29 June 2022: Horam - C

The afternoon kicked off the session from a dateline in mid-1996. In another letter rejecting calls for financial support for haemophiliacs infected by HCV, the witness had described the disaster as “inadvertent”. He clarified that, “It was a tragedy that should never have happened.” Does that mean he thinks some tragedies should have happened? Which ones, (rap music, platform shoes, Covid-19, Jeremy Kyle)? Counsel then explored the frequently stated argument of people having received the best possible treatment available at the time. He said he didn’t question this direction from civil servants. In hindsight, had there have been a reason to doubt this, he would have sought the information himself. He recognised the reliance of consecutive Ministers on accepting the best treatment assertion, mostly without question. Counsel pointed out how such a blanket statement could be applied to all medics, in all hospitals, and all patients. He got the point.

On the references to the “floodgates” argument, often used by lawyers, the Chair suggested how using the floodgates risk can be seen as a last-ditch attempt to sway a judge when all other arguments had failed, rather than it being a robust argument in itself. The floodgates fearmongering was then laid on thicker through the blackmailing boost of describing any payments as money being taken away from sick patients in the care of the NHS. Again, the scrutiny by Counsel was about how decisions were justified, not only in hindsight, but by reference to the Government sticking its position despite other knowledge around at the time which ran contrary to the line to take. There is a line to be walked between the responsibility of politicians as Ministers of the Government to be accountable for what was done or not done “on their watch”, as opposed to the role of civil servants who gave the politicians the information upon which life and death decisions were made and official policy lines were settled on. Basically, to what extent are Ministers liable for the advice, actions, competence, biases, etc. of their civil servants? All the politicians have waxed lyrical about the high quality of persons filing civil servant posts, so, are they admitting negligence by too easily accepting what they were told without doing their due diligence into the sourcing of that advice? In practical terms, if a civil servant is too busy (or lazy) to stay up-to-date with subject knowledge, and so gives poor, inadequate, out-dated, or simply wrong advice, does the fault for that reside with the civil servant, or is it with the government minister?

The argument of continually asserting how any money to infected people was money out of the budget for patient care was described by John Marshall in a debate as “intellectually threadbare and immoral”. There needs to be a cull, or a public execution, of the erroneous statements which have swirled around the Contaminated Blood Scandal for far too long and caused so much suffering, including; “best treatment”, “robbing patients”, “they would have died”, “slippery slope”, “no liability”, “no negligence”, “ it all come from the US”, “we did the best we could”, etc.

Finally, Counsel checked with the witness about his awareness of their having been calls for a Public Inquiry during the time of him being in post as the Minister. He did not know of these calls, and it never occurred to him to move in that direction arising from his own growing knowledge of the problem. In effect, all the efforts over the years to seek a Public Inquiry have been killed off at birth by these wonderful civil servants gatekeeping information from their too busy, very hard-working political masters. That is the reality, or so it seems, of how our template-to-the-world democracy serves power back to the people who gave it. Now that’s a real tragedy which should never have happened.