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If the Labour frontbench pull any further stunts like today, they don't even deserve a 'hung parliament'
It is thought that part of the reason that Ed Miliband was so keen to pursue ‘press regulation’ was that this was the first topic where there was a sense the public were on the side of victims. Miliband has not shown the same passion for the privatisation of the NHS, for example. On the other hand, today, the anger on Twitter and Facebook was really ferocious. To give you some idea about what sort of country this is, this was not even considered newsworthy enough to be included on the BBC news website. Opposing workfare was not a question about playing politics: it was very much about the lives of real people, morality and justice. The result of the vote of the second reading of jobseekers bill (aka “workfare” bill) was 263 vote for, and only 52 vote against. Labour MPs were asked to abstain.
Some MPs did make a “principled stand”, like John McDonnell.
Members of Labour are genuinely seething. Owen Jones is correct to flag this up as a “red alert” for Labour:
This one episode in itself has blown up “One Labour”. Sunny Hundal has written a very elegant blogpost here about how the ‘concessions’ over Workfare can’t really be considered concessions in the scheme of things. To understand why this has dramatically driven a ‘coach and horses’ through ‘One Nation’, you have to consider what Ed Miliband had sold “one nation” as. It was an idea where the economy couldn’t be divided into private and public, but where everyone had a part to play, including Unions and invested bankers, provided that there were “no vested interests”. Consequently, this meant society pulling in the same direction, in other words no division between rich and poor, North and South, unemployed and employed, disabled or non-disabled, etc. Why “one society” is clearly ‘left wanting’ is perfectly clear to witness as disabled citizens continue to feel uncomfortable with the welfare reform, and continue not to be inspired by Liam Byrne’s perceived lack of concern about their plight. Finally, it depends on a political process which we can all trust in. However, the last few days has seen shabby behind-the-scenes political manoeuvring which Labour in its old days of ‘beer and sandwiches’ could only have possibly had dreamt of; with party leaders up to 4 in the morning, with ‘interested parties’ such as Hacked Off.
Shiv Malik explains extremely well how this workfare situation evolved, in his article from today:
“Labour is expected to support the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) in speeding a retroactive law through parliament that will overturn the outcome of a court of appeal judgment and ensure the government no longer has to pay £130m in benefit rebates to about a quarter of a million jobseekers.
The law has been hastily drafted by the government in response to last month’s ruling from three appeal court judges in favour of science graduate Cait Reilly and unemployed lorry driver Jamieson Wilson.
The court found that Reilly, who had been made to work unpaid in Poundland for weeks; Wilson, who was forced to work unpaid for six months, and up to 231,000 other benefit claimants had been unlawfully punished over the last few years because the government had failed to give them more than a few lines of regulatory information about the schemes they had to take part in.
In a move that has upset campaigners and activists, the parliamentary Labour party said it was likely to abstain from any vote expected on Tuesday and was pushing for concessions – including an independent review of the benefit sanctions regime – in return for allowing the jobseekers (back to work schemes) bill to be rushed through parliament at “lightning speed”.”
The situation is now an ugly one. The economy is about to enter a triple-dip, and Labour is still not trusted on the economy. Despite a perfect Keynesian narrative, people blame Labour for waste and profligacy, and there is no sign of this mistrust shifting. The current Coalition government have legislated for the privatisation of the NHS (all experts now agree it is a privatisation which is now experiencing difficult regulatory problems such as how to deal with ‘creamskimming’ aka ‘cherry picking’). John Healey was politically impotent in stopping the advance of the Bill through parliament. Labour implemented in its tenure a programme of PFI and now Trusts are saddled with debts from this ‘off ledger accounting’ at uncompetitive competitive rates – some hospitals will have to go into ‘managed decline’. Some Foundation Trusts, having been awarded ‘foundation status’, have had to declare themselves bankrupt, and it is generally conceded that setting up these hospitals was a convenient way of repackaging the NHS suitable for privatisation exactly like had happened in Spain.
Labour members have a right to be angry. Decisions like today show evidently that Labour is not afraid to ignore its key values or its core members. It has widely been advanced that the best that Labour can hope for in 2015 is a ‘hung parliament’, but this will be disaster with a ‘more of the same’ recipe for a stagnant economy, and a continued march of the privatisation of the NHS. Presumably Miliband will have to conclude his painfully protracted policy review at some stage, but his lack of concern about poor employment rights amongst workers has been conceded as nothing short of disgusting. We now have a maximum number of people in employment with no job security at all. Also, through the backdoor, this Government made it much easier to sack people, as George Eaton elegantly explains in the New Statesman:
“”While the Commons noisily debated press regulation, MPs elsewhere in the House quietly signed away workers’ rights. On a delegated legislation committee (a backdoor means of sneaking through contentious amendments), nine Conservatives and two Liberal Democrats voted to reduce the consultation period for collective redundancies from 90 days to 45.
At present, employers planning to make 100 or more redundancies are legally required to consult with trade unions and other employee representatives for this period to help minimise the impact and seek alternatives to job losses. Unite cites the example of Jaguar Land Rover, which proposed making over 1,000 staff redundant in 2009 but later avoided any job losses after identifying £70m of savings during the consultation.
The reduction to 45 days, based on a proposal in the infamous Beecroft report, means fewer companies will now adopt this enlightened approach. As John McDonnell, one of the seven Labour MPs who voted against the measure (only 18 MPs can sit on the committee), noted: “We know that the reduction to 45 days means that the opportunity for consultation is hopeless. It will not happen and will be meaningless. There will not be the time for the employees to work with the employers to look at alternative plans for that company.””
Liam Byrne is an influential member of the Shadow Cabinet. Nearly all of us are no longer “loving it”. It is a tragedy that many voters will not be able to turn to their MPs to stand up for their real-life concerns (though hats-off to Grahame Morris, John McDonnell and Ian Lavery who all voted “no” today). It had been a fairly safe bet that Labour would be in a “hung parliament”, but now, having clutched onto defeat from the jaws of victory, Labour could even look set to experience a resounding defeat, and they will have only themselves to blame. Some remnants of New Labour ideology clearly haven’t been excised from the Labour front bench; consequently we should be careful now.
Spoonies: the demonization of the disabled class
A ‘spoonie’ is possibly as well known a term as ‘chav’. A spoonie is someone living with a chronic illness. The word is apparently derived from The Spoon Theory written by Christine Miserandino. And why demonisation? Well, whilst not in the terms of reference of the Leveson Report published tomorrow, we can all think of examples of how parts of the media have embraced the ‘scrounger’ rhetoric when referring to any disabled citizen, and the tragic spike in hate crimes in the UK. Owen Jones’ ‘Chavs: the demonization of the working class’, most agree, is a remarkable piece of work, and the treatment of people with chronic illnesses in UK society is for me an interesting one. I only became physically disabled in my adult life, due to acute bacterial meningitis, having spent six weeks in a coma on the ITU of a London Foundation Trust. I have therefore witnessed simple changes in attitudes to me as a person, having been both physically able and physically disabled in my early adult life. I was aghast last Friday that, despite satisfying the legal definition of disability in the UK, I was denied disability living allowance, having in fact received the highest rate for my visible mobility difficulties. I was more aghast, however, that the DWP summary of my disability bore absolutely no relation to my account of it, nor the independent account provided by my own General Practitioner.
There are, apparently, over 6.9 million disabled people of working age which represents 19% of the working population. There are over 10 million disabled people in Britain, of whom 5 million are over state pension age, and there are two million people with sight problems in the UK. The work capability assessment (WCA) tests for the DWP are not cheap – they cost more than £100m of public money each year. However, after several years with the test in place, it is clear that the experience of some of those tested is yet another example of an omnishambles. Most people agree that we need to focus not on what disabled people can’t do but what they can do. That’s why the idea of a WCA is one most people support, and it’s why Labour introduced it in Government. It is undoubtedly important that sickness benefit claimants be assessed to demonstrate whether or not they can work, and the benefits of work are clear too, not just to the individual’s health, social and family life, but for wider society as well.
Sue Marsh – a well known disability campaigner who has severe Crohn’s disease – once received a letter confirming she was no longer eligible for Disability Living Allowance(DLA), a payment which enables her to meet the considerable costs of care and of getting around. The whole benefits system is not fit for purpose any more. Well documented storeies include one man who suffered from heart failure and died 39 days after being declared fit for work. Stephen Hill was sent to his first Work Capability Assessment in 2010 when he gave up his job as a sandwich delivery man after being referred for tests on his heart. His wife Denise, who was with him at the assessment, said: “She checked him out. She did his blood pressure and his heart and said to see a doctor as soon as possible.” Despite the assessor telling Mr Hill to seek urgent medical advice, he was still found fit for work. In the meantime doctors had diagnosed him with heart failure. He won his appeal but he was ordered to attend another assessment. “He got a letter for another medical and I couldn’t believe it,” said Mrs Hill. “He’d got to go for a medical when he was waiting for a heart operation.” Yet he was again declared fit for work, with the assessor declaring: “Significant disability due to cardiovascular problems seems unlikely.” Mr Hill died of a heart attack five weeks later.
So what has gone wrong in the UK? Whereas the narrative for ‘Chavs’ can turn to the sequelae of the Thatcher administration, it is hard to identify a Miners’ Strike (or Oregreave) moment in the 80s for the disabled community. Britain and America are actually two countries that, in recent years, have led the world in attempting to give disabled people rights and equality. During his presidency, George Bush Senior was proud to sign the Americans with Disabilities Act while the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act has gradually transformed the lives of disabled people in the UK. It may appear on the surface that the UK and USA have nothing in common with Nazi Germany, a regime that is estimated to have killed 200,000 disabled people and forcibly sterilised twice that number. And yet something has clearly gone very wrong indeed. Liam Byrne, Shadow for the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, indeed, after most concede has been a slow start for Labour, recently erupted to say:
“The nasty party is well and truly back. Lord Freud is a former investment banker and now a minister of the crown. For him of all people to compare people on benefits to corpses and likening their lives to a funeral is quite frankly disgusting. Before the summer his boss Iain Duncan Smith had the temerity to call Remploy workers idlers who did nothing better than sit around drinking coffee. He sacked over 1,000 of them and only 35 have managed to find work again. He is quite clearly a man in total denial about the pain his policies are about to cause. Shelter have begged the government to consider the ‘terrifying reality’ of the damage they are doing. Scope talk of disabled people facing a tipping point, risking poverty, debt and isolation. This government is next year about to take out billions from disability help and housing. All to pay for their catastrophic failure to get Britain back to work, and a 3 billion tax giveaway to Britain’s richest citizens. This government’s so-called welfare revolution is collapsing around its ears. The work programme isn’t working. Universal Credit has become universal chaos. Yet Lord Freud’s response is to kick people when they are down and not even pretend to offer a helping hand.
Byrne in fact mounted a passionate response to the demonisation of the disabled citizen community in the UK with Andrew Neil on ‘The Sunday Politics’, in a recent ‘Sunday interview’. When a country’s economy is not performing well, due to abject failures of that country’s economic policies, a right-wing government will tend to blame those people whom they perceive not to contribute to the wealth of this country. The fallacy of this argument is of course that bankers in the City of London are more to blame for the economic woes of the UK than working disabled citizens. (There is, of course, a minority of impressive citizens, who are disabled, working in the City in the finance and law sectors, for example.) There are currently 1.3 million disabled people in the UK who are available for and want to work. However, only half of disabled people of working age are in work (50%), compared with 80% of non disabled people, and 23% of disabled people have no qualifications compared to 9% of non disabled people. Nearly one in five people of working age (7 million, or 18.6%) in Great Britain have a disability.
Whatever the precise arguments are about the ‘economic power’ of spoonies are (and I am a spoonie), there is no doubt, strengthened in principle by the Equalities Act (2010), one of the last statutory instruments to be enacted by Labour, disabled citizens have a powerful role to play in society, even if they remain somewhat under-represented. For example, how many disabled GPs, doctors or lawyers do you know? The bitter pill which the Coalition has to swallow is, that despite all their efforts into espousing ‘happiness’, many disabled citizens are distinctly unhappy with their demonisation in recent yesars. They do have enormous political power, and even polling evidence suggests that while most individuals do not support welfare payments for people patently ‘freeloading’ off the State, they do simultaneously believe that disabled citizens should be supported for their mobility and living in a fair society. That is the problem David Cameron and Nick Clegg have to face in the short term. Iain Duncan-Smith is not a well liked person by many disabled citizens, and, if he is insistent on producing what is a complicated change in culture and functions of the benefits system, the project is definitely doomed to outright failure, due to the weakness in follower support. Whether the Coalition listen to this in the short term is a political choice, of course, but they will have absolutely no choice but to listen in June 2015. Labour has a powerful opportunity to reframe and rearticulate the debate concerning the Welfare State, and it is extremely likely that Beveridge would have been vehemently opposed to any demonisation of the disabled class.
Frankie Boyle's democratic right to be a shit
Let’s spend a minute thinking about Frankie Boyle. Frankie Boyle has of course every democratic right to be a complete and utter shit, and I am not going to proselytse about ‘turning the other cheek’ at this juncture.
I am not in any audience of a Frankie Boyle skit. This means I am not sitting in the audience when he performs at the Hammersmith Apollo, and I do not download his video in HD from the iStore. I choose not to listen to his routine, simply as it is not my type of comedy in general. This volitional decision is not because I find the material immoral or offensive – my higher cognition simply doesn’t come into it. Though, wearing a different hat, I wasn’t at the Holocaust, but to say that I find the Holocaust an immoral or offensive event would be the biggest understatement of the year.
I know that some disability campaigners loathe his stuff, and I am sensitive to their views in being offended. However, as a disabled citizen myself, I am simply not offended – like followers of religion, I do not judge Islam because of how certain muslims react. I am not saying that certain disability campaigners are fundamentalist about their beliefs, but it is a broad church. It is so broad that I feel that the word ‘disabled’ is unhelpful: but – even then – I don’t particularly care about it, despite once having given a well-known outspoken able-bodied journalist a very hard time for talking rather patronisingly about ‘disabled people’. I certainly don’t care enough about it enough for people to take special precautions, like talking about this ‘heterogeneous class of differently-abled individuals’. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
I think removal of a Facebook page, hypothetically, which read ‘Cancer is fun’ would be justified on the grounds of the number of people who may be upset, having lost perhaps a dear relative with cancer. By these standards, I should care about Frankie Boyle’s jokes. But I don’t – this is simply because Frankie Boyle is a small cog in a giant commercial wheel, with many people in the Boyle entourage (such as PR, marketing, booking agents, DVD producers, CD producers, and and so). Frankie Boyle is a product, like David Beckham or Damien Hirst, with a high brand equity, and part of the distinctiveness in his humour is his risqué manner. Like a cinema which does not make most of its money from the film itself, most of the money of the Frankie Boyle product is to be found in the Frankie Boyle entourage.
Crucially, Frankie Boyle has what intellectual property lawyers would call “distinctiveness”. This distinctiveness is what set Bernard Manning apart. Whilst thought crimes are not against the law, incitement to hate crimes would be – most reasonable people would deplore this, and Frankie Boyle would not be allowed to perform his skit if the ruling authorities felt that such crimes were being committed. Discrimination has no boundaries under the current equality legislation (ranging from age, sex, race and disability), but the danger is that Frankie Boyle humour gets legitimised by society when racist or sexist jokes are simultaneously frowned upon. While it may be ‘cool’ to respect Boyle’s right to be odious, just remember the democratic right of certain political parties to knock on doors at Luton or Dagenham? Tackling a different angle, Frankie Boyle’s jokes are not even political, although one may hazard a guess that he might be more left-wing than right-wing. And is disability itself a mechanism by a right-attack government may attack its citizens through ATOS? This argument is not especially tenable when you consider that it was actually ‘Labour’s fault’ that ATOS was awarded the disability benefits contract in the first place.
All publicity is good publicity. In the time it has taken you to read this, the Frankie Boyle share price has increased, and it’s been “kerching” for him and his whole entourage. So you should have been, in fact, devoting the last minute of your time thinking about something else, I feel.
Blogpost: "Blogging Against Disablism Day 2012" – my experience #BADD2012
The seventh annual Blogging Against Disablism day is today, on Tuesday, 1st May 2012. This is the day where all around the world, disabled and non-disabled people blog about their experiences, observations and thoughts about disability discrimination. In this way, we hope to raise awareness of inequality, promote equality and celebrate the progress we’ve made. I once wrote a post for the legal blog, Legal Cheek, describing the practical difficulties that disabled students like me, have in training contract interviews. But this is a different post!
I have often written on this blog about inclusivity and accessibility in relation to law and legal education; and I strongly recommend their twitter thread @legalcheek.
Actually, the firms on the whole are very good at making you feel comfortable for the interview. So much so you end up feeling very uncomfortable (as a result of the ‘Does he take sugar?’ syndrome). However, I would say almost too comfortable, in the sense that you do feel that the Partners concerned were taking meticulous care. In a sense, this is a case of ‘damned if you do, or damned if you don’t’.
My disability is multi-fold. I see double all the time, therefore I often voluntarily have to shut one eye to avoid seeing double. This is because I was in a coma for six weeks in the summer of 2007 due to meningitis. I now have also a cerebllar dysarthria (speech problem), but I am told that my speech is comprehensible. Secondly, I have trouble walking. I have a condition which is known as ataxia, which means I can easily go off balance, and I look as if I am mildly drunk. I find that London cabbies immediately know that I have ataxia, even if I hail a cab from outside a pub (I do not drink alcohol any more); they are very discerning, and, of course they have a right to refuse to pick you up if they wish and they can justify it. The handicap means I have to take it steady while walking (I won’t be doing the London Legal Walk 2012, but the organisers have kindly given me the chance to do sponsored tweeting for it, which makes me very happy as I volunteered for 5 months last year in a law centre in London in welfare benefits, as a law student approved to do the LPC).
I think for training contract interviews, some candidates do not even know that they require ‘reasonable adjustments’. I am very influenced by David Merkel, the lawyer in charge of the Law Society’s ‘Lawyers with Disabilities’ group. I went to their Christmas bash in 2010, and David told me, at a quiet moment aside, it was all about giving law students ‘a chance to show what they can add to a law firm, on a level playing field‘.This I feel is very true. Disabled citizens like me don’t like being made to feel ill, which they can sometimes do in the application procedure for training contracts. They’re not ill, they’re just different. Unfortunately, this Government, which stopped my Disabled Living Allowance without any warning or notification, makes me feel unwanted. I refuse to allow that perception of me, even if Katie Hopkins makes hurtful tweets like this. I cried for a bit after I read it, but with all due respect having completed my MBA recently I feel confident about business too, but in a different sense. I am 37, with several good postgraduate degrees, including in business, law and natural sciences, so I feel that I can bring value to society, even more than a popular TV show. Ironically, I feel @Lord_Sugar appreciates ‘value’ in business.
Finally, I am most grateful to @BADDTweets for alerting me to this, which is the Twitter stream for “Blogging Against Disablism Day”, run by @goldfish and @themanoutside (#bad2012): http://tinyurl.com/BADD2012. I particularly appreciate the chance to voice my experience of disability and disabilism here. All I can say to disabled and non-disabled citizens that it can be, in any context, very insidious and subtle. I am very lucky in that the law school I’m in does not “make me feel ill” (in any way you wish to interpret this legally or not!), but rather instead wanted and valued, and it is a joy to study my Legal Practice Course at BPP Law School, Holborn.
Will the new proposed Bar Course Aptitude Test be fair to aspiring barristers?
The completion of the training of barristers is a genuine regulatory concern of the Bar Standards Board (BSB). According to recent statistics, the number of students who want to become barristers shows little sign of diminishing with 3,100 applicants to the Bar Professional Training Course (BTPC) in 2010/2011 and 3,016 in 2011/2012. There is a growing level of concern at the Bar and amongst law students that the rising demand for the BPTC is not reflected by rising availability of pupillages, coupled with increasing fees for the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC). BPP Law School, one of the main providers of the BPTC, recently announced an increase in fees by five per cent for September 2012 to £16,540. It is hoped that introduction of the Bar Course Aptitude Test (BCAT) will introduce fairness, by decreasing the number of law students who fail the BPTC, and the public consultation until 29 February 2012 is encouraged to see if this will be the case.
The BSB proposes that, in addition to existing entry requirements as specified in the Bar Training Regulations, all BPTC students should attain a minimum pass threshold on the BCAT, which has been carefully developed and piloted specifically for this purpose. It is proposed that this implementation of the BCAT by Pearson Vue should commence with the cohort of candidates applying from November 2012 to start the course in September 2013. Whatever is proposed by the Bar Standards Board, it will be for the Legal Services Board to determine whether the proposal may be implemented.
The BCAT is based on the established and recognised Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Test which is used by some law firms in recruitment assessment days and by the Graduate Management Admissions Council. The Wood Review of the BPTC’s predecessor, the BVC, had been commissioned by the BSB with a Working Group chaired by Derek Wood QC, and published in July 2008. Learners will now be able to take the BCAT at any stage of their education or career, including after applying for the BPTC. The requirement will be that applicants must have scored the threshold pass before enrolling on the course, similar to the current English language rule and other entry requirements. It is staggering that, despite the fact that no socioeconomic data in the pilot were collected, the Bar Standards Board find that the test will not any effect, adverse or otherwise, on socioeconomic factors of enrolment on the BPTC.
Students in the UK are already prone to be most over-assessed in Europe, and it is an embarrassment to our educational system that academic competences will not have been identified by other means by the time a learner sits the test. The cost of taking the test will be a consideration for some learners at a time when some may in future be coping with university course fees. Unfortunately there is a slightly higher cost of taking the test for international students due to higher cost to Pearson Vue of testing and processing results overseas. The BSB has apparently explored the chance of a reduction with Pearson Vue but it has been confirmed that this cost is non-movable.
Certainly the equality and diversity impact assessment will have to be evaluated critically. For example, while no significant differences were found for age, or disability, statistically significant but small differences were found for gender and primary language. Indeed, Pearson Vue intend to mitigate against the effects of disability, indeed as they are obliged to under current equality legislation, through “reasonable adjustments” at test centres. The BSB will need to ensure that these are enforced rigorously, as anecdotal reports on the success of implementation by legal recruiters have been unimpressive for training contract applications.
A legal secretary commented on Twitter today that diversity would be ensured according to ‘how easy is it to pay for coaching to pass’. Formal education is currently expensive, and it is unlikely that educational providers might draw attention to the finding in the report that ‘coaching can have a small effect’, and indeed It is the view of the Bar Standards Board that it is more important to ensure fairness by allowing an unlimited number of re-sits, as the risk of applicants being coached sufficiently to achieve a pass is limited.
Views of current BPTC towards the proposed BCAT are mixed, but few current students are enthusiastic about what it will achieve. One current BPTC student ‘tweeted’, ‘I did LNAT and failed. According to that I shouldn’t have done law at uni, or anything further. So sceptical at aptitude tests.’
It is hugely impressive that the BSB have put produced such an excellent report into the development of the BCAT which is now open to consultation until 29 February 2012. It will be very interesting to see how the profession responds. The Law Society has already commenced investigations into a similar LPC aptitude test, and will undoubtedly follow the progress of the BSB BCAT with enormous interest.
Serious letter from Shibley Rahman to Sir Michael Lyons 12/7/10 BBC Trust (from which no reply)
Dr. Shibley Rahman
[address]
Sir Michael Lyons, 12th July 2010
Chairman of the BBC Trust,
180 Great Portland Street,
London.
W1W 5QZ
Dear Sir,
URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL
I know that you must be incredibly busy, and it is a honour and privilege for me to write to you. I suspect that you will know nothing of my case yet, which has been going for 8 months nearly.
To serve as background, I am copying you a copy of a letter which I am sending to Fran O’Brien, BBC Head of Editorial Standards, today. The purpose of this present letter is that I should like you very much to bear witness to how my complaint has been managed thus far by BBC Complaints, and for you to consider what lessons – if any – that can learnt from this incident. In a nutshell, the BBC reported my regulatory case with the GMC in a highly inaccurate way across three online news stories within a space of about a week in 2006, claiming I was working at the Brompton at the time (inter alia), when the case involved me as a doctor with a severe alcohol problem. These stories should never have been classified in the ‘Entertainment’ section, but actually this label reflects rather well the ‘gutter-press’ style and content of the articles. They gave the impression that this was a stalking case (this case was nothing to do with stalking) and failed to allude to the substantial alcohol problems which had made it impossible for me to continue my professional career in medicine. Although medicine constitutes over a decade of my life that I have no wish to return to, I feel that the BBC should have some degree of human compassion for me: a human, now disabled human-being (due to a coma in 2007 due to meningitis), who has given up alcohol for four years, and who is trying desperately hard to rebuild his place in society.
The upshot is that I would like three online news stories from 2006 to be removed, because I have proven that they offend the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy, balance and/or impartiality. I simply do not understand why [NAME REDACTED] fails to understand the basic issue involved that (a) I have never been a stalker, (b) I have a Police National Computer check which proves this. The BBC running these stories so many years down the line is very damaging to me both professionally and personally (they are instantly Google-able). I (and senior lawyers) feel that they are indeed defamatory, but I see no reason why the BBC cannot remove them after having admitted their faults as regards their own Charter and editorial policy.
My hearing has been scheduled for 21st July 2010. Finally, I should explain that the purpose of my letter is to explain to the Chairman of the BBC Trust fully the hurt that I have experienced over this protracted complaint, and just in case Fran O’Brien is unable to bring this to the meeting due to any summer vacation. This does matter a huge amount to me. I have opened up this can of worms, as I can tolerate such abusive behaviour from the BBC any longer.
I am still deeply disturbed that anyone reading these three ‘entertainment’ stories will come away with the idea that I was a nuisance stalker (not true), rather than a very sick doctor with alcoholism who needed to help and who needed to be removed from the register (true). This should have been priority for any decent journalist covering the story legitimately.
I clearly feel that the articles are in stark contrast with the professionalism that the BBC is supposed to stand up for, and I would like the BBC Trust to give this careful thought. In particular, I should like the BBC to consider how it can liaise with the Law Society or the General Medical Council to cover their cases in such a way it cannot prejudice the hearings.
I take solace, in fact, from the fact that [NAME REDACTED], Legal Advisor to the BBC, feels that my complaint is not legal, in that I feel that resolution by the BBC Trust is entirely appropriate.
I will always abide by what you judgment the BBC Trust provides, but I hope that the Trust can consider my distress sympathetically. Finally, I will always be proud of the BBC.
Yours sincerely
Dr Shibley Rahman (mobile [redacted])
E-mail: management@lawandmedicine.co.uk
Queen’s Scholar
BA(1st) MA MB BChir PhD (all Cambridge) MRCP(UK)
LLB(Hons.) FRSA MSB
Master of Law student at the College of Law of England and Wales
Associate Member of the Institute of Directors
Company Director of Law and Medicine Limited
