Bishop Hill Civil servants protect their own
Aug 15, 2011 Climate: CRU When pondering the ethical contortions of the various inquiries into the Climatic Research Unit, I sometimes wonder whether there was ever any chance of anyone being found guilty of anything. As Doug Keenan has pointed out, there are tens of thousands of scientists in the UK and none has been found guilty of research fraud in the last twenty years. The idea that the scientific community here is populated entirely by choirs of seraphim and cherubim is, of course, not credible, so we are left to conclude that bad behaviour by scientists is, in the normal run of things, completely ignored. And it's not just the scientists, of course. It has been pointed out that only 18 teachers have been fired in England in the last 40 years.
In this vein, I note (H/T Raedwald) the story here that the head of the UK civil service is trying to organise a cover-up of civil servants' use of government credit cards to pay for personal expenditure, a technique that has been correctly characterised as "stealing".
Parliamentary officials -- sometimes dubbed "the men in tights" for their ceremonial garb -- used official credit cards on items ranging from luxury hotels to junk food.
Records show that last year, their other purchases included new shoes for £94, an £885 food mixer and £189 of French lessons.
With one of the London rioters being jailed for stealing a bottle of water, it's hard not to notice the contrast to misdeeds by the general public and misdeeds those on the government payroll.
Reader Comments (25)
It would appear moral corruption is now the perceived "norm" in public life.
Would we see a hockey stick in plotting it's rise in both the Civil Service and activity in Parliament?
Don't feel bad. There is always someone here in Australia who can plumb depths even British politicians and civil servants have probably never been tempted to descend to:
http://tinyurl.com/3qw9yfn
Bish, there is a huge difference between being "fired" and being struck off the GTC register for incompetence. The 18 figure applies to the latter.
It's all part of the PC world, no one in public service ever gets fired, unles they head up a metropolitan social services department & can be hung out to dry to protect the guilty at large wthinin it!!
In my experience, those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach plan curriculums; those who can neither teach nor plan supply course materials; and those who can do none of the above become Ministers for Education.
'Lessons have been learned...'
'We have learned from our mistakes, in fact, we can repeat them exactly...'
I was going to report a local politician to the standards board in the UK. Very nasty piece of work who has been taking bribes for years on the planning committee. Then I looked at their success rate. Something like 80% of cases no action. About 14% a stern letter and the rest passed on to another body. This guy had been up before them numerous times and just lied his way out of it each time. Basically if you didn't have everything on video there was no proof, if you did you had illegally breached his rights and it was not admissable.
I think its now been disbanded.
Anybody got numbers for the medical professions?
The worse part of this story is that the cabinet secretary is supporting moves to withold information on how he and his fellow civil servants spent our money. One hopes that the government will force exposure.
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." "Yawn", says the bureaucrat. America is looking forward to a change of regime that will address and redress the current corruption, but it's herding cats trying to get people to agree on anything today. But corruption is like rodent infestation -- it's mostly about prevention (i.e., not inviting it in) through proper sanitation (in this case, competent science, whose lack is what is mainly at fault). Science is broken, what can you expect from that?
Not just UK. Number may not be current but order of magnitude is likely correct. New York City school system formally dismisses about 10 teachers a year out of 40,000.
My question was why does their union clamor for higher pay when it seems quite clear that we already are enjoying the services of a clearly superior sub-population. Of course the 10/40,000 isn't the turnover.
A total of 333 people have died in or following police custody over the past 11 years, but no officer has ever been successfully prosecuted, according to a watchdog's report.
One individual a fortnight is killed in Police custody, yet there has not been one prosecution, and they want to jail people for stealing a bottle of water.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/03/deaths-police-custody-officers-convicted)
Sorry Bish but you've completely missed the point.
'Misuse' of public money is a non-problem - there's a bottomless pit of the stuff just waiting to be dug into.
If it appears to be running out just tax the sheople a bit more, or borrow some, or just print the stuff.
Seemples!
Largely when research turns out to be rubbish it simply does not matter , in most cases people will have never heard of it and it will have zero effect on most peoples lives .
Climate science was like that until tit stepped into the political realm , lead by scientist/advocates this charge brought fame and riches to some . Unfortunately for them it also brought public 'interest' for there was no chance that people where going to follow the approach of 'trust me I am scientists' that Nurse and other feel they should. Given the dramatic claims made and the radical changes to most peoples lives these claims where used to support .
That is were the workings of small self congratulate club failed when exposed to others not of the club . Ironically its very initial marketing success where the seeds of its downfall , when few knew about it the 'club ' could get away with a lot for who in the end really cared . Once it became headline news that game changed now people did care and worse for the club they started to ask questions.
Civil Servants. Well, those words are pregnant with irony.
'Servant' is what they are at the pleasure of the citizen, but in-effect the citizen is working to pay them.
'Civil' is what they aren't to the citizen when enforcing the bureaucratic mandates, they are more like condescending.
'Civil' & 'Servant' used in one phrase seems an illogical irrelevance.
John
Another for the Dictionary of Standard Oxymorons, John?
Like "police intelligence", "airline food", "liberal intellectual".
As a former (very minor) civil servant - I resigned about 25 years ago - I can say that the highest standards were observed when I was there. Things seem to have gone badly wrong. I am dubious about the figures for death in police custody. They do come from The Guardian, after all.
Mike Fowle, the largest grouping of deaths in custody is "deaths which raise issues about standards of care such as deaths due to self injury, alleged drunkenness or drug intoxication, or poor medical care".
So these folk could well have died anyway, out on the street or wherever, but as they'd been nicked the police get the credit.
As a retired teacher and a parent of almost fifty years' experience, plus a couple of decades of duty as a grandparent, it seems to me that teachers are an easy and frequently unjustified Aunt Sally for the press, politicians and public. Everyone who has attended school as a pupil appears to feel loudly comfortable in their educational expertise, which is usually non-existent. Politicians generally lead the brigade who 'shoot from the lip'.. Journalists are a close second, particularly during the Parliamentary recess and nothing newsworthy is on offer. A huge proportion of the public in the UK, politicians particularly, see education as a public good then do their very best to subvert it.
But these people are the "Great and the Good".
How could they ever do anything wrong?
/sarc
Re: only 18 teachers fired over 20 years.
In private industry there are a lot of actual criminal acts of theft, misrepresentation, insider trading etc., including those of top management and directors, that occurs but do not result in convictions or even investigations. Misdeeds of intent are difficult and expensive to determine with assurance; the effort is often not worth the trouble unless, like Conrad Black, one wishes to send a message to the hoi polloi that even wealth and privilege don't save you (actually, yes, they do). The much more common result of detecting bad stuff going on is to have the person quit, retire or transfer. Yes, there is the problem of doing the bad stuff again somewhere else. But that is practical reality.
The 18 fired - because of union rules - must have been especially obvious. But that does not mean that nothing else was done, nothing else was looked into. So this stat, though speaking to the issue, is misleading. The teaching profession - like private industry - is not the Wild West of corporate malfeance, in which all look the other way. It is more a testament to our society these days that the doubt remaining must be very, very small before punishment is applied. From my experience of private industry and the widespread desire of the more powerful to deflect blame onto the less powerful, I believe that more restraint is better than less.
Bad teachers and bad employees of all types and stripes should be ejected from their positions. But firing people should be a tactic of last resort. The world is full of those who would love to get rid of others better than themselves or "troublemakers", i.e. those who ask awkward questions.
The public service sector is not, I believe, much different from the private sector. Indeed, look to the small business, where control of knowledge is better, if you want to find serious nefarious behaviour.
And consider how many MPs & 'Lords' have been jailed.
"Found guilty" by who? Do you think things would be improved by police, judges and lawyers investigating scientific results?
of the zilliions of words written or spoken about the recent riots, this is the only piece that resonated with me:
11 Aug: Telegraph blog: Peter Oborne: The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom
David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.
But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.
I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up...
Our politicians – standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday – are just as bad. They have shown themselves prepared to ignore common decency and, in some cases, to break the law. David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet...
A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.
Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.
Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.
The Prime Minister showed no sign that he understood that something stank about yesterday’s Commons debate. He spoke of morality, but only as something which applies to the very poor: “We will restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility – in every town, in every street and in every estate.” He appeared not to grasp that this should apply to the rich and powerful as well.
The tragic truth is that Mr Cameron is himself guilty of failing this test. It is scarcely six weeks since he jauntily turned up at the News International summer party, even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations. Even more notoriously, he awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that “everybody deserves a second chance”. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters...
The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/
An excellent article by Oborne - and if Cameron wants to start dealing with the gangs, he should begin at the top, with the gang which looted taxpayers' money in fiddling their parliamentary expense claims.