Baby P case: Our arrogant borough needs intensive care
Haringey Council has blood on its hands. What has gone wrong? Its problem is systemic, it is in need of intensive care. But is there a cure for arrogantly professed infallibility other than annihilation? I doubt it. Haringey believes it can do no wrong, y
Haringey Council has blood on its hands. What has gone wrong? Its problem is systemic, it is in need of intensive care. But is there a cure for arrogantly professed infallibility other than annihilation? I doubt it.
Haringey believes it can do no wrong, yet it has done wrong - now and in the past - the same wrong - the same unlearned lessons - ending on two occasions with the death of unprotected innocents.
The arrested murderers of those children were clearly not solely responsible, as Haringey Council alleges.
They were aided by the ailing mechanism of defective social services which failed, in both instances, to give protection clearly deserved by two innocent victims - aided by a "blind" doctor who, in this latest atrocity, could not see evidence clearly laid out before her that the little life in her care had been tortured and was about to die.
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What "lessons" have been learned this time - if any? Two children have died as a result of inexcusably gross incompetence. Haringey Council tries publicly and pathetically to justify itself for the second time. What we hear are words empty of guilt, of humility, of any human virtue.
The very least it can do is to replace the directorate of its social services department - now - with professionals who care and know how to organise their forces in accordance with the needs of the community they serve. Will they do this? I doubt it.
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Meanwhile the egregious Haringey Council is the national object of shame, disgraced by its blatant incompetence, by its continually-held belief that what it does is always right.
What planet does it inhabit, this council of repetitive failure to which professionalism is, and always has been, alien?
If the social services claim, as they have done publicly and repeatedly, that they are overworked and understaffed, why has nothing been done about it by its executive?
Council tax in Haringey is one of the highest in the kingdom. Why was it put on ice in Iceland, to what end, when it could have been used for what it was forcibly paid - the community. And those who live and die in it - in two cases, heartbreakingly prematurely.
Barry Bermange
Alexandra Park Road, N10
