Adversarial

  Listening to the radio this morning they had two people talking about Hugo Chavez whose death has just been announced. Do we have an interesting discussion about his role what he achieved and what he did wrong. Of course not we had two people, both blokes of course, one saying he was good and one saying he was evil. I am sure the reality is much more complex than that, why does the BBC, probably reflecting our society have to create an advesarial situation rather than trying to have a rational discussion.

 Similarly, Andy Burnham could not just welcome the change about competition in the NHS but has to call it a "humiliating climb down". If we want to encourage politicians, managers etc to get things right we should applaud them for changing their mind when they are wrong. Not create this adversarial competition. Surely one of the most dangerous activities is to make a mistake and then compound it by not realising and correcting it. In some situations this is not possible, playing a shot at tennis has to be done very quickly and you can't correct it but very few decisions in normal life are like that, driving being an exception.

 A more depressing example is our legal system, on Saturday there was a long article about the death of a baby caused by a failure to realise how  serious the situation was.The parents did not want to delay the inquest as this they find it painful. The private health care company responsible employed lawyers and "expert" witnesses to make sure that the coroner could not blame them. They did not want to go down that route. So no counter "expert" witnesses were called. The Coroner can only rule on what is said. So there is no attempt to find the truth or understand what is happening. This again is our adversarial system, two lawyers lying at each other and so called expert witnesses lying for money.

  I always think that one should use the term "expert" in quotation marks when they are being paid by one side of the case since they will hardly get paid for telling the truth if it is against the person or company paying them. Oddly the BBC did it again on a programme "Bang goes..". They were discussing plastics and whether plastic wrapping si dangerous. The so-called expert was employed by the plastic wrapping industry, he might be a very good chemist but he is hardly likely to say these plastic wrappings are bad for you.

  Can we change the way we do things so that a more reasonable approach to investigating failures in our society can try to reach some sort of truth.