case, was merely speaking for the country and performing his constitutional duty to hold the government to account. Mr Balls has sent a ‘hit squad’ into Haringey to take over its social services; reviews of varying scope are being carried out by Ofsted, the Healthcare Commission, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary and Lord Laming. When they report, we will doubtless be told: ‘Never again.’ The same was said after the death of Victoria Climbié eight years ago. New procedures, however rigorous, will not be enough. What matters much more than the rules themselves is that they be underpinned by a sense of social responsibility, collective shame and untrammelled urgency. Will they?
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