Thinking Allowed with Professor Laurie Taylor

If you have never listened to the Radio 4 programmes called Thinking Allowed with Professor Laurie Taylor, I’d like to recommend that you give them a try. Laurie Taylor is an excellent presenter, always on top of his subject, always with interesting topics and always with knowledgeable people in the field for discussion and information.

Currently he is tackling the subject of White Collar Crime, a rather more serious topic than is usually his wont. Details are here: Thinking Allowed, and on that page is the facility to listen to the 30 minute programme on the BBC’s iPlayer.

In the notes for the programme it says:
“In a series of special programmes in association with the Open University, Laurie Taylor explores the subject of white collar crime, from its late addition to the statute books to the increasing difficulty in securing a conviction. He speaks to the key academic experts in the field, explores the latest sociological research and hears from professionals on both sides of the law about the culture, the practice and most often the non-prosecution of white collar crime.

In this edition, Laurie explores the culture of corporate crime and how regulatory bodies serve to keep the police at arm’s length. In the UK, people are twice as likely to suffer a serious injury at work than to be a victim of violent crime, yet only a fraction of safety crimes are actually prosecuted.

Globally, more people are killed at work each year than are killed in war. Why has corporate crime had a low priority, why has it been so hard to prosecute corporations and will the new crimes of corporate manslaughter and corporate murder make firms more responsible for the crimes they commit?”

I wish it would include the terrible harm that healthcare professionals so often perpetrate on their innocent patients, usually with near-impunity, since the General Medical Council and similar bodies are lenient paper tigers, of no use whatever in protecting the public from medical negligence and medical ignorance, particularly in relation to the ghastly effects of doctors’ reckless over-readiness to prescribe powerful, dangerous drugs when ill-informed about their side-effects, and in relation to their woeful lack of understanding about how obesity comes about and how best to treat it. Maybe in a future programme this largely taboo subject will be broached. We can but hope.