NANA AKUA: It’s monstrous to claim that Lucy Letby’s ‘white privilege’ left her free to kill
It takes a special kind of evil to murder the tiny babies in your care.
But it takes a particular kind of ghoul to seize on Lucy Letby’s awful crimes to push a deluded race-baiting agenda, inflaming tensions and manufacturing prejudice.
Earlier this week, lawyer and political activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu published this angry and ill-lettered tweet in the wake of the murderer’s sentencing: ‘Lucy Letby exemplifies how ideology of Whiteness keeps Britain in a chokehold.
‘They believed her tears/denials even though evidence said otherwise for no other reason than she’s White. A Black or Brown nurse would’ve been reported to the police immediately & sacked for suspicion.’
The president of the Royal College of Nursing, Sheila Sobrany, echoed this bizarre claim, adding that one of the whistleblower doctors had been ignored because he was non-white: ‘We need to stop denying that racism is a serious issue in the NHS, this doctor would have been listened to if he was white and Lucy Letby would have been stopped sooner if she wasn’t white… Dr Ravi Jayram was not listened to or taken seriously.’
Earlier this week, lawyer and political activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu (pictured) published an angry and ill-lettered tweet in the wake of the murderer’s sentencing
Lucy Letby 33, was sentenced to die in jail after being found guilty of killing seven babies at the Countess of Chester hospital where she worked and the attempted murder of six more
Even the women’s fashion magazine Glamour lent its insubstantial weight to this crackpot theory in a piece headlined: ‘Lucy Letby’s white privilege helped her commit murders in plain sight — and yes, she’s still benefiting from it.’
READ MORE: How did Lucy Letby become a baby murderer? The church-going ‘vanilla killer’ who holidayed with her parents and slept surrounded by teddy bears was nicknamed the ‘Innocent One’ by friends
Put aside, for a moment, the breathtaking lack of judgement in using the grief of bereaved parents to promote these absurd ideas.
No, what infuriates me is that in all three cases, the individuals concerned have clearly been so desperate to take offence, they ignored the facts of the case.
Activist Mos-Shogbamimu and the RCN’s Sobrany suggested respectively that Letby was allowed to offend for so long because she was white, while whistleblower Dr Ravi Jayram was not believed by managers at the Countess of Chester Hospital because he was of Indian heritage.
Both have overlooked one inconvenient fact: four hospital consultants complained about Letby, and the first of them was the white head of the neonatal unit Dr Stephen Brearey.
It was Dr Brearey who was stalled for three months after requesting a meeting with the hospital management and who said he was made to feel he was ‘the problem’ whenever he raised concerns.
All the consultants, regardless of race, came under pressure to keep quiet about their concerns, and it became clear that the hospital managers were keen on closing the situation down, not because Letby was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, but simply to protect the reputation of the hospital and, by extension, their own futures as highly paid NHS managers.
Dr Stephen Brearey was stalled for three months after requesting a meeting with the hospital management and who said he was made to feel he was ‘the problem’ whenever he raised concerns
I have a special interest in the Letby story. My son was born early at 28 weeks and I spent three months with him in neonatal intensive care and the special-care baby unit.
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I’ve seen how vulnerable these infants are and observed at close quarters how the system works.
Like other serial killers, Letby got away with her crimes for so long because she is deeply manipulative and was clever enough to know to leave no trace.
She was ‘nice Lucy’: a seemingly cherubic presence who fawned over her bosses, reportedly had a crush on one of the senior married doctors and charmed anxious parents — while killing their children.
It is crystal clear that race played no part in the Letby case, whatever some misguided people claim. Conversely, it’s not difficult to see how fears of racism can make some criminal investigations slower and more complex.
Take the Rotherham sex-grooming case, where politically correct social workers and police were slow to act because of their fears of being accused of racism. Try telling the gangs’ teenage victims that the law protects white people.
Happily, serial killers are rare in this country, and female ones even more so.
Cases in which nurses have been accused of killing their patients are fewer still. Yet in one, a white nurse, Rebecca Leighton, spent six weeks in prison in 2011 while under investigation for the murders of three patients at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, Greater Manchester — before it transpired that the killer was Vitorino Chua, a Filipino nurse.
What answer do Mos-Shogbamimu and Sobrany — let alone the critical-race theorists of Glamour magazine — have to say to that?
Only a fool would suggest that racism doesn’t exist in Britain. But claiming to see racism everywhere does nothing to help — even if it’s a good career move for some ‘anti-racist’ campaigners.
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