IF IT WERE not for the fear that increasingly dominates doctors’ professional lives, I would write in far stronger terms about the decision of the General Medical Council to strike Sir Roy Meadow off the medical register. I shall merely say that it was very wrong.

Professor Meadow did not wrongly convict anyone — only the courts could have done that. And if his statistical reasoning was so obviously and disgracefully wrong, why was he able for so long, according to the GMC, to persist in his errors, uninterrupted by defence experts and lawyers? (I leave aside the question of what part his statistical evidence actually played in the original convictions.) An error that is obvious once it has been pointed out may not be so very obvious before it is pointed out.

Let me prove this to you. In the O. J. Simpson trial, it was said by the defence that his having beaten his wife was not of evidential value as far as her murder was concerned, because the vast majority of men who beat their wives do not kill them. Do you see at once what is fallacious in this argument? I bet that you don’t.

Of the class of women who have been beaten by their husband or boyfriend and subsequently murdered, the vast majority were murdered by the husband or boyfriend who had beaten them. In other words, that O. J. Simpson had beaten his wife was of evidential value. But would an expert on domestic violence who testified to the court that most men who beat their wives do not kill them have been guilty of misleading it?

Evidential value is not proof, however, and anyone who thought it were would be failing to understand the nature of proof in a criminal trial. The expert does not speak, and the jury convict or acquit accordingly; or if it does, the fault lies not with the expert, but with the court.

A society that is intolerant of error will soon become intolerant of truth, for truth rarely emerges except by the testing of error. In this connection, it is probably not irrelevant to note that Professor Meadow was a disseminator of an unwelcome and disturbing truth: that parents may sometimes maltreat their own children in bizarre ways, and those children, therefore, need to be protected from them. Although I am not a paediatrician, I can testify from personal clinical experience that parents are capable of doing things to their own children that, had I not had incontrovertible evidence, I should scarcely have credited as being possible. And all paediatricians in this country are familiar with the kind of cases that Professor Meadow described.

We should not forget, either, that we are prey to an equal and opposite sense of outrage when, far from wrongful conviction, child abusers such as the guardians of Victoria Climbié, go undetected. Most cases are, of course, less clear-cut, and many are very difficult, requiring subtle judgment. The demand that judgment should always be right is a demand that no judgment should ever be made; by striking Professor Meadow off the register, the GMC will have created a climate of fear in which people will hesitate to make the difficult but necessary judgments.

It is possible, of course, that the GMC was itself gripped by fear: a fear that if it failed to strike Professor Meadow off the register it would itself be punished by an increasingly centralising and authoritarian government which dislikes autonomous organisations — such as the GMC used to be — that escape its direct control.

Moreover, the Government, populist rather than popular, is anxious to be seen to be responsive to popular, or at least noisy, demands, especially if they come from people who have been wronged. An attack on the medical profession in the person of Professor Meadow (a useful scapegoat because of his very eminence) via its governing body thus kills two birds with one stone.

Another manifestation of the Kafkaesque fear that is spreading in British institutions is the rise in the number of prosecutions of doctors for manslaughter after fatal medical accidents. That the decision to do this is fundamentally political is demonstrated by the low success rate of these prosecutions in comparison with other prosecutions for manslaughter. The Crown Prosecution Service is supposed to consider two things before it decides to prosecute: whether it is in the public interest to do so, and whether there is a reasonable chance of conviction. Between 2000 and 2002, the success rate in prosecuting doctors was 16 per cent, while the success rate in other prosecutions for manslaughter was 85 per cent. Yet the CPS persists in trying to bring prosecutions against doctors.

In other words, even if it is not responding to a government directive, the CPS is responding to a Zeitgeist. This Zeitgeist is composed of several noxious elements. The first is the desire to destroy all authority except one’s own. An anti-authority attitude thus bolsters authoritarianism.

The second is an immature inability to accept error as an inevitable part, indeed consequence, of human ratiocination, and similarly to accept that undesirable and undesired things happen, because of chance, and because human beings are not perfect, or constructed like Toyota cars. As we become more technologically sophisticated, it seems we are becoming intellectually less sophisticated, indeed returning to the condition of the Azande, the Sudanese tribe that believes that no one dies except by malign magic.

Finally, of course, we have a government that is so convinced of its own virtue and omnicompetence that is has ultimate responsibility for everything that occurs within its jurisdiction. Soon even sparrows will have to ask permission from air traffic control to take off.

The striking-off of Professor Meadow is therefore a sinister manifestation of a society that tolerates no error, and therefore no thought; that is in constant need of scapegoats; and that offers vanishingly little resistance to the centralisation of authority.

The author is a doctor and author. He has been an expert witness.

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