DT stuff

I share two items from yesterday's DT, one amusing, one annoying.

The first is the obituary of a scholarship boy from what was Southern Rhodesia, who made his way to the University of York where he got his first degree, then to London where he got his doctorate. Presumably a pampered and personable advertisement for our so enlightened management policies in East Africa. I think there were quite a few of them knocking around our universities at that time, shortly before I arrived on the scene. He then swanned around the groves of African Academe for a bit before winding up as a spokesman for Mugabe. In the process he seems to have forgotten whatever he may have learned about civics during his stay in England, aiding and abetting the unpleasant goings on in what had become the Zimbabwe of the end of the millennium, perhaps going the whole hog as he was not really trusted by the old fighters, of whom he was not really one. They probably thought that he was pampered and worse rather than pampered and personable. He died on the farm that he had managed to winkle out of all of this, having been gored by a grumpy bull.

The second is the front page lead about the use of the Liverpool Care Pathway in the NHS, a pathway which the DT seems to have a pathological aversion to. It is always finding opportunities to have a pop at it, insinuating that it is pretty much the creeping euthanasia of decent readers by the faceless bureaucrats of the NHS. No recognition that I have spotted that having a properly documented and supported process to help us die might be a very good thing. For us, for our relatives and for our carers. A process which puts the whole business on a much better footing than the lottery that it tends to be at present.

The DT was helped along in its popping on this occasion by the deployment of the Pathway being incentivised by all kinds of performance indicators, indicators which can look a little crass in this context. But who is to blame for all the indicators? Answer: the management consultants and privatisers for whom the DT has done so much to empower and enrich.

Sadly, another case of irresponsible coverage of important matters by a widely read newspaper which claims to be serious. Claims to be respectable fading. The good news is that, as far as I have been able to see, none of the other national newspapers are picking up on the story. Maybe it really is just a private pathology of the DT; a smelly eddy in the media pond, a smelly eddy without great significance.