Who’s to blame?

Sometimes shit happens! When are we going to get out of this blame game culture? ‘Oh no another rant’ I hear you say. I need to get this one off my chest though so listen and listen well. The straw that broke this particular camel’s back was the news this week that there has been an inquiry into the emergency services for their action during the 7/7 bombings. The gist of the hearing is that some of the victims were still alive directly after the atrocities, but later died due to the time taken by the emergency services to get to them.

This is a rather sensitive issue so I’m going to state very clearly that my heart goes out to the victim’s families and no one should have to endure the pain they’ve gone through. You can sense a very heavy-hearted ‘but’ coming here …but why do we feel we need to make the emergency service accountable? Isn’t the blame for this one purely put at the door of the terrorists, or expanding on this further, the groups behind funding and training the terrorists. Apparently not. My more cynical side tells me that it’s because a litigation case against Al Qaeda may be difficult to get off the ground. Whereas the emergency services probably will be where the compensation’s at.

I’m not saying these families aren’t entitled to a full inquiry and compensation but I believe there’s a national incident fund set up for these extreme circumstances. People seem to think that there is a magic pot of money for all of these successful claim hearings. There isn’t ok just so everyone is now clear. The money for these compensation claims has to come from somewhere and the holes may be plugged by cutting costs in yes, you’ve guessed it the emergency services. Vicious circle time.

My last point is I’m all for full reviews of these incidents, how else do we learn and improve things. But we need to understand what an outstanding job the emergency services did that day. We could throw money at it so that for the next terrorist attack we’d have the most well-oiled machine. Sounds like a huge expenditure for a rare eventuality to me. Besides, what money is left after Dave from Cheltenham sued the local NHS for £10,000 for slipping on a wet floor at his local A&E?