The report on the situation at Ashworth hospital read like something out of a nightmare, didn't it? This is an institution housing some of the most dangerous, perverted people in the country, yet those in charge of it apparently didn't have a clue about how to deal with them properly.

Or if they did have any clues they were red herrrings, which led them off in entirely the wrong direction towards a liberal regime which allowed the "patients" to call all the shots. As a result, Evil took over.

How on earth could it have been allowed to happen, and to go on for so long? Was nobody outside the hospital management keeping an eye on things? Did nobody with the job of inspecting places like Ashworth notice that an extraordinary and entirely unacceptable culture had been allowed to develop there, in which the inmates were in charge?

Why on earth did it need one of those inmates to escape and turn whistle-blower before the situation began to be investigated? And now, when the investigation has been completed and the most damning report produced, why is the hospital being allowed to remain open?

Some remnant of that culture is bound to linger on, among the inmates and surviving members of staff. It will take root and flourish, and the Evil will grow again.

You couldn't make it up for a horror-film scenario, could you? A psychiatric hospital packed with perverted and/or murderous men who are allowed to run their own copying and distribution centre for pornography, turning it into a lucrative business. A hospital where patients are allowed credit cards and are able to borrow large amounts of money. A hospital where child molesters and killers are described euphemistically as having "personality disorders" when they are clearly, in many cases, irredeemably wicked.

A hospital where no-one either notices or cares when a small girl is taken in there week after week by a male visitor and allowed to mingle with men whose lives are filled with fantasies of sexually abusing small girls - a child who apparently is being "groomed" to satisfy these perverted lusts at some time in the future.

Nobody would believe it, would they?

There's only one sensible thing to be done with Ashworth and that's drop a large bomb on the place and then start all over again with an entirely new, tough, uncompromising, incorruptible management and staff.

Enjoy Mike Priestley's Yorkshire Walks

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.