1st June 2016

There are three things to explain here straight away.

1. What is the ‘new Wirral Council website’?

Teenwirr@l is basically a toe dipped into the always difficult to fathom waters of local ‘yoof’ – but Wirral’s bureaucrats, who reside on another planet, have made a valiant attempt, and here it is.

We believe the new site is a matter of only a few days old.  The Wirral Globe has been more than Frank, and has done its duty in reporting another positive council development.  Here’s the web address:

www.teenwirral.com

2. Who is the corporate abuser?

It’s a former senior Wirral Council chap called Mike Fowler who worked in the finances of DASS or Adult Social Services.  Fowler’s nine years of corporate financial abuse is the stuff of local legend and has been explored in great but not exhaustive detail on this blog and others.  Use the search facility top right to discover Fowler’s contributions or otherwise to the wellbeing of a large number of ‘sitting duck’ learning disabled citizens of Wirral.

We followed Mike after he’d left the council (more of which below) – a departure which was in the frantic manner of an ejector seat lever being yanked for all it was worth as the doomed Wirral Council aircraft lurched into a nosedive.  Fowler and his colleague Maura Noone bailed out a matter of days before the release of the full version of Anna Klonowski’s hard-hitting (but not too hard-hitting) and extensive (but not too extensive) report into failed governance, abuse of disabled people and much more, which came in at a price tag of £371,000.

The gruesome twosome not being there to take the rap (production designer, Jim Wilkie) meant that the mythical beast known as accountability (think Yeti, Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Unicorn) could not be allowed to gallop around the place, knocking over well-dressed, smart looking VIPs whose reputations stated they’d never so much as hurt a fly.

3. How are Wirral Council helping Mike Fowler?

If we’re going to be detailed and comprehensive about this, which we’ve always tried to be in the past, here goes …  Mike Fowler’s former employer had invariably helped not just themselves, but their departing abusers too.  And in Mike’s case, high level protection was never very far away.  It was there when he was a senior officer busily doing dirty deeds. And it was also there when detailed arrangements were put in place for the future – the period after he was given the heave-ho in early 2012.  This was in the form of a clean bill of health – despite the years of abuse.

Getting found out is always a delicate scenario, one that’s controlled by knowledge, threats, cunning and is handled with kid gloves.

An evaluation is carried out on the knowledge held by a senior individual and what threats the potential unplanned public release of that information could hold for the careers of those left manipulating the levers of power abuse.

Another mythical creature known as ‘the public interest’ doesn’t really get a look in.

This is the point where cunning comes into play, and gags within settlement agreements play an important and perfectly legal ‘balancing’ role.  This is the classic democratic deficit covering a multitude of sins, many criminal, the value of which amounts to many hundreds of £millions (but more likely £billions) in public money across the public sector since the mid-1990s, all representing a towering mountain of waste, which stinks to high heaven, but largely remains hidden thanks to several pisspoor bodies: the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee, the Information Commissioner, the Local Government Ombudsman and several out of control, dysfunctional Central Government departments, all of which is covered elsewhere in more detail on this blog.

If you click on the very first option on the landing page of teenwirr@l (Sexual Health), you’re taken to a local NHS site and listed below is an organisation called Brook Wirral – which is a well-known alleged ‘charity’.

We say ‘alleged’ because the behaviour of its top people – and when we say ‘top’ we mean at the top organisationally, not morally, ethically or by any other positive measure or scale or ranking known to man.

Brook have been busy avoiding our tweets and messages asking for explanations ever since we discovered that they’d employed Mike Fowler back in late 2012.  Any simple Google search would have uncovered the abuse.  We can only marvel at…

a. how he got the job in the first place and;

b. how he’s still doing it

He’d had the summer of off work to sit back, take stock and enjoy the £110,000 pay off which had successfully greased the path towards this, his new role.

Luckily for Mike, who may have been uncertain about the prospect of tracking down another flexible and accommodating employer, he hit the ground running at Brook, which was an organisation led by a CEO who obviously hadn’t grasped the significance of the seven Nolan Principles of Public Life – the ones he’d had the damn gall to allow Brook’s trustees to openly brag about on his website.

Here they are again:

So that’s it really.  It’s yet another example of that strange circularity that comes around and goes around, popping up when and where you least expect it, rather like an unwanted S.T.D. – ha, would anyone actually want an S.T.D?

Anyway, the S.T.Deed is done.  Wirral have nodded in deference to their former employee turned ‘charity’ worker Mike, and brought some potential business via the NHS to his kindly but very hard to reach by tweet organisation.

We’re pretty sure he won’t know a thing about this.  Being a well-remunerated ‘charity’ finance person, he’ll have far more important matters to be dealing with than encountering and grappling with mythical beings such as selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, leadership and the public interest.

These links will provide you with some more flavour:

Corporate abuse of disabled people needn’t sound the death knell for your career

Brook appear to be lying low re: Mike Fowler / foul abuse

Mike Fowler and learning disabled abuse. Brook ‘Charity’ are on the lookout for a new CEO