Rotherham: who wins? PC or love?

In the light of the Rotherham scandal I ask myself whether there is something temperamentally flawed in women who get top public service jobs – poor judgment, lack of nous, and so on.

 

The major local government scandals of recent years have all had women at the heart of them.

 

There was the Victoria Climbie tragedy, in which social workers knew that this toddler was being subjected to severe and frequent beatings but failed to intervene because ‘physical punishment is part of African culture’, never mind that it is a crime in English culture.

 

Then we had Baby P in which a small child, known to be at risk from parental violence and neglect, was left to die. The female head of the department took an early bath as a result.

 

We had the Birmingham vote rigging scandal. The judge at the subsequent election court said that it would disgrace a banana republic. So the female CEO resigned. To spend more time with her severance pay? Nope. She was appointed head of immigration at an even higher salary, which might explain a few things about the current state of immigration.

 

There was the fiasco at Suffolk County Council, where the CEO almost brought it to its knees before she too rode off into the sunset, not exactly poorer but wiser.

 

Now we have Rotherham.

 

The head of the department, Ms Thacker, that has removed children from the foster parents care without any investigation or prior consultation with  the foster parents but purely on a tip-off by a nark that they belonged to UKIP.

 

Ms Thacker has a bit of form.

 

She was in charge when the Asian child-raping outrages occurred. She has some questions to answer there, including whether it is a fact that she suppressed information that all of the culprits were Asian.

 

She commented that it was ‘interesting’ that child abusers on her patch were Asian.

 

Then there is the case of Laura Wilson, a 17-year  old single mother. She was murdered by an Asian and her body thrown into a canal. She was known to be seriously at risk; in her 17 years she had come to the attention of 15  care organisations. She got little help from Rotherham authorities.

 

My prediction? That’s easy. After her car-crash interviews on radio and TV she will depart shortly with a hand-bag of council tax-payers’ Wonga.

 

To revert to my original question, the answer is no, there is nothing inherent. The real explanation is that many ‘right-on’ councils may have chosen women CEOs and other big-shots not from merit but to show how terribly correct they are in matters of ‘equality’. If they happen to be sympathisers of TIGMOO, so much the better.

 

Let me close with a small anecdote.

 

When I was working in post-apartheid South Africa I watched a middle-aged couple being interviewed on TV. They were typical Afrikaners, big, tough as old boots. And they were heart-broken. Why? Because they had been fostering a little black girl – yes, black – until they came up against the local Thacker, who took the child away.

 

 Yet another PC apparatchik who couldn’t understand that race has nothing to do with love