Decisions Decisions

People in seniority make decisions.

The chief executive of Bucks Healthcare (Stoke Mandeville) hospital two years ago denied that Jimmy Savile had the unfettered access that he did , which was essentially the run of the place. 

Go on, Jimmy...abuse as many children as you like, just keep bringing the cash in.

She blinkered her ears to being properly informed.

It was her job to know and she didn't find out.

Now she says the information wasn't available.

Well, you never hear when you close your ears.

You never see when you close your eyes.

She needs to resign.

She won't.

Poor decisions. Poor decision-making. Poor choices.

Wrong person. 

Wrong job.

The chief executive at Stoke Mandeville made choices. 

Breathtakingly poor decisions. And there is no reason at all to think the tacit condoning of Savile were the only poor decision she's made.

That should be enough to terminate her.

And it should enough to terminate her hospital.

Stoke Mandeville Hospital needs to be shut down. It is the sexual abuse hospital and the template for poor decision-making.

Schools are closed all the time when they failed to hit some ephemeral educational targets.

There is no place in the UK for the sort of values that Stoke Mandeville represents.

The point about decisions it that it is not just enough to make them. You have to make the right ones.

You have to be the sort of person who can make the right ones.

All voices can be heard but not all decisions are capable ones.

Politicians, senior policemen, lawyers, judges, make decisions all the time. But frequently, they are not good ones.

The reason is this.

Decisions are not the same as choices.

The concept of decision-making infers the concept of decisions being good ones.

Choices don't. They are just choices.

But all choices are not equal.

There is, or used to be an NHS website called Choices. There is an entire lobby of alternative bogus health remedies from homoeopathy to the Liverpool Care Pathway that consider themselves an equal and equivalent choice. 

People think they have the right to choose them. They do of course. But they don't have the right to make the taxpayer pay for them. And they always want that.

They want you to pay for every bogus treatment they think should be their choice to obtain for free.

These demands have helped to privatise (by which I mean sacrifice) the NHS.

Jihadi John has been unmasked as Mohammed the Briton, a serial beheader of innocent people, and yet only a handful of years ago, a charity CAGE to whom you may have given money, supported him. Only yesterday, they described him as a "beautiful man" and his cocky advocate shed a tear. The tear was for beautiful Mohammed the victim not merciless Mohammed the ruthless executioner and certainly not for the innocent victims he practised his beheading skills on. 

And why?

There's no mention of choice.

There is no mention of poor decision-making.

There is no mention of being bad. 

Or evil.

The only mention is of being radicalised.

Radicalised? Really. Radicalised?

What's that?

I thought we stopped talking about brainwashing in the 1950s? It was universally discredited.

Is that what we are talking about?

Or are we talking about recruitment by some charismatic Svengali? Some bearded crusader who floats around in a white smock performing minor miracles.

But of course a white smock wouldn't be his choice. It would be the black balaclava of cowardice. The full face mask of the guilty. And in the photograph with him will be the Kalashnikov of justice and truth.

Radicalised? No. 

Poor choices. Poor decision-making. Lack of morality. 

If we are going to allow the terminology of 'brainwashing' as a weak defence of weak Muslims, we have to allow it as an excuse for every other criminal. 

Stop them first. Analyse later. Thats' why we have history books. When you analyse badly you legitimise. That is a different prospect altogether. Lose sight of who the victims are adn you are qualifying to be redicalised yourself.  You are certainly not qualified to judge further.

But we don't  allow the brainwashing defence. We don't even consider it. It is never, ever mentioned. Even the crafty loophole lawyers steer clear of it, barrign teh occasioanl reference to Stockholm syndrome. I don't know of a brainwashing syndrome backed up by colourful MRI findings.

We might be sold the excuse that radicalisation is a word that has crept in because it is supposed to represent to some bigger ideal.

But that doesn't mean the human brain works differently in these people than it does in everybody else.

Poor decisions. Lack of morality. Poor choices.

There are no ultra-persuasive super-gurus. The Muslim children and adults at risk are frequently radicalised by "Internet". But you don't feel the breath of the Internet. You don't feel the touch and the timbre of a webpage. There's nothing here speaks to a new word of radicalisation that doesn't fit in with the tried and tested understanding of what weak human beings are. Children with tearful parents who managed to bring up their children without ethics and without pity for their fellow man. 

I'm sure they got some things right. Study hard. Earn pots of money. Write to grandma on her birthday. But the bigger picture of parenting was totally lost for simplistic rituals.

That void grew and that very determination that they had been instilled with by their parents developed into a personal desire for more influence. 

Their choice? To be part of a power that delivers beheadings, misery, death, disaster and fear to others.

Don't tell me these schoolgirls that are racing to the bosom of Isis are victims.

If they are then they are the victims of poor decision-making with which they have been instilled. 

The reasons for that are closer to their home than you would like to think.