Faddishness and Minorities

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”, so the ancient proverb goes.  I’m quietly rejoicing over the great Cyprus bank bungle, the latest symptom of European insanity and a clear sign that the gods are on my side!  I have my eye also on the craziness of our present coalition government in England, the craziness in particular of David Cameron and George Osborne, the Dumb and Dumber of our political life. 

I’m in the mood for quotations; I’m in a particular mood for Disraeli.  England does not love coalitions, he rightly said.  I would update this slightly by saying that England hates coalitions; this Englishwoman certainly does.  The grand old Tory also said that a Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy.  My, oh my, I do wonder what he would have made of our present government and the present leadership of the Conservative Party – a disorganised idiocy, perhaps? 

Lynton Crosby, Cameron’s campaign chief, has a cunning plan for a Tory victory in the scheduled 2015 general election, or so I read recently in the Telegraph.  In the wake of the drubbing the Party got in the recent Eastleigh by-election there are to be no more stupid ideas.  Really?  Then I take it we can see gay marriage and windmills dropping from the agenda?  I have a plan also for a Tory victory, though it’s not really that cunning – get rid of Cameron and Osborne. 

Take the Prime Minister…please.  Mediocre leaders are the rule rather than the exception in the Tory Party.  Margaret Thatcher?  No thanks; let’s have John Major instead.  But, my goodness, on the scale of mediocrity Cameron has no contenders.  He even manages to make Stanley Baldwin look good.  When it comes to breath-taking incompetence there are few better than Call Me Dave.  His latest wheeze was the introduction of minimum alcohol pricing.  Eh, excuse me, Prime Minister, does this not mean that the price of booze will increase when voters have had more than enough of price increases in general?  Oops – goodbye to all that.

Simple truths are simply stated – the Conservative Party led by Cameron is heading for sure defeat.  I was tempted to write that there are lies, damned lies and David Cameron but, on reflection, I think that’s unfair.  It’s better said that he is a little man lost in his own confusion.  Having no identity of his own he took on that of Tony Blair and the metro-cosmopolitans.  The Tory Party went mad when it elected him leader, much as Labour did when it elected Michael Foot.  The Cameron Manifesto is another of history’s long suicide notes.

The credibility of all politicians is pretty low these days, particularly those in the Conservative Party.  It gives me no pleasure to write this because I have only ever voted Tory – a long family tradition – and I have a great many Conservative friends.  But the Party has forfeited all credibility and all trust; people simply do not believe a word it says.  In fact the more Cameron and Osborne say the greater the disbelief.  These men are hopelessly out of touch.  The one great platform the government stood on was reduction of the public debt.  What’s happened?  It’s now more bloated than ever.  Some of the reductions we have had are beyond crazy.  Favoured socialist causes have been ring-fenced while defence spending is being slashed.  We spend millions on foreign aid while depriving tank regiments of, er, tanks.  This really is the political theatre of the absurd. 

Can things get any worse?  Yes, indeed they can.    If people distrust the Conservative Party the Conservative Party distrusts itself.  Call Me Dave’s gay marriage scheme has introduced a huge fissure into the Party ranks, one I suspect will never be fully healed.  Nobody wanted this; nobody needed this except a loud-mouthed minority.  And when it came to standing up to Europe and the European Court of Human Rights the Cameron government is nothing but piss and wind. 

Oh, yes, on the subject of wind we have what the Chancellor calls a ‘renewable levy’, a rip-off tax by any other name, one which will penalise consumers and cripple industry.  And for what?  Merely to placate another loud-mouthed minority, the green fanatics who are set on covering this green and pleasant land with ugly and unpleasant windmills. 

I do not care what Osborne says in today’s budget (I wrote this piece before I knew the details) because it will make little practical difference.  The game is up.  There are simply not enough gay couples, greens and lovers of foreign aid to secure a future Conservative government.  Under Cameron the Tory Party has become a movement of faddishness and minorities.  In future it is likely to become the biggest minority of all. 

Let Them Eat Crap

You obviously will know about the horsey in the national diet if you are British, on the assumption that you have not been away on Mars for the past few weeks.  For the rest of the world, those who are blissfully ignorant of these shores, let me just say that the British public, or the poorer part of it, was being fed horse meat pretending to be beef. 

Shocking! Shocking!  Mind you, I’m not convinced that those who buy tripe (possibly?) like Findus’ or Tesco’s deep frozen lasagne really know or care what they are eating, so long as it has a meaty taste.  Then there are the burgers.  Lord alone knows what’s in those.  Actually, we do know – udders, guts, sexual parts, all rendered down; revolting enough, even when it is not horse. 

There was a readers’ poll in the Daily Telegraph recently arising from the horse meat scandal. The question was simple: do you think it acceptable to eat horse meat or not?  I voted no, because I would no more eat horse than I would eat cat or rat.  Rat, yes, this is something I will come on to in a bit or a bite.  The result of the poll - revealed after one had voted - was almost neck and neck, the antis winning by a mere nose.  So, whether or not the pros actually eat horse burgers they do not think there is anything wrong in principle here.

Oh, but there is.  First of all the issue is about honesty.  I know one virtually has to have a PhD now to make sense of the labelling on food products, but at the most basic level people have a right to know if they are eating beef or dog meat.  If they have a preference for dog that’s fine, just as long as they understand what it is they are buying.  I say dog, knowing full well that the Telegraph poll would have produced a far clearer result if that had been the product in question, though there are some places in the world where dog is considered tasty and nutritious. 

The real issue, the issue that is beyond the comprehension of the unimaginative, is that of adulteration; of the corruption of food, a corruption born of the drive to feed the masses with the cheapest product available.  “Let them eat cake”, Marie Antoinette is falsely alleged to have said.  But that is positively benign compared with the “Let them eat crap” of the modern food Tsars.

The adulteration of food was big issue in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in England and the United States.  The problem got worse with industrialisation, when cheap food was a necessary corollary of low wages.  In the States it got so bad that the New York Evening Post published a parody of a well-known nursery rhyme;

Mary had a little lamb,
And when she saw it sicken,
She shipped it off to Packingtown,
And now it's labeled chicken.

Upton Sinclair caught the mood in The Jungle, a novel published in 1906, which described the dreadful conditions in the meat packing industry.  But sick lamb pretending to be chicken was not enough for him; oh, no.  He went that step further, claiming that the workers who had the misfortune to fall into the rendering tanks were ground up and sold with the rest as Durham’s Pure Beef Lard! 

We have come a long way since then, with legislation and inspection aimed at reducing corruption (meat) and corruption (human).  No we have not.  If anything the situation is getting worse.  Corruption, in one form or another, is the name of a pretty dirty game; and when it comes to meat things can get an awful lot dirtier.  It’s not really that long since England was beset by the BSE crisis, when it was discovered that rendered meat products was being fed to cattle, with disastrous human results.  We learned from that that we clearly learned nothing.  For now horse is in the stakes and the steaks.

Keep your eye on that horse; keep your eye on the one named Profit, the odds on favourite; for that is what it’s all about.  We have enough pasture in England to produce all of the lamb and beef we need, with pork and chicken not far behind.  But we have become a link in a longer and longer international food chain.  The more extended it gets the greater the opportunity for criminal intervention.  Writing in the New Statesman (Meat Market, 22 February), Colin Tudge rightly asked “If crooks along the tortuous food chain can add horse to our meat products, why not dog, or rat, or cat?”  Yes, why not?  He raises some additional pertinent questions;

Given that the world trade in bushmeat is now vast, why not add bush fat of baboon?  What’s to keep out the meat that has been assigned for pet food?  Why not meat that has been condemned?  What guarantees can be given? 

None, it would appear, though we have had a Food Standards Agency in England for the past twelve years, a guarantor that clearly guarantees nothing.  Then there are the supermarket chains like Findus and Tesco, who have singularly failed to investigate their suppliers.  Then there are the politicians, who assure us that our meat is ‘safe’ when they know full well that, as a member of the European Union, we as a country have no proper control over the product that comes from the Continent.  Horse meat today; cat or rat tomorrow. 

I think there is a strong element of cynicism here.  As I say, the horse to watch is Profit.  The poor - and it is the poor - are the principle victims of our two for one deep frozen food culture.  In the wake of the horse fiasco, super market chiefs are saying that their products are likely to become more expensive, that the days of cheap food are over.  This suggests to me that they already knew that there was something fishy, make that horsey, about the stuff they were selling, that or they simply did not ask too many pertinent questions.  Get ‘beef’ from Mexico or Bulgaria rather than local suppliers – why not?  It’s cheap and goes very well in burgers and lasagne.

This is a story, as Tudge says, that might turn nastier yet.  The world food chain is out of control, or falling in to the control of unscrupulous profiteers, pirates of all sorts, the sort of people who only care about Profit, the one horse they do not want to see fall.  Inevitably the scandal will settle down as cosmetic changes are made, as politicians issue further assurances and standards are supposedly raised, as the public’s fickle attention turns to some other tale of woe.  Those who have become veggies, fearful of eating horse, will return to meat.  The pendulum will swing the other way in this best of all possible worlds.  At least until it is discovered that the benighted public have been eating something a lot less benign than horse.  In the meantime I would strongly urge you to avoid Durham’s Pure Beef Lard. 

A Culture of Fear

I wrote recently about the atrocious case of Stafford Hospital, a place where hundreds of patients are now thought to have died needlessly as a result of mismanagement, negligence and incompetence. Mismanagement, negligence and incompetence seem to have become the three wicked fairies haunting the state-funded British National Health Service (NHS). The scandal caused by their malevolent magic is now all but impossible to disguise.

The attempt has been made, though. The rot here goes high; it goes high as Sir David Nicholson, the former communist who is now Chief Executive of the National Health Service.  He recently made it plain that he had no intention of resigning, despite the damning and damaging report on Stafford Hospital, detailing abuses committed under his watch. But now the dam has burst; now we know of even further abuses that he chose to ignore.

In 2010 Gary Walker was sacked as the chief executive of the United Lincolnshire Hospital Trust in the east of England. The reason given was that he swore openly at meetings, which seems pretty flimsy on the face of it. Swearing or not, he was given a very generous severance package - £500,000 ($775,000) is not to be sworn at. It now appears that this money really was meant to shut his mouth.

The year before Walker was sworn off he raised concerns with Sir David over the standard of care in Lincolnshire hospitals. It seems that close on 700 patients may have died needlessly as a result of poor care. More were at risk. His warnings were ignored by Sir David, allegedly because he was “not interested in patient safety.”

He may not have cared about patient safety but he certainly cared about swearing Walker to silence. As part of his Midas handshake, he pledged to keep his concerns to himself. It was not, perhaps, a commendable choice on his part but his conscience got the better of him. His silence has been broken despite emails from NHS-funded lawyers warning him to keep to the terms of the 2010 agreement.

Speaking to the Daily Mail Walker said “I want David Nicholson to be held to account. I warned him that this was going to happen. I warned him that Lincolnshire was going to become the next Mid Staffordshire. He didn’t investigate those concerns, and now look what’s happened.” He went on to refer to the “culture of fear” within the NHS, something that seems to have been part of Nicholson’s management style.

United Lincolnshire Hospitals is one of fourteen trusts presently under investigation for negligence in the wake of the Mid-Staffordshire revelations about death under care. Gagging is clearly no longer an option. But Walker’s honesty has placed him in an invidious position;

I stand to lose everything if they sue...Now I risk having to repay more than the settlement because I could be liable for the Trust’s legal fees. I face ruin. But if it’s got to the stage where thousands and thousands of patients are dying needlessly in NHS hospitals and the government says no one’s to blame, someone needs to stand up and be counted...I lost my career, my partner of six years and most of my assets challenging my dismissal. But I would not lose my integrity.

Letters have now emerged written by doctors and staff at the Lincolnshire Trust warning that they were being coerced into treating patients in an unsafe environment and thus endangering their safety. High mortality rates were simply ignored and staff told that “targets must be met regardless of demand.”

The recent Francis Report on the Stafford Scandal might useful be subtitled the No One’s to Blame Report; for seemingly no one is to blame for the abuses and the atrocities inflicted on patients, from Nicholson downwards. But at least it recommended an end to gagging orders imposed on whistle-blowers. Gary Walker’s case has now been raised in Parliament. Stephen Dorrell, Chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Health, has said that he will be invited to give evidence. He went on to condemn gagging orders, describing them as “unacceptable in the NHS” and “against the public interest.

But that’s the thing: they clearly were acceptable, a part of a corporate culture that had little concern for the public interest or patient welfare. Speaking to the BBC Walker compounded an already heavy indictment against his former employers;

This is a culture of fear, a culture of oppression - of information that's either going to embarrass a civil servant or embarrass a minister. These are big problems. And if you consider that the people that have been running the NHS have created that culture of fear, they need either to be held to account or new people need to be brought in to change that culture.

On present indicators it seems likely that little will change. The corruption, the complacency and the laziness here go deep. In face of monstrous state bureaucracies like the NHS ordinary people, those who cannot afford private care, are effectively powerless, as much guinea pigs as they were in times past. Rather ironic considering that the whole institution is supported through their taxes. Here, perhaps, we have the true meaning of taxation without representation.

Tim Yeo is NOT a Corrupt Bastard

Do you ever wonder about political corruption, about those who use positions of power to advance their own venal interests?  I imagine it’s an issue that concerns most people, the declining standards of honesty in public life.  It’s always been with us, of course, but there was a time when it took effort to uncover dishonesty and the abuse of office. 

Now the corrupt are able to drape their dealings quite openly in some fashionable theory or other, avoiding all conflict of interest and crisis of conscience.  How convenient when one no longer has to justify one’s financial wheeler-dealing; how convenient when enrichment is aided by theory and by fashion. 

Just think of Timothy Yeo.  For those unfamiliar with the British political constellation, he is one of the stars in the Tory firmament, presently among the luminaries of our tree-hugging Coalition government, out to save the planet, regardless of the cost.  Oh, but no cost to Yeo; just the contrary; it’s rather a nice little earner. Rather conveniently for him, and for his bank balance, he is the Chairman of the Commons Select Committee, a powerful and influential voice.  

Green policies and wind farms are a jolly good thing, he thinks.  Is there any surprise here?  He earns £65,000 ($98,500) as a Member of Parliament, not a lot, you may very well agree, not a lot for a man like Yeo.  Not to worry: this was supplemented last year by those who appreciate the true value of the Yeo factor.  It was supplemented, to be exact, by an extra £136,000 ($206,000), enabling the poor man to live in a manner to which he clearly has become accustomed.  This, I should add, for a minimum of work.  More, really, for his windy presence. 

So who are these Yeo philanthropists, you ask?  Would it surprise you to know that they are all green?  Oh, not green in judgement, just green in interest, keen in ensuring that environmental friendliness remains one of the great political and policy stalwarts of the day.  For as Tim gets rich they get richer - ‘green’ companies like AFC Energy, Eco City Vehicles and TMO Renewables. 

On his paymaster’s behalf – sorry...in the interests of all of us, at least for those who are not green with envy, Yeo has moved an amendment to the present Energy Bill that will add even tighter targets on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted by generating power.  A holy green alliance has been formed.  Alongside Yeo and his shadowy backers (where does their money come from?  Who are the investors) there are the usual suspects, the usual variety of nauseating green lobby groups, Socialist and Liberal MPs and others who are likely to ensure that the amendment is adopted.  The irony of making the rich richer and the poor poorer seems to have escaped the Parliamentary Labour Party.  Yeo’s amendment will mean ever higher energy bills, energy beyond the means of many of the elderly, many more of how will die in future of hypothermia.  I urge you, do not grow old in our brave new energy world.  Oh, but the greater cause of Yeo is such a noble end, worth a few casualties along the way

Two years ago I wrote an article on the spread of wind farms (Whistle down the wind, 31, May 2011) in which I made the following points;

Wind farms, who does not hate the sight of wind-farms? I certainly do. You may think they are necessary as a source of clean and renewable power. If you do I urge you to think again, think of the implications of these hideous blots on the landscape for the landscape. As foreign investors rush in to capitalise on British wind - and the wind of British politicians - just remember that it would take require a farm the size of Greater London to generate as much energy as a single coal-fired power station, assuming a never ending windy day. 

Oh, but think of the money to be made; think of the money being made, for example, by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, effectively bribed by developers to stop them complaining about the killing of eagles by wind turbines. Then there are the bats, of course, the damage these things cause to them; but who cares about the bats? You should care about yourself, though, enough to make sure that you live nowhere near these monstrous carbuncles, because the noise generated has caused health problems for those who do. The difficulty here is that, as the contagion spreads, it will be difficult for any of us to escape them. 

And all this for what, all this disruption, all this stupidity for what? We see our land destroyed, we see the economy weakened, jobs lost or exported elsewhere; we see an ever greater burden of taxation for what?   

Well now I know – it’s all for the benefit of Yeo!  Speak out as much as you want; it will make no practical difference.  Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University has spoken out, saying that even without the amendment the long-term consequences of the Bill will be horrible (his word).  “It’s a recipe for deindustrialisation”, he added.  “Either we get rid of this obsession, or we give our future to the rest of the world.  The question is whether we are serious about our economic future or not.”

Tim Yeo is serious about his own economic future, just as he is serious about keeping wind farms away from his own immediate neighbourhood.  The rest can go hang, which a great many may very well do in future, when the alternative is a slow death by cold. 

Let me amend the ending of my previous article.  As you sit in your blacked-out and freezing home, listening to the sound of the roaring wind farms, comfort yourself by thinking of Yeo’s profits.  Shame on you for thinking this man, with all of his noble intentions, is a greedy, corrupt, pocket-lining bastard.  Same on you for thinking that the Energy Bill is a fraud, verging on treason against this country.  Shame on you for thinking that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Labour Party are deluded, self-serving and pathetic morons.  Shame on you for thinking that the investors in the ‘green’ energy firms might very well be Chinese.  The future, you see, is Green...backs.  Oh, and the future is for pigs.  

The Sixteenth Pluviôse of David Cameron

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Karl Marx said that everything in history occurs twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.  The Eighteenth Brumaire is a reference to the date on the French revolutionary calendar when Napoleon Bonaparte – the tragic hero – seized power in 1799 in a coup d'état.  Louis Napoleon is the nephew, a grotesque mediocrity, who had his own Eighteenth Brumaire in 1851, subsequently creating the comic opera Second Empire.

It’s not often that I agree with anything that Karl Marx said or wrote, but here I think he has a point – tragic greatness is succeeded inevitability by laughable mediocrity.  In the history of British Toryism, for instance, we have Sir Robert Peel, the man who shaped the modern Conservative Party and then almost destroyed it by later supporting the repeal of the Corn Laws, thereby undermining the economic power of the landed gentry.  In this instance Peel put Country above Party.  It was for him an issue of necessity and of principle, an issue that destroyed him personally, an issue that divided the Party irrevocably. 

Peel is the tragic greatness.  Now at last we have the farce; we have David Cameron, the present leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister under a Coalition government.  He, too, has fought on an issue of principle; he, too, has laid down the lines of battle; he, too, has presided over a new split in the Party.  And what is his great issue of principle; what is his Corn Law moment?  Was it the level of public debt, was it unemployment, was it the danger of another wave of mass migration from Eastern Europe; was it over our ancient constitutional liberties?  No, his Corn Law moment is...same sex marriage.  This is Cameron’s gay moment in history.

Parliament voted on this rainbow flagship policy on Tuesday 5 February (Sixteen Pluviôse!), with a healthy majority in favour.  Unfortunately for Cameron, who did not even have the courage to attend the debate, 134 Tory MPs voted against with 35 abstentions.  Even some members of the cabinet and the government’s own top lawyer voted against.  Only 126 voted in favour.  The measure was carried with the overwhelming support of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.  Is this the beginning of the end for the Cameroons, I have to ask?  Toryism, in any meaningful sense, is already dead.

I’ve been re-reading George Orwell.  My, what fun he would have had with modern politics, the lies, the absurdity, the dissimulation and the hypocrisy.  I look at David Cameron, I look at Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister, and I look at Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour opposition, and what do I see?  I’m not sure.  A terrible sameness, that much is clear, as if they had all been cast from a single mould.  Wait; I know exactly what I’m reminded of, the concluding words of Animal Farm – “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”  I cannot say which is which. 

Social conservatism died last week.  No, it did not; it’s alive in the country at large, but in Parliament it lacks representatives among the leadership of the three main parties, a point made by Charles Moore writing in the latest issue of the Spectator.  It’s a momentous disenfranchisement, as he puts it.

He makes some other points, things I’m wholly in agreement with.  Personally I could not care less if a fat nancy boys (oops; sorry; it’s the Orwell influence) like Elton John go through some parody of Christian marriage or not.  I’m wholly indifferent, just as I would be if dogs decided on nuptials; it’s no business of mine.  Besides, I suspect that there is a comedy goldmine here.  Oh, the joys to come, like gay divorce and gay custody battles. 

But, surely, the onward march of equality is not to be halted?  By what right, Moore asks, do we oppose polygamy?  After all, Muslims believe that a man has a right to take up to four wives.  Why does our present law disrespect their traditions?  Pure prejudice, clearly.  And there is more.  For, you see, Moore has logic and history and progress on his side;

The same-sexers express old-fashioned disgust at their opponents’ suggestion that their arguments could justify incest, but I do not see why. The gay marriage case is that marriage is good if people love one another very much. Why, by their argument, should this not apply to siblings who feel that way about each other or parents and their (adult) children? Are they saying that certain sex acts are disgusting? If so, on what grounds? Besides, gay incestuous marriages could not possibly pose any genetic risk, since they can produce no offspring. What taboo from the dark ages is holding the reformers back?

Good questions, Charles, you soft old leftie; what is holding the pig politicians back?  Surely not the fear of an adverse reaction by the public, who, as we all know, are fully behind the progressive agenda.  Oh, don’t take my word for it; the Economist has spoken here, and we all know how perspicacious and prescient the Economist is.  The opponents of gay marriage, you see, are a lot of old fogies (Zimmer-framing the issue, 9 February).  The grey vote may be the stronghold of bigots but look to the young, fully behind progress and equality;

To win in 2015 the Tories must target younger voters, who are disproportionately present in marginal seats.  Whisper it softly, but in setting himself against many of his MPs, Mr. Cameron – the party’s greatest electoral asset – may have improved their prospects of re-election.

An interesting viewpoint, don’t you agree?  Hey, but why whisper it softly?  David Cameron, the party’s great electoral asset, Mr. Bullingdon Club himself, will ride back into government, possibly with a decent majority, on the back of a lot of metropolitan fads.  Yes. England has turned into Islington! 

I’m quite prepared to admit that most people in my age group will give the soft soap response when asked for their opinion on equality.  It’s only fair, innit?  But what is clearly beyond the wit of the arses on the Economist is that when people vote, if they vote at all, and when voting is not simply a reflex, they do so because there are matters of deep personal concern to them.  Just imagine all the proles approaching the ballot box in 2015, in a fey and gay mood.  It’s just so, so difficult to control my natural cynicism.  How many divisions does the Pope have?, Stalin asked in dismissive scorn.  How many votes are there in gay marriage?  Oh, don’t look to me for an answer.  Ask David Cameron. 

George Orwell (him again!) wrote of Jonathan Swift, the great eighteenth century satirist, that he was “one of those people who are driven to a perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.”  I was driven to perverse Toryism at an early age, the influence of my much loved grandfather, a county gentleman of the old caste.  But since Toryism in its Cameron mutation has become part of the progressive folly of the moment I can’t be sure what the future holds for me politically. 

I welcomed the Coalition government in 2010, not the best of all possible worlds, but the best we could get; at least the ministry was headed by a Conservative.  I was wrong; it’s headed by a worthless idiot, a mediocrity of the first degree, one whose personal politics are based on nothing but condescension, faddishness and guilt.  He even makes Louis Napoleon look good, which really is quite an achievement. 

So far as his wretched government is concerned I call to mind the words of Oliver Cromwell in dismissing the Long Parliament in 1653;

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth? Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go! 

You see, now I’m in agreement with Karl Marx and Oliver Cromwell.  The world has been turned upside down!  Alas, this is what Cameron has driven me to.  

“You are no Longer a Human Being.”

In 1946 George Orwell published How the Poor Die, an horrific account of his experience in a French public hospital in the late 1920s.  In this he drew the following conclusion;

In the public wards of hospitals you see horrors that you don't seem to meet with among people who manage to die in their own homes, as though certain diseases only attacked people at the lower income levels. But it is a fact that you would not in any English hospitals see some of the things I saw in the Hôpital X. This business of dying like animals, for instance, with nobody interested, the death not even noticed till the morning—this happened more than once.

Orwell! thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee; her hospitals are fens of stagnant waters.  OK, my apologies to Wordsworth for my free adaptation of one of his most memorable poems.  But what I say is true: English hospitals, it’s coming to light, are stagnant fens, places were healthy people go to die, at least if the the example of Stafford Hospital can be taken as a benchmark. 

I’ll say more on this dreadful case in a  moment, but first a word on our National Health Service (NHS), the great sacred cow that politicians criticise at their peril.  We have here a system of socialised medicine set up in the immediate post-war period by the then Labour government of Clement Atlee. 

Orwell, a self-defined socialist, though of a unique kind, was a supporter.  What would he have made of the dream if he had been alive now?  Here we are, seventy years on, and English hospitals are reproducing some of the things he witnessed in France all those years ago, yes, including the business of dying with nobody interested.  The horror here is almost impossible to imagine. 

It has been calculated that between 2005 and 2009, a mere four year period, some 1200 patients at Stafford Hospital in central England died needlessly.  Last week an inquiry headed by Robert Francis, a senior lawyer, published its report, the second into the hospital’s failings.  And the failings are truly appalling, a complete abdication of all duty of care, examples of incompetence, negligence and outright brutality, in some ways worse than anything Orwell witnessed in his foreign charity ward. 

Patients were left lying in their own urine and excrement for days.  Those in desperate thirst were forced to drink water from vases.  People were sent home with life-threatening conditions.  One old man suffering from dementia and Parkinson’s disease was pulled from a lavatory in a state of undress, the nurse screaming at him “You are no longer a human being but an animal.  I hate you.”  Not only were the patients unwashed, in some cases for up to month, but wards were shockingly unhygienic, covered in blood, used dressings and bloody needles. 

One woman arrived to find her 96-year-old mother-in-law “completely naked… and covered with faeces… It was in her hair, her nails, her hands and on all the cot sides… it was literally everywhere and it was dried.”  Another was so concerned about the welfare of her mother, who said she was frightened of the staff, that she mounted a 24-hour vigil by her bedside.  She was horrified by the things she witnessed;

Patients were screaming out in pain because they could not get pain relief. Patients would fall out of bed and we would have to go hunting for staff.  It was like a Third World country hospital.  Things were so bad on the ward that I started feeding, watering and taking all the other patients to the lavatory. It felt like it was not just my mum I watched dying, but all the others as well.

Those who complained were dismissed with contempt by senior management.  A twenty-year-old man was sent home with painkillers after a serious fall from his bike.  Doctors completely failed to diagnose a spleen injury.  He bled to death at home in agony.  The hospital’s chief executive, later reacting to complaints from his mother and family, wrote to them, saying that they should “put the matter behind them and move on.”  

Well, now we have moved on; now we know exactly what was involved, a culture of turnarounds, tick boxes and statistics, all encouraged by the government of Tony Blair, a culture of quick fixes and negligence, encouraged by those who trumpeted the endless virtues of our ‘much-loved’ NHS. 

Charles Moore, writing in the Telegraph, rightly said if negligence on this scale had been discovered in the private sector the management would be sacked and criminal charges would quickly follow.  But with the ‘much loved’ NHS a different culture prevails.  What happens?  Why, nothing, merely reports that take years to produce and end by blaming nobody.  The latest instalment effectively concludes, after much pious hand-wringing, that those in charge should stay in charge.  It was all a ‘cultural failure’, you see, not a question of individual responsibility .  That must be a great comfort to the relatives of the dead.

No sooner was the latest tome published than Sir David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS, was interviewed by the BBC.  This man in a previous life was head of the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority between 2005 and 2006, and thus the senior figure responsible for the Stafford Hospital.  In a previous life he was also a member of the Communist Party.  He was “shocked,” he is “sorry” for past ‘cultural failures.’ No matter; he is staying, backed by the present Health Secretary and David Cameron, the Prime Minister. 

In a public statement launching his report, Mr Francis began by saying: “Many will find it difficult to believe that all this could occur in an NHS hospital.”  No, quite frankly, I don’t.  Stafford may be an extreme case but it is by no means an atypical feature of our rationed, managerial-conscious and patient-negligent ‘much loved’ NHS.

The point is, as Moore also says, this dreadful bureaucratic monster was never about patient care; it was about taking charge of delivery by centralised diktat.  It was for people who produced the service, not those who received it.  The truly shocking thing is we now see that those like Nicholson, effectively responsible for the death of hundreds of people, can escape blame for fear of ‘scapegoating.’  Could this happen in any country that is not called Cuba or North Korea?  It has happened in England.  It must be of some benefit to have a former communist in charge. 

Pleased do not think the Stafford case is an isolated incident.  Other hospitals and other NHS trusts are now under investigation.  It’s estimated that a further 3000 patients have died needlessly elsewhere over the past two years.  Inquiries – more delaying tactics – have been ordered into hospitals where death rates are persistently high.  Solicitors are preparing to act against nine trusts accused of neglecting elderly patients.  You might like to remember all of the above facts in considering the alleged virtues of rationing and socialised medicine.  Come to England; we know how to do it, we know how to deliver health care with dignity and comfort.  There again you might be better advised to go to a charity hospital in France. 

The dread of hospitals probably still survives among the very poor, and in all of us it has only recently disappeared. It is a dark patch not far beneath the surface of our minds. I have said earlier that when I entered the ward at the Hôpital X I was conscious of a strange feeling of familiarity. What the scene reminded me of, of course, was the reeking, pain-filled hospitals of the nineteenth century, which I had never seen but of which I had a traditional knowledge.

Ah, George; the future is not a foreign country; we do things pretty much the same here. 

Your Horse is Gay!

Homosexuality is just so gay.  I could be prosecuted in England for writing that.  Why?  Because someone or other might conclude that there’s a wounding intent in my words; someone or other might feel ‘insulted’ by my – alleged – inference.  Someone or other might inform the police, who might very well arrest me for a breach of the Public Order Act.

This is just too, too absurd, I can almost hear you thinking.  No reasonable plod would consider such a thing.  A policeman’s lot may not be a happy one, but policemen, by and large are not a stupid lot.  Well, then, let me offer you a different view.

Sam Brown, an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, was out with friends celebrating the end of his exams.  Passing a mounted policeman, he asked in jocular high spirits “Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?”  What happened next was not at all gay.  Oxford’s underemployed police people arrested Brown for his ‘homophobic’ remark. 

He was handcuffed and bundled off to the local Bastille for a breach of section five of the 1986 Public Order Act, which outlaws ‘insulting words or behaviour.’  Once inside, the Keystone Cops tried to extort an £80.00 ($130) fixed penalty notice.  He quite rightly refused to pay.  Locked up overnight, he was taken to court the following day, where prosecutors – not quite as dim as Oxford’s finest – immediately dropped the case. 

It’s laughable, I know, but it actually gets worse.  Have you ever said boo to a goose?  Just be careful if you do, because a sixteen year old boy from Newcastle in the north-east of England was arrested for saying ‘woof’ to a dog.  This was within the earshot of local police.  He was fined £50 ($80) with £150 ($240) costs for ‘threatening behaviour’ a decision later overturned on appeal by a jury.  The whole silly affair was no joke on taxpayers, because it allegedly cost them £8000 ($12800).   

Another case concerns a boy who held up a placard saying “Scientology is a dangerous cult”, fair comment, in my view, unless you are a scientologist, in which case it’s an ‘insult.’  His offence was reported and he was arrested. 

It’s impossible to make this sort of thing up, and I can assure you I did not.  It would be risible, a massive laugh at the expense of a stupid and literal-minded police force if it did not present genuine dangers to free speech.  No-one likes to be insulted but in a free society no-one has a right to expect not to be insulted. 

For some time now campaigners including David Davis, a former government minister, and Rowan Atkinson, the comedian, have been urging a change in the law.  Atkinson has attacked what he calls a “creeping culture of censoriousness.”  I would go further and attack a creeping culture of mind-numbing stupidity, especially on the part of the police. 

The little light of sanity has at last broken through the fog.  Tomorrow Geoffrey Dear, a former Chief Constable who now sits in the House of Lords, the venerable branch of the British Parliament, will table a motion calling for an amendment to the Act.  This, if passed, and accepted by the government, will remove the word ‘insulting’ from the legislation.  The measure is apparently backed now by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Actually I wonder if the legislation is the problem.  It’s really just a symptom, not the disease.  The disease is stupidity coupled with the growth of thin-skinned sensitivity.  I’m sure that in the past, even in the time when the legislation was first put on the statute book, people would never have imagined that public order measures could be put to such facile use.  There have always been those who are prepared to take offence at the least thing.  For the law to give support to each and every silly ass who can’t take a joke is, quite frankly, beyond a joke.  

The not so strange death of Liberal England

I’ve been looking at developments oop north, Rotherham in South Yorkshire, to be precise.  Politically it’s a socialist redoubt, held for years by the Labour Party.  It’s the kind of territory where if a red rosette was pinned on a chimp it would be returned to Parliament. 

Come to think of it Denis MacShane, the previous incumbent, is a bit of a chimp; a chump anyway.  I shall be even more unparliamentarily in saying that he is little better than a crook, forced to resign the seat over expense claims that were ‘plainly intended to deceive.’  That’s the parliamentary phrase! 

Anyway, Rotherham has turned into a bit of a graveyard – a graveyard for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.  It’s also become a graveyard for toleration and the birthplace of something altogether more sinister.

 I’ll come to the latter in a bit but first I need to do a spot of crowing.  Caw, caw, I call; my, how I delight in the decline and decline of the Limp Dumbs.  Can it be, can it possibly be that they will turn in ever decreasing circles to the point of complete extinction, the Incredible Shrinking Party?  Let it be, she sings; oh, let it be. 

The Northern Folk, you see, had a by-election last week in the wake of MacShane’s disgrace and forced resignation.  They got rid of Labour and – guess what? – they got Labour.  The vote is dead; long live the vote!  They voted for another chimp, one Sarah Champion, memorable for being completely unmemorable. 

But the election itself was memorable for other reasons, not least of which was the disastrous showing of the Clegg gang, who slumped to eighth place in the poll, behind the British National Party, behind the English Democrats and behind George Galloway’s Respect. 

Incidentally, the Respect candidate was a certain Yvonne Ridley, a journalist of a sort once held captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan.  She enjoyed the experience so much that she subsequently converted to Islam.  She is also something of an obsessive, vowing to hunt down Zionists wherever they are to be found, yea, even so far as the ranks of Respect, which must be a bit like hunting for a vegetarian among cannibals. Her anti-Zionist credentials are doubtless why she was chosen to stand in Rotherham, that well-known Zionist stronghold.

Sorry for the diversion.  Let me get back to the Liberal Democrats, now in deep mourning.  I dare say they are falling back on the usual guff about not getting their message across.  I rather think the Rotherhamites got a message across to them.  Polling pundits are saying that no major political party has ever performed so poorly in a Westminster by-election.  Eighth place and a mere two per cent of the vote; that is the message they have to bear!

The thing about the Liberal Democrats is that they had no clear idea of what they are and what they represent.  Oh, yes, they were desperate for power, but power has its penalties, most of all on a movement that was really just a collective gripe.  Out of power for generations, the Liberals and subsequently the Liberal Democrats turned into a protest party, embracing every politically fashionable cause, from windmills to gay marriage.  It was a movement for socialists who could not quite define themselves as socialists, progressives who progressed in whatever direction the wind blew.  In the end power was their Inchcape Rock, upon which their fragile vessel shattered.

I suppose the really interesting thing about Rotherham is that the onward march of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has not been halted.  With over twenty-one percent of the vote, they came second behind Labour, well ahead of the Tories, to whom they must now be considered as a serious rival on the right, following the Corby result earlier in the month

Rotherham’s Ministry of Love, sorry, make that Social Services Department, must be seriously concerned by this trend.  I expect they are already scouring their foster register just in case any children have been placed in the care of UKIP supporters.  After all, one’s political views have a clear bearing on one’s suitability as a parent.  The Labour-controlled Rotherham Borough Council certainly believes so, having previously removed three children, including a baby, in the care of a UKIP-supporting family. 

The great crime of these people was their opposition to multiculturalism, which in the eyes of Rotherham’s KGB-trained social workers makes them ‘racist.’  The older children, who called the people in question mum and dad, are said to be traumatised by the whole experience. Apparently in true KGB-style the social service apparatchiks descended on the family after an anonymous tip off.  Here come a candle to light you to bed; here comes a chopper to chop off your head.  Yes, we become more like Airstrip One with every passing day. 

So it’s pretty dangerous to be a supporter of UKIP in Rotherham, especially if one wants to be a parent.  It’s reasonably safe, though, to be a member of a predominantly Asian gang trafficking underage white girls for sex.  Big Sister in the shape of Joyce Thacker, Rotherham’s social services director, goes around the place defending her dawn raid, all the time ignoring that her department was one of those singled out earlier in the year for its negligence over the pimping issue.  If only the perpetrators had been members of UKIP.  That surely would have made all the difference.  

Thacker Speaks

Cameron’s Gay Week

  

I no longer support the Conservative Party.  My goodness, I should really keep quiet about this; my family would be outraged!  That’s not quite true.  I know my late grandfather, a life-long Tory who once met Churchill, would be sad, but mother and father have, along with me, become increasingly disenchanted.  I will always vote for decent Tories like Boris Johnson, London’s mayor; I will not vote for a faux Tory like that hopeless muddle-head David Cameron, all windmills and gay marriage. 

I may in future support a Conservative Party, and that party is the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).  I’m writing this in the wake of the parliamentary by-election in the middle England seat of Corby.  Formerly held for the Tories by the idiotic Louise Mensch – such a little mensch - , it was taken by Labour last Thursday with a comfortable swing.  You know the sort of thing – if this result was repeated across the country blah de blah de blah. 

I expected the Tories to lose, they deserved to lose, but the UKIP advance was a delight to behold, a warning, if you like, from Conservatives to the Cameroons.  Attracting over 5000 votes, some 14% of the poll, the party moved into third place behind the Tory candidate.  Even more gratifying, the pestilential Gay Liberation Front, also known as the Liberal Democrats, lost their deposit. 

It’s as well not to make too much of this sort of thing.  The boast that UKIP is now the ‘third party’ in English politics is premature in the extreme, in some ways as asinine as the ‘if this result were repeated’ mantra.  But it shows that the traditional support for the Conservative Party is in danger of haemorrhaging away to the right.  It shows just how sick and tired people are not just with the ghastly European Union but with Cameron and his feeble-minded politics.  His version of Conservatism is just another Gay Coalition Front. 

On the subject of which, I noted from a Spectator blog that Cameron is accused of misleading supporters over the possible loss of support the Conservatives would risk if the government legislated on gay marriage.  In responding to a letter by Cheryl Gillian, the former Welsh Secretary, deeply critical of the gay policy, Cameron claimed that polling data showed that it would make more people vote Conservative.  Oh, Mr Cameron, that’s a lie.  Sorry; I’m breaching parliamentary etiquette.  I should say it’s a terminological inexactitude. 

I hope you won’t mind a slight digression here but people might be interested to know that the forms of language that can be used in Parliamentary debate are governed by strict procedural rules.  It’s all rather quaint, the Speaker ruling if a particular member has crossed the boundaries or not.  Benjamin Disraeli, a former Tory leader then in opposition, was once instructed to withdraw his allegation that half the cabinet were knaves.  Half the cabinet are not knaves, came the response.

Anyway back to Cameron, who is not a knave, just a little confused.  Andrew Hawkins, director of ComRes, the company that carried out the poll, wrote to the Prime Minister correcting his terminological inexactitudes.  Amongst other things he said that “the more important point from the poll…shows both that the party loses more votes than it gains as a result of the policy, and that former Conservative voters are especially less likely to return to the fold.”

Hawkins went on to say that the policy would have a detrimental effect on the Conservative Party’s electoral fortunes if pursued – “your letter states that ‘all of the published polls have found that more voters support equal civil marriage – however described – than oppose it.’ That is simply not the case.”

It was such a gay week from Mister Cameron.  I don’t suppose he is feeling very gay at all just at the present.