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Went there 64 to 68. Remember all them teachers

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Experts with so much experience don't come much bigger than this .....l

PROFESSOR JOHN ASHTON
Professor John Ashton CBE is not an internet commentator who has casually attached himself to this case. He is a medically qualified public-health specialist with decades of senior experience examining how healthcare systems function, fail and respond when patients die.
He served for 13 years as Regional Director of Public Health and Regional Medical Officer for North-West England. He later became Director of Public Health and County Medical Officer for Cumbria and was President of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal Colleges of Physicians from 2013 to 2016.
His career has brought him into direct contact with some of Britain’s most serious medical and institutional disasters, including the Harold Shipman murders, the Alder Hey organ-retention scandal, the Morecambe Bay maternity deaths and the aftermath of Hillsborough.
Professor Ashton’s particular expertise lies in public health, patient safety, organisational failure and the way large institutions behave when services have gone badly wrong.
He says that his initial position was cautious. He believed the prosecution case was wholly circumstantial, but did not then claim to know whether Letby was guilty.
After spending two years studying the evidence and engaging with international specialists from relevant disciplines, his position became unequivocal. In February 2026 he wrote:
“I can now say that I have every reason to believe that Lucy Letby is innocent of the charges against her.”
His central argument is that the deaths and collapses should have been examined as a possible systems failure before being constructed as the work of a serial killer.
He points to:
• a neonatal unit caring for babies beyond the level of complexity it could safely manage;
• staffing and clinical practices that he considers inadequate;
• an ageing building with environmental-health concerns;
• stretched resources and institutional ambition;
• the failure to use established multidisciplinary child-death review processes properly;
• police officers effectively being drawn into determining medical causation;
• the misuse of statistics;
• medical theories involving insulin and air embolism that are now heavily disputed;
• an institutional culture in which attention shifted from systemic failure towards one individual.
Ashton believes that what occurred at the Countess of Chester fits a familiar pattern: an ambitious but struggling organisation fails to recognise the limits of its service, closes ranks when outcomes deteriorate and eventually finds an individual upon whom the catastrophe can be placed.
This is particularly significant because he has personally witnessed how institutions protect themselves. He has described recognising in the Countess of Chester the same dynamics of institutional self-preservation that he encountered following Hillsborough.
His conclusion is therefore not simply that a few items of evidence may be questionable. He believes the entire case was approached through the wrong lens.
Instead of asking first whether prematurity, natural illness, infection, inadequate staffing, poor clinical practice and an overstretched neonatal service explained the deaths, investigators came to interpret events through the theory that one nurse was deliberately harming babies.
Professor Ashton now believes Lucy Letby was scapegoated for failures within both medical care and the justice system.
People may agree or disagree with him. However, his views cannot honestly be dismissed as uninformed speculation. They come from a senior doctor and former national public-health leader with extensive first-hand experience of healthcare disasters, institutional defensiveness and catastrophic failures of accountability.
When somebody with that background says he believes the convictions are unsafe and that Lucy Letby is innocent, the proper response is not ridicule or censorship.
It is independent, scientifically rigorous scrutiny of the evidence.

Blame the advertising industry, they are the main funders of the internet and govern how the internet is used. It is an invisible tax on consumers. There isn't a solution, the advertisers are trapped in a perpetual cycle of competitive advertising and the consumers have no say in the matter.

Perhaps one day, some more analytic companies will expose the truth about internet advertising, like doing a study asking consumers to name all the brands/products they saw advertised on the internet the day before. I imagine most responders will report very little (zero in my case), saturation advertising has made us advertising-blind. The huge amount of advertising money is pretty much wasted but we are still paying for it financially and time-wise.

Some stats on the following link, not forgetting that the company producing these stats are heavily biased in favour of advertising eg I fail to believe anybody remembers 98 adverts a day as claimed in the student figures. Despite the positive bias I find the figures horrendous. https://www.digitalsilk.com/digital-marketing/marketing-trends/how-many-ads-do-we-see-a-day/