Introduction

While scandals are relatively rare, sin is common enough. As this book will demonstrate, neither the chronic administrative failings, small carelessnesses and institutional brutality of the long-stay hospital, nor even the abuse of children or the violent deaths of innocent bystanders, are sufficient cause for scandal. This book is about the process whereby such everyday tragedies are transformed into something extraordinary; the process whereby events that are local and personal become national and public; the process whereby the specific comes to stand for the general and where meanings and historical significance become attached to acts and events that at other times might have passed almost unobserved.

While the means whereby scandal is constructed and sustained is a central concern of the book, our particular interest is in how scandals illumine the process whereby public policy is produced and, specifically, welfare policy. The obvious connection between a scandal and the production of welfare policy is the Committee of Inquiry and the workings of such Inquiries are also a key object of our interest. But scandals do not appear in a policy vacuum; rather they develop in very particular contexts at very particular times and it is the complex, reciprocal relationship between scandal, the Public Inquiry and the development of policy with which this book is concerned.

Scandal

It is central to the argument of this book that a scandal is not coterminous with the underlying events from which it springs. Often the events will have been in train for many years before they are construed as scandalous, as in the case of Ely Hospital, the subject of Chapter Three. The underlying events may not even be perceived as ‘sinful’ by those directly involved. On the contrary, they may be the subject of official approval, as in the case of the Staffordshire Child Care Inquiry described in Chapter Nine. Even where the underlying event quite clearly represents a fundamental violation of shared moral norms – as in cases of murder – it cannot be assumed that scandal will follow. Some murders assume greater significance than others, as the contrasting cases of Isabel Schwartz and Jonathan Zito, described in Chapter Seven, demonstrate. A few years or a few miles in between ostensibly similar sets of circumstances seem to make a great difference.