I thought I would set down here, in detail, how untruths can be and are created. I take as my text the public attack on me by Dr Ben Goldacre on Twitter, a man who (as I know from direct experience) is always complaining about how he is too busy to respond just now, but who somehow wasn’t too busy to make that attack.
I’ll begin at the end, with Dr Goldacre’s response (sent to me on Monday) to my charges against him. I sent him those charges, in detail, so that he would have time to respond to them before I published them. I’ve edited out a couple of personal details I suspect he didn’t really intend to share widely, and a patronising sign-off which I think we can all do without.
Reproduced after Dr Goldacre’s words, though edited slightly, partly in the light of Dr Goldacre’s reply, are the charges against him, which I sent him so that he would have a full and timely opportunity to defend himself.
So, first, here’s Dr Goldacre’s response to me
'Hi Peter,
I don’t think this is complicated, and I’m surprised to see you write a fifth long blog post about my tweet, and send me hectoring messages demanding that I respond.
I’m aware we’ve already discussed all this on Twitter, but I’m happy to explain my concerns again:
1. You said that terrorist offences would be prevented if the culprits were in psychiatric hospitals.
2. There is only one practical reading of this:
very large numbers of people with mental health problems, who are viewed as being at long term risk of acts of violence, would need to be admitted to hospital. It is very unlikely that these long term admissions to psychiatric hospitals would be voluntary. So these people would be incarcerated pre-emptively. (Think through, for example, whether the offenders whose histories you describe would have agreed to a long term voluntary admission into a psychiatric hospital to manage their risk of violence; let alone whether they would indeed have been mentally ill at the time of admission, and during the many years of their pre-emptive incarceration that would have to follow).
3. I say “very large numbers” would need to be detained, because it is extremely hard to predict these very rare acts of violence among people with mental health problems. I explain why in this piece (which I’ve also already posted in response to one, or possibly two, of your four previous blog posts about my tweet):
http://www.badscience.net/2006/12/crystal-balls-and-positive-predictive-values/
I don’t think you were really aware of the implications of what you were suggesting, when you wrote your piece.
It wasn’t the central thrust of your argument, it was an aside, but in my view it was a foolish one, and not what I'd expect to see from you, however much we might disagree on things. It jarred with me, as a doctor reading your piece, to see someone suggesting that psychiatric hospitals somehow have a role to play in preventing terrorist attacks.
I think that’s a reasonable reaction for anyone to have, doctor or otherwise, and a reasonable concern to voice.
Some might view your five long, circular blog posts - in response to one tweet - to be inappropriate or hectoring.
*****
And here are my charges against him, and my description of the controversy.
Anatomy of a Smear. How a supposed apostle of accuracy and responsibility manufactured a false account of what I had said, and then attacked me for it on a public forum.
On January 7th, the day when the whole world was concerned with the terrorist murders in Paris, Dr Ben Goldacre posted on Twitter:
‘Peter Hitchens says terrorists are on drugs and in the 1980s would’ve been in asylums. Jesus’
I think it was reasonable to assume that casual readers of this Tweet would immediately have thought I was referring to the terrorists then on the loose in France.
The story was dominating all news outlets and most people would have assumed any contemporary reference to ‘terrorists’, especially in the present tense, concerned the French episode.
If Mr Goldacre had objected to my sentiments when I first expressed them (and he asserts that he is ‘a big fan of [my] work’), he had had 18 days in which to do so.
But he chose to make his objection - on a medium in which detail is difficult and mature refection close to impossible - ,right in the middle of the Paris atrocities.
He then published the quotation ;
“At Woolwich, in Ottawa and now in Sydney, deranged maniacs kill, in most cases while out of their minds on the drugs we have given up trying to control. Deluded by propaganda, we classify this as ‘terrorism’.
“The streets are flooded with troops and robocops, helicopters clatter overhead and blowhard ‘experts’ drone portentously about how these are ‘lone wolves’, as if that solved the matter.
Actually, they are mad, and in the days before ‘care in the community’ they would not have been able to kill because they would have been in mental hospitals. Such hospitals would be a much better use for all the money we currently pour into grandiose ‘security services’.”
I expand on the view expressed in these words in detail below, explain the background to it and the reasons for my concern. I also explain how and why I initially misunderstood the nature of the attack which Dr Goldacre was making on me. Note that all he says is ‘Jesus’, which for many modern people is (in this sort of context) an expletive denoting exasperated disapproval. A number of people duly did attack me on Twitter, one of them to the point of tedium.
I had in fact half-expected to be attacked, probably by the cannabis lobby, for my basic point that cannabis abuse is, in many of these cases, a more credible culprit than Islamist extremism. I am used to such opponents deliberately misunderstanding my point and then jeering at what I haven’t actually said.
I had absolutely no idea that anyone could have reached the conclusions which Dr Goldacre had drawn from it, not least because no such conclusion had ever crossed my mind. I thought he was just trying to attack my idea that cannabis may often explain such murders better than anything else, by suggesting it didn’t apply to Paris.
Readers of his Tweet could either click on a photographic reproduction of the article, or follow a link. Only those who followed the link would have known the article was not new, but more than a fortnight old, and written in response to another, specific and different event.
But I do withdraw and apologise for my mistaken suggestion, which I made earlier, that this was an abbreviated version of my article. It was the full text, though without any indication of the date of publication (which would only have been evident to those who followed the link he quite properly gave) . I was mixing up the article on the 21st with another on the same subject. I have in fact written several times about this. For instance, I did so on 30th November
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/11/theresas-right-we-do-face-a-dire-new-threat-from-people-like-her-.html
The key passage in that article was as follows:
“‘Not merely is this response crass and wrong, it is based on a total, wilful misunderstanding of the murder of Lee Rigby. We are looking in entirely the wrong direction, and so not seeing the blazing, illuminated signs which show what is actually going on.
Adebowale was obviously crazy when he committed his crime. An eyewitness, Cheralee Armstrong, told police he ‘looked mad, like he’d escaped from a mental hospital’.
During the trial of Adebowale, and of his accomplice Michael Adebolajo, newspapers received a very unusual warning from the judge that they must not report ‘the demeanour of the defendants’ on the video link from prison. What was it about their behaviour that prompted this strange instruction?
It wouldn’t be odd if they had behaved weirdly. Both killers were habitual users of cannabis, a drug increasingly correlated with mental disturbance, especially in young users. It was after Adebolajo began smoking the drug in his teens that his character wholly changed. Many sad parents of ruined teenagers will know about this process.
Adebowale had a history of serious mental illness, heard voices in his head, and was on anti-psychotic drugs while on remand. At one stage he had been recommended for treatment in Broadmoor.
A psychiatrist found him ‘paranoid and incoherent’, and said his symptoms were worsened by ‘heavy use of cannabis’.
Most people don’t even know this, as it doesn’t fit the ‘Al Qaeda plot’ storyline and has barely been reported.
Yet how can these gibbering, chaotic husks have been part of a disciplined, intricate terror organisation?
It’s very strange. Our Establishment sees proper enforcement of the laws against the dangerous drug cannabis as an infringement of liberty. But it is ready to place us under totalitarian surveillance, never before seen in our history, in pursuit of terrorists it will probably give in to later.’”
But as it turned out, Dr Goldacre was not taking this line at all, and was exercised only about the following passage, more or less an afterthought to my main thrust. : “Actually, they are mad, and in the days before ‘care in the community’ they would not have been able to kill because they would have been in mental hospitals. Such hospitals would be a much better use for all the money we currently pour into grandiose ‘security services’.”
He said, after I challenged him : ‘…your suggestion that terrorist atrocities can be prevented by widespread pre-emptive incarceration of people with mental health problems is disproportionate, offensive to those with mental health problems (who make a tiny contribution to the total amount of violence in society), and unjust.’
As Dr Goldacre won’t back away from this , I am afraid I am just going to have to dissect it. Almost every word in the above passage from Dr Goldacre’s e-mail is baseless, including ‘and’ and ‘the’ – as I shall now demonstrate.
1, ‘Your suggestion’.
What ‘suggestion’? I made no suggestion. In no part of the passage do I suggest any action, except the diversion of taxpayers’ money from self-styled ‘security’ services to the treatment of the mentally ill.
I did compare the present to the past and I did say that in the past things would have been different, as I believe they would have been. It’s a belief, perhaps a speculation, about the past. But I made no proposal, urged no action or policy (why would I? Who’s listening?) , though I have for many years believed that ‘Care in the Community’ was and is a grave mistake.
It seems quite plain to me that my principal concern in this and other articles on the subject is to warn of the dangers of cannabis, largely in the hope of preventing even greater relaxation of the laws against it. It was also clearly a warning against the government’s demands for increased powers, which I clearly oppose. If I take this stance over such demands, on what basis can I be accused of favouring the pre-emptive mass round-ups which Dr Goldacre has conjured out of his imagination?
2. ‘that terrorist atrocities could be prevented’ . Again, I simply did not say this.
First the article refers to three specific episodes, classified by governments and media as ‘terrorist’ but actually (in my view) much better understood as isolated crimes of violence committed by people who have lost their reason.
At the very most, an honest description of the category concerned would have to be *some* terrorists. I referred quite clearly to specific cases and individuals, and made no general statement. Its use without any qualification suggests that a discussion of three particular incidents applies to every terrorist atrocity, or to terrorist atrocities in general. I don’t think this, and didn’t say it.
(For those who are having trouble keeping up with the vast difference between what I wrote and what Mr Goldacre says I said, here’s a pause for reflection: Dr Goldacre’s account of my phantasmal ‘suggestion’ so far consists of the following:
A phrase that is totally false – “your suggestion” (it isn’t mine and I didn’t suggest it) ; followed by a serious misrepresentation of the subject under discussion, lazily and/or dishonestly using the word ‘terrorist atrocities’ when I actually dispute the designation ‘terrorist’, and refer only to three particular atrocities.
Then of course there is the phrase 'could be prevented', which I did not write, and do not think.
So what do we have next, in this exposition of the truth by this eminent physician and scourge of the inaccurate and the exaggerator?
We have the words ‘widespread and pre-emptive incarceration’.
What justification can be found for the word ‘widespread’ in my actual words? Precisely none. It is another phantasm, based upon nothing. What justification can be found in the context? Precisely none. Events of this kind, though horrible, are mercifully rare, perhaps (see below) 40 a year in a country of nearly 60 million. Only two of the four individuals to which I referred even lived in this country. Even had I called for such a policy, it would not need to be ‘widespread’. The word, once again, has been invented out of whole cloth.
What justification can be found for the word ‘pre-emptive’? Again, there is none. When I said that such people would have been in mental hospitals, I did not say that this would be as a result of some effort to prevent them from doing such terrible deeds. I assumed that, having been found to be ill in this unhappy fashion, they would have been declared ill by doctors, taken to hospital and there treated to the best of the abilities of the medical staff in charge of them, for their own wellbeing.
Their own wellbeing, not some ‘Minority Report’ science fiction attempt to predict the future actions of individuals, would have been the reason for their presence in such hospitals.
I believe this is how people generally found their way into mental hospitals, before we shut most of them down. They were ill. We sought to help them. Once there, I believe, they would not have been in anything like such danger of doing the terrible things of which we speak. That seems to me to axiomatic. The word ‘pre-emptive’ is an invention of a thought I didn’t have, as well as an invention of a view I did not express. I never thought or wrote anything to justify its use.
Do we now live in a society where one must not say things for fear that others will wholly distort their meaning in this way, and then blame us for having given them the opportunity? Is this what Dr Goldacre means when he chides me thus '
'I don’t think you were really aware of the implications of what you were suggesting, when you wrote your piece.'
Well, I certainly wasn't aware that a plea for more mental hospital beds would be so comprehensively misrepresented, no. I mistakenly thought that left-wing persons generally agreed with me that such spending would be a good idea.
Next, what justification can be found for the use of the word ‘incarceration’, a synonym for imprisonment? Again, precisely zero. Does Dr Goldacre believe that the housing of mentally ill people in hospitals under the full-time care of nurses and doctors is a form of imprisonment? I do not.
This is surely a major category error, and a slight on the medical staff involved.
I have no access to any information on how many mental patients in British mental hospitals (before they were shut down) were detained against their will. Even if it was all of them, which I very much doubt, this condition was not imprisonment. It followed medical diagnosis, not prosecution, trial and conviction (except, obviously, in the case of the hospitals for the criminally insane which are another matter). It was triggered by the state of the person’s mind, not by criminal acts he or she had committed.
Much slander is nowadays levelled against mental hospitals from the Left (Laingian believers that mental illness is some sort of oppressive social construct) and the Powellite Right (who wanted to save money by closing them) .
No doubt they were far from perfect and had many faults. What human institution can claim that it is perfect? Even Dr Goldacre has his faults. But for many patients, and their unhappy families, they were a welcome refuge from the life they might have had to live (and nowadays do have to live) in the outside world.
So, there go three more words in the bin marked ‘wholly and completely made up’.
What is left of Dr Goldacre’s assertion?
We have this ‘…of people with mental health problems is disproportionate, offensive to those with mental health problems (who make a tiny contribution to the total amount of violence in society), and unjust.’
Well, it is true that I am referring to ‘people with mental health problems’ but since all the previous words are untrue, the strictures which follow are valueless and without weight. If it was never said, it cannot be ‘disproportionate’ or ‘offensive or ‘unjust’ because it doesn’t exist.
The whole thing was a fantasy. Well, if people wish to fantasise, and to write fiction in their spare time (or even as a profession) I am happy with that. I enjoy reading fiction myself. But they must be careful not to mix it up with the truth, or to put real people in their made-up stories, or to attribute to them actions they have not done and words they have not spoken, or thoughts they have not expressed.
I didn’t expect Dr Goldacre to reply to this and, while I was surprised that he did so, and regret that his reply, when it came, was a reiteration of his previous unresponsive claim that I had said things I did not say, and thought things I do not think.
I can’t of course, prove that I did not think something, and I should not be expected to have to prove it. But I have provided the appendices below, which explain the facts on which I form my opinions on this subject, for those who are interested. I think it will be clear from them that I have never expressed any desire for pre-emptive round-ups of anybody, and my main desire is that we should be kinder and mre generous to the mentally ill.
They also show definitively that the ‘Care in the Community’ programme originates in the 1960s. It is extraordinary that half-educated leftists are so obsessed with Thatcher-hatred that they find to hard to imagine any bad thing happened before or after she was in office. But Dr Goldacre really shouldn’t make such a basic mistake.
APPENDICES .
It now becomes relevant that on 28th May 2013, on the same broad topic, I had blogged as follows:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/05/dont-care-in-the-community.html
I’ll quote it in full because it gives such a clear idea of my concern on this matter, and also shows that I am far from alone in worrying about it. Once again, it is descriptive of a problem, not prescriptive about any solution. The only strong practical implication is that cannabis use is unchecked, and that the laws against it certainly should not be further weakened, one of my abiding concerns, many times expressed.
What marks me out from others who are concerned is that I suspect that there may be a link between the growing use of cannabis and the levels of violent mental illness in the Western world. The reason for my suspicion, as I have stated before, is a correlation between the one and the other. I am not definitive, just raising a concern which I believe merits further investigation – and great caution about the legalisation of cannabis.
‘I just thought I would illustrate here the existence of a very serious problem, of innocent people killed by total strangers in our streets (or, in one terrible case, which I mention because it involved a British subject and because the culprit, who had British connections, was undoubtedly an abuser of illegal drugs including cannabis, on a foreign street).
It is hard to quantify because of the shifting definitions involved. Even so, it seems to me to suggest that a danger to life and safety exists in our country which is certainly serious, and is could in my view be significantly reduced by government action.
In the light of what is below, are we seeing straight when we attribute the atrocity in Woolwich primarily to militant politics and religion?
What follows does not pretend to be a complete account of the problem but is the fruit of some hours in the archives.
On 26th February 2005, The Independent published an article by Maxine Frith which began thus ‘In 1992, Jonathan Zito was murdered by a stranger in an unprovoked attack. Yesterday, the man who stabbed to death Denis Finnegan was jailed. In both cases, the assailants were mentally ill patients denied the care they needed. In the years between these two tragic incidents, up to 40 people a year have died in similar circumstances. In 2005, is there still such a thing as care in the community?’ At the bottom of the article, the newspaper published an appalling and desperately upsetting list of recent random killings by mentally ill persons, often using particularly horrific methods - generally involving stabbing though in one case involving the victim [being] burned to death.
The Times wrote on 27th July 1995 ‘One killing a month and two suicides a week are committed by mentally ill people living in the community.’
The variation between the two newspapers’ figures illustrates the difficulty in fixing categories, and in uncovering details of such cases, which are often not much covered by the media, except locally.
Among such cases one of the worst was that (mentioned above) of Christopher Clunis, 30, a mentally-ill man who stabbed to death Jonathan Zito, 27, after selecting him from a crowd at a London Underground station in December 1992, weeks after being released from hospital.
More recently, Deyan Deyanov beheaded Jennifer Mills-Westley, in Tenerife, on 13th May 2011(shortly after being released from a local psychiatric unit). He was a drug abuser (this is completely undisputed). Deyanov, an undoubted user of cannabis, cocaine and LSD, believed he was a reincarnation of Christ, filmed himself smoking cannabis. After committing his terrible deed, he carried his victim’s head on to the street
In February 2013, Nicola Edgington was convicted at the Old Bailey of murdering Sally Hodkin, and attempting to murder Kerry Clark in the town centre of Bexleyheath on the morning of October 10, 2011. Edgington, 32, of Greenwich, virtually decapitated Sally Hodkin, six years after killing her own mother.
This case gained prominence because of the failure of the authorities to heed blatant warnings - from the killer herself - of approaching danger.
In the hours before the murder, Edgington called emergency services four times asking for help, saying she was hearing voices again and that she was going to kill somebody.
Note that in these cases that the killer decapitated, or attempted to decapitate, the victim.
In Doncaster on February 14 2012, a woman with a history of mental health problems who stabbed a teenager to death in South Yorkshire was imprisoned for ‘life’. Hannah Bonser, 26, randomly attacked Casey Kearney, 13, as she walked through Elmfield Park in Doncaster. The judge said she would serve a minimum of 22 years.
The Daily Mail reported : 'In 2002, Bonser walked into a hospital on her 17th birthday complaining of hearing voices telling her ‘to kill people’. She was admitted to hospital and given anti-psychotic drugs. Later that year she twice overdosed.
The judge said Bonser had a ‘mental and behaviour disorder due to abuse of cannabis’. She was in regular contact with psychiatric services between 2004 and 2007 and had been given drugs to control her delusions.
The September before the killing, Bonser was warned by a policeman for carrying a knife. She was at that time taking cannabis and regarded as a ‘strange loner’ by neighbours.
In November she was admitted to hospital after attempting suicide and in January her requests to be sectioned were rejected as ‘nothing was wrong with her’.
Looking at many of these cases, I am compelled to wonder how many of them involved cannabis, but were not connected to this drug because a) its use is so common and accepted that the authorities don’t regard it as notable and its users don’t regard it as a drug, , the law against it is not enforced so its presence and use are not recorded, and b) nobody has made the connection or asked the necessary questions.
I know from sources with direct personal experience of mental health nursing that cannabis is frequently smuggled into the locked wards of mental hospitals.
Where we do have the details, usually because it actually came up in the trial, it is often the case that cannabis is prominently involved.
In any case, I fear that most of us are in greater peril from these sad and wretched cases than we are from terror. And I believe that government action could significantly lessen this risk, without attacking the freedom of speech or the privacy of the subject.’
This shows that this is a subject about which I have often expressed opinions, and if Dr Goldacre wished to challenge or disagree with them he has , as a professed admiring reader, had plenty of opportunities for doing so. I think I can guess why one of his readers chose to send him the link to my 21st December article on the 7th January. He could have guessed it too. But why then rush on to Twitter to say what he said?
Then there’s the question of the meaning of the word ‘Jesus’, obviously used as an exclamation of disgusted and scornful amazement, rather than for pious reasons.
I think I may have jumped to conclusions about what, exactly, Mr Goldacre expected his readers to be scornful and disgusted.
I thought he and they believed that I had linked the Paris killings with cannabis use and mental illness. Or perhaps they were trying to discredit this theory by arguing that the Paris killers weren’t cannabis users, or mentally ill (in fact we know for certain that at least one of the killers *was* a long term cannabis user, and that all three probably were. But I have made no such claim in this case as our knowledge of the whole event is still sketchy and incomplete. I haven’t said, don’t argue and don’t believe that *all* such murders might be attributed to this cause. I have said that there appears to be a correlation, and that we should take it more seriously.
It was only later that I realised I was under attack on a wholly different front. I had wrongly thought that the ideas of Dr R.D.Laing, that mental illness is a an oppressive social construct, etc etc, had died and gone away, although they were most useful, as far back as the 1960s and 1970s, in aiding the cynical ‘Care in the Community’ concept under which mental hospitals all over the advanced world were closed and turned into fancy apartments.
In fact they seem to have been reborn in a new politically correct form, which monitors any statements about mentally ill people for possible ‘discrimination’ against what I suppose we must call a ‘community’. Modern psychiatry has ushered so many people into the zone of ‘mental illness’ though its array of ‘disorders’, its certainties about ‘clinical depression’ and ‘ADHD’ and its endless rewriting of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, that it is now quite a large community. Personally, I think most of the people caught in this pharmaceutically-motivated net are not remotely in the same category as the killers referred to in my articles.
Yet any statement which suggests that hospital care is better than ‘care in the community’ it seems, is now interpreted as a ‘discriminatory’ call for ‘incarceration’. I simply wasn’t aware of this trend in thought, which seems to me to make a fair and just discussion of the subject very difficult indeed.
Note on ‘the 1980s’. In his Tweet, Dr Goldacre spoke of ‘the 1980s’ and of asylums’, apparently under the impression that the closure residential mental hospitals begn in that decade. I have since pointed that this isn’t so. This process did *not* begin in the 1980s, though it certainly accelerated greatly during that time.
I fear that ‘care in the community’ is now assumed to have taken place entirely in the 1980s because all bad things in history must be attributed to the Evil Thatcher Regime. This isn’t a good guide to postwar history. Much of what she did was a continuation of Labour and Tory ‘consensus’ policies, stretching back into the days of Butskellism.
I can well remember discussing it with my old comrade Peter Sedgwick (a strong and passionate critic of Laing, when Laing was very modish) in the early 1970s, and it was already well-known by then. We tended to blame Enoch Powell for it, and we were right.
He had made a speech speaking of ‘*our* assault’ on the asylums in *1961*, see here http://studymore.org.uk/xpowell.htm
He proposed then to *halve* the number of beds in mental hospitals thanks to alleged ‘advances in psychiatric knowledge’, ie ‘antipsychotic’ drugs, and spoke of ‘provision in the community’)
Here is a sample from that speech :
‘However tentative, however qualified, however much in need of the revision which it will receive in each succeeding year, this plan must thus embody our aims and ambitions, our vision of the future for 15 years ahead. Let me apply this now to mental health, a field in which the advances in psychiatric knowledge and methods offer a standing challenge to the National Health Service to provide the setting in which that knowledge and those methods can yield their fullest benefit. I have intimated to the hospital authorities who will be producing the constituent elements of the national hospital plan that in 15 years time there may well be needed not more than half as many places in hospitals for mental illness as there are today. Expressed in numerical terms, this would represent a redundancy of no fewer than 75,000 hospital beds. Even so, I would say that if we err, we would rather err on the side of under-estimating the provision which ought to be required in hospitals 15 years from now. This 50 per cent reduction itself is only a statistical projection by the General Register Office of the fall in demand based upon present trends. Yet there is not a person present whose ambition is not to speed up those present trends. So if we are to have the courage of our ambitions, we ought to pitch the estimate lower still, as low as we dare, perhaps lower.
Beds in General Hospitals
But that 50 per cent or less of present places in hospitals for the mentally sick - what will they look like and where will they be ? We know already what ought to be the answer to that question: they ought for the most part to be in wards and wings of general hospitals. Few ought to be in great isolated institutions or clumps of institutions, though I neither forget nor underestimate the continuing requirements of security for a small minority of patients.
Now look and see what are the implications of these bold words. They imply nothing less than the elimination of by far the greater part of this country's mental hospitals as they exist today. This is a colossal undertaking, not so much in the new physical provision which it involves, as in the sheer inertia of mind and matter which it requires to he overcome. There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside - the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault. Let me describe some of the defences which we have to storm.
First there is the actual physical solidity of the buildings themselves: the very idea of these monuments derelict or demolished arouses an instinctive resistance in the mind. At least, we find ourselves thinking,
"Can't we use them for something else if they cannot be retained for the mentally ill ?"
"Why not at least put the subnormals into them?'"
"Wouldn't this one make a splendid geriatric unit, or that one a convalescent home."
"What a pity to waste all this accommodation!"
Well, let me here declare that if we err, it is our duly to err on the side of ruthlessness. For the great majority of these establishments there is no appropriate future use, and I for my own part will resist any attempt to foist another purpose upon them unless it can be proved to me in each case that, such, or almost such, a building would have had to be erected in that, or some similar, place to serve the other purpose, if the mental hospital had never existed.’
I think that’s pretty clear. Given Mr Powell’s later record, it is surprising that this rather terrible speech, with its terrible results, isn’t better-known.
