Nurse sacked over press interview

Mark Steel has a sadly unsurprising tale to tell in the Independent today, You can't go round telling people you've been sacked.

A nurse has been sacked for

• speaking to the press about 24 mental health patients being kept in 20 beds,
• for telling people, after she had been suspended, that she had been suspended
• for telling people she was innocent
• for allowing the press to print misleading statements about her case.

No you could not make it up.

You know I stood during the silence on Remembrance Day observations on Sunday and thought about the sacrifice that all those people have made for this country and others - including, only weeks ago, a young man, originally based locally, killed in Iraq, leaving behind his wife pregnant with their first child - and I asked myself if they would now consider that sacrifice worthwhile, for a country

• where mass surveillance is now routine,
• we criminalise people for reading out the names of the war dead at the Cenotaph in central London, just as the local church minister was doing on Sunday
  
• we have multitudes of fear-driven 'war-on-terror' laws and initiatives
• we operate a shoot to kill policy when there is a panic over the possibility that someone might be a terrorist, as opposed to a diabetic in a coma
  
• we pay private security firms to beat up immigrants, which it might be argued is not as bad as the US where the government pays private mercenaries to shoot innocent people
  
• we're introducing massively invasive biometric identity cards
• and huge central databases of personal data, incapable of being secured by any computer scientist anywhere in the world
• we facilitate rendition for torture
• we complain the longest detention without charge period in the Western world - 28 days - is too short
• we paint human rights legislation as an unnecessary and irritating constraint on the power of the state to "do something" about terrorism and immigration
• we fail to implement privacy legislation appropriately and still see it as an overreaching barrier to doing whatever we like with personal data
  
• shored up by the climate of fear promoted by politicians and the media, we demonise whole communities simply because of their race or religion
• the government treats privacy of personal medical data as an irritant in need of eradication
• we treat children like criminals
  
• and now nurses can get sacked for claiming they did nothing wrong

I could go on but it is way too depressing. Yet I still have to believe the sacrifice of those killed in war has to have been worth it. My younger son is really interested in the Second World War at the moment and he has concluded that war and wars "are just so stupid, dad... there were much better ways to fix those things..." My kids and their friends are a lot smarter than me and hopefully they will have the confidence, the perseverance and the strength to use those 'better ways'.