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| Bosch job losses were expected, says factory worker Evan Williams says prospects are bleak for the 900 workers made redundant at the Miskin plant in South WalesEvan Williams, 56, who has worked at Bosch's Miskin plant in South Wales for five years, was told yesterday that his place of work would be closing. All the workers knew that Bosch was in trouble but they had been hoping that new orders would come in and their jobs would be saved.Williams said that in October workers were told that there would be two possible outcomes from a 90-day consultation period. Either new orders would be received and only 300 jobs would be cut, or the plant would close, leaving 900 people out of work."My friend said that if [management] had new orders they would be running down the corridors shouting yippee," he says. "People knew that no new orders had come in and were expecting the factory to close."However, Williams refuses to blame Bosch."I'm not angry at them. It was purely economic. They had no choice."Williams and the other workers will now start looking for jobs elsewhere, but as factory after factory closes in Wales, the outlook is bleak."We are all worried for the future because jobs aren't out there as they used to be. This will increase unemployment dramatically," he says."It's a huge blow to Wales itself. What's happened to the recession bottoming out?"Job lossesManufacturing sectorWalesRecessionKathryn Hopkinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Iraq inquiry: 'Gordon Brown cut budget for helicopters' Talk of regime change in Iraq came from US two years before the 2003 invasion and months before 9/11, Chilcot inquiry told. telegraph.co.uk |
Jon McGregor on coroner's courts Close to half of all deaths in England and Wales are sudden, unnatural or unexplained, and referred to a coroner's court. So why do we know so little about what goes on there?Michael Stansfield was lying on a sofa in the hallway of his flat when they found his body. He was still warm, but he wasn't breathing. The housing association staff who had come looking for him called the ambulance, and the police, and when the ambulance arrived Stansfield was declared dead at the scene. It was 1 April 2009. He was 43. The police examined the scene and found evidence of heroin use; the staff confirmed that Stansfield was known to have used drugs. There was no record of next of kin, so none was contacted. His body was taken away to the hospital mortuary and the coroner was informed.In England and Wales, the coroner must be informed of any death within his or her jurisdiction that is sudden, unnatural, unexplained, or for which a doctor has been unable to certify the cause. Approaching half of all deaths fit these criteria: the Nottingham coroner's court, one of the busiest in the country, opens inquiries into around 6,000 deaths a year. In most cases, those will be limited to contacting the dead person's GP, discussing medical history and allowing a death certificate to be issued; if the GP is unable to give a cause of death, or if there is any uncertainty about the circumstances, the coroner can order a postmortem examination, and will often be able to issue a death certificate without further inquiry. But if the death is not found to be from natural causes, or if there is remaining uncertainty about the circumstances, an inquest will be formally opened, witness statements gathered, evidence collected and a date for an inquest hearing set.I first visited Nottingham coroner's court in 2008, as research for a novel I was working on. The administrator asked which inquest I wanted to attend. "It depends what you're interested in," he said, turning the pages of a large desk diary. "We've got a road traffic and an industrial tomorrow morning, a hanging in the afternoon. On Wednesday we've got a baby and another road traffic. Thursday's quiet." As an introduction to the dailiness of sudden death, this was hard to beat.I was fascinated, then, by the work being done in the coroner's office, on the public's behalf but almost entirely out of the public eye; the bureaucratic ritual with which quiet lives and ordinary deaths were being held up to the light of scrutiny and entered into the records of the state. It felt strange that an institution with such a long history, and a key role in civil society, would have such a low public profile. I was intrigued by the stories I'd glimpsed on that first visit, so last April, with the novel finished, I went back to learn more.When Beverley Brealey's mother, Victoria, died, on 8 May 2008, it was almost a year before the inquest was held. "All that time waiting just delayed our grieving process," Beverley said. "We couldn't move on without getting some answers about what had happened in that hospital."Victoria Brealey was 62 when she died, in the Nottingham hospital where she was being treated for bone cancer. Her death was sudden, and followed what had seemed a routine procedure; the family immediately felt that something had gone wrong, that, as Beverley puts it, "she wasn't meant to die". Within hours, Beverley had been contacted by the coroner's office to say they were in receipt of her mother's body and were ordering a postmortem examination. She was pleased, she said: she didn't feel the hospital was giving her family the answers they were looking for.The family were kept informed while they waited for the inquest; they were given the results of the postmortem examination and were able to ask questions about the investigation. They were offered the opportunity to visit the court before the hearing, so they would know what to expect, but Beverley's father didn't feel able to face it.On the day, the family arrived early and were shown into a side room. "That was a bit daunting," Beverley said. "It felt like we were being kept out of the way of the witnesses." What had she thought the court was going to look like? "I don't know. I thought it was going to be a proper court, like you see on television. But it wasn't. It was just a room."The courtroom is long and narrow and simply furnished: a dozen short rows of soft chairs, a table for the witnesses, a desk for the press and a raised bench for the coroner. There are jugs of water on the coroner's bench and press desk, and a box of tissues on the witness table. Tall windows look out over a busy road which runs past the station; in the hushed minutes before an inquest, the noise from the street – music, shouting, buses starting and stopping – can be so intrusive that the windows have to be kept closed on even the warmest days.I watched as the clerk showed people to their seats: a journalist from the local paper, two solicitors with wheeled cases full of files, half a dozen doctors and other hospital representatives, and, finally, the Brealeys, a dozen strong, squeezing into the front three rows. They sat, and whispered, and shuffled through their papers. They shifted in their chairs. The clock moved slowly towards 10.The clerk told everyone to stand and the coroner for Nottingham, Dr Nigel Chapman, walked in, took his seat at the bench and opened the inquest. One by one, the doctors were called to the witness table. There was no attempt to explain the background to the case – everyone there knew what had happened – but gradually the story emerged: Mrs Brealey, who had been receiving treatment for bone cancer, had died from perforations to her bowel within hours of being given a sigmoidoscopy (an internal examination of the bowel). The witnesses, guided by Chapman, went through the medical history, referring to thick folders of notes and occasionally looking up at the family. It became clear that the possibility of a connection between the sigmoidoscopy and Mrs Brealey's death was the underlying focus of all the questions, and the reason the family were leaning forward so intently, folding their arms and shaking their heads and tutting every now and again. The coroner kept coming back to this point, taking care to ensure the discussion could be readily understood by the family. ("When you say the larger perforation was 'in the transverse colon' – that's right round the bend, isn't it?") Was Mrs Brealey in pain after her examination, he asked. Could her cancer treatment have affected her bowels? Why was there such a delay between her first report of abdominal pains and her diagnosis? And could the registrar explain, he asked, in a dramatic crescendo that prompted gasps from the family, why one of the times in Mrs Brealey's medical notes had been altered?But the witnesses from the hospital were also encouraged to detail the extent of Mrs Brealey's illness, and the steps they had taken to treat her. At one point, the family's solicitor asked why she had become so ill when she had been diagnosed with "mild myeloma". On the contrary, her doctor said, the diagnosis was "multiple myeloma". She was in serious pain; her illness was not responding to treatment, her prognosis was not good. He turned to the family and gently emphasised the point: "Mrs Brealey did not have a mild illness."After two hours, Chapman moved to his summing up. He commented on the delays in treatment and diagnosis between Mrs Brealey's examination and her death. He noted that the larger of the two bowel perforations had occurred naturally, making a verdict of accidental death impossible. But the internal examination and its aftermath were not entirely unrelated, he added, ruling out a verdict of natural causes. "We simply do not and cannot know exactly what led to this death," he said, using a phrase I was to hear him repeat throughout the week I attended his inquests. It seemed an obvious truth, and one that left the family little comfort. He returned an open verdict, and offered his deepest condolences.The Brealeys left the court and went to the cafe across the road. "We were quite deflated," Beverley said. "We just sat there looking at each other. We weren't sure what had gone off. It was shorter than we'd expected, and traumatic, having to relive the whole thing again. Dr Chapman was very fair, he did a good job, asked good questions and really put one of the doctors in knots. But I wanted answers and solutions, and I didn't get them."The family's solicitor has advised them not to pursue a legal case, for lack of evidence, but Beverley is still writing to the hospital, still hoping for an acknowledgment that something went wrong, an apology. "I don't think open verdicts help families," she said. "I think the coroner needs to pursue it further until he gets a proper verdict. Somebody's got to be at fault, haven't they?"Dr Chapman has been the coroner for Nottingham since 1993. A briskly spoken man in his late 50s, with a headmasterish air, he gives the impression of being at pains to conceal both a deep compassion and the pride he feels in his work. One of the first things he told me was that coroners are not allowed to apportion blame. "People still sometimes come with a lot of expectations. They think that, like the big lottery finger, I'm going to point to somebody and say, 'It's your fault.' That's not my role. My role is to hear all the facts. If you want to blame somebody, there are other courts in which to do it." It's something families can find hard to accept, he said.We were sitting by the window of his large, open-plan office, looking out at commuters emerging from the station. It was 7.30 on a Monday morning and Chapman was glancing through the reports that had come in over the weekend – deaths in a care home, in a public park, in hospital, a young man found by his parents at home – and making notes for his staff to follow up. This was a quiet Monday, as spring Mondays usually are. In winter there can be 50 reports coming in over a weekend, rising to 150 after the Christmas break. "Occasionally," he had told me earlier, "I get a new financial wizard in the council who writes and says, 'We're going to knock 15% off your budget next year.' And I write back and say, 'Thank you very much. Will you tell 15% of the local population not to die?' "Chapman's reputation locally, particularly among medical professionals, is rather stern; he sees his duty, in part, as uncovering their mistakes. ("When it comes to record-keeping," he said, "as far as I'm concerned, if they haven't written it, they haven't done it.") He is clearly conscious of his image as a public office-holder: he makes a point of wearing his wig and gown to civic events, and is careful to avoid anything that could bring the office into disrepute ("I drive very slowly; I don't drink"). And he has been known to open the talks he gives about his work by fixing the audience with a grim stare and announcing, "Every dead body in Nottinghamshire belongs to me."I spoke to Chapman on a number of occasions during the week I was there, usually in the office while he was also dealing with telephone inquiries from pathologists, police officers and members of the public, or signing documents, or advising officers and administrators dealing with awkward situations. And though he was scrupulous about never discussing ongoing cases ("Everything out there is public," he said, pointing towards the courtroom, "everything in here is not"), I wondered whether there might be any past cases he was able to discuss – were any particularly memorable?He thought for a moment. "Every case is important to somebody, therefore it's important to me. Clearly, some cases are easier than others, some more memorable. But each, I would hope, is treated with sincerity and the dignity it deserves."He started to gather up his files, then turned back to me. "I can quote you one. With suicide, you have to be satisfied that someone intended to die. It's not just the act; they have to intend to die. And there was a case with a very old lady who took some pills, and she was quite confused, and I thought she'd taken them because she was confused. But then I had a letter from her husband, years later, which said, 'I have committed suicide. Don't mess up my inquest like you did my wife's.' So, you know, you can't always win."Every case might be important to somebody, as Chapman says, but only some cases are deemed important enough to bring camera crews to the courthouse steps, and to fill the court with journalists and solicitors, and be reported in the national press. Bethany Townsend's inquest, held the day after Victoria Brealey's, was one of those.Bethany was six when she died, suffering from acute chronic kidney failure and other complications, on 22 January 2007. Her father, teacher and GP were called to give evidence as the court pieced together the narrative of her last weeks: a series of oversights, administrative failings and errors of judgment that meant a girl weighing just 15kg at the time of her first appointment with the GP – when she was reported as drinking excessively, bed-wetting, not eating and being lethargic – wasn't referred to a specialist until three and a half weeks later; a referral of which her father was informed, by awful coincidence, on the evening she died.The GP, who had failed to ensure a blood test was taken and an urgent referral made, and had kept Bethany's urine sample in a fridge over the weekend instead of sending it straight to the lab, was the focus of sustained questioning at the hearing. But there was something quietly impressive about the way she faced up to her responsibilities in the courtroom and acknowledged the mistakes she had made: "That was an error of judgment," she said more than once. "I have since altered my practice." (Chapman commented on this later, saying it had made the whole inquest easier for everyone and was one of the few positive aspects of the case. "The ones you have to worry about are the doctors who sit there and refuse to accept they've done anything wrong. They're the ones who aren't going to learn from their mistakes.")Towards the end of the hearing, a consultant paediatric kidney specialist was called to give evidence, and asked a simple question: would Bethany have survived had she had a blood test soon after her first appointment? "Absolutely," he said with a devastating lack of hesitation. The family's solicitor pressed the point: what was the latest opportunity at which Bethany's life could have been saved? "Accepting that she may have required dialysis and a kidney transplant," he said, "I would say her life could have been saved up to about two or three days before her death." There was a long, winded silence in the court.The next day, Chapman showed me the press reports. He'd returned a narrative verdict, an option that leaves the coroner free to declare exactly how the death occurred, and had kept it as brief as possible so that it would be quoted in full: Bethany's death, he'd said, "was caused by a natural disease which was both preventable and treatable". This was intended to highlight the failures and omissions that had preceded her death, but in many of the press reports his verdict had been abbreviated to the almost meaningless "caused by a natural disease". He consoled himself with the comments made by the family's solicitor that they were "grateful... that the circumstances surrounding her death have been made public".I wondered whether cases such as this ever affected him or his staff emotionally. Obviously they must get used to dealing with sudden and tragic deaths, and develop a distance, but with a young child and such an avoidable death? "No," he said, briskly. "No. This is a job. You can feel tremendous sympathy for the family, and express it in court, but you can't let it get to you. You can't."There were no camera crews on the courthouse steps for Michael Stansfield's inquest, held on 24 April 2009, three weeks after his death. There were no family members leaning forward in their seats; no family or friends at all. Instead, it was attended by the housing association staff who had found his body, the detective who led the police investigation and a journalist from the Nottingham Evening Post. The proceedings were brief. Chapman outlined the report of the postmortem examination, which had found death was caused by a heroin overdose. The housing association staff described the circumstances in which they found his body, and what little they knew about him: he had suffered from mental health problems for a long time and was due to see a doctor on the day he died. The detective described the findings at the scene, concluding that no one else had been involved and there was no indication of suicide.After summarising the evidence, Chapman asked the journalist to publish an appeal for any of Stansfield's family members to come forward. "Otherwise," he said, "we'll just have to see what we can do for him ourselves." He returned a verdict of accidental death, and left the court to begin making arrangements for the funeral.• Jon McGregor's new novel, Even The Dogs, is published by Bloomsbury on February 1 at £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.LawHealthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Culture hub to make way for football Preston sport archive to be set up in popular exhibition centre that drew 250,000 visitors a yearIt has been innovative, eclectic and that rare thing: a post-millennium project success story. But now the finishing touches are being put to the final popular culture show at Manchester's Urbis – for the centre is about to be booted out for football.Redundancy notices have gone out to two-thirds of the staff at the Manchester exhibition centre and the outgoing chief executive, Vaughan Allen, says the process has been akin to grieving."The thing is we haven't failed," Allen said. "Commercially, our current year will probably be our best ever trading year. It's very hard to say to people you've been a great success but we're going to make you redundant, we hope there will be a job for you in 12 to 18 months' time."Urbis, it was generally felt, had found its feet. With 250,000 visitors a year coming to see its ever-changing self-curated shows on subjects ranging from Manga to video games to urban gardening, it was a success story.That was not always the case. Urbis (Latin for "of the city") was built in 2002 and is easily one of the most visually striking buildings in Manchester, resembling a glass ski slope with an indoor funicular.The original idea was for Urbis to be a museum of the city but few really knew what that meant. It became, like so many post-millennium projects, something of a white elephant. Four years ago, with the arrival of Allen, a former style journalist, that changed. "We banned the word museum. The word museum does mean things in cabinets, and we didn't have any," Allen said.The focus shifted towards representing popular culture in all its forms – fashion, music, television, gardening and so on – and having lots of changing shows that would be "zeitgeisty" and surprising. "We got to a point after a couple of years where we suddenly realised what we had created was a Sunday supplement," said Allen.It seemed to be working: visitor numbers rose steadily and the place was popular with a young demographic group.Then football came along. The National Museum of Football in Preston was in serious financial trouble and on the verge of closure. Its trustees approached Manchester city council, the main funders of Urbis, in the summer, and things moved quickly. After it's final exhibition, the building will close to reopen as the new football museum in the summer 2011.Urbis was working, its reputation was growing, people said, but times were tough and, in terms of public spending, would get tougher. Wouldn't football, in the long run, be more bankable?There were arguments. Ken Hudson, leader at Preston city council, said the football museum trustees had "given two fingers" to the people of Preston and Lancashire. Artists and people working in the creative industries in Manchester also complained, setting up Facebook campaigns against it. But the lure of football won.It will not be a case of just transplanting the Preston exhibits to Manchester in the hope more people will be interested in seeing them; lessons must "be learned", drawing on the way Urbis handled popular culture, said Allen.However, he is rueful. He hopes a property developer will consider a new version of Urbis elsewhere in the city. Or even in other places in the UK."The real victory would be, in two or three years, eight, 10, 12 galleries in Britain looking at popular culture … it is ludicrous that there are no other galleries really supporting or showing it," said Allen. "We shied away from taking an academic approach to a subject and we liked doing stuff that was still alive and still happening, and I think that's an attitude that will go over to football." The new football museum will certainly have enough subjects, Preston being home to both the Fifa and FA collections.Meanwhile, in the centre's main galleries, Urbis' head of creative programmes, Pollyanna Clayton-Stamm, is leading the mad rush to prepare the final show, a display on the "best of Urbis". Downstairs the hip-hop show continues, and upstairs a nostalgic look at Manchester TV is busy with people lounging on sofas watching Shameless, and Coronation Street.Clayton-Stamm and her team will be working at the football museum. "I do have mixed feelings," she said. "But I am looking forward to it. There is a huge potential with football and we'll be bringing an Urbis take to it. We're going out on a high. Walking in to Urbis this morning and seeing all the galleries filled with exhibitions is an immense feeling, I'm so proud of what we have achieved."In his notes for the final exhibition Allen refers to the best popular culture being "of the moment and short". He said: "You should always end with the public wanting more. The Jesus and Mary Chain got it right, they never played for more than 30 minutes."MuseumsArts policyArts fundingMark Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Sunday Times editor and Carter-Ruck partner on libel law reform panel The Sunday Times's John Witherow and law firm Carter-Ruck's Andrew Stephenson appointed to government panel on libelThe Sunday Times editor John Witherow and a partner from the law firm Carter-Ruck are among those who have been appointed to a government panel considering changes to the law on libel, the lord chancellor, Jack Straw, said today.Straw said the group, made up of senior lawyers, newspaper executives and scientists, would look into concerns that the current law was having a "chilling effect" on freedom of expression.Members of the group include Witherow, the long serving editor of the Sunday Times; Andrew Stephenson, a partner at Carter-Ruck and the libel specialist; and Desmond Browne QC, former chairman of the Bar Council; Robin Esser, the executive editor of the Daily Mail; Jo Glanville, the editor of Index on Censorship; Tony Jaffa, the head of the media team at solicitors Foot Anstey; and Marcus Partington, the chair of the Media Lawyers Association and the legal director, Mirror Group Newspapers.Also on the panel are Jonathan Heawood, the director of English PEN; Gillian Phillips, the director of editorial legal services at the Guardian – part of the group that also publishes MediaGuardian.co.uk; the Medical Research Council chief executive, Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, and Sarah Jones, the BBC head of litigation and intellectual property.The libel law review group will be chaired by Rowena Collins Rice, the Ministry of Justice's chief legal officer, and is expected to report in the middle of March.Last month the ministry set formal terms of reference for the review: to "consider whether the law of libel, including the law relating to libel tourism, in England and Wales needs reform, and if so to make recommendations as to solutions".The review will look at whether a specialist libel tribunal should be established to resolve defamation cases out of court. The issue of whether academics and scientists can defend their remarks on the basis of fair comment or in the public interest will also be examined.The wide terms of reference will also allow the working party to look into whether the burden of proof should be shifted from defendant to plaintiff, as is the case in countries such as the US.Other issues for examination include whether large and medium-sized corporations would have to prove malicious falsehood for a libel claim to succeed. It may also look at the implications of the internet for libel.The working party would also address issues raised in a joint report prepared in November by Index on Censorship and English PEN, a charity that supports persecuted writers. John Kampfner, chief executive of Index, warned at the time that if the government did not reform the laws "we're at risk of becoming a global pariah".The new panel will also look at considering the case for capping the level of damages that courts can award. The Index/PEN joint report recommended a libel damages cap of £10,000. The inquiry originally looked as if it would be confined to the issue of "libel tourism", but it seems officials believed it would not be possible to restrict the inquiry in this way.The only issue that will be excluded are the costs of defamation proceedings because they are already the subject of a separate justice ministry consultation led by the court of appeal judge Lord Justice Jackson.Earlier this month Jackson singled out media law as one of the areas where costs were highest in a 557-page report on the cost of all civil court proceedings.Jackson said media organisations regularly paid four times the cost of damages in libel cases because of the success fees charged by lawyers and the insurance fees.Straw subsequently published proposals last week to cut the fees lawyers who sue the media can charge by 90%.• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".Media lawPress freedomJohn WitherowSunday TimesNational newspapersNewspapersNewspapers & magazinesJack StrawLawJason DeansStephen Brookguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |