Derby NHS Trust - "Do Not Resuscitate" forms for all

Mail :

Peter Clarke was not treated by doctors after going into cardiac arrest as a nurse had spotted the form in his files and, even though it was blank and had not been filled in, told other ward staff he should not be revived.

The blunder emerged at an inquest into the incident at Derby Hospitals NHS Trust, where bosses revealed staff had been ‘routinely’ placing the forms alongside medical records before they had been correctly signed and witnessed by senior doctors.

The errors go against the usual Trust policy on using the forms and mean the documents were inserted into files without the consent of patients.

It has affected an unknown number of patients and it is not known how long the practice was going on.

The good news is that 'lessons have been learned and procedures changed' :

Dr Robert Hunter, Derby and South Derbyshire Coroner, recorded a verdict of natural causes. He said that on the balance of probabilities the failure to carry out resuscitation did not cause or affect Mr Clarke’s death.

But he added: "The circumstances have highlighted faults within the system. If anything has come out of this, it's improved the policy for future patients."

Miss Fowlie said that several changes in procedure had been made to prevent a repeat occurrence.

Blank Do Not Resuscitate forms were no longer being routinely filed into patients’ medical records by clerical staff, and greater checks and balances had been implemented when it came to deciding whether to resuscitate a patient.

Just wait until they start adding the Terry Pratchett 'I really want you to top me if I can't do it myself (and save a lot of NHS budget)' forms.

Saturday Night Luurrve

What was the name of the record shop in Bradford's John Street Market ? I remember almost crying with laughter when they played this - and it's still pretty good now. Bill Cosby in Walrus of Love mode - a touching tale of domestic violence :





(And he doesn't do a bad line in political rhetoric, either)


UPDATE - I grow old. The record stall which I can't recall the name of (Jumbo ? Discovery ?) was in the late Rawson Market, a small market of mostly butchers/fruit&veg between the (then) new Kirkgate monstrosity and John Street Market - John Street being a fine market with a pie and peas stand, Baltic food shop and the very wonderful Doris and Roy's Furniture, where house-clearance treasures were to be found.

Like so much else of beauty in Bradford, Rawson Market no longer exists.

Old Bromsgrovian Dies

When I mentioned the few notable alumni of my alma mater and the fee-paying place up the road, I completely forgot to mention Bromsgrove School's most famous OB - the actor Ian Carmichael, who made a career playing silly-ass public school types, and has just died at 89.

Excellent Guardian obituary here.

Friday Night Is Music Night (Global NeoCon Special)

Come on. When did Polly Toynbee or George Monbiot last step into the studio to do a Christmas single ?

Mark Steyn may not be God's gift to performing music (as opposed to his brilliant writing on the subject), but Jessica Martin keeps him comfortably afloat here.

"I'm in the global justice squad, and we've been working on human rights in Burma"

I suppose the only surprise is that it's taken so long to get there. Perhaps "citizenship" had to be made compulsory first.

"It is easy to become complacent about equality and diversity, just ticking the boxes," he says. "The Stephen Lawrence Standard takes monitoring very seriously, constantly checking on students' involvement, the work going on and its results."

The original award was quick off the mark after the 1999 Macpherson report recommended such strategies in all education authorities, but Edwards points out: "Quick is a relative term. Remember Stephen Lawrence was murdered in 1993."

There are 12 criteria in the toolkit all schools are now being urged by Balls to adopt, including mandatory anti-racist training for staff and governors, a written equality policy, and individual checks on successes and setbacks for minority pupils. The system has three levels, from standard 1 to the top, standard 3.

There'll always be room for initiatives like this in schools, but don't expect to see any like this over here, btw :

The study appears in the February edition of Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. It was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and involved 662 black children in Philadelphia. The students were assigned to one of four options: eight hour-long abstinence-only classes; safe-sex classes; classes incorporating both approaches; or classes in general healthy behaviour. Results for the first three classes were compared with the control group that had only the general health classes.

Two years later, about one-third of abstinence-only students said they had had sex since the classes ended, compared with about 49%of the control group. Sexual activity rates in the other two groups did not differ from the control group.

Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Programme, said she hoped the study would revive government interest in abstinence-only sex education. The research was led by psychologist John Jemmott III, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has long studied ways to reduce risky behaviour among inner-city youngsters.

(My views on the undoubted evil of racist murder are here. I need to post this for the benefit of any readers who might presume, quite reasonably, that the MacPherson enquiry had good cause to declare the Met 'institutionally racist'.

In fact, no credible evidence of police racism was brought before the MacPherson enquiry, which was precisely why they invented the hitherto unknown concept of "unconscious or unwitting" institutional racism.

The MacPherson report was the high-water mark of liberal white idiocy in relation to race. Never before have so many educated English breasts been beaten for so much non-existent racism. It's not as if there's a shortage of the real thing.

I'd recommend people to take a look at the paper "Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics" by Norman Dennis, George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi, available as a pdf download from Civitas.

It's top stuff, well-written and an easy read. I'll just quote the summary.


The public inquiry set up under the chairmanship of Sir William Macpherson sometimes had the appearance of a judicial proceeding, but in many crucial respects it departed from practices which have traditionally been regarded as essential in English law. Rules of evidence were modified and witnesses were harassed, both by the members of the inquiry team and by the crowd in the public gallery. Representatives of the Metropolitan Police were asked to ‘confess’ to charges of racism, even if only in their private thoughts. They were even asked to testify to the existence of the racist thoughts of other people. It is part neither of the English judicial process nor of English public inquiries to put people on trial for their thoughts. The proceedings bore some resemblance to the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s.

However, no evidence of racism on the part of the police was ever produced. There was no attempt to show that the Metropolitan Police Service was racist in the sense of being formally structured to put members of ethnic minorities at a disadvantage. Nor was any evidence produced that individual officers dealing with the murder of Stephen Lawrence had displayed racism, unless one includes the use of words like ‘coloured’ which are currently out of favour with professional race relations lobbyists. No evidence was produced to indicate that the police would have handled the investigation differently had the victim been white.

In spite of this, the Macpherson report found the Metropolitan Police, and British society generally, guilty of ‘institutional’ or ‘unwitting’ racism. This claim was justified by referring to ‘other bodies of evidence’ to that collected at the public inquiry, including a list of publications consulted which in many cases had nothing to do with the Lawrence case, and sometimes nothing to do with the UK at all.

Some of the Macpherson report’s proofs of racism were circular and self-reinforcing. To question whether the murder of Stephen Lawrence was a purely racist crime was, in itself, adduced as evidence of racism. This was despite the fact that the suspects had been accused of violent offences against white people and were heard, in tape recordings made of their private conversations, to express violent hatred against white people. The tape recordings were quoted selectively, and this crucial fact does not appear in the Macpherson report.

The Macpherson inquiry, unable to find evidence of racism, produced a definition of racism that at first glance absolved it from producing any. It switched attention, in one direction, away from racist conduct and towards organisational failure. The ineffectiveness of the police had (purportedly) been demonstrated. That ineffectiveness concerned a racist crime. Therefore the ineffectiveness was due to police racism. It switched attention, in the other direction, away from observable conduct, words or gestures and towards the police officer’s ‘unwitting’ thoughts and conduct. But how could the Macpherson inquiry know what was in an officer’s unconscious mind—except through the failure of the police to be effective in the investigation of a racist crime? This definition puts charges of racism outside the boundaries of proof or rebuttal.

The Macpherson report has had a detrimental impact on policing and crime, particularly in London. Police morale has been undermined. Certain procedures which impact disproportionately on ethnic groups, like stop and search, have been scaled down. The crime rate has risen. Nevertheless, the Macpherson report has been received with almost uncritical approval by pundits, politicians and academics. It is still routinely described as having ‘proved’ that the police and British society are racist.)

Labour MP - "British workers for all major construction contracts"

Interesting report at leftie blog The Commune on a construction workers demo today :

The protests at the Alsthom office, Peter Mandelson’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Houses of Parliament’s Old Palace Yard were attended by about 100 people, most of whom were unemployed construction workers from power stations in the Midlands and the North. The demo was organised by the GMB after an audit proving that at the Staythorpe power station site in Nottinghamshire, migrant workers were being paid only 500 euros a month – i.e. 1300 euros a month below the industry rate.

This doesn't sound kosher - or indeed halal to me. 500 euros a month is way below UK minimum wage - or does it not apply to people under the Posted Workers Directive ( Wikipedia says it does apply, but gives no citation) ?

I digress.

The union’s placards demanded equal pay for all, and attacked undercutting which meant the subcontractor Somi preferred to use foreign labour rather than local unemployed workers, since it could do so more cheaply and undermine the industry agreement. Speakers at the closing rally repeatedly and clearly expressed solidarity with the Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Greek workers who were being underpaid and demanded that they be paid the industry rate.

Blogger David Broder has a problem here. As a good Marxist internationalist the idea of a nation having interests of its own is self-evidently ridiculous. There is only class and class struggle.

Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. As others far to the left of me have said, a glut of labour lowers wages, and a glut of imported labour lowers indigenous wages. In another Labour MP, Jon Cruddas' words :

“the government tacitly used immigration to help forge the preferred flexible North American labour market. In the service sector, construction and civil engineering, for example, immigration has been used as an informal reserve army of cheap labour. People see this at their workplace, feel it in their pocket and see it in their community - and therefore perceive it as a critical component of their own relative impoverishment.

Objectively, the social wage of many of my constituents is in decline. House prices rise inexorably, and public service improvements fail to match local population expansion. At work, their conditions, in real terms, are in decline through the unregulated use of cheap migrant labour.

Migrant labour is the axis of our whole domestic agenda.

Now there's a lot of PC self-deception here - or possibly cynicism, in the demo speakers' "solidarity with the Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Greek workers who were being underpaid".

"whereas the Daily Star had quoted an Amicus/Unite shop steward to the effect that “All we want for Brit workers is a fair crack of the whip to have first preference on jobs”, and at yesterday’s Cadbury demo Unite’s Jack Dromey had commented that “Our fear is that the Kraft takeover is not in the national interest”, most speakers at the Old Palace Yard rally steered well clear of such sentiments."

Because the speakers - and the workers - know quite well that if the imported workers were paid UK wages, there would no longer be any incentive to import them, cheapness being their USP. In effect, if not in form, the call for "the industry rate" is the call of 'British Jobs For British Workers'. It's just the call that dare not speak its name.

Save for one champion. I know little about John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, a solidly working class constituency covering what was once the Nottinghamshire coalfield. Emboldening is mine.

However, while most speakers stressed that the struggle was over the industry agreement and agencies’ monopoly of recruitment, the New Labour MP John Mann injected his own special venom into proceedings. Mann “had no problem” with ‘British jobs for British workers’ and stressed that there was plenty of land in his constituency to build more power stations. He argued against employing migrant workers who supposedly “don’t pay tax towards the NHS” and put British workers on Jobseekers’ Allowance, decrying this as ‘bad economics’ for Britain.

What ? Here we have the grotesque sight of a Labour MP - a Labour MP, mind you, suggesting that it's bad for Brits to be unemployed while migrants work ? What is the world coming to ?

With an eye on the upcoming General Election, Mann announced that he would be tabling a motion in Parliament to the effect that all major construction projects are carried out by British workers: if anyone had a problem with that, he assured us, he had the “100% backing of all 79,000 men women and children” in his constituency.

I'll keep an eye open for that. He's got an enormous majority - are the BNP giving him a hard time, or his constituents, or both ? Could it be that he's sincere ? Seems to have taken him a long time - he's been an MP for nine years.

While what Mann had said was at odds with the general themes of the rally, he received enthusiastic applause, more than anyone except Hicks’ militant class struggle speech. Whitehurst and Kenny’s speeches were several times interrupted by unemployed workers asking what precisely the union was going to do about the situation, which has left many without work for as long as 9 months. Quite. It seemed as though, just like Hicks’ call for solidarity action and fighting rather than lying down, Mann’s overt and defiant nationalism might also perhaps have appealed to a sense of frustration at the lack of progress made by the GMB and Unite over the last year.

In other words, the workers are noticing that the boilerplate union rhetoric is long on words, short on jobs and wages. They're noticing that :

"the moral and political objections to undercutting "our own people" (a phrase which immediately brands the utterer with the indelible scar of racism) have been totally marginalised and discredited (in this context, rendered almost unsayable - LT). The trades unions, which instinctively understood the objections to cheap 'scab' (non-unionised) labour, now welcome the undercutting of an entire working class."

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. I'll be keeping an interested eye on Mr Mann.

Cognitive Dissonance Alert Part 492

Lawrie Penny takes issue with Simon Jenkins on the vexed issue of whether in a liberal democracy Christians can be allowed to self-organise, brilliantly parodying those who accuse secularists of 'liberal fascism' :

"Because she's an eeeeevil feminazi, OMG"

"All liberals R Nazis!!*$!"

"This whiny attempt to curry favour with the chain-smoking wingnut libertarian contingent of Guardian readers just makes me want to stub out a fag in your face, Simon."

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a cigarette being stubbed out in Simon Jenkins' face - forever.

Decline of the West

1959 - Western clothes. Blouse and skirt, at the front a few floral dresses of the sort my mother was wearing at the time. Formal jacket and tie for chaps.

1978 - looks like 1973 at an English university, with maybe slightly longer skirts. Even the hairstyles are familiar. The chaps have loosened up, too - more hair and far fewer jackets and ties.

1995 - Blimey. 50% hijab ? Where'd they all come from ? And I think I'm in love with front centre, pale face and pre-Raphaelite hair.

2004 - now it's spot the girls without hijab. Half-a dozen maybe ? Eight ? Not more than 10% max.

Cairo University Class Photos. It would be interesting to see some from the 1980s.

As Mr Steyn puts it, "the idea that social progress is like the wheel or the internal combustion engine — once invented, it can never be uninvented — is one of the laziest assumptions of the Western Left".

Cognitive Dissonance Alert (Part 637)

Dave Osler on Tibet :

"China has since then systematically exploited Tibet’s natural resources, and has resettled Han Chinese colonists there to the point where Tibetans are at risk of becoming a minority in their own homeland"

Dave Osler on the UK :

"further mass immigration obviously has the potential to rejuvenate the population of this island once the politicians can get their head round the idea"

LA's Fine, The Sun Shines Most The Time

... and the feeling is laid back ?

All depends on where you live.

And your age.

Sex.

and ethnicity.

I must give 'props' to the LA Times for the Homicide Report, a terrific resource started as a blog by a lone LA Times journalist, Jill Leovy, and now put together in conjunction with the Annenberg School of Journalism- would that such a resource existed for the UK, which has around the same number of murders per annum as LA. Someone did start this, and the UK police have created this, but I've failed in two days of trying (with a 750K ADSL connection) to get any of the maps to actually load - after about ten minutes I give up. Looks like the work of Rock Kitchen Harris is in the best tradition of state-funded computer projects.

Interesting Homicide Report FAQ here.

Mind, the Annenberg School either need a new Managing Editor or a decent subeditor, judging by their announcement.

Alan Mittelstaedt, managing editor of Annenberg Digital News, which publishes Neon Tommy, said Khouri’s recent article in The Times is a prime example of how this partnership can work.

“It was as good of a story as a 15-year veteran at a newspaper could have done,” Mittelstaedt said.

While we're on the subject of homicide rates, Harry Hutton pointed out a while back that they'd be much higher were it not for medical advances. This New England Journal of Medicine piece looks at military survival rates (30% of WW2 wounded die as against 10% Iraq wounded).

And this Wayback-retrieved Canberra Times article quotes a British Medical Journal piece (it gives the reference) :

"The latest British Medical Journal draws a different link between medicine and murder, arguing medical advances mask an epedemic of violence by cutting the homicide rate. In the September issue Roger Dodson says murder rates would be up to five times higher without medical developments during the past 40 years"

Medical advances mask epidemic of violence by cutting murder rate

Roger Dobson

BMJ September 2002; 325: 615.

There's also this at the delightfully named Killology site, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

Since 1957 in the US, the per capita aggravated assault rate (which is, essentially, the rate of attempted murder) has gone up nearly sevenfold, while the per capita murder rate has less than doubled. Vast progress in medical technology since 1957 to include everything from mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, to the national "9-1-1" emergency telephone system, to medical technology advances is the reason for this disparity.

Any Chemists or Physicists Out There ?

My daughter has a question - and not a bad one, either.

When a radioactive substance decays by alpha emission (I told you she was precocious) , the alpha article is a helium nucleus i.e it has no electrons and a positive charge of 2.

What's left has lost two protons - so its atomic number is two less and it's a new element.

Here's uranium decaying to thorium :


Uranium has 92 protons (and hence 92 electrons), thorium has 90 protons and hence 90 electrons.

Her question is - if the uranium fires out an alpha particle, what happens to the 2 surplus electrons left on the thorium atom ? It's now got 90 protons (having lost 2 in the alpha particle) but still has 92 electrons.

Answers on the Web are :

Health Physics Society :

It is possible that the two excess electrons associated with the thorium could find their way to the alpha particle and neutralize it, but this would likely not be a one-step process, since the alpha particle is emitted with appreciable velocity and moves some distance away from the decay site before coming to rest. More likely excess thorium charge is transferred to some other atoms or molecules in the system; eventually the alpha particle is neutralized as it picks up two available electrons to yield a neutral helium atom, and charge remains conserved.

Physics Forums :

When the U (Z=92) transforms to Th (Z=90) as a result of alpha decay, the two electrons are lost to the nearby medium. The decay nuclide is like surrounded by similar material, or if at the surface of a solid, it is in contact with air or some gas. Likely though the alpha particle rips away some electrons on its way out of the nucleus, but those electrons are quickly recaptured.

As charge particles (alpha and beta), and even gamma rays, pass through material, they interact with atomic electrons and excite or ionize atoms (hence the term - "ionizing radiation"). The range of an alpha particle in solid material is very small - on the order of microns, so it does not travel far from the nucleus from which it originated. Because it has a +2 charge, the alpha particle will ultimately attract two electrons. There will be an effective net migration of 2 electrons along the path the alpha particle took while slowing down.

Advanced Physics Forums :

It's an interesting question that whether the atom of the new element now have a negative two charge or does something else happen to these electrons. Electrons are not exactly static charged particles. They have a good deal of fluidity in practice, and in fact one could go as far as saying that they are inherently fuzzy objects, like a photon of light. In most solids (and even in gases) any non-equilibrium electronic state is almost instantaneously readjusted. It's rearrangements of atomic nuclei which take time (so that, while chemical reactions technically involve only electrons, any reaction which requires movement of whole atoms will have a measurable rate). Essentially what happens in a-decay is that the a-particle knocks electrons loose from one or more nearby atoms, then picks up two of the loose electrons to form a neutral helium atom. Meanwhile, the other surrounding atoms (including the "dianion" parent atom -- the scare quotes are deliberate) very quickly reshuffle their electrons in order to have the most energetically stable configuration. This reshuffling energy, by the way, shows up as heat; strong a-emitters like radium are typically a little warmer than their surroundings, and radioactive decay is a prime source of the earth's internal heat. Hope this answers your query.

So while the answers make sense in terms of charge conservation, they're all a little vague on the actual mechanics. Does the thorium atom spend time as a thorium ion ? Are the electrons lost by the thorium atom to spend time as free electrons, or do they immediately attach themselves elsewhere ? Or does that depend on what kind of atoms or molecules are around for the elecrons to attach to ?

And a question from me - at any time, how many ions or free electrons are around, say in air ? If you drew a virtual metre-square box in your living room, what proportion of the molecules therein would be ionised ?

All Liberal Life Is There ...

Cheesed off with a world where feral child-torturers get five years and anonymity on release ? From the comments on another Guardian "they're victims too " thread.

"It's Thatcher's Fault"

"It's the legacy of Thatcher and the Tories, their crusade against the primary industry has produced children who have grown up with parents who have never had a job"

"Society was brutalised through industrialization and the aftermath and the denial of "society" by Thatcher, and the complete social-moral disintigration she caused"

"Most torturing of small children takes place within the family"

I think in the media-fuelled moral panic about 'stranger danger', people have ignored the fact that the greatest damage done to children tends to be within their own homes at the hands of their own families.

"You're worse than they are"

"I feel that people who seem to want to inflict punishment on small children are themselves in need of treatment."

"The lynch-mob attitude of some of the comments and the call for throw- away-the- key justice reflects just what a brutal society Britain is"

"Who knew that the true sociopaths dwell in this thread"

The all-purpose Guardian editorial seems to have been a pretty good predictor on this occasion. I see the Indie borrowed from it too :

Laban :

The natural horror felt at (insert appalling crime here) should not blind us to the fact that (crime is actually falling/it is all Thatcher's fault/such crimes have always been with us).

If we surrender to (the tabloid agenda/the Daily Mail hysteria/knee-jerk populism/the politics of the soundbite) and take the easy option of (jailing more of our young people/bringing back the birch/bringing back hanging/walling off the cities then bombing them/demonising our young people) we run the very real risk of (actually achieving something/alienating a generation/an invasion of killer bees).

There is only one answer. An enormous increase in the funding of (Sure Start schemes/outreach workers/emotional intelligence mentors/youth projects/anti-racist 5-a-day smoking cessation co-ordinators).

Indie :

"No cause for moral panic"

In the ongoing dialogue of the deaf which recurs whenever feral youths or children commit dreadful crimes, there are only a few liberal arguments, picked up in criminology class and amplified by the Guardian/Indie/BBC, and they come out every time.

a) 'it's always been like this' - aka 'moral panic'.

b) "one case doesn't tell us anything about British society" (except the Stephen Lawrence murder)

c) "it's Thatcher's fault"

d) "crime is actually going down" (having risen by 1,000% since 1950, it started to decline when we locked more people up)

e) "anyway, most torturing of small children takes place within the family" - not the married one it don't.

f) "you're worse than they are" - if you call for evil criminals to be punished, you're even more evil yourself !


One commenter links to this piece, about a classic Guardianista - a woman with empathy for everyone except her neighbours. Kind of reverse-Christianity.

"Who is my neighbour ?"

"The outcast, the rapist, the criminal, the thug"

"And what about your ...er.. neighbours ?"

"Those straights ?"

I had been a foster carer for just over a year when James came to us, and had worked for the council's mental health service for 10 years before that. But I wanted to help the teenagers who had been in the care system for a long time and had suffered serious trauma.

I did every training course on offer. Central Bedfordshire council was brilliant: I studied attachment theory, behaviour management, the problems caused by drug and alcohol abuse, and how to work with sexually abused children. I even did a BTec in advanced fostering.

No problem, then - all boxes ticked.

I was realistic enough to recognise that he was a danger to himself and to everyone he came into contact with, and so I was nervous about the young children who lived around us, but because I knew what a hurt, vulnerable side James possessed I wanted to believe that, deep down, he was a good lad.

We soldiered on. I refused to reject James like everyone else in his life had done, but 10 months after he had come to live with us my neighbour of more than 20 years sold her house and moved away. She told me she couldn't live near him a day longer.

Then, last July, James was accused of raping an 11-year-old local girl and forcing her to perform a sexual act on him.

So a woman is forced from her home of 20 years and an innocent child is raped - and all because "I wanted to believe".

That's religion we're seeing.

Rejoice ! Rejoice ! (Tentatively...)

I must confess to having been a tad depressed by the Cadbury sale. It was all of a piece with the 'Globalisation In One Country' strategy which Labour have been so keen on, and it also brought to mind the deeper currents of the last 20-30-odd years in which British capitalism forgot all about the 'British' bit, in a mirror-image of what was happening to British socialism.

Capitalism is a very fine thing. But too much of a good thing can kill you - and more to the point, there is always a cultural setting within which capitalism operates. I mentioned the cultural setting of Adam Smith's time way back.

That fine blogger and canny investor CityUnslicker wrote of the Cadbury deal :

No doubt there will be plenty of harumphing about another UK company being sold abroad. People seem to forget the effect is a net inflow of money in the UK, to staff, to banks, to pension funds; all of which can be re-invested in new companies.

Invested in new companies. Like the 'new products and services' that the redundant Longbridge workers would soon ('perhaps') be producing, 'for which the UK can find ready markets'.

All through the 80s/90s/00s I kept hearing how trickle down would work - yacht manufacturers would expand on the Hamble and riven slate shower cubicles would be produced in Bethesda to feed the expenditure of the new rich. But what actually happened was that property prices soared. Assets were the thing.

On consideration, this desire for safety, to preserve value, reflected a real, though unexpressed, crisis of confidence. The new City money, and the doubled then quadrupled relative pay of top executives ('The chief executives of the UK's 100 largest companies will earn 81 times the average pay of all full-time workers in 2009') didn't think of a home in hi-tech start-ups outside of a few dot-coms- after all, where were these start-ups ? All the top UK physics and maths grads were at the next terminal in your office working on trading algorithms, not soldering cables together in some small industrial unit. That sort of thing happened in other countries - by strange chance, the ones whose markets were the most exciting (and volatile).

So our rich guys bought houses and land (no inheritance tax on land), and the countryside rapidly became unaffordable. Where I live, average house prices are now nine times average local wages. Like many of my neighbours, I live in a house that I could never afford to buy at its current market value.

I came to the conclusion some time ago that what we'd been seeing over the last twenty years was a vast transfer of assets from the working and middle class to the rich and super-rich. Individual working people (the old lady in the idyllic but crumbling cottage, the canny local builder who snapped it up and made it some director's weekend bolt-hole) made some money, but the end result was that a whole generation grew up for whom even a small house was either way beyond their reach or required two full-time incomes ('we can't afford to have kids').

I could never understand the media assumption over this period that rising house prices were A Good Thing. Didn't these people have any children ?

So I was interested to read the words of one of my favourite economic commentators this morning, Albert Edwards, chief global strategist at French bank Societe Generale, quoted at the FT Alphaville blog :

Mr Bernanke’s in-house Fed economists have found that the Fed wasn’t responsible for the boom which subsequently turned into the biggest bust since the 1930s. Are those the same Fed staffers whose research led Mr Bernanke to assert in Oct. 2005 that “there was no housing bubble to go bust”?

The reasons for the US and the UK central banks inflating the bubble range from incompetence and negligence to just plain spinelessness. Let me propose an alternative thesis. Did the US and UK central banks collude with the politicians to ‘steal’ their nations’ income growth from the middle classes and hand it to the very rich?

The US and UK have seen a huge rise in inequality over the last two decades, as growth in national income has been diverted almost exclusively to the top income earners. The middle classes have seen median real incomes stagnate over that period and, as a consequence, corporate margins and profits have boomed.

Some recent reading has got me thinking as to whether the US and UK central banks were actively complicit in an aggressive re-distributive policy benefiting the very rich...

Indeed, it has been amazing how little political backlash there has been against the stagnation of ordinary peoples’ earnings in the US and UK. Did central banks, in creating housing bubbles, help distract middle class attention from this re-distributive policy by allowing them to keep consuming via equity extraction? The emergence of extreme inequality might never otherwise have been tolerated by the electorate... it is clear in my mind that ordinary working people would not have tolerated these extreme redistributive policies had not the UK and US central banks played their supporting role. Going forward, in the absence of a sustained housing boom, labour will fight back to take its proper (normal) share of the national cake, squeezing profits on a secular basis. For as Bill Gross pointed out back in PIMCO’s investment outlook ‘Enough is Enough’ of August 1997, “"When the fruits of society’s labor become maldistributed, when the rich get richer and the middle and lower classes struggle to keep their heads above water as is clearly the case today, then the system ultimately breaks down”. In Japan, low levels of inequality and inherent social cohesion prevented a social breakdown in this post-bubble debacle. With social inequality currently so very high in the US and the UK, it doesn’t take much to conclude that extreme inequality could strain the fabric of society far closer to breaking point.

I've quoted before Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist who believes that 'the finance industry has effectively captured our government' - that the US and UK are not so very far from post-Soviet Russia, or say 1980s Argentina.

Here's a condensed pdf presentation that he posted at Baseline Scenario:

How the U.S. economy will fare over the next few years will depend on the outcome of a likely power struggle between politics and finance, an outspoken economist said Monday.

The U.S. economy could face a similar financial crisis to the one it’s emerging from unless the government tackles the problem that some banks remain too big to fail, Simon Johnson, economist at the MIT, told a panel at the American Economic Association.

The U.S. Congress has proposed legislation to drastically overhaul financial sector regulation, including measures to seize control of troubled big banks and to cut the powers of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank.

The crisis that ended in 2009 has only exacerbated the problem because of the resulting financial sector consolidation, Johnson said. There are now six big banks that could soon engage in the sort of excessive risk-taking that led to the recent crisis because of a belief that the government would bail them out if they’re in trouble.

“Goldman Sachs has become the world’s largest hedge fund underwritten by the U.S. government,” the MIT economist said. The other five banks he mentioned as posing system risks to the economy are Bank of America, Citibank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.

It will be harder to deal with any new crisis because the U.S. Federal Reserve has likely exhausted its ammunition to counter a financial meltdown after it cut rates close to zero and took other emergency lending steps, Johnson warned.

“A crisis strengthens the oligarchs who survive,” Johnson said.

Well, cometh the hour, cometh the man. Or at least it's a start. Johnson's 'power struggle between politics and finance', which appeared up to now to be a total walk-over for the oligarchs, has kicked off in earnest with Obama's 'Glass-Steagall III' proposals - effectively a reinstatement of some Depression-era legislation obliging banks taking retail deposits to avoid the kind of gambling which dropped them in deep doo-doo - from which the taxpayer is pulling them.

Bank shares and the QE-inflated stock markets are down - and the questions now are two.

First - can Obama actually do it ? Will the banks shimmy round him as they've shimmied round so many other rules ? And second, what will the Republican view be, buoyed as they are by the gain of Edward Kennedy's Massachusetts seat ? They have the power, should they wish, to shaft his legislation.


On the first, I dinna ken. Those Goldman Sachs guys are clever. Too clever. Will they be clever enough to knuckle under ?

On the second - well, some idiot commentator in the Guardian (where else) said :

Watch the reaction of the Republican party, which probably be squealing with rage and fear right now

I'd have thought Republican voters would be pleased but suspicious that Obama's all mouth and no trousers. For the Republican leadership - they may be paid lots of dosh by Wall Street but even they could see that any attempt to defend the banks would see them strung up by their own voters. As RBS Bob Janjuah (again at Alphaville) put it :

The Obama defeat in Mass is HUGE…….even a freshman can figure out that ‘Obama’s’ defeat in Mass is a move towards a lame duck president AND, most seriously, is a move that will directly and indirectly cause de facto FISCAL TIGHTENING – the Republicans have seen some serious and seriously UNEXPECTED gains in Washington since Obama’s inauguration and are now at the point where they COULD block Obama’s fiscal recklessness….

most seriously, the message out of Virginia, New Jersey and now Mass is that the Republicans will do really well in the mid-terms…they will do ‘really well’ because they are going on the tkt of anti-big govt, anti-bailouts to all, & anti-big deficits, all of which is clearly hitting the sweet spot with the US electorate….

I don't see the tea-party crowd coming onto the streets to defend Goldman's bonuses, do you ?

furthermore, Obama has become a guy who folks either perceive or believe (I’m in this latter camp) has merely bailed out Big Wall St & Big Corporate America, all at the expense of the lower strata of the US economy (the youth, Black and Hispanic people, the SME sector, regional banks) – Yes, that’s right, the very folks who voted Obama in

Well, that's what remains to be seen. But there can be little doubt that what he's attempting to do is the right thing. He's shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, all right - but the horse has been enticed back into the stable at the cost of billions of taxpayer bucks . He might have been better advised to shoot the horse and buy another one with the money, but we are where we are. Shutting the door is the right thing.

Can he do it ? I wish him luck. Never knew he had it in him. It's a hell of a volte-face for him, too. Bernanke and Geithner have been more in the print-money and inflate away the debt "Gordon Brown mode". Paul Volcker don't like inflation. I don't either.

'Sing now ye people of Minas Anor
for the age of Bernanke and Greenspan is ended for ever
and the Dark Tower is thrown down.

Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard
for your watch hath not been in vain,
and the Black Gate is broken,
and Obama hath passed through,
and he is victorious.

Sing and be glad, all ye children of the West
for Paul Volcker shall come again,
and he shall dwell among you,
all the days of your life.

And the Tree that was withered shall be renewed,
and he shall plant it in the high places,
and the City shall be blessed.

Sing all ye people!'

Dies Irae 3 - Kate McGarrigle

My middle son is a big Rufus Wainwright fan - he's at the piano most nights giving 'Dinner At Eight' a bash. When he told me it was about Rufus' dad (Loudon Wainwright III), I said 'so's this song from 30 years back' and played him Kate McGarrigle's heartbreaking 'Go Leave'.

The whole family saga is here in great detail. I did wonder if Rufus' sexual orientation was a result of trying to find that elusive lost father-figure, but he seems to be a nature-not-nurture kind of guy. And IMHO he has his mother's celestial harmonies.

Kate has died today age 63. I like to think she's doing a few Scots ballads with Bill McLaren right now.


It looks as if youtube have scoured all the recorded stuff off, so you'll have to suffice with this :



and for all those Rufus and Martha fans, the whole family doing Stephen Foster songs. Rufus was singing pretty good at 16.

Dies Irae 2 - Bill McLaren

Another great British icon gone. Teacher, Cassino veteran, and an enthusiast whose love of the game went straight to the heart of the listener.

Dies Irae I - Cadbury's

Another British company bites the dust. Now all our chocolate will have processed cheese in it.

It's Longbridge (followed by Longbridge II, no doubt) all over again. The A38 south from Brum looks set to become an industrial wasteland to compare with the north of the city, where the remains of the Ansells brewery and the HP factory are long gone, and only the redeveloped Fort Dunlop remains as a reminder of past glory. The east has been mostly deindustrialised (and the natives displaced) as far out as Solihull and the Land Rover plant - only in the west do you still find people making things.

A very long time ago my primary school class sat in the dining room to watch "The Story Of Bournville" - chocolate from Africa to Brum. Now (I might have been 6 or 7) I knew the full story of the Cadbury trucks and tankers we passed on the Bromsgrove to Birmingham line, in their sidings opposite 'The Factory In A Garden'.

The open spaces and gardens around the factory are used by staff during lunch breaks. There are sports grounds. Men play football. There is a swimming bath for the women and an open-air pool for the men. Scenes in Bourneville village, the Day Continuation School, Selley Manor and Minwirth Greaves, the Friends Meeting House, the Church, the Almshouses and the school. Young employees are seen at summer camp under canvas, washing-up, playing cricket, on an excursion in a boat, sea-bathing and playing music in the evening. The nightwatchman says "It's pretty wonderful, isn't it?"

Flickr photoset here. Wonderful description of a 1920 factory visit here :



Kraft said all the nice things about investment and the brand when it took over Terry's of York. Now the York factory is empty and the chocolate oranges are made in Poland.

Already the first talk of redundancies is coming from the company. I guess it was nice while it lasted.

"Your Slappers Are Driving Our Young Men Crazy"

The mighty Yazza (for it is she yet again) on the difficulty of being a good Muslim male in a world of half-dressed drunken "dancing slags":

On blogs now thought to be written by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit, you are given the impression from news reports that he was a lonely boy, unhappy with his peers who drank and partied. At university he apparently cut himself off, tried to hold on to Islamic Puritanism in a country of no shame, no restraint. Millions of Britons of all backgrounds are alarmed by the dissipation and debauchery that now defines Britain.

For Umar Farouk and many other Muslim men like him, living in such a landscape is literally intolerable. He confesses that he does try to lower his gaze in front of females, wonders if he should get married because he is getting too aroused. You could make a movie, a Taxi Driver for our times, about just such an anti-hero, the hormonal male who is expected to live a life of total abstinence in the middle of licentiousness.

She's got a point - and it's one she's made before. But it doesn't take full-on slapperdom to arouse the ire of the faithful. Sayyid Qutb, spiritual guru of the Muslim Brotherhood, wasn't too impressed with a church dance in late 1940s Greeley, Colorado.

"And they danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire."

(Qutb also noted 'The American Temptress' - a paragraph on the American Girl which made it quite plain that he had clocked every seductive thing about them. What would he have made of Mindy Jones ?)

Now I know that even back in the 40s the Septics were considered 'fast' by UK standards (now we've long since left them behind), but the atmosphere has always contained a greater or lesser amount of desire wherever young men and young women have been in proximity to each other. The genius of pre-cultural revolution Britain (and I'm sure to some extent the States) was that this desire was constrained and controlled - as I wrote here :

Christianity and the other major world religions have been around a long time. They understood, accepted and respected the power of sexuality, which was precisely why it was bound in with all manner of prescription, proscription, culture and custom. Procreation, the link between sexuality and the family, then and now still the chief transmitter of culture between the generations, was similarly attended.

Alas, the same cultural collapse that causes drunken slappers is the one that brought Yazza - and lots of other Muslims - here (I'm not saying she's not an ornament to this country - but under a pre-deluge administration Uganda wouldn't have got premature independence, Idi Amin would have hit his ceiling at Captain, and Yazza's family would still be making a good Ugandan living). Good Muslims and drunken slappers don't go together like a horse and carriage, but you don't seem to be able to have one without the other. Not a situation that will endure, though. Though the current, hypocritical accommodation (fornicate with said slappers but marry your own) will doubtless suffice for the moment.

A Few Sledges Fron The Curate's Porch

Riots in Calabria :

The rioting began after Thursday's shooting, in which two men - one from Nigeria, the other from Togo - were lightly injured. The foreigners angrily blamed that shooting on racism, and groups of protesters stoned police, attacked residents and smashed shop windows and cars. Friday, angry migrants, mostly from African nations, some armed with metal bars or wooden sticks, scuffled with police and residents in the streets of Rosarno. Other residents were holed up in their homes, state radio reported, and schools and shops were shuttered.

Christians murdered in Egypt :

Thousands of Coptic Christians clashed with police in southern Egypt on Thursday during a funeral procession for seven people shot dead as they left a Christmas service hours earlier. The protesters pelted cars with stones and set fire to ambulances in the town of Nag Hamadi, 40 miles from the ancient ruins of Luxor. The riots were sparked by a drive-by shooting. Three men sprayed automatic gunfire into a crowd leaving a midnight Mass to mark the Coptic Christmas.

Christians attacked by Muslims in Malaysia :

There have been more attacks on churches in Malaysia, in a growing dispute over the use of the word Allah by non-Muslims. The police say petrol bombs were thrown at a church and a convent school in the northern state of Perak, and at a church on the island of Sarawak. Another church in the south of the country was daubed with black paint. The attacks come days after four churches near the capital, Kuala Lumpur, were hit by petrol bombs. Religious tensions in Malaysia have increased since a court ruled last month that a Roman Catholic newspaper could use the word Allah in its Malay-language edition to describe the Christian God.

The Lancashire town with an 8,000 population - and plans for a 5,000 pupil Islamic boarding school.

On the banks of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, the old cotton mill stands as a gigantic ghost-like relic of England’s industrial past. It seems unthinkable that this immense sprawl, a key source of employment for a century and a half, should have been idle for three years.

But an ambitious project to give the cluster of buildings a new lease of life, converting them into a boarding school for up to 5,000 Muslim girls, has bitterly divided the local community.

The eager support of parents of prospective pupils is rivalled by a deep hostility that has been shown in responses ranging from anxious questions in parliament to extreme right-wing allegations of plots to “Islamify” Britain.

Another extreme right-winger, former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, adds fuel to the flames of hatred :

We have had to wait decades for this moment, but it has finally happened. A leading British clergyman has said something sensible about immigration.

Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, this week signed a declaration by the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration calling for an urgent tightening of borders to stop the British population reaching 70 million by 2029. He also gave an interview yesterday in which he called for a tougher Church. "We Christians are very often so soft that we allow other people to walk over us, and we are not as tough in what we want, in expressing our beliefs, because we do not want to upset other people," he said.

Adn two damn stupid articles in the New Statesman, which moderates its comments but can't afford to have anyone doing it over the weekend.

Jon Cruddas :

Labour, like the wider social-democratic tradition, has been unable to build a counterculture that can offer an alternative ethics of living and working. As a result, it has colluded in distinguishing morally between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor.

It has ? You could have fooled me, mate.

History has shown us that economic crises generate middle-class panics about a "dangerous" underclass and its racial and sexual transgressions. In the 1980s, the new right embarked on a project to theorise an underclass in Britain. It drew on the work of the American political scientist Charles Murray, whose research had revived eugenicist debates about race and intelligence. Murray was invited to Britain by the Sunday Times in 1989 and his ideas were taken up by Digby Anderson's Social Affairs Unit. The American academic Lawrence Mead was also influential in reviving the belief that poverty was about behaviour and dependency, rather than economics and justice. The problem was not environment, but individual failing. The work of the new right laid the foundations for New Labour's welfare reforms.

Moral panic ! Moral panic ! It's just like the Garotting Panic of 1862 !

(Laban's Charles Murray posts here.)

The government calculated that it could triangulate the Conservatives and subject the underclass to punitive measures without alienating Labour's core supporters. Its refrain of "hard-working families" attempted to codify this division. But the so-called underclass is not a class apart as the new right and the social investigators of the 19th century tried to prove. It is an imagined body of people - chavs, hoodies, junkies - projected on to single mothers, the sick and parts of the working class impoverished by the impact of recession and unemployment.

Against stupidity the gods themselves battle in vain, what ?

And something even more weird by one Francis Beckett. Who he, you may ask ? Oh. Not an encouraging upbringing for anyone, really. Poor little rich kid.

His basic thesis - that the baby-boomer generation messed up big time - is one that few would dispute. Even the Magistrate is on board.

Magistrate :

I am one of the lucky-sod generation, born just after the war. I have had to cope with economic ups-and-downs, but I went to a grammar school, thanks to the 1944 Education Act, and thence to a university that was flush with funds, and at which I received £360 per annum grant. There were no tuition fees to pay, and a handsome room with full board cost me £6 per week. In the student bar beer was (in new-fangled money) 9p per pint.

Beckett :

The idea that one might have to pay for education, at any level, seemed to us primitive and backward-looking. In the Thirties, my grandmother used to save pennies in a tin in her kitchen, fearfully guarding against the day when one of her children might require medical attention. In the week that the National Health Service was inaugurated in 1948, GPs' surgeries were overwhelmed with patients whose painful and often life-threatening conditions had never been treated or even shown to a doctor. When we baby boomers were ill, we expected, as a right, the best treatment available. Paying for it never occurred to us.

There was full employment, and the slums were torn down and replaced with council housing, built to Aneurin Bevan's high standard. And what did we do with this extraordinary inheritance that had eluded our ancestors, and that an earlier generation had worked and fought to give us?

We trashed it.

It's in the 'why did we trash it' bit that he seems to lose touch with reality. Indeed I can't actually understand what, if anything, he's trying to say. We did indeed 'use up' the manifold blessings showered upon us - but how, exactly ? He almost seems to be suggesting that if only the Sixties had gone on for ever ...

Religion, royalty, government: nothing was sacrosanct in the Sixties, and everything could be questioned. But we used up the time when nothing was sacred. The age of deference seemed to be over, yet the baby boomers, who now run things, have seen how useful deference in for the governing class and are bringing it back as fast as they can.

How about - 'we trashed the existing culture and didn't replace it' - save with the dreadful secular liberal nostrums with which our rulers attempt to put back the ruins of the house, so carefully built - no, not so much built as grown organically on the bedrock of patriotism and Christianity, over generations, so easily destroyed in one.

Tin Foil Hat Alert (Agrippa Value - 549)

Not since the Bishop of London presided over an act of necrophilia at Buckingham Palace have I felt in such need of a tin-foil titfer.

Bristol Indymedia correspondent dizzy dissident tells all about Charles de Menezes, Blairs Tony and Ian, Ur of the Chaldees and Aleister Crowley.

Please note that this is gematria and is distinct from numerology and bible code. Do some research first if you're going to remark on the gematria and please be assured that I probably know far more about it than you do...

'Kratos' was formally signed off operationally and legally at a meeting on 22 January 2003 at MI5 headquarters in London.

Jean Charles de Menezes was killed 911 days after the introduction of the shoot-to-kill policy known as Operation Kratos. To clarify - I am saying 911 days after the introduction of Operation Kratos. If you do the math there is a difference of 912 days but it is still 911 days after. There is a similarity here that the event known as the Madrid Bombings or 3/11 occurred 911 days after the event known as 9/11 in New York.

An entry for 911 at the Aleister Crowley's 'Sepher Sephiroth' reference reads "beginning" and this is what I have come to understand the number 911 to mean...

The astral chart of Jean Charles de Menezes death is very similar to the Goat of Mendez showing an inverted pentangle. Also present is the alchemical symbol for water - the downward pointing triangle...

Occult gematria is based on the Hebrew alphabet and language. Water corresponds to the Hebrew letter Mem. This gives us a clue that Mem is a letter to watch out for in gematria. Hebrew is written right-to-left. The Mem-final or the left-most Mem is the one to watch out for.

There follows the application of gematria to Jean Charles de-Menezes' name. Remember that Jean Charles was Brizzle-ian...

Brizzle-ian ? Took me a moment to get that one.

I suppose it's just as big a waste of time to be in front of the telly every night.

Heatwave

Round here the snow has stayed as perfect powder since it fell on Tuesday - it's been so cold. Not good for snowballs as it doesn't cling, but lovely to kick up in great clouds. Yesterday it took three kettles of boiling water to unfreeze the chickens' drink dispenser.

This morning it feels positively tropical - only half a kettle needed for unfreezing, and walking the dog you could feel the snow compressing under the feet. It must be only around freezing or possibly a tad above.