Being an employee of the UK Forensic Science Service used to open doors back in the year 2000. Even if you you were too lowly to personally know the top people, you worked for them,: you saw them in corridors and said good morning. People as far away as San Francisco wanted to know about their pioneering DNA techniques, excellence in evidence handling and preservation, in new intellectual approaches like Bayesian statistics. It was like playing for Manchester United (then popular and successful exponents of the game of Association Football)
But lurking in the background was a disease that would kill this particular goose and the golden eggs it laid. “Private sector good, public sector bad” It was a mantra that had taken deadly root in the Thatcher years. The private sector, it held, was full of hard working go getting, sharp- suit- wearing entrepreneurs who cut through the red tape and got things done. Civil servants(the FSS and its predecessors were Civil Service bodies) were lazy, hidebound, slow, risk averse pen pushers who needed nothing so much as a good kick up the backside The result was that anything and everything (except police and armed forces) was sold to private investors. Eventually even the Forensic Science Service went under the hammer. The results are made clear in this story by Hannah Devlin of the Guardian [1] We cannot begin to do justice to the wasteland of failed justice, loss of expertise and collapsing confidence which has resulted. All we can do is quote this extract-and beg you to read the whole thing
Forensic science in England and Wales as currently configured isn’t working for anyone – not for the police, not for the lawyers or for the courts, not for the scientists themselves, and not for the general public who get caught up in the criminal justice system,” said Prof Angela Gallop, co-chair of the Westminster Commission on Forensic Science.
“Like a plane hurtling downwards in what has become known as a ‘graveyard spiral’, with the pilot in desperation making increasingly erratic decisions, it can only be a short time now before it impacts the ground.”
Perhaps the Manchester United metaphor was not so facile. Things sort of function- but at laughable shadow of their former glory.
This is what happens when a country is seized and held by a single doctrine. When the lazy self interested opinions of journalists and the gin sodden flies who hang around golf club bars are substituted for rational policy No one would deny that Forensic Science under the Government had its inefficiencies, or the odd passenger. It contained more than a few fools who loudly praised the tax cuts and bought the gas shares that Thatcherism created. Its even arguable that some industries did benefit from the injection of private capital and techniques (water is not one of them) But like water, the whole sorry mess now needs clearing up. And none of it ,none of it , needed to have happened. That’s the biggest injustice of all.
#forensic science #justice #police #courts #evidence #economics #privatisation #thames water
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