Frustration

It is without doubt, a travesty that defies logic, that Jane Barton has escaped the ultimate sanction that she rightly deserved. It is once again the destruction of an expectation of Justice, that most felt to be inevitable and desired. Ann Reeves, who fought long and hard for the opportunity to bring this profligate over subscriber of opiates to vulnerable and now dead patients, is both bitter and outraged.

At the same time 'teflon' Tony Blair was expounding his singularly individual account of how he got us into our own version of Vietnam; the Iraq War. With a confidence bordering on Evangelism he absolved himself of all blame, piling it on the head (now detached) of Saddam Hussien.

Both events are a travesty of the natural Justice that we all feel should be meted out to those that are guilty of sending people to their deaths, be it on the field of battle, or the Wards of Gosport Memorial Hospital. Not because people die in either place that is given, but because they died without need, without a purpose that their loved one's feel, they can espouse or understand.

Tony Blair continues to earn the inflated and undeserved reward that he would never have been heir to without the bodies he has clambered over. His £15 million a year income (as reported in the Sunday Mirror, so it must be true) would never have been possible without his unholy compact with Bush to invade both Iraq and Afghanistan. He would have been consigned to a different history, of Memoir and Scholarly endeavour, with a comfortable, but hardly lavish lifestyle.

Jane Barton too, continues albeit with some restriction, to continue the practise of Medicine. Probably with a lifestyle, that the victims of her particular penchant for profligacy with syringe driven morphine, would never have achieved, presupposing of course that were not already dead; which is a fairly certain curtailment of one's ability to earn a crust.

Blair seems to have stolen Barton's dubious victory from the limelight, which only the most paranoid would believe to have been a plan rather than kismet. But, in a country where basic, intuitive belief in fundamental justice, is now so eroded, we expect almost anything of the machinery of the State. One thing that does stand out as significant, is the lack of  condemnation of Jane Barton by her peers. The medical bloggers, especially the Doctors have continually highlighted the case and roundly condemned the verdict, with splenetic utterings that are both deserved and even ingenious. You can read them at the side of this blog.

One however, stands out in his silence, which as I generally admire him is almost hurtfull, but with a nom de plume, linked with another poisoner of historical fame, maybe he thought comment to be inappropriate. That's as maybe, where are the other 30,000's view of this consumate figure of evil, in the eye's of her victims loved one's. If it comes to that, where are these men and women of letters views, on the litany of disasters, nigligence, accidents and sheer stupidity perpetrated in OUR NHS almost daily. Do they think that we do not notice their silence ? Is it too much for the servants of the Taxpayer to side publicly with their constituency, or am I being too dense ?

Doctors have been known to kill as Shipman proved but their ability to evade the Law is both tragic and counter to all the tenets that we as citizens have to abide by. Have we created a cohort in Society that has the power over life and death with none of the responsibility attached ? You would almost believe they were Politicians or Policemen.