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.

On the rich man's side

 Once again the judiciary have shown that they support the rich against the poor. The recent decision to allow the government to cheat the public over pensions and benefits just reinforces all one's prejudices about English judges.

 If you are an employee and have a contract with your employer how cam they can just change the rules.  If the government wants to change a contract, let us say over PFI, I am sure the judges will find against the government. How could they possibly change a contract. It would be illegal and unfair, but who would lose out, the rich and powerful, have a change that will screw the workers and somehow that is OK.

The only times judges fin for poor people is when there are no financial consequences for the poor. The trouble is that they only mix with the rich & powerful and have the same set of prejudices as all their public school mates. Is it surprising taht they get cases like this wrong almost every time.

  We need to get a system where judges no less law and more about the world and how things really happen. Are there any penalties for judges who get things wrong?

Justice & Tribunals

Yesterday evening I went to a talk at the AGM of Norwich CAB by Mr Rosser who chairs Norfolk Tribunals of some sort. He was talking about appeals about benefits. He commented that when he first got involved many of those involved were no even lawyers, as if that is a bad thing. But now there were lots of lawyers so it seems justice goes out of the window.

For example he wants a duty roster of people to represent those who come before the tribunal to help them. He actually said that there were people who wopuld win their cases if they had been represented. If one thinks about this statement carefully it shows that the tribunal is not interested in justice or doing its job properly. How could the tribunal find against someone and yet say that they would have won if represented. It means that the members of the tribunal had realised from the evidence that the claimant had a justified case BUT found against them. I do not ubderstand how this can happen. Surely if the tribunal is interested in the truth and justice they must have found for the claimant.

Perhaps someone can explain.