Twenty Nineteen

The forthcoming year is the sixtieth birthday of the first piece of modern mental health legislation – the Mental Health Act 1959. It’s worth noting this milestone, in my opinion, because sixty years on we are still struggling to think about how we give effect in the real world to some of its requirements. Section […]

Stress-Testing Contingencies

About a decade ago, I was pottering about as the duty inspector in south Birmingham when a full-scale police mobilisation of public order units was ordered. This involves having to get together a sergeant and seven constables on to van, all of them ‘level two trained’ in public order tactics – riot police, to you […]

One Great Thing

I’ve just deleted about half a dozen draft blogs, none of them finished … I tried to write a few things over the last fortnight and just became interminably bored, quite honestly, for the fact that I was just saying the same thing, over and Over and OVER again. This is what I was going […]