Drugs funding continues to taint Scotland's health awards and equality remains off the menu

Nicola Sturgeon - former
Cabinet Secretary for Health

Over a year ago I blogged on how Scotland's Cabinet Secretary for Health was planning to break bread at a dinner table with company which appeared to be less than squeaky clean.  In July this year I updated the blog with this :

In a story breaking on the BBC - GlaxoSmithKline [GSK] is to pay $3bn (£1.9bn) in the largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history.  The drug giant is to plead guilty to promoting two drugs for unapproved uses and failing to report safety data about a diabetes drug to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The settlement will cover criminal fines as well as civil settlements with the federal and state governments.  The case concerns 10 drugs, including Paxil, Wellbutrin, Avandia and Advair.  Deputy US Attorney General James Cole told a news conference in Washington DC that the settlement was "unprecedented in both size and scope".

If you follow this link you will find that the 2012 Scottish Health Awards featured a category of 'Doctors Award'.  Read along the line and you will find that it was sponsored by GSK.

Last August I drew attention to reports on Pfizer's questionable drug trials in Nigeria in 1996 and the prolonged efforts by Nigerian people to get restitution.  Pfizer sponsored the 'Care for Long Term Illness Award' in the 2012 Scottish Health Awards.  

Alex Neil - Cabinet Secretary
for Health

Just last week, the Independent newspaper carried a story on major companies who pay little or no tax in the UK.  You are ahead of me.  The company featured in detail by the Independent ?  Pfizer and its best selling drug Viagra.

We may have a new Cabinet Secretary for Health in Scotland.  The reluctance to do an ethics check on those companies government chooses to share a dinner table with remains unchanged.

I can also report that a couple of years ago an award for work in the NHS on equalities was allowed to slip of the menu.  It remains off the menu.

Tina Turner not being booked to sing at unveiling of new EHRC Scotland Director

As many of you will know, the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] has been stumbling along these last few years, reeling from the many gratuitous and WASP'ish slaps, head-butts and knee-cappings administered by government, and more recently being forced to smile politely as budgets are butchered and its role publicly rogered as ministers play pass the parcel with the equalities brief in their red boxes.

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve

Trevor Philips has been cast aside as Chairperson of the EHRC and replaced by Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve.  The appointment of someone unknown outside academe and cherry-picked from the crowded cross-benches of the unelected great & good who infest the woodwork in the House of Lords to lead the government's strategy on equality & human rights needs little analysis as to where it is going.

In the midst of this permanent chaos, the Scotland Office of the EHRC lost its leader, Director Roz Micklem.  Sources indicate the vacant post was offered to other senior managers across the re-organising and jobs-haemorrhaging EHRC.  None were willing to venture into the frozen north.  Perhaps no surprise when the Scottish government's track record on equalities is so abysmal.  Further attempts to recruit internally yielded a thunderclap of disinterest in the opportunity to work closely with such as Scotland's 'shovel ready' Alex Neil, Cabinet Secretary, who has to be reminded to put equalities on his web site list of responsibilities.

Faced with enormous upheaval, a butchered budget, barely 10 staff left in Scotland, and a UK government which thinks equality is 'red tape' and bad for business, one would have thought the EHRC would have advertised here and abroad for someone keen to tilt at those windmills of prejudice, inspire the diminished pool of beleaguered EHRC staff in Scotland with visions of real equality being possible, and to arm-wrestle some real action out of government and the public sector to show that Scotland's widespread and oft-denied culture of discrimination can be easily identified, exposed to daylight, and quickly eliminated.

Kaliani Lyle, EHRC
Scotland Commissioner

One would have thought.

With this scale of challenge on halting the growth of discrimination, the resurgence of prejudice and the frenzy of state-sponsored demonisation of those people in society who are simply different, one would have thought the EHRC, under the guidance of Scotland's EHRC Commissioner, Kaliani Lyle, would have demanded the best for Scotland.  Along with the great and good people on the EHRC's Scotland Committee who support Kaliani in her work [Alastair Pringle, Angela O'Hagan, Elaine Noad, Louise Falconer, Morag McLaughlin and Neelam Bakshi] one would have thought that there would be an aspiration that Scotland should seek to attract the finest the world has to offer.  That Scotland's diverse population deserved simply the best the world had to offer.  

One would have thought.

So what happened next ?

Sources indicated that the EHRC was made to follow perversely discriminatory civil service rules and advertise the vacancy widely amongst ..................... civil servants only.  Not the world, not Europe, not the UK, and not even Scotland itself.  At a time when unemployment is at obscene levels, the EHRC was made to recruit not from the biggest and best oceans of talent available, but instead is made to fish in a half-filled thimble of talent and one in which only those who are already employed are allowed to swim.

the EHRC ..........is made to fish in a half-filled thimble of talent and one in which only those who are already employed are allowed to swim.

Alastair Pringle,
EHRC Scotland Director

And just what has emerged from this opaque, constipated, and light years from good-practice, recruitment process to lead the EHRC in Scotland into the critical years ahead ?  None other than Alastair Pringle, until recently part of Scotland's civil service and, curiously, a member of the EHRC's Scotland Committee.  

Justice in Scotland needs to wear a hearing aid and drop the dodgy blindfold

Not that long ago I got one of those brown envelopes in the post from the Scottish Court Service [SCS].

In essence it advised me, in a tone straight out of Ealing Films where all but the heart-warming Cockney ruffians spoke with what used to be known as Received Pronunciation, that I had been called to serve on a jury in November and that I should attend unless I was dead or dying or I suppose about to become the President of the US.  A lengthy list of possible grounds for exemption were printed in what I think was probably 8 point typeface and crammed in a Scrooge-like squeeze onto several A4 sheets of paper.

Being hearing impaired, I contacted the SCS [no easy task] to ask how they would go about ensuring communication support [I use Electronic Notetakers when attending large meetings, conferences or interviews held in large rooms and where the panel sits several miles away from the candidates in order to intimidate them] would be available in the event that I was picked to serve on the jury.

Deaf awareness is obviously not mainstream to the SCS.  It took a little while for the extent of my hearing impairment and its consequences in the context of jury service to sink in.  Once it did, I was quickly advised that I would be excused duty.  I equally quickly expressed a strong desire to do my duty as a citizen and serve on a jury, with communication support following me from the court room into the jury room.  It was as if I had suggested rigging LIBOR or doing something rude to a dead sheep.  There was no way that any communication support worker would be allowed into the jury room with me.  It was the law.

"the law is a ass- a idiot. If that's
the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor;
and the worst I wish the law is, that
his eye may be opened by experience
- by experience."

Accepting that the SCS was but a cog in the machine of government, I resisted the strong temptation to re-enact that scene from Oliver Twist where Mr Bumble declares to Mr Brownlow "the law is a ass - a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience- by experience."  Instead, I contacted the Justice Secretary, Kenny McAskill, and pointed out the structural discrimination inherent in a law which prevented deaf and hearing impaired people from serving on a jury when they required to use communication support workers.  

I wrote about my exchange with the SCS :  

I was advised that as the law prevents anyone not a juror from being in the jury room that it would not be possible for me to serve on the jury.  This strikes me as being discriminatory and effectively removes deaf and hearing impaired people in Scotland from serving on any jury.

I would urge you and colleagues in government to amend the legislation around this aspect of the criminal justice system to allow communication support workers to enter jury rooms in support of their clients and so enable deaf and hearing impaired people to serve on Scotland’s jury service.

Kenny McAskill, Justice Secretary

As ever, Ministers devolve correspondence with mere citizens to their civil servants.  I got a response which said :

It is important that a person charged with a serious crime has their case decided by a jury of fellow citizens rather than a judge. In Scottish criminal trials, 15 jurors are empanelled.  As you say, legislation prevents an additional person from joining the 15 balloted jurors in the jury room. This is in no way intended to be discriminatory but is to ensure that an accused person, if convicted by a jury, is convicted entirely because those jurors have formed their own view of his/her guilt from the evidence heard in court uninfluenced by anything other than the judge’s direction.
I can assure you that wherever possible the Scottish Government and other bodies within the justice system will always endeavour to ensure that as many people as possible are able to perform the civic duty of jury service. Specifically in relation to those with a hearing impairment, courts in Scotland are generally sound enhanced and most are either fitted with Baker Sound Induction Loop (SIL) or Phonic Ear System to assist a person with hearing difficulties to participate as a juror.

I responded :

Thank you kindly for this response. In [my earlier] email I specifically suggested to the Justice Secretary, Mr MacAskill :

I would urge you and colleagues in government to amend the legislation around this aspect of the criminal justice system to allow communication support workers to enter jury rooms in support of their clients and so enable deaf and hearing impaired people to serve on Scotland's jury service.

Can I ask you to read your response and then tell me where in it you respond, on behalf of the Justice Secretary, to my call for amending the legislation ?

What came back was :

My sincere apologies, I can see that I have not answered you as directly as I should have. The Scottish Government has no current plans to amend legislation in this area.

Justice is often depicted as being blindfolded, to represent the need for justice to be dealt out objectively, fairly, without fear or favour.  The blindfold clearly has as much integrity as an Atos capacity assessment.  It has surely been woven from the discarded luxuriant tresses of the formerly hirsute Work & Pensions Secretary of State, Ian Duncan Smith, for it is able to see if communication support workers are about to enter the jury room in support of deaf jurors.

It is time we updated our concepts of justice.  What we cite as 'justice' must be able to 'hear' clearly.  In turn, 'justice' must ensure all citizens are heard and enabled to 'hear' in all of its processes.