Can the state be trusted to do anything right? You could certainly make a case for such repellent behaviour if, say, you were seeking information from a foreign enemy that would save British lives. But Peter Francis was preying on the earnest, harmless herbivores of Hackney. And for what? The only crime those women had committed was to think that anything in the Cranks cookbook was edible. In the past week, it has become clear that such monstrous abuses of power are not rogue blemishes on an otherwise healthy system. Our public services are riddled with this cancer. Speaking out about the crisis in the East of England Ambulance Service, health minister Anna Soubry castigated the "mates culture" in which the priority is to "protect your mates, systems and structures," instead of protecting the patient. She is so right. This is what Orwell called Groupthink, a phenomenon in which the dysfunctional dynamics of the "ingroup" creates an inflated certainty that the right decision has been made. Thus the "ingroup" - police officers, hospital managers, social workers - refuses to admit mistakes and stamps out dissent in the "outgroup." That's you and me, folks, plus anyone from the ingroup who has the guts to protest. When Kay Sheldon, a board member of the Care and Quality Commission, warned the Mid Staffordshire inquiry that the CQC was failing to spot bad treatment of patients, Dame Jo Williams, then the head of the regulator, claimed that Sheldon was mentally ill. She tried to have Sheldon sacked and actually ordered a psychiatrist's report. This is truly Orwellian. If you point out that the ingroup is wrong, you must be mad. If not, they will make you mad by telling everyone you are a paranoid schizophrenic. Jo Williams - who should be stripped of her damehood - fabricated a charge of insanity against Kay Sheldon in order to protect the cruelly inept CQC. Just as the Met sought to smear the family of Stephen Lawrence to save its own reputation. This is scary stuff. There have been huge concerns raised in recent days about the access the state has to our private data. Personally, I am much less worried by the idea of GCHQ thumbing through my Ocado order and uncovering my fondness for passionfruit pannacotta than by the NHS regulator suppressing evidence of babies" deaths. Or undercover policemen breaking into innocent lives without a search warrant. It will not surprise you unduly to learn what the new head of the CQC has just called for. Yes, it's Openness "n" Transparency. Make no mistake, only two things have forced them into this. First, there are courageous, campaigning individuals like Julie Bailey, founder of Cure the NHS, and James Titcombe, whose baby son Joshua was one of 14 infants to die unnecessarily at Furness General Hospital. Secondly, there is the media. Television programmes such as Dispatches and newspapers such as this one have given support to whistleblowers. They have embarrassed politicians and dodgy NHS executives and exposed lies, damned lies and collusion. If we can't trust the state on surveillance, how the hell can we possibly trust it to guarantee a free press? Ninety Met police officers are presently investigating tabloid journalists who hacked people's phones. How many will investigate the Met undercover police who took similar liberties, or worse? "Freedom," said George Orwell, "is the right to hear what the state doesn't want us to know." Today, we face an unprecedented culture of institutionalised lying. Without an untrammelled press, Openness "n" Transparency is just another Big Brother slogan, and freedom itself is under threat. Why we're persuaded to put Jane on our tenners If all goes according to plan, Jane Austen will appear on the £10 note. Sir Mervyn King, the outgoing governor of the Bank of England, said as much this week, making clear his belief in an important principle: more women on our wonga. Elizabeth Fry, currently gracing our fivers, is to be phased out to make way for Winston Churchill in 2015, which will leave the Queen as the sole female face on the currency. Charles Darwin, too, will soon need replacing, preferably by someone less hairy, leaving tenners up for grabs. Who better than Jane? Will that not signal the survival of the wittiest? Ten pounds matters a lot in the work of Jane Austen because, then as now, it means much to the prudent, and nothing at all to the rich. Double it and you can have a small theatre installed in your home by a local carpenter, as Tom Bertram, who is mad about acting, suggests in Mansfield Park. Multiply it a thousandfold, and you reach Mr Darcy's annual income, which doesn't actually hurt. Quite a long way from the 10 guineas that Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, is given by her father as she sets off excitedly for Bath. But the publishing of that novel, the first that Austen wrote, is a story in itself. It was sold, to a publisher named Crosby in 1803 for £10 exactly. Whereupon Crosby decided that the book wasn't up to much. He announced publication, but never went through with it. On his shelves it sat, unloved, until 1809 when, under an assumed name, Jane wrote to Crosby and asked for her manuscript back. No deal. Not until 1816 was it actually returned to her, after her brother Henry paid the same sum (£10) for its purchase. And here comes the good bit: only after the sale did Henry have the infinite pleasure of telling Crosby that it had been written by the author of Pride and Prejudice - now a best-selling writer, and one day to be the greatest of them all. So there you have it, dear reader. The pride of the young Jane Austen, the prejudice of a foolish publisher, and the price of a light, clever masterpiece: all wrapped in £10. That is why she will, and must, appear on the brand new note. No one could offer better value. Oh, to have just an ordinary child with an average of talents . . . Horribly fascinating or just plain horrible? Every parent I know insists they are appalled by Channel 4"s Child Genius, yet we carry on watching this competition to find the brightest of 21 highly gifted youngsters. Because it makes us feel so damn superior. "Who knew we were such ------- great parents?" texted a jubilant friend. Unlike Hillary, the American mom of Josh the prodigy, we are not making our sons do 50 hours of chess a week in the hope that the kid will become the youngest-ever grandmaster by the time our sub-standard offspring have learned to cut up their own fishfingers. Hillary gave up work to devote herself to Josh. The self-sacrifice of the mother can clearly be viewed on the eight-year-old's face. Thousands of therapists will have been watching as Josh and the other baby boffins were put through their Mensa paces and shouting, Kerching! There must be several hundred thousand pounds of forthcoming counselling fees among those junior guinea pigs. Blame the parents for entering their children for a high-stress competition to be broadcast on national TV. Sarah, mum of Conor, said: "I want him to do well "cos I want to show off." Nervous laughter. Is that bad? Answer came there none from the Channel 4 team, even as Conor sobbed on the bed because he had another 263 words to learn for this week's big spelling test. Child Genius avoids mentioning words such as Asperger's or autistic spectrum because that might mean it was holding children with special needs up to ridicule, which would spoil the fun. Take Hugo: "From the word go, I knew that I was clever, Clever, CLEVER!" Hugo may be among the 0.01 per cent of highest IQs but, trust me, you wouldn't want to be his parent. Michelle, his droll, long-suffering mother, has no choice: "If Hugo's happy, we're happy." Or we're allowed to be happy. Hugo, a walking railway encyclopedia, is asked: "Would you like to be a train driver?" "No, it's too common," he snaps imperiously. What is sort of amusing in a precocious 10-year-old will be rude, insensitive and unemployable in the adult he seems fated to grow into. Maybe that's why Child Genius has us all glued. It's the perfect antidote for anyone who has ever looked upon their lazy, Xbox-addled spawn and yearned for a compliant, dictionary-memorising kid. Child Genius makes me think of the poem Born Yesterday, which Philip Larkin composed for Sally, the newborn daughter of Kingsley Amis. "May you be ordinary," he wrote, "have an average of talents... Nothing uncustomary To pull you off your balance... In fact, may you be dull - If that is what a skilled, Vigilant, flexible, Unemphasised, enthralled Catching of happiness is called.