The real mistake is if they keep their jobs

Wow. According to the Telegraph, here’s the situation report two weeks after it was revealed that over a 16-year period, 1400 girls were systematically raped and abused by a group of men in Rotherham (South Yorkshire), while police, politicians and public welfare representatives did nothing:

In a nutshell, those on whose watch this happened for years are still courageously admitting that mistakes were indeed made, by...someone, but that they personally really didn’t know what was happening and therefore their responsibility is limited, and of course, their moral culpability is nil.

The director of children’s services (and, in the context, ain’t that an oxymoron of a title?) told a parliamentary committee, and I swear I am not making this up, “All of us could have done better.”

And, therefore, she should keep her job.

The town council’s chief executive also slithered up to the committee and admitted that key files with details on the years of organized child rape by “men of Pakistani heritage” have gone missing, unaccountably. (He won’t specify whether they were destroyed, just that “they are not within the council’s archives.” Which is why you bloody well need cloud back-up.)

But he never saw two of the reports on the abuse-on-an-industrial-scale that had been submitted to authorities (one in 2003 and one in 2006), so, really…not his fault. Year after year after year, not his fault.

The chief police officer of the area doesn't appear to have graced Parliament with his presence, but he's definitely singing from the same songbook. About knowing nothing.

What’s interesting to me is the “we’re not criminal, just criminally incompetent” explanation. It’s not like we haven’t seen that before from people trying to evade prison sentences. I’ll be curious to see if it’s a good career strategy.

Because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. And these people have demonstrated that they know how to do just that one thing very, very well.