POWER CORRUPTS......

Nothing succeeds like success, nor                   

apparently does failure, if the obscene

pay-off with a £1.9m pension to Sir
David Nicholson, the failed head of the
NHS and former communist is anything
to go by. And while failure has always been
part of the human condition, failure in this
case is of a wholly exceptional kind.

The future for the 500 patients whose
lives were cruelly cut short by neglect and
incompetence is no more, their grieving
relatives unable to comprehend the deaths
of their loved ones at Stafford Hospital.

However, not so that for the one on whose
watch this nightmare was allowed to
happen. Undaunted by shame, Sir David
will collect a substantial lump sum and an
index-linked pension of a reported
£100,000 a year, having decided a time
of his own choosing to stand down.
Then, in common with colleagues who
have also left the hospital under a cloud,
he will doubtless be open to highly-paid
job offers and lucrative consultancy work.

At the same time, his wife, Sara-Jane
Marshall, a 34 year-old, former intern in
his office, will continue in her post as
chief executive officer at Birmingham
Children's Hospital on a salary of
£155,000 a year. It as been reported that
she was recommended for the position by
Sir David.

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, defends
the indefensible by saying that Sir David
Nicholson has been worth every penny, given
that his job has been incredibly complex and
difficult. Yet he has always had a reputation
for staying calm and maintaining a relentless
focus on what makes a difference.

As the Francis Report showed, at Stafford
Hospital it was a story of appalling
suffering. It happened within a culture
of secrecy, defensivenness and
performance targets. This was not
compassionate healthcare. It was a regime
devoid of humanity for which the head of the
NHS knows no shame. It was an intimidating
atmosphere of gagging orders and threats,
which hid the awful catalogue of events at an
institution that was rotten to the core.

The events at Stafford Hospital are thought
to be just the tip of the iceberg of what is
happening in the NHS. In Britain's
increasingly secular society, the NHS,
which employs more people than the
Red Army, is the nearest thing we have to
religion. It is based on the myth that infinite
demand can be funded from finite resources.

However, the NHS is not the only part of
the public sector where there is a serious
lack of accountability and a political elite
ignores the concerns of ordinary citizens.
It happened, for example, when a million
people marched on Westminister over
Tony Blair's decision to invade Iraq on
the strength of a fraudulent dossier.

It was a similar story when the Labour
Government conspired to flood the country
with immigrants, in order to make Britain
an increasingly multi-cultural society
and improve its electoral chances.

A 2012 independent panel report on the
Hillsborough football disaster in 1989
when 96 people lost their lives and 766
were injured, revealed incompetence and
a total lack of accountability.There were
multiple failures by medical, emergency
services and public bodies, details of
which were kept from grieving relatives
and the public.

The BBC is a series of apparently self-
governing fiefdoms. It extracts some £3.5bn
a year from viewers under threat of
imprisonment if they do not pay the £148
annual licence fee. It has admitted that it
is politically biased and, as recent events
have shown, is a corrupt organisation,
broadcasting repeats and increasingly
inferior programmes.

Millions are squandered in the true,
unreformed, nationalised industry
tradition. Mediocre senior executives
receive outrageous golden goodbyes
and the public is powerless to change
an institution that is manifestly
unaccountable, protected by Royal
Charter.

It has just been reported that the BBC
has now discontinued a digital archiving
project, which would not have been fit
for purpose. They have said sorry for the
£100m write-off.

For over three hundred years, since the
abolition of the Star Chamber, the Fourth
Estate, has held governments to account
on behalf of the citizen. But this could be
about to come to an end, if the draconian
recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry
are implemented. This would be an end
of free-speech as we have known it, with
newspapers facing bankruptcy for
publishing that which the public has a
right to know.