Rank has its privileges, such as not having to bother about keeping the rest of us safe
Punishment for any senior person over the release in error of a dangerous man is about as likely as the sky falling in
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The Barrie Hudson Column
Barrie Hudson is a known quantity when it comes to writing words. Sometimes he even spells them correctly. In fact he has been writing words in the Swindon area for more than two decades. First of all for the Swindon Advertiser and then for Swindon Link and now for The Ink. Here are some of his words…
When being important means never having to be any use whatsoever
As most of us are aware, the remorseless sexual offender Hadush Kebatu, who attacked a woman and a child and subjected them to degrading, squalid ordeals, is now back in custody.
This follows his having mistakenly been allowed to leave that custody when he should have been transferred from jail, where he was serving a customarily derisory 12-month sentence, to a specialist facility pending deportation.
In light of this, I’ve decided to set out a modest mental exercise consisting of a small number of scenarios, which I would like you all to consider and then decide which is the most likely among them to happen:
First Scenario: The troupe of slobbering, useless incompetents responsible for unleashing this man into the society to which he is clearly a danger are punished in any meaningful way, shape or form.
For a start, the prison service personnel who were supposed to arrange the transfer of Kebatu from one facility to another, but who somehow not only released him from custody but apparently left him to vanish for several days, are immediately called into the relevant office at their place of work, told to hand in their equipment and change out of their uniforms, and ordered to leave the premises.
If they experience any difficulty or confusion while leaving the premises, a colleague suspected of having an IQ greater than their own shoe size, assuming such a colleague can be located at short notice, is enlisted to help them find the relevant door.
In addition, an immediate investigation begins, an investigation tasked with forcefully and mercilessly interrogating every manager in the relevant chain of command, whether at a local, regional or national level.
Anybody and everybody in that chain of command who has demonstrated so much as a scintilla of ineptitude is chucked out of their employment without so much as a by-your-leave.
If this procedure happens to leave any inconvenient gaps in the management structure, a recruitment process for replacements begins. In the meantime, the roles of each dismissed manager are filled by stopgaps of comparable or superior aptitude. A box of armpit hair, for example. Or a baboon cruelly derided among its fellow baboons as not being exactly what one might call qualified to join the baboon equivalent of Mensa.
Or a blob of chewing gum peeled from beneath a pub table. Or a prawn from the remains of a sandwich found in a bin outside a bus station.
Having got rid of the front line staff and management directly involved in this calamitous, contemptuous affront to public safety, the process of retribution is expanded to encompass any Home Office or other Government official even peripherally responsible, not to mention any politicians of this or any previous administration who fall into the same category.
Irrespective of who those officials or politicians know, who they or their parents or grandparents went to school or university with, irrespective of favours owed, favours done, nods and winks given, promises of jobs for life and cut glass pensions, promises of knighthoods, damehoods, peerages and so on, not a single culpable person is left in post.
‘Scorched earth’ would be an understatement.
