Barrie Hudson column: Scapegoat alert

The most recent instance of this has seen me approached by teachers, social workers, police officers, youth workers and the like.

As you may be aware, the Government has recently announced that such people can expect severe jail terms if they fail to report cases of child abuse.

If your job falls into one of the affected categories, you may be wondering: “How does this affect me?”

Well, the answer, as with tax laws, rather depends on your specific professional role.

If you are, for example, a frontline teacher and a child in your care turns out to have been the victim of abuse, you will undoubtedly be chucked out of your job and into a cell.

It will be no defence to point out, say, that you gave up attempting to alert senior education officials when they threatened to have you branded as a troublemaker, destroy your career, place you under a cloud of suspicion and generally deprive you of the means of supporting yourself and your loved ones.

Likewise, if you are a frontline police officer, you are also liable to end up in the nick, possibly enduring regular batterings at the hands of some of the criminals you were responsible for putting behind bars.

If you were deterred from highlighting abuse because some senior officer hoping for a top spot somewhere, not to mention a knighthood/damehood, let it be known that boat-rockers were not welcome, you will still go to prison.

Should you happen to be a social worker, please be aware that you will be held responsible for any and all abuse on your watch. This will happen even if your caseload has been trebled by the council you work for, half of your colleagues are off work with stress-induced nervous breakdowns, and bosses of other departments fail to act on concerns you raise.

If you happen to be a senior official in charge of frontline workers who find themselves in the firing line, your experience is likely to be somewhat different.

The golden rule is that junior staff must always be thrown under the bus, even if – especially if – their failings were a direct result of your slobbering incompetence or your callous disregard for anything other than your own personal advancement.

Whatever happens, you can be almost 100 per cent certain that you will suffer no judicial punishment whatsoever, no matter how many horrific things can ultimately be laid at your door.

Nor is there much risk of you losing your job and its attendant six-figure salary, massive bonuses and assorted perks, especially if you keep repeating: “Lessons will be learned.”

If you do happen to lose your job, you could always hold out for a settlement worth more cash than most ordinary people make in a decade.

Yet another set of rules applies if you are a member of the political establishment.

You, of course, are ultimately responsible for appointing incompetent senior officials and tolerating their ineptitude. You do this on the understanding that they won’t raise a peep of protest about decades of underfunding in our vital services.

However, when the balloon goes up about some disgraceful catalogue of vileness, simply insist you had no access to the full facts at the time and are as shocked and horrified as anybody else.

Incidentally, if you yourself have a fondness for carrying out acts of sickening criminal depravity, rest assured that you’ll get away with it.

For as long as you are alive and imprisonable, details of what you did will be kept safely under lock and key.

Not even the titles of the documents chronicling your filth will be made available to the public.

Rank has its privileges.

As for telly debates, I think I’ve quacked it

WHAT do you make of the ongoing squabble between the political parties over televised debates in the run-up to the General Election?

There’s a groundswell of opinion which says the broadcasters should simply announce the dates and times, and leave an empty chair for anybody who fails to turn up.

I’m inclined to agree, although for a while I toyed with the idea of taking things a step further.

Instead of just having empty chairs to mark the absence of any candidate unwilling or unable to attend, I thought it would be more interesting to have a small cage containing a duck on each empty chair.

Then, instead of having to listen to whatever the politician had to say, we could listen to some random quacking instead.

But then I thought about how random quacking might shape up against the empty promises and patronising, point-scoring platitudes usually spouted by politicians in these debates.

What effect might this comparison have on the electorate come polling day?

Are we really ready for a Government led by a Mr or Mrs Mallard, whose first order of business would be free bread distribution at every pond and the criminalisation of orange sauce possession?

And more to the point, would that be a better or worse proposition than whatever we’d otherwise end up with?

Drive to tackle vile criminals

I WAS delighted to hear about plucky pensioner Wendy Lee, who was pounced on by a couple of distraction thieves as she waited in a disabled parking bay at a supermarket.

Mrs Lee leapt from her vehicle, chased the thieves and made them drop her bank card. Sadly she was the passenger and doesn’t drive, so couldn’t give chase in the vehicle.

I’d like to see some drivers with decoy vehicles in disabled bays, ready to chase criminals. Not to knock them down, obviously; that would be cruel and potentially murderous.

No, what I have in mind is retractable blades in the wheel hubs, a bit like the ones on Boudicca’s chariot. Then the criminals would be fine so long as they managed to summon assistance before the crows got them.

Not Russian into any foreign war

YOU may have noticed a little article in the Adver the other day about hundreds of British troops and armoured vehicles training on Salisbury Plain.

The officers in charge said these forces would be necessary in the event that Britain became involved in a major ground operation overseas.

Not that we are going to become involved in any major ground operations overseas, of course.

And especially not in any part of the former Soviet Union.