Irritated this morning by reading of a judge taking a local council to task for what was described as the atrocious treatment of a very badly disturbed female teenager, a refugee from a bad part of Iraq.
I dare say the treatment was pretty bad, as is all too often the case for all kinds of mental illness and disability up and down the land, but I find it a bit rich that a highly paid judge sitting up on his throne in all his splendour should be criticising a local council struggling to make ends meet. Until collectively we decide to pay more tax and to put more money into mental health, these things are going to happen - and shooting the messenger, as it were, is not going to help.
PS: I am also reminded that, as Simon Jenkins reminds us from time to time, that the UK is one of the most centralised of the large countries in the world, with our organs of local government having very little power, very little flexibility of action; hardly organs at all. The purse strings and all the other strings are held by central government; a centralisation which probably hinders rather than helps in this present case.
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