Millions of people in Britain and in countries around the world have been gripped with emotion over the past few weeks trying to fathom how a young girl who had a burning ambition to have a career working with children could turn into a heartless killer of defenceless babies.
Lucy Letby was born in 1990, attended a local school and sixth-form college, selecting subjects she believed would help her achieve her goals and aspirations.
She told the jury at her trial: “I have always wanted to work with children,” adding she had chosen A-levels “which would best support that career”.
She was the first person in her family to go to university and studied nursing for three years at the University of Chester, and during her studies, completed numerous work placements. The majority were based at the Countess of Chester Hospital, either on the children’s ward or the neonatal unit.
She qualified as a Band 5 nurse in September 2011 and went on to start working full-time at the hospital from January 2012 before qualifying to work with intensive care babies in the spring of 2015.
There was nothing, in her early career to suggest she would go on to systematically kill or attempt to kill numerous babies by injecting them with air, insulin or force-feeding them with milk.
So, what on earth went so badly wrong for Letby? She still maintains her innocence, but the evidence points undeniably to her guilt. Back in the past such actions would be dismissed as the work of the Devil. But that is nonsense. Something in her past must have triggered the insanity. Was it some kind of rejection, some form of experimentation? I hope that one day she will allow psychiatrists to work with her to discover a cause, so that it can be identified among others early and be dealt with.
The Letby case has much in common with that of the Greater Manchester doctor Harold Shipman, who was convicted of murdering 15 of his patients and left questions over the deaths of up to 250 more.
My wife, Eileen, who was a nurse, escaped Shipman’s reign of death – she and her family were patients of his. He, like Lucy Letby, was a most likeable person, but he systematically injected victims with a lethal dose of the painkiller diamorphine and then signed death certificates attributing the incident to natural causes.
There is another sad similarity in the cases. Shipman had many more deaths in his practice than others, but it took far too long for colleagues to raise questions. With the Letby case, while consultants questioned the number of baby deaths when she was around, their concerns were ignored by senior managers and, for further humiliation, consultants were forced to give Letby a written apology for questioning her competence.
And here we have the first obvious failure in the system. Who are the people best equipped to run a hospital, doctors and senior nursing staff i.e. a matron, or very highly paid bureaucrats and local politicians within Trusts? I think the answer is obvious.
NHS trusts are public sector bodies established by parliamentary order by the secretary of state for health to provide healthcare services to the NHS. They have a board of executive and non-executive directors, and are accountable to the secretary of state. Members of Trusts could be retired business people or councillors and probably have little if any medical experience. In my book a total nonsense that they can overrule senior medical staff. Good one Tories (under John Major) for dreaming up that nail in the NHS coffin!
And there you have it – the top brass in true don’t rock the boat brigade form, sat on their hands not wanting to “damage the good name of the hospital”.
Sound familiar to you? It happens time and time again, senior, well-paid bosses, close ranks and do their best to eliminate or ridicule the whistle-blower.
What can be done to stop it? If it can be proved that the top brass deliberately ignored a legitimate complaint and put their own self-interest first, and as a result babies died, then that should be the subject of a criminal investigation, and if proved they should be jailed for a long time.
It’s on record that top brass at the hospital ignored consultants’ concerns for months, failed to call in police and in that time Letby was free to carry out more killings. The top brass should be held responsible and police should be investigating.
Now I turn to Letby and other criminals being allowed to refuse to enter the dock to hear victims’ statements, the judge’s summing up and the sentence. It’s a disgrace and it is beyond belief how it could be allowed to happen.
Britain has become far too soft on criminals. They should be forced into the dock and if they cause trouble, then Tazer them. They would soon get the message.
People try to say that the human race is more caring now. I would argue the opposite is the case – and there is more pure selfishness and criminality now than way back. Personally, I believe that if we had public hanging for murder and public birching for all crimes of violence there would be far less crime. Question: Why on earth are we spending millions of pounds every year locking up murderers – I could think of many better ways of spending that money.
Here is one of my biggest hates… Bosses at Britain’s biggest companies saw their pay rise by almost 16% on average last year.
The average pay of top bosses in the UK now stands at 3.91m in 2022, up from £3.38m in 2021.
The average earnings of a FTSE 100 boss were 118 times more than a typical UK worker on £33,000 a year.
It sickens me that bosses sit around boardroom tables, more than happy to see their pay go up by more than double the inflation rate, while they plot to keep workers’ wage rises as low as possible. And as for the government trying to keep public sector workers’ pay rises even lower, is beyond contempt.
I‘m no communist, but we cannot keep seeing the rich get richer and the poor poorer – it’s obscene, and in the end will lead to extreme trouble in the UK.
