Weekly Sanity Check

Just as I despair of the all the attention seeking, the shallow me only selfishness and the endless mindless prattle that fill every day along comes Alison Graham's weekly column in the Radio Times. A breath of sanity. A welcome no nonsense, face life as it is and get on with it attitude. She, like we all, has her lapses when she get overcome with girlyness. Fair do's and she does forewarn with an unmissable klaxon before she gives into her temptation. Her doing girly is of course gritty, blunt and scalpel sharp to the point. Gets over it and gets back to her plain, but so nicely couched self. So often she mirrors, or rather she hones in with clarity on thoughts that were rambling around in me. Or perhaps more honestly, she plucks out of all the chatter a key essence of social conduct that I wish I had had the sense to see, before her enlightenment. And consistent, week after week. No overblown ego, no inflated sense of importance, just another generous insightful observation sparked off by some TV media event.

Her day job, the one that pays the bread, those previews of all the up-n-coming schedule programmes she is paid to write are equally pithy and to the point. A degree of dissemblance is entirely forgiveable. She is employed after all to promote programmes appearing in the schedules and though she seems to have a range of freedom, it is clear she cannot just say, it is all rubbish this week but has to find something. Over time it has become very clear those days when she is of a mind it is all unworthy rubbish, then picks out some long standing formulaic series or some oft repeated golden classic to make her choice for the day. Her linguistic somersaults and verbal gymnastics become words of wonder, as she trips lightly through many varied degrees of faint praise to satisfy the only upbeat requirements of her paymasters. Not that that stops her, occasionally firing both barrels from the hip, finding up-beat words to scathingly expose the nature of rubbish that she has been paid to praise.

A very loud thank you, Alison Graham. Each week you restore my faith as I brace myself for another week's bombardment of trivia. Thank you pay-masters, for carrying on having the courage to give her her head.

Oh yes as a ps, whatever she says is liberally drizzled with high octane irony, delicious!

Finding the Fraud

The hardest bias to eliminate in proving a scientific theory is that of prior expectation. The researcher, knowing what he expects to see, will find it within the data, when another unbiased person would not. It skews the results, unfavourably. No proof is certain until another, remote uninvolved, institute has replicated it. All very pragmatic, detached and objective way of assessing and limiting the errors of our human vulnerabilities.

How come then when we have a need to overhaul the disability financial support allowances, it is prefaced with that statement that twenty percent savings are to be achieved in the process! If you are starting out on a major policy procedural revue, the last thing you want to do is to cloud your starting point with prejudiced presumptions based on nothing more than speculation, hearsay and the roar of the crowd. Any manager worth their salt would say first off, sort out your facts, know your starting position and be very clear what your goal is, keep it clear and simple.

But then it does not matter about being rigorous in our approach because these are only disabled people with no clout or large well of support. It does not matter then if the threat of yet another fraud seeking investigation puts each and every one on suspicion; each has yet again to go through the humiliating hoop of proving the self-evident that they are unable to cope as well as a 'normal' person; suffer the indignities of some disinterested investigator putting them through meaningless tests that might never in a million years expose the real handicaps they have to struggle and cope with which may actually take insight and compassion to begin to understand and, to cap it off, have there noses rubbed in the social smear yet again that they are dependant on support and help and they are not free agents to do what they want, when they want it.

The justification for all this is there is blatant fraud going on and our country needs to make huge savings inorder to survive let alone recover from the brink of financial ruin. Surely everyone would willingly want to play their part. If only we were all of equal stature.

Rather than harangue the claimants for their suspected misuse of the rules and forms prescribed for them to follow, equally the blame could be placed at the feet of the managers. Let us investigate these lax managers that allow frauds or false claims to be made, unchallenged and do not tighten up procedures or guidance to minimise the scope for abuse of the systems. Lets sack the managers with high claim records and make all the savings that way!.

This is where the heart of the problem lays. It is yet another example of the systematic failings of centralised control, remote form the actual interface, that just cannot devise questions, rules and procedures capable of coping or defining the infinitely wide range of human responses and conditions out there across the whole spectrum of humanity. Even if the impossible was achievable it would then only become the next target to prove that the defined is well short of limits of human ingenuity. What we expect as our social right is rough justice. Not exactly equal to everyone, nor exactly equal wherever or however, just lumped together, across the board, a rough parity can be seen. This requires a human commonsense interface, flexible, adjustable, empowered to apply discretion, compassionate and above all accountable.

Our national effort and technology should put its muscle here where it can be really useful. To provide comparators, to example best practice or to alert to weakness and excesses. Provide good, robust and understandable on demand support but leaving the human agents to make those thousand and one incomparable comparisons, applying their skills to balance the dissimilarities. That is what our brains are good at. The bottom line is what rule, question or procedure can define just how much personal effort is necessary to overcome a weakness. None, it is a piece of string exercise and only the human interface can judge when enough is enough and some help will go a long way.

Who ever signed off on this initiative deserves to be taken out into the street and shot in front of the cameras, no trial, no judge, no jury just let presumption, prejudice and sentiment decide.