Sometimes people say "for centuries and even thousands of years, people have complained that things are getting worse". The implication is that any assertion that things have got worse in Britain in many ways - though not, of course, in terms of prosperity - is probably wrong and just a symptom of getting older.

The argument is clearly illogical since surely no one argues that things have always got better. So the suggestion that things have got worse must be true for at least some of the time. If you were around as the Roman empire collapsed and anarchy broke out, you would probably have been right saying things had got worse. Similarly when a large part of the population was dying in the Black Death.

On the other side, it is not entirely true that people have constantly said that things are getting worse. In Victorian times there was, in the study of history at least, a view that things were improving over a long period of time. It is called the Whig view of history.

Here is part of the glorious view of how things had got better from Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James II

I shall relate how the new settlement was, during many troubled years, successfully defended against foreign and domestic enemies; how, under that settlement, the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known; how, from the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example...

A newspaper this week, though, carried a story which even the most rose-tinted optimist surely would not argue would have been seen at any time beween 1900 and 1960.

Hospitals are paying tens of thousands of pounds for police officers to cover accident and emergency departments on Friday and Saturday nights, it has been disclosed. Officers cover A&E across the UK in a bid to prevent violence towards doctors, nurses and other workers, hospital trusts said.

A total of £60,000 a year pays for four officers to cover A&E at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the Western Infirmary in Glasgow on a Friday and Saturday night.

Trusts in Liverpool and Newcastle also said they paid for police officers at the weekend.

From January to December 2009, Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust spent £28,980 for a police officer at Arrowe Park Hospital from 9pm to 5am on Friday and Saturday nights.

Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust pays £25,000 a year for a police officer for Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at Newcastle General Hospital.

The story is, I would suggest, mainly a reflection of the incivility of modern society. Possibly it is also a reflection in part of the slowness of treatment in the hospitals themselves but not necessarily. Either way, it is a symptom of a change - yes, for the worse I am afraid - in our society.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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