Andrew Whitehead 
‘This is a day of shame for the British state’ – powerful words uttered in Parliament this week by Britain’s prime minister. He was delivering an unequivocal public apology in response to an excoriating official report into the country’s most profound health service failure and cover-up. That scandal demonstrated, Rishi Sunak declared, “a decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life”.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
For years, the British health services provided blood products for transfusions which were pooled from large numbers of donors. Much of this blood was imported from the United States where it had, on occasions, been sold by people desperate for money, including drug users. That blood infected 30,000 patients in Britain with HIV or Hepatitis-C and led to the loss of 3,000 lives.
The 2,500 page report into the infected blood scandal compiled by a former High Court judge after six years of hearings and inquiry is brutal: he finds that politicians, health service officials and doctors lied about the risks of contamination, dishonestly insisted that screening and treatment of blood products had been introduced as soon as it was available, and covered-up their deceit for decades by a smokescreen of evasions and half-truths.
“People put their trust in doctors and the government to keep them safe and that trust was betrayed”, said the author of the report, Brian Langstaff. And that was a verdict echoed by Sunak in a contrite statement to MPs. “At every level, the people and institutions in which we place our trust failed in the most harrowing and devastating way’, Sunak said. “On behalf of this and every government stretching back to the 1970s, I am truly sorry”.
The lies and deception were not motived by financial gain; those responsible were not evil people. It’s a tragic tale of bad decisions being buttressed by institutional complacency; of ministers who didn’t ask the difficult questions, or accepted the answers they were given too uncritically; and of governments that quailed from exhuming a scandal for which they may not have been directly responsible and from meeting the compensation demands that would inevitably arise.
Compensation payments from the infected blood scandal are likely to amount to $12 billion. Sunak has pledged that “whatever it costs to deliver [the compensation scheme], we will pay it”. What’s far less certain is whether any of those directly to blame – senior civil servants, medical experts or ministers – will ever be prosecuted and punished.
This is part of a pattern: grave scandals arising from governmental or corporate incompetence or evasion which fester for decades; the government eventually, and reluctantly, instituting an official inquiry; then, when that report reveals the shocking scale of the offence, an abject public apology and compensation payments.
If you want to take the glass-half-full approach, then at least there are mechanisms in British public life which eventually uncover and acknowledge grave failures in governance. There are many nations where inconvenient truths would remain brushed away out of sight. Or to look at it as glass-half-empty, there seems to be something profoundly rotten in a system of governance where institutions which are supposed to serve the public repeatedly make personal and institutional self-interest their priority.
Public confidence in government had already been dented by a scandal over the treatment of sub-postmasters, people who run small local post offices. This again goes back decades. Hundreds of sub-postmasters – many of South Asian heritage – were prosecuted when the new payments software introduced by the corporate Post Office suggested that large sums of money were missing. Post Office bosses knew – or should have known – that there were glitches in the new software, and so the evidence was not sufficiently robust to merit prosecution. But they persisted in taking to court a large number of innocent people: some were jailed; a few took their own lives; and in almost every case, livelihoods and reputations were trashed.
The official inquiry into that episode of mis-governance is still hearing evidence. It was a recent TV drama series which made people aware of the depth of the corporate and official dishonesty. Again, there have been apologies and compensation payments – but (as yet) no criminal charges against those who perpetrated the injustice.
Delving further back, official inquiries instituted after many years of campaigning by those affected have revealed official complicity in a number of incidents: how the police blamed football fans for causing a crush in which dozens died when it was the police themselves who were culpable; how British troops were at fault in a notorious massacre in Northern Ireland the truth about which had been deliberately covered-up; how London police, because of a mix of incompetence and institutional racism, had failed to bring to justice the killers of a young black man stabbed to death while waiting for a bus.
What’s really corrosive is the gnawing anxiety that there must be other shocking scandals still to surface and other cover-ups still underway.
Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC India correspondent.
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