The Cambridge English Dictionary defines ‘expedience’ as ‘the situation in which something is helpful or useful in a particular situation, but sometimes not morally acceptable’. The consequences of such moral shortfalls are unfolding in long-running controversies the Gazette continues to cover.
In Rotherham, police and social services made the expedient choices which have now been set out in Baroness Casey’s audit of group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse. The way in which judgements were made on how the law should proceed wound up reinforcing rape and child abuse myths. While much has been made of a race lens in these cases, the course of action taken by the authorities (no action also being a decision) showed a wider expediency embedded in our system: misogyny. Had the girls and women who came forward been treated as credible, and their position understood, action would have followed.
What else? In the infected blood scandal, what is now the Department of Health and Social Care took the path of expediency for decades – the issue being at first an embarrassment, and then with its scale increasingly obvious, too big and too expensive to comfortably admit. Corporate expediency informed the Post Office’s response to the Horizon scandal.
What is striking in such episodes where a course of action seemed ‘advisable on practical rather than moral grounds’ (switching to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition) is how much worse that choice proves in the long run. When legal remedies follow at a distance of time, the correction is far from practical.
People, including (allegedly) lawyers who had the chance to ‘do the right thing’ and did at best nothing, find their reputations shredded. The cost of such expediency is measured in pain, death, public trust, the cost of inquiries, and the price of compensation and the clean-up.
In all these cases, it seemed difficult for decision-makers to choose integrity over expediency. Yet within the law the right choices could have been taken, including a view of the law which, in the case of Rotherham’s grooming gangs, took an accurate view on the position and credibility of the victims.
After all, the advice, ‘Whoever walks in integrity walks securely’ (Proverbs 10:9), has been available for a while.
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