We all have heroes. I don't think it's possible to live a good life and not have people we admire and who inspire us. That doesn't mean we diminish ourselves. It means we recognise what it is in others that we wish to emulate.
Allyson Pollock is one of my heroes. She's courageous, analytically brilliant, committed and, perhaps importantly, consistently right. She has an article in the Guardian this morning. In it she argues with regard to the Morecambe Bay NHS scandal and the role of the Care Quality Commission in it:
The CQC is has a legal imperative to get the market up and running by developing the systems to register more than 22,000 health and social care providers. The real story of the CQC scandal is that market-led changes are creating deficits and poor quality of care, which managers must seek to conceal in order to survive. Central to the government's NHS reforms is the concept of a well-regulated market. Behind the CQC controversy is an assumption that if a commercially run hospital is failing it has simply not been well enough regulated. But experience from the US shows that effective regulation of large healthcare corporations is impossible: we cannot afford it, or get the data necessary to carry it out. That is why the NHS had direct management in the first place.
This is spot on.
And for those managers now complaining about being "hung out to dry" by the CQC and government I have a simple comment to make. If you endorse a market model you also endorse the concept of failure and all that comes with it. You have been described as the failure, rightly or wrongly, but someone was always going to be. It comes with the territory and was the inevitability you endorsed by taking the job. It was wrong. Maybe your treatment is wrong since the failing is systemic and is marketisation. But don't expect to be saved when you endorse the branding of failure in a public service when in fact that option should not exist because accountability should lie with the minister, and no one else and the only acceptable expectation is success.
The trouble is the CQC was created to permit failure to cut the size of the NHS. The Morecambe scandal, in all its aspects, is what follows.
That's why we need an NHS. A state run NHS. A democratically accountable NHS. And one without market control or involvement that always presumes failure is an inevitable option.
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Well said Richard. Unfortunately, while we have ‘cowardly state’ politicians such as those in this government or New Labour in charge, we won’t get what you want. It’s funny how Jeremy hunt can call for the pensions of public sector people who’ve (alledgedly) cocked up to be confiscated, but nobody in this government makes the same call for the bankers’ multi-million pound pension pots to be confiscated.
Private good, public bad as usual.
Funnily enough I was just about to respond in a similar vein. But I would like to add another point. What do you expect from a health secretary who is in the pocket of Murdoch and other elements of the 0.01 per cent?
No
What do I expect from Jeremy Hunt? Nothing but lies, propaganda and nonsense.
If something can be used to attack the NHS and its staff, he’ll say it.
Richard
Another reason to admire Prof Pollock is that she uses her academic freedom to conduct research that runs counter to the neo-liberal narrative. That will come at a cost, I can tell you. It’s unlikely that she’ll get any invitations to join government advisory groups. And it may well be that her ability to “capture” research funding is similarly reduced. Certainly there’ll be no FTSE 100 companies – or any others for that matter – offering to fund a research centre, or a Chair.
But it would seem that at least Prof Pollock works at a university where the senior management still support staff who research and teach topics that challenge the neo-liberal orthodoxy, and in this day and age that’s saying something. Because otherwise she’d be engaging in what many academics are forced to do nowadays – self censorship. In reality that is what “academic freedom” means to many academics who would otherwise choose evidence based research and teaching over the promotion of an ideologically driven agenda.
Ivan
As I am well aware – that is uncomfortably true
It is one reason why I am not in academia
Richard
Allyson Pollock is a rare beacon of light in a sea of darkness. Elizabeth Warren in the US is another such beacon.