Conservatives and Sharon Shoesmith

Sharon Shoesmith’s appeal judgement has been generating a lot of debate since the court delivered it on Thursday. With a few exceptions, the commentary seems to be splitting along ideological lines. For the most part, the right-wing columnists and bloggers are attacking Ms Shoesmith while the left-wing ones are defending her. Some of this, perhaps, reflects the tribalism of modern politics. These days, it seems, to be authentically right-wing you have to hate the public sector and to be authentically left-wing you have to support it, whatever it does. Maybe the reason so many on the right have attacked Sharon Shoesmith is simply because she was a public servant who will now be getting a hefty payoff.

I’m not going to comment on whether or not Sharon Shoesmith was incompetent. The information in the public domain has been so muddied by the politics and by the bone-headed decision to sack her in breach of the law that we will never hear the full truth about this case. 

However, there is something very un-conservative about the suggestion, implicit in much of the criticism from the right, that social services departments should be able to stop all children from being abused. Traditionally, it has been the left that has aimed for social perfection. Conservatives, by contrast, thought that, whatever governments did, society would always be flawed. The left wanted to build new Jerusalems, make poverty history and eliminate need. Even the more compassionate conservatives believed that the most they could do would be to make the world’s bad parts just a little bit better.

The right-wing press has condemned Sharon Shoesmith for saying that a child’s death doesn’t mean her organisation was in chaos, but, actually, it doesn’t. There have been lots of children killed or seriously injured by abusive carers. As Peter Oborne said a couple of years ago, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the death of Baby P, or of Victoria Climbie.

Some parts of Britain’s cities are dreadful places. Communities have collapsed, migrants come and go and children engage in violent postcode wars. The weak, and even some of the strong, walk in fear. People don’t know who their neighbours are and, in any case, they often change from week to week. It’s sometimes safer to keep yourself to yourself anyway. Laban Tall, for I’m sure it was he though I can’t find the reference, once said that the sixties removed society’s moral scaffolding and the eighties removed its economic scaffolding. The result has been social breakdown and a high rate of family collapse in many areas.

Hidden deep in this morass are some nasty people who like to abuse children. Although most of them are not intellectually bright, they possess the low animal cunning that enables them to cover their tracks. The blurred lines of responsibility between local councils, police forces, GPs and other arms of the state only makes the job of duping the authorities easier. That the over-stretched social workers we charge with looking after this mess manage to stop the abusers at all is a minor miracle. Nevertheless, as Oborne says, social workers are “on the whole, remarkably good at safeguarding children.”

They’ll never be able to protect all of them though. Extra resources, better systems, more power and improved co-operation would probably increase their success rate but social services departments can never eliminate child abuse entirely.

Abused children don’t die because social workers are incompetent, they die because some people are bastards and they live in hell-holes surrounded and protected by other bastards. If we could find a way to get rid of these hell-holes and prevent people from being bastards then the child abuse might stop too. Pragmatic conservatives, though, know that such aspirations are pipe-dreams. 

Which is why the ‘never again’ calls from some on the right are so un-conservative.  Just as we will never make poverty history or free the world from need, we will never stop people from murdering children either. Berating social workers for failing to protect every single child from abuse is the sort of infantile poppycock we usually get from the most ideologically blinkered sections of the left. Conservatives don’t usually fall for that sort of rubbish. What’s so differrent about this case?