Peter Rhodes on enforced listening, floating birds and the statistics behind murders in the NHS
Can we please, in the name of sanity, end this debate about bringing back the death penalty for baby murderers like Lucy Letby?
One reason Britain abandoned capital punishment in the 1960s was that juries were refusing to convict and have blood on their hands. So those calling for baby murderers to be executed should consider this: if we still had the death sentence, Lucy Letby would probably have been acquitted.
As for the suggestion that Letby and her ilk might be locked up with the judges' sentencing video-linked into the cell, how long before some smart lawyer would claim that “enforced listening” was a breach of their human rights? And that would never do, would it?
This week, all sorts of professional and amateur psychiatrists have been offering explanations for Letby's callous murder of babies, ranging from her romantic obsession, to a psychopathic demand for attention, to the presence (seriously) of the Devil. Here's another wild guess. Might this whole ghastly episode be simply a statistical inevitability?
The NHS is enormous. One of the world's biggest employers, it has more than a million staff in England alone; imagine it as a city the size of Birmingham. According to research, about 1 in 100 of the UK population has psychopathic tendencies. And even if the NHS had a selection process capable of rooting out 90 per cent of psychopaths, that would still leave 1,000 of them on the NHS payroll today, working with patients.
When you consider how hard the NHS system worked to shield and defend Lucy Letby, how many less dramatic incidents involving harm to patients by staff with mental-health issues, have been quietly swept under the managers' carpets?
You would think, after all these years of David Attenborough and Chris Packham banging on about the natural world, that Brits would be up to speed on the basics of birds, bees and suchlike. Apparently not.
At the lake in our local park, I was approached by two twentysomething men in a state of great excitement. “Have you see the water chickens?” one asked. “They're great, just like chickens but they float.” Indeed they do. We usually call them ducklings.
Comment Guidelines
Iconic Media encourages reader discussion on our stories. User feedback, insights and back-and-forth exchanges add a rich layer of context to reporting. Please review our Community Guidelines before commenting.