David Cameron's Birmingham Speech re-examined

Slogans, claptrap and cliché - half hair-gel and half snake-oil

 

A lot of David Cameron’s speech in Birmingham was either weary sloganizing, crude electoral claptrap or cliché, so I don’t propose to do a complete analysis of the text (which is currently available here http://press.conservatives.com/ )

 

But I thought I would look at some of parts of it that seemed to me to be interesting, not necessarily in ways that Mr Cameron or his aides and speechwriters would want them to be interesting. By the way, anyone watching the BBC news channel’s coverage of the speech would have noted that the commentators selected to comment on it afterwards were *both* from the heart of the Tory project, and both from the Blairite ‘Times’ stable. They were Lord (Danny) Finkelstein,long sympathetic to the Cameron project; and Tim Montgomerie, of ‘Conservative Home’. Wouldn’t it have been a touch more balanced to have included a person sympathetic to UKIP, and a person sympathetic to Labour? Also there was a curious segment in which representatives leaving the hall were asked for their opinions. The first two were gushing, one of them embarrassingly turning out to be a keen EUphile. But the third was quite rude about it. It seems to me that it’s quite remarkable to find an activist , who has probably paid to be there, being rude about his own leader’s speech on live TV. The BBC commentator seemed to me to be anxious to portray the speech as a success, and to have been discombobulated by the critic.

 

What is Patriotism really?

 

I would first of all note that the Second World War is still the moral gospel of modern politics. Somehow or other, it is confused in his mind with his (pro tem) victory over Scottish separatism. I think this has something to do with the Union Jack. The straightforward, unashamedly patriotic idea of defending the Union because it makes us strong , independent of the continent and less vulnerable to back-door attack ( a clear and honest reason for doing so) is obviously unattractive to him. He doesn’t see the Union in this way, and is very happy with Britain’s post 1945 return to continental entanglements and dependence. Any wars we may have fought, therefore, must be for similarly non-patriotic, idealistic purposes.

 

He described his constituent, Patrick Churchill,  as having been ‘fighting fascism’ in Normandy in 1944, a curiously  leftish description of that conflict. Very few actual ‘Fascists’ were involved by 1944, Italy having got rid of Mussolini and changed sides by then. I suspect Patrick Churchill thought back in 1944 that he was fighting ‘Germans’. Many people in Europe, who had done the same before, came to that conclusion. It was a rather particular experience, unlike fighting anyone else. My mother, who was bombed by them, and my father, many of whose friends were killed by them and whose life was in ceaseless perils from their aircraft and ships for months on end, both referred to them as ‘Germans’ during my 1950s childhood when the subject was still all-embracing.

 

My mother in particular could never abide hearing the German language spoken, saying that it made her shudder. I think she was exaggerating a bit, but not much. Years later we had a German ex-PoW as a neighbour, and ny parents got on perfectly well with him as far as I could see (in fact I think my father had some respect for him as a fellow fighting man from the war) . But that was the 1960s.

 

It only became an ideological war later.

 

Mr Cameron unwittingly employs the language of the Comintern

 

But I don’t think Mr Cameron knows that, Having grown up since the 1960s, he probably uses these Marxoid categories himself without thinking, not knowing that the Soviet Union and the Comintern popularised the term ‘Fascism’ for the Axis enemy (and later as a general boo-word and all-purpose anti-conservative smear) for very specific reasons.

 

The first was the Nazi-Soviet Pact, as it was widely known ( a recent book on this astonishing alliance, reviewed on this blog a few days ago,  can be purchased here  

http://www.mailbookshop.co.uk/StoreFront/Product/Roger-Moorhouse/The-Devils-Alliance--Hitlers-Pact-with-Stalin-1939-1941/16038859 )

 

This made the Comintern and the Kremlin a little nervous about the word ‘Nazi’, which would trigger, in millions of minds, memories of the shameful Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty.

 

They had another difficulty, too. ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’ and once again makes that awkward connection between the two murderous, utopian dogmas of the 20^th century, whose profound similarities the Left have always wished us to ignore - and which we all had to ignore anyway when we became Stalin’s ally in 1941. They had so much in common - power worship, leader-worship,  militarism, censorship, secret police, destruction of private life , thought control, torture, perversion of the young,  turning of children against their parents, hatred of Christianity, means-and-ends ‘morals’, single parties, uniforms, shouting, people’s courts, show trials, labour camps, controlled media, cowed academies, intellectual apologists. One wanted to exterminate on the grounds of race, the other on the grounds of class. 

 

But if we say we were fighting ‘fascism’ in 1944, we don’t have to think about that.

 

Anyway, I think it culturally interesting that a Conservative Premier should use such language.

 

Is there really any link between World War Two and Afghanistan?

Then there was this elision : ‘The heirs to those who fought on the beaches of Northern France are those fighting in Afghanistan today. For thirteen years, young men and women have been serving our country there.’

 

Is that really so? The Afghan War , futile by any measure, was a war of choice in which professional soldiers did as they were told by politicians they don’t respect (and were of course thrown to the wolves if they ever got caught doing anything nasty) . The 1939-45 war, whatever its many faults, often discussed here, was not in the same category in nature, cause, importance or scale. To try to cover up the fact that, for five long years, Mr Cameron sucked up to the Murdoch press by continuing our Afghan engagement, by equating it with the liberation of France in 1944 is, in my view, a bit much.

 

If politicians knew what servicemen really thought of them, they would never try to pose in the reflected shine of military glory. They would be too embarrassed.

 

Can we afford to drop these bombs?

 

Now, again with the frantic encouragement of the Murdoch press, we are using World War Three equipment and weapons to bomb a few 4X4 pick-up trucks in Iraq. I gather each of these missions costs something like £210,000 an hour ( see  http://news.sky.com/story/1342768/how-much-will-airstrikes-on-is-cost-taxpayer , and yes, I know this is a Murdoch outlet. He’s not all bad ) , but that’s if they bring their bombs back. If they use them, the mission cost can rise far higher. And yet we are a bankrupt country. How can we afford this?

 

The only purpose of this war is political, to try to look good at home to the few dim people who think Britain is still a world power, and to suck up to the Americans (who I suspect don’t care whether we turn up or not).

 

Shamelessly, Mr Cameron intoned ‘The threat is Islamist extremist terrorism – and it has found a new, hellish crucible – with ISIL, in Iraq and Syria. These people are evil, pure and simple. They kill children; rape women; threaten non-believers with genocide; behead journalists and aid workers.’

 

Well, what does he think is going in Libya, whose fate is his personal responsibility for the rest of his life. Or in  Nigeria? Has he studied the governance of our ally Saudi Arabia? Or noted that Western air-attacks on Libya undoubtedly (though accidentally)killed children, as was reliably reported at the time?

 

As for ‘These people are evil, pure and simple.’, so are the IRA, with whose frontmen he willingly does business.

 

Did Oxford make a mistake?

 

All these points have been made many times about his vapourings, by many others apart from me.  He must be aware of the criticism. He is supposed, by the examiners of Oxford University, to have a first-class mind. Yet he does not moderate or adapt the crude, Sun-type language. Is this because he is shameless, or because Oxford made a mistake?

 

As for ‘There is no “walk on by” option. Unless we deal with ISIL, they will deal with us, bringing terror and murder to our streets,’, this is simply untrue. The Iraqi Sunni fanatics probably have as little idea of where Birmingham is as Mr Cameron does of where Mosul is. Most major countries have indeed chosen to ‘walk on by’. I don’t think that will make the Islamists any more likely to attack them

 

Then there’s a lot of macho bluster about taking passports away from, and locking up, people who , more consistently than Her Majesty’s Government, have stuck with the (admittedly mad and unwise) policy of aiding the Syrian rebels which Mr Cameron (and the interesting Brooks Newmark) wanted to adopt so much -  until Parliament got in the way.

 

For the Syrian rebels were and are of course the same people as ‘ISIL.’

 

England is, well, a lot bigger than the other members of the UK, yah?

 

Then we have a section on ‘English votes for English laws’ - The fact that England is far bigger, more populous and richer than any of the other nations of the UK, and has different religious and political traditions as well,  still seems to escape Mr Cameron and other Tories. Once you’ve accepted that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are different from England, then you’re going to have to live with anomalies like the West Lothian Question. If you don’t want to live with them, then why encourage these nations to stay in the UK at all, let alone claim you love them so much that they mustn’t go?

 

If London starts demanding autonomy, as well it may, will the Tories take the same view, denying London MPs a vote on English laws? I don’t think so.  Well, in that case, it’s not a principle.

 

 

The First Thumping Terminological Inexactitude

 

 

Then we get the first really thumping terminological inexactitude of the speech:

 

‘Believe me: coalition was not what I wanted to do; it’s what I had to do.

And I know what I want next. To be back here in October 2015 delivering Conservative policies……based on Conservative values……leading a majority Conservative Government.’

 

Mr Cameron was never forced by anyone to enter a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. He did not ‘have to’ do it. He could have tried to run a minority government, proposed a programme, been defeated, gone to the country and won or lost.

 

He could have let the Liberal Democrats and Labour form a minority coalition and let them tear themselves to bits before forcing a confidence vote and again causing an election.

 

He could have negotiated far more fiercely with the Liberal Democrats, who would have sacrificed limbs and organs to get into office for the first time in peacetime for about 90 years. The LibDem negotiators have said since that they were astonished how readily their Tory negotiating partners gave in to their demands, and even asked them if they wanted anything else on top.

 

He could have proposed a three-year partnership with the freedom to dissolve it before the election. But no, he went for a rigid and detailed pact, and then guaranteed it for five full years with the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act.

 

All these actions were matters of choice. The choices he made suggest to me that he wanted office above all ( he certainly seems to enjoy it) , and was ready to pay a very heavy price for it .

 

They also suggest that he had known for some months that he was going to lose, and had thought deeply about what he would do if so. And the deal that he made suggests that he saw the LibDems as an important ally against his own conservative faction. Like the absent Jorkins in ‘David Copperfield’, fear of a LibDem walkout could always be employed to browbeat anti-EU, pro-grammar school types into giving way. Mr Cameron and his allies have always had far more in common with Nick Clegg that they do with ‘Cornerstone’ and its members.

 

But the arrangement was founded on the belief that Tory conservatives had nowhere else to go. This was true in 2010. It isn’t now. They have dug a tunnel called UKIP since then, and more and more of them are scurrying along it to freedom.

 

 

Mr Cameron misses a bit out of his speech

 

Mr Cameron’s speech was like Ed Miliband’s in two ways. One (in practice rather than rhetoric) he totally ignored the vast deficit which his government increases every week with profligate borrowing. Despite this position of hopeless indebtedness, in which tax receipts cannot be stretched to match the government’s outgoings, he blithely promised tax cuts worth (I believe ) £7,000,000,000 a year. At the same time he promised to safeguard the NHS’ vast budget, which is a bottomless commitment and will strain every other area of spending. Where *is* all this to come from? We are already borrowing £2,000,000,000 a week just to make ends meet. And every penny of that adds to our huge budget for debt servicing.

 

Two, he spent most of it apparently ignoring another vast and important fact – the existence of UKIP, daily taking form him more votes, more members and more donors.

 

He did not mention UKIP at all until the last few minutes of his oration, and then not in a serious fashion. Yet his whole purpose was to damage UKIP  He pretended throughout that his real opponent was Ed Miliband, a man who struggles to find and show any difference between his plans and the policies of the present government. In fact his main opponent is Nigel Farage, a man who actually disagrees with him and appeals to many of his voters and supporters, and whose breakthrough offers a long-term threat to Mr Cameron and all who sail in him.

 

Two Phantom Governments are described

 

 

Mr Cameron displayed to the electorate two imaginary governments – one a sort of Bolshevik Milibandite spectre which – he implied – was against private education and would ruin the country even more than it has already been ruined by Mr Osborne’s debt-driven housing bubble boom, the bill for which must come in pretty soon.  

 

And the other a sort of Angelic Ghost of Christmas Past, an actual majority Tory government of the type that hasn’t existed for 17 long years, because the Tories can’t win a Commons majority.

 

This phantasm will fulfil all the ‘promises’ that Tory central office feeds every few months to what’s left of the Tory press . There’s all that stuff, dredged up in great scoops near elections, about being tough with the EU. There’s that ‘British Bill of Rights’ that has been roaming round the edge of the playing field waiting to bat for years now, but whose face we never see (I suspect that if we could see it, it would look remarkably like the Human Rights Act, only with a different name).

 

There are those tax cuts that can’t possibly be afforded (though what happened to the old inheritance tax promise from 2010?) .

 

We are proud of our Green Belt Policy and we are building on it

 

There are those cheap houses. This pledge at least is partly being fulfilled. The Tories’ friends, the developers, are chewing up great tracts of countryside to build more rows of mean, cramped hutches, from which mortgagees can then commute vast distances on choked roads and decrepit railways, to underpaid, insecure jobs, pausing only to stash their infant children in state-subsidised day-orphanages. British liberty reborn, eh?

 

Actually, anyone who *can* remember the last Tory majority government will recall that it was pretty much the same as the one we have now, monstrously politically correct, hopelessly pro-EU, obsessed with flashy gimmicks and centralisation in education. Its only good policy was the one it was forced into totally against its will – departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which boosted the economy just in time for the Blairites to plunder it again in 1997.

 

Trying to re-fight the 1992 Election, but without Neil Kinnock, and with UKIP

 

The election Mr Cameron wants to fight is the 1992 one which extended the Major era. To do so he has to portray Ed Miliband as Neil Kinnock, which he isn’t,  and to pretend that UKIP doesn’t exist, which it does.

 

He also has to pretend that people like me, and I suspect there are quite a lot of them, are as willing to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt as they were in 1992.  And he has to pretend  that the Tory Party membership, voting reserve and organisation are anything like as good as they were in 1992.

 

If his recovery were real, he might manage it. As it is a matter of ‘meagre ‘self-employment’, zero-hours contracts and a housing bubble, mostly confined to the better-off bits of the South of England, I think he may be in for a surprise. Certainly, no opinion poll suggests a Tory majority government, or has done for many years.

 

We all went to bed with David Cameron in 2010, and woke up with Nick Clegg. After that experience, waking up with Ed Miliband isn’t really going to be much of a shock. Mr Cameron would much rather lose to Ed Miliband than to Nigel Farage, because his project, such as it is, would be safe in Mr Miliband’s hands. And ask yourself this, honestly: In a seat where the Tories can’t win, do you think Mr Cameron would rather it fell to UKIP or to Labour?

 

Their hypocrisy drives me mad. Our hypocrisy doesn’t

 

 

Now we come to the section on education.

 

‘The biggest risk to all this is Labour.  You know what drives me the most mad about them?

The hypocrisy.’

 

There then follows this confused passage about Tristram Hunt, Labour’s education spokesman, who has struggled throughout his tenure to find any substantial policy differences with the Tories

 

Mr Cameron said :’Tristram Hunt, their Shadow Education Secretary – like me – had one of the best educations money can buy.’

This true. But look at what comes next:

‘But guess what? He won’t allow it for your children.’

 

Really? I know of no plan by Labour to abolish private fee-paying schools.  If you can pay the fees ( and few can) Labour’s happy to let you do so, just like the Tories.

 

The Prime Minister then mangled facts and logic out of all shape and sense, saying:: ’He (Mr Hunt) went to an independent school that wasn’t set up by a local authority…’

 

That’s the thing about independent schools. They weren’t set up by local authorities. They are private foundations. Hence the name.

 

Mr Cameron continued ‘…but no, he doesn’t want charities and parents to set up schools for your children.’

 

This is the one rather tiny difference between the two parties, which are more or less united on the gimmicky, worthless policy of rebranding comprehensives as ‘academies’ or a something of the kind. Labour doesn’t favour the ‘free schools’ which have, to put it mildly, had a mixed record since they were allowed, and which are as remote as Tibet for most people, since there are so few of them. Not all of us can (or want to) live near Toby Young. And if there are any instances of rich Tory politicians, or Tory politicians living within reach of existing selective state schools, sending their children to Free Schools, I’d like to hear them. Michael Gove himself , living within yards of an academy he had ceaselessly praised, and not all that far from a free school too, chose for his daughter a traditional single-sex Church-based former grammar school. Who could blame him, if it weren’t for his political activities? But Mr Gove’s political hypocrisy escaped Mr Cameron’s fierce eye.

 

Our premier went on: ‘I tell you – Tristram Hunt and I might both have been educated at some of the best schools in our country.But here’s the difference: You, Tristram – like the rest of the Labour Party – want to restrict those advantages……I want to spread them to every child in Britain.’

 

American readers baffled by my previous posting on Theresa May’s secondary schooling should grasp the real point here. Until 1965, Britain had many hundreds of first-class state schools, free to the bright children of poor homes, which rivalled the best independent (fee-paying) schools in the quality of their education. By their nature, they were selective, and not everyone could go to them. Entrance was decided by an examination generally thought to be fair.

 

Tory and Labour parties, influenced by left-wing ideologues who reasoned that if everyone couldn’t have a good schooling, nobody but the rich should get one, shut almost all these schools down. Now, good schooling is only available ( as in the USA) to those who can pay fees, or those who can buy homes in the catchment areas of the better High Schools, or otherwise wangle their children into them. Religion, or simply knowing the complicated rules of admission, is often the ticket to a good High School.  For a  detailed case of this, see here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/03/more-thoughts-on-michael-goves-school-choice.html

 

Less emotion, please

 

I have in the past commented on Mr Cameron’s references in party political circumstances to the heartbreaking illness and death of his son. I will try not to say any more than this, about the passage on the subject in his Birmingham speech. I really don’t think this has anything to do with policy. I have no doubt that the NHS did all that it could for Mr Cameron’s son, and that the doctors, nurses and others involved exerted themselves greatly in kindness and skill.  Likewise I am sure that, had the Camerons hired non-NHS help to aid them in the task of caring for the child, they too would have been models of goodness. Nor do I doubt the great devotion of the Camerons themselves to their child. Heaven knows I would not let political disagreement prevent me from seeing common humanity in an opponent, and sympathizing as far as it is possible to do with his grief and pain.

 

Most people, confronted with a seriously ill child, will behave in this way, and not expect to be thanked for it. It is what we all know we ought to do. But that was because they were good people in highly moral professions, not because they worked for the NHS, not because the NHS is organised as it is or funded as it is.

 

These are different arguments. I think they should be kept separate from each other. The NHS is a vast political and economic problem for this country, as well as a vital employer in many parts of Britain where employment is very hard to find. It is a problem which cannot easily be solved, either by simply spending more money, or by reorganisation, or by the market. I don’t think any political party wants to destroy it . I am not by any means sure any of them know how to save it.   I would favour a multi-party truce on it, myself , and one in which the mighty weapons of emotion are laid aside.

 

 

Not exactly crime-busting

 

 

Mrs May, whom Mr Cameron described as ‘crime-busting’, is nothing of the kind. The government, ably assisted by a sedentary, centralized and bureaucratic police force, has dealt with crime by redefining it. Much that normal people have long viewed as crime is no longer classified or recorded as such , let alone deterred or prosecuted.

 

Mrs May’s supposedly miraculous survival in what is always said to be a risky job, Home Secretary, is largely due to the removal of some of her department’s trickiest responsibilities, now handled by the ‘Justice’ Ministry. Much of the rest is down to her use of first-rate spin-doctors to feed an image of cool competence to willing media sources – and of course to Mr Cameron’s pressing need for a senior female figure in his government, to please the politically correct faction. Who else is there?

 

Our immigration policy? Posturing, bluster and inaction as usual

 

The speech contained no explanation of what Mr Cameron actually plans to do about mass immigration (the only thing that would make any difference, immediate departure from the EU, is impossible under our current leadership). I have discussed elsewhere the problems of the Tory position on the EU

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/09/a-tory-ukip-pact-would-be-bad-for-britain.html

 

 

 

The choice lies elsewhere

 

So I would only say that it is deeply misleading to describe the next election as a ‘choice’ between the Tories and Labour. Those two parties are so close that most people’s lives will be unaffected by a change from one to the other, or vice versa. The only change available to us is a revolution in our party system in which both Labour and Tory parties are made obsolete, and new parties arise which actually represent the true differences there are among us. Mr Cameron’s main aim is to prevent that revolution from happening. My main aim is to encourage it, for without it there is no hope of the great reforms we so badly need. Please don’t be misled by this stuff.  

Striving Officiously to Keep Alive?

One or two readers seized on remarks I made in a recent posting to recruit me to various views on assisted dying, etc. Mr ‘R’, for instance, wrote (first quoting me)  :’ “This, in my view , is because the NHS is a sort of Anti-Death League , which mainly intervenes in people’s bodies with scalpel or drug (or both) when they are already very ill, and is very much influenced by modern society’s unwillingness to accept that death is the natural end of life, which we must all undergo.” Which is exactly what the Liverpool Care Pathway prevents - unnecessary and invasive treatment to people who are dying. Unfortunately, this government as a result of a campaign by your sister paper is removing.’

 

I think the problem with the ‘care pathway’ is that a scheme with humane, benign intent, in the hands of a rigid, target-driven bureaucracy heavily (and terrifyingly) influenced by incentive payments,  became in practice something quite different – hence (for example) the many episodes remarked upon (I think) by Lady Neuberger in which patients were wrongly denied water, a denial which is very close to torture when applied to a conscious person. Something had gone very seriously wrong, and I think the campaign by the Mail on Sunday's  sister paper was entirely justified and will result in more kindness in the world, rather than less. This is generally a laudable objective in any moral system.

 

But I do concede that this business of keeping people alive is very complicated indeed, and I was interested to see one contributor quoting Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘The Latest Decalogue ‘ Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive officiously to keep alive’ in *support* of the idea that we might make less effort to keep the serioulsy ill from dying. I’m not at all sure that was what Clough himself  (whose ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’ is one of my favourite poems) intended us to understand, though he was writing about very different times. By the way, I’d also recommend the same author’s ‘Through a Glass darkly’ as a thoughtful examination of the problems of religious  belief.

 

The whole tone of the ‘Decalogue’ poem (there is more than one version, by the way)  is a bitterly sarcastic attack on the dubious morals of his own hypocritical late 19^th Century (Interesting question:  was that era *worse* than our own because they knew that they were being hypocrites, or *better* than our own because they knew they were being hypocrites?)  

 

One version runs

 

‘Thou shalt have one God only; who

    Would tax himself to worship two?

    God's image nowhere shalt thou see,

    Save haply in the currency:

    Swear not at all; since for thy curse

    Thine enemy is not the worse:

    At church on Sunday to attend

    Will help to keep the world thy friend:

    Honour thy parents; that is, all

    From whom promotion may befall:

    Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive

    Officiously to keep alive:

    Adultery it is not fit

    Or safe, for women, to commit:

    Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,

    When 'tis so lucrative to cheat:

    False witness not to bear be strict;

    And cautious, ere you contradict.

    Thou shalt not covet; but tradition

    Sanctions the keenest competition.’

 

Another version ends with this extra sneer:

 

‘The sum of all is, thou shalt love,

    If any body, God above:

    At any rate shall never labour

    More than thyself to love thy neighbour.’

 

So I think we should be careful about using the rather tortured Mr Clough, that High Victorian apostle of doubt and sorrow,  as a sort of scriptural warrant for switching off the life support machine. The modern problem of medicine which can keep the body alive long after it would have failed in any other age or civilisation, didn’t exist in Clough’s time, and he wasn’t referring to it.

 

The old Commandment from the original Decalogue (if you acknowledge any such) stands : ’Thou Shalt Do No Murder’ (Gospel According to St Matthew, 19^th chapter, 18^th verse, words of Christ himself, Authorised or , for Americans,  ‘King James’ Version).

 

This plainly forbids us from killing an innocent human being. What it permits us to do is open to perpetual debate, as in the limits of Just War, and the activities which can be included in such a war, bot to emntion self-defence, or the defence of another under attack, or just punishment for a heinous act. My contention is (for instance) that the execution of some heinous murderers, by performing a redemptive, just and deterrent purpose, is justified in the constant war that ordered societies fight against lawless, selfish violence.  I also think that prohibition against ‘murder’ rather than ‘killing’ leaves us with an alarming latitude.

 

What if (as happens to a character in William Boyd’s ‘The New Confessions’ ) a soldier is begged by another soldier to shoot him. In this case, the man doing the begging is drowning slowly in a shell-hole, and cannot be rescued, but similar, and worse, events are recorded in many memoirs of war. Shall we be forgiven for helping such people to a swift death? Do the morphine packs carried by soldiers in combat , perhaps, allow them to give an appallingly wounded man a dose from which he is unlikely to wake. Does this happen? I suspect so. Little good would be done by publicising these events. I am myself entirely against bereaved relatives being told that their sons, fathers, brothers or husbands have been killed in the appallingly misnamed incidents of ‘friendly fire’ that are so common in warfare. It does not do to think too much about this, nor about the modern ability to save the lives of soldiers terribly wounded on the battlefield, so allowing them to live on, terribly injured in body and sometimes mind.

 

I’ve always found it hard to be dogmatic about the hard cases which are frequently given large publicity by the BBC, in its endless campaign for weakening the laws on euthanasia.  Have they never heard the old saying that ‘Hard Cases Make Bad Law’, a maxim which seems to me to be invariably true?  Why is it that so much of the political and cultural left are so keen on weakening the laws on euthanasia? Why is this campaign so persistent and unending, if it is not intended to have a profound effect? And whose interests will it serve, if the old and ill can more easily be snuffed out without fear of investigation or prosecution?  

 

My view has tended to be that ( as in the Aleck Bourne abortion case of 1938 (discussed here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/safe-legal-and-.html), if people truly think that aiding someone’s death is an act of mercy, they should be ready to stand trial for those beliefs. I think it was right that Dr Bourne was acquitted. I admire Dr Bourne greatly. Yet I also believe, with great reluctance, that what he did was in fact morally wrong.  The aborted baby had played no part in the appalling crime ( a gang rape by soldiers) which had impregnated the young woman, actually a girl of 14. The baby could have been adopted.  I am well aware of the difficulties of this position, and do not know what Dr Bourne knew about the young woman involved, which led him to conclude with absolute firmness that her life was in danger, the only defence in  law to the charge he faced. I strongly suspect that, had I been him I would have done what he did, and I don’t doubt that mercy is available in such dreadful circumstances. For what doth the Lord require of Thee but to do Justly, and to love Mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah (not Clarke), 6^th chapter, 8^th verse). But I think the existence of a firm law is crucial to protect *all* doctors from undue pressure to do things which are much, much more questionable. The abolition of such a law (as happened with the Abortion Act of 1967) has been shown in practice to lead to a general collapse of resolve. Technically, the 1967 Act contains safeguards. In fact, these safeguards are worthless in practice.

 

I am not interested in the sort of people who will seize immediately on my admission that my position has grave weaknesses. I admit them because they exist, and because moral judgment, in practice, is so often so very difficult, and because we so often fail to get it right.  They are not interested in civilised or generous debate, and I am not writing this for them.  I expose these weaknesses precisely because the problem is so difficult and often rends the heart.  But I think that Dr Bourne’s action was wholly different from that of those doctors who now provide what is in effect abortion on demand, as a form of contraception. And my best witness for that is Dr Bourne himself, who became a founding member of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, refused to perform any further abortions for the rest of his life (he was often asked)  and wrote, in 1963 : ’ Those who plead for an extensive relaxation of the law [against abortion] have no idea of the very many cases where a woman who, during the first three months, makes a most impassioned appeal for her pregnancy to be 'finished,' later, when the baby is born, is thankful indeed that it was not killed while still an embryo. During my long years in practice I have had many a letter of the deepest gratitude for refusing to accede to an early appeal.’

 

In the comparable problems of the care of the very old, or the very ill, or very badly injured,  for whom life appears not to be worth living, who are in grave pain and distress, what is murder? In my view, I am afraid murder may be involved when the person’s life is ended for the benefit of others. I don’t just mean legacies and property,  though these may be involved. I also mean when the person’s life is ended for the convenience of others.

 

Of course many difficulties are caused by the ‘advance’ of medical science. One example of this common problem is Pneumonia, which used to carry off many old people when they were ready to go, and now doesn’t because of antibiotics and other treatments. But once these treatments are available, isn’t it then a wilful act to withhold them? I think this is why the passage from Clough, about ‘officious striving’ has become so well-known, way out of its true context, in modern times.  

 

Has medicine, in fact, taken a completely wrong turning? Has it become too concerned with combating disease, in the abstract, and too little concerned with preserving the health of the actual person, and with relieving actual pain?  I was astonished, during the final illness of an elderly relative some years ago, how reluctant doctors were to allow sufficient pain relief, in one case on the grounds that the person involved, clearly dying, might become ‘addicted’.  I began to wonder whether the people I was talking to were entirely sane, but it was probably just bureaucracy at work, as usual, that dreadful inadequate substitute for experience, skill, wisdom,  initiative and thought.

 

The law, it seems to me, must remain in place. Hard cases cannot be used to abolish it. It is precisely when we are most vulnerable that we most need the law’s protection.  Those who campaign against the existing law do so, doggedly, repeatedly, determinedly,  because they wish to be free to behave differently, and they wish to free everyone else to behave differently too. Will the old be safer if they are so permitted? Of course not. I suspect that many old and ill people are already being quietly shuffled into the next world, as it is.

 

If the actions involved are genuinely selfless and compassionate, then let those who do them selflessly face the possibility of prosecution. It seems to me that if their arguments are as good as they claim, they will not face any serious risk of conviction. 

Sigmund Freud, Propaganda, Smoking, Death, Health and the NHS

The heart sinks at yet another partisan shouting match about the Health Service. The public relations professionals,  who appear to have taken over the government, seem to have decided to try to win Tory voters back from UKIP by staging as many tribal confrontations with Labour as possible, so recreating some of the Anti-Gordon Brown fervour which (alas) helped save the Tories from deserved oblivion in 2010. The fake outrage over Unite’s influence over Labour, and now the fake outrage over Labour’s stewardship of the NHS, are simply noisy attempts to pick public fights with the ancient enemy, which isn’t really an enemy at all. But for the Tories to survive, it needs to look as if it is.

 

The whole point of Prime Minister’s Questions these days is to give the fake impression of genuine combat between the two major parties. As it happens, the shouting and bad manners grow worse as the two parties converge.

 

This fake combat (I have referred to it in the past as being like all-in wrestling) is the only way in which Mr Cameron’s politically-correct, statist, pro-EU rabble can be made to look attractive to natural conservatives, and if the most recent polls are right it is working for now. If the media didn’t play along so readily with these games, they wouldn’t work . For instance, the huge coverage of the supposed Abu Qatada ‘victory’( he went of his own accord) was given far more prominence than was Theresa May’s craven surrender over the European Arrest Warrant, and the meaningless play-acting of the Tory vote for a referendum on the EU sometime in the 23^rd century was also treated seriously by media outlets who really ought to have known better.

 

 

The designers of this strategy, I rather suspect,  know that Australia’s Tories (more honestly called Liberals) were badly threatened by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party (very like UKIP)  in the late 1990s. The reinvention of the Liberal leader, John Howard, as a supposedly tough right-winger rapidly deluded Liberal rebels into returning to their tribal loyalties, and Mrs Hanson and her party, who once scored 25% in some state polls,  have now virtually disappeared. The allegations that John Howard was a right-winger were no more true in reality than the similar legend that the British liberal Tory Michael Howard is a right-wing toughie. It is amazing how these images, once established, survive any sort of examination.

 

It is distressing to see this sort of thing going on, but then universal suffrage democracy is a source of distress to any educated or thoughtful mind. How easy it is to engineer consent to all kinds of rubbish, and make the ill-informed enthusiastic about very little, or militantly hostile to some bogeyman or other. 

 

The invention of modern propaganda, under the slippery name of ‘public relations’ was the great achievement of Edward Bernays, himself a nephew of another great manipulator, Sigmund Freud. Much of Freud’s work is now doubted or discredited, but Bernays ( who, for example, persuaded women that smoking cigarettes was a form of liberation, so helping to kill millions of them) continues to influence the modern world in dozens of disagreeable ways ( I discussed Vance Packard’s great work on manipulation 'The Hidden Persuaders'  here

 http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/11/the-hidden-persuaders-and-the-menace-of-tv.html

some months ago   The fact that the fate of nations often hangs on such successful manipulation is , in a way, horrifying. As Bernays wrote in his 1928 book ‘Propaganda’

 

‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

 

...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind’

 

 Of course manipulation doesn’t always work. But it often does.Look at the NHS.  

 

 

I feel I’ve dealt with the largely phoney row about party funding. All the parties have grubby secrets, and these stem from the fact that they are not very popular. The biggest scandal of all is the huge amount of state funding which all the parties receive at one time or another, and which the public know nothing of , together with the BBC broadcasting rules which favour the established parties and more or less choke any challengers with silence. This arrangement, of course, is worth untold millions to the major parties, who could never afford to buy the coverage they ceaselessly get, coverage which creates the impression that there is no other choice but them, and that the existing parties are still living, breathing organisms rather than corpses kept from decay by vast transfusions of other people’s money.  

 

So let’s turn for a moment at the question of the NHS. My own experiences with this vast nationalised body have been mixed, including some excellent emergency treatment after a road accident, and a badly bungled mis-prescription which nearly led to me having a wholly unnecessary and painful operation. I know of other people’s experiences which contain a similar range of good, bad and indifferent. I have also seen birth and death in NHS hospitals, and once again there is a mixture of good and bad.

 

This is to be expected. Huge national bodies such as this must vary, over time and from place to place. The problem is that the bad is sometimes very bad indeed, well below the standards that ought to be acceptable in a civilised country, and preventable by better training and supervision.  It’s my own strong impression that training and supervision have declined badly.

 

These problems run up against trade union power, which works to weaken supervision, EU power, which regulates to make systematic training difficult, and against the general decline in educational levels which must in the end mean that doctors are less knowledgeable than they used to be.  

 

Then of course there is the invention of the ‘degree’ qualification for nurses, which puts off people well qualified to nurse, and encourages the recruitment of people who are not really interested in the hard, practical side of nursing, which is its most important aspect.

 

 

But these are just overtures to the main problem of the NHS, Here we are in a secular society in which death is a taboo, a horror to be shoved away, the moment when the feared pain does not go away, when the lump turns out to be cancerous, when there is no recovery. And yet we die.

 

As Philip Larkin didn’t put it, the NHS is in some way a political attempt to deny this fact - ‘A vast moth-eaten medical brocade, created to pretend we never die’ .

 

I think it is true that most of us will receive 95% of the care we ever get from the NHS in the last few weeks of our lives. I suspect that much of the money used in such care would be far better sent on setting up networks of hospices skilled in the palliative care of the dying, admitting that their patients are dying and that what they need are comfort, rest, peace, serenity and relief from pain. These are all too often in short supply in most NHS hospital wards. This, in my view , is because the NHS is a sort of Anti-Death League , which mainly intervenes in people’s bodies with scalpel or drug (or both) when they are already very ill, and is very much influenced by modern society’s unwillingness to accept that death is the natural end of life, which we must all undergo.

 

We want to push it away, we don’t want to witness it, we don’t like to think about it and we have, in many cases, no source of comfort when it approaches.

 

Of course, there are plenty of diseases which strike without cause or explanation. And there are accidents and injuries which can happen to anyone. But there are also many ailments which we encourage by our way of life.  Oddly enough, while fearing death as a terrible bogeyman, because we are so unfamiliar with it and because almost all of us now view it as the end of everything,  we also live lives which hasten death, driving instead of walking, eating, drinking and smoking things which are guaranteed to make us ill and old before our time, and then hoping that surgery or pills will stave off the problems we have invited.

 

I am always grimly amused that my nearest teaching hospital is approached through two concentric rings , one of smokers (both patients, some of them actually attached to drips,  and staff) expelled from the hospital grounds and so hanging around in yellow-stained knots at the entrances;  and then one of cars, the other clearly identifiable elective threat to health which we have as a society enthusiastically embraced. These cars are crammed in garishly coloured ranks into vast and ever-expanding car parks which have, over the past 20 years gradually eaten up much of the pleasant parkland which once surrounded the hospital. What makes me smile, sourly, is that nobody appears to see the connection between these cars and the heart disease and back problems which have brought so many to the hospital in pain and woe.

 

If we were more religious (or, as our atheist contributors would say, more superstitious), we might be able to be more rational about how to run a Health Service. We might come up with a better way of treating the dying than ‘care pathways’ in noisy, cheerless wards. We might not keep people technically alive,  but in ghastly pain and with no possibility of ever regaining their health,  in some kind of struggle against death, for no other purpose than to stave off death.

 

We might concentrate upon what we *can* do, create many more hospices for the dying,  make people more responsible for their own health so as to concentrate limited resources on those who really do need mercy. I cannot contain my anger that people are allowed to use the NHS to remove self-inflicted tattoos, or that healthy children are drugged because they are bored by bad schools, or that countless millions are spent on ‘antidepressant’ medication whose prescription is based upon a wholly unproven theory, or that people are led into needless heart disease by living in cities designed around the motor car.

 

 And yet at the same time people in real need are deprived of drugs or treatments that would help them. We might also stop thinking that the only two types of health service are ours or the American system(both of which are full of faults), let alone that our NHS is the envy of the world. It isn’t. Lots of other countries do as well or better. The NHS is not a religion, but a big unwieldy nationalised industry,  which probably *ought* to be nationalised but doesn’t need to be the way it is.  

 

On the other hand, many of its faults are our faults, the faults of poor education, weak self-discipline and general cultural and moral decay. And if we can’t cure them, we certainly can’t cure the NHS.  

Let's remember Maggie for what she really was... a tragic failure

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

I suspect that Margaret Thatcher would not have much minded the wave of spiteful, immature loathing unleashed among foolish, ill-mannered people by her death.

She knew perfectly well that nothing can be achieved in politics without making enemies, though it is important to make the right ones.

I am not myself a worshipper at the Thatcher Shrine, but anyone who can make foes of Michael Heseltine, the Soviet Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Left-wing teachers by the thousand, The Guardian newspaper, the Church of England, Jacques Delors, the BBC, Salman Rushdie and Glenda Jackson simply cannot be all bad.

The only thing that would have annoyed her would have been the lazy ignorance of most of her critics (and quite a few of her admirers too). They have not done their homework, as she always did.

They loathe her because of her voice, her old-fashioned manners and style of dress, her hair. They loathe her because she looked as if she lived in a neat, well-tended suburb. They feared her as bad, idle schoolchildren fear a strict teacher.

Many of them, half-educated Marxoid doctrinaires, scorn her out of a pseudo-intellectual snobbery that is the curse of our school system. They think they are cleverer than they are. Few of them know anything about her or her government.

Alas, if they did, the spittle-flecked Left would probably dislike her a good deal less than they do. For her 11 years in office were a tragic failure, if you are a patriotic conservative. She was an active liberal in economic policy, refusing to protect jobs and industries that held communities together.

 Was privatisation so wonderful? Personally, I think British Telecom is just as bad – in a different way – as the old Post Office Telephones. The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.

And this country still has the biggest nationalised industry in the world, the great, over-rated NHS. It also has huge armies of public-sector workers in quangos and town halls – only these days they are condom outreach workers or climate change awareness officers.

At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.

Income tax has certainly fallen. But indirect tax is a cruel burden, and energy costs are oppressive. The ‘Loony Left’ ideas she tried clumsily to fight in local government have now become the enthusiastically held policies of the Tory Party.

As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities. What’s conservative about that? And why, come to that, didn’t she reward the brave Nottingham and Derby miners, who defied Arthur Scargill, by saving their pits?

She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.

She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.

She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.

In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands. True, she won them back, or rather the fighting services did. But they should never have been lost in the first place

Brave as she was at Brighton, she still began the surrender to the IRA that was completed by Anthony Blair. It was all very well standing firm against the Soviet menace, safely contained behind the Iron Curtain by American tanks and nuclear missiles. It was another thing fighting off the incessant threats to our liberty and independence coming from the EU.

She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools and 80 per cent of our laws made abroad.

I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.

But I advise both her enemies and her worshippers to remember that she was human – deserving in the hour of her death to be decently respected, but to be neither despised nor idolised. May she rest in peace.

Putin: The Naked Truth

Alas I can understand what is written on the back of the young woman, fashionably protesting against Vladimir Putin.

It is very rude. Apparently the inscription on her front was even ruder.

I have no doubt Mr Putin deserves this sort of thing (though, to his credit, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much).
But why, of all the many equally shady despots and tyrants of the world, is he singled out for it? It is simple. Mr Putin, for all his many faults, is the only major political leader who still holds out for his own nation’s sovereignty and independence.

Left-wingers the world over hate this, as they aim to force us all into a global utopia. If you don’t want that, then Putin is your only hope.

Is the NHS our servant or our master? When Mary Kerswell found that her medical records were full of untruths about her, she asked for a copy (as is her right, and yours) and paid a fee.

When she went to collect her documents, officious receptionists refused to give them to her.

When she in turn refused to leave, the police were called, and of course handcuffed her (they love doing this to 67-year-old women, though they are often hesitant about doing it to 17-year-old louts). They have ‘apologised’. Who cares? We know where we stand.

The BBC is making much of a measles outbreak in Swansea. The implication of much of its reporting is that those media who highlighted concerns about the MMR vaccine in the late Nineties are to blame. Not guilty.

Many parents were genuinely worried, and did not find official reassurances convincing. Why should they, given the track record of Government?

If the authorities had really wanted to avoid this, they should have authorised single measles jabs on the NHS.

Two 15-year-old youths have admitted to manslaughter after robbing an 85-year-old grandmother, Paula Castle, who fell to the ground, hit her head and died the next day.

While she was dying, the pair were busy robbing another woman, aged 75. The prosecutor said the pair ‘simply did not care what happened’ to Mrs Castle.

In fashionable circles, you will be accused of ‘moral panic’ if you think this is worrying or significant, and also told that crime figures are falling. So they are. But crime itself is rising.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Some Reflections on Measles and the MMR

I’m asked for my thoughts on the measles outbreak in Swansea.  I’m not sure quite why, as most readers here will know my views on the MMR controversy.

 

Perhaps there’s some intended suggestion that I am in some way responsible for this outbreak, which is also being attributed by some to a long-ago local newspaper campaign against the MMR vaccination. The local newspaper, I should add, says that it covered the controversy fairly, which I have no reason to doubt. I was interested to hear its current editor rather aggressively and righteously questioned on the subject by a BBC presenter the other day.

 

Longstanding readers will know that I was myself mysteriously targeted, some years ago, by a skilful anonymous letter writer who faked a letter from a mother claiming that her child’s terrible illness was my fault. As it turned out, the woman whose identity the fraud had stolen (and whom I eventually traced) confirmed that no such thing had taken place. Nor, of course, had she written the letter sent to me with her signature faked upon it.  The address from which the letter was sent was also a fake, though a very clever and carefully-planned fake which I only uncovered by going to visit it personally, a step the fraud did not think I would take.

 

The elaborate faking of the letter, the invention of a real-seeming address, the use of an actual name, have always seemed to me quite sinister and unpleasant. And it is things like this, rather than the science of the matter, which have continued to make me question the behaviour of those who petulantly insisted that the MMR injection was the only option for worried parents.  I  am still astonished that the supposedly beloved National Health Service, every inch of which is paid for by the public, treats the parents of children in this high-handed way. If it is the people’s service, a national benefit, surely its loyalty is above all to those who use it? Is the state our servant or our master?

If it is our servant, it should sympathise with our fears. Yet, while public money could not, apparently,  be used for single jabs, it could be used to pay generous bonuses to doctors who increased the uptake of MMR, and it could be used for propaganda campaigns telling parents that all was well. Yet the Chief Minister of the government which used tax money for these purposes refused to reveal if his own small child had been given the MMR which his ministers and civil servants were vigorously pressing on everyone else.

 

Another of the authorities’ tactics has been to over-rate the importance of immunisation. They suggest wrongly that the main defence against measles is immunisation, when (see below) history shows that it was general improvements in public health, especially in nutrition, housing and the availability of clean water, which reduced the numbers of measles deaths from thousands to a tiny few, before any vaccine was brought into use. Linked with this is a tendency to exaggerate the dangers of measles. In rare cases, measles can without doubt be very damaging. But in most cases it is not. And the rare measles deaths which take place in the modern era tend to involve patients who are already gravely ill or otherwise vulnerable for separate reasons (such as chemotherapy making immunisation impossible).

 

Given the possibility, also discussed below, that a small minority of patients may react badly to any vaccination, this is an important point in calculating risks.

 

Before quoting my January 2001 article, I should make a historic point. It was written when the dispute over the safety of the MMR was already in full swing and had not been resolved. I doubt very much if it influenced even one person in deciding whether to give their child the MMR or not. It certainly was not intended to do so. Many parents had already declined the MMR and were unconvinced by official assurances of its safety. They may have been mistaken in this view, but their fears were reasonable at the time.

 

An experienced doctor’s public doubts about the vaccine had been considered so significant by medical journalists and news outlets that a controversy had by then continued for three years (though, as I show below, it goes back even further than that).  This is not itself unreasonable. Medical treatments can go wrong. Vaccines can have problems.  Should reporters or media suppress such worries? Surely the default position, in a free society, is to publicise them. What if they had been justified, but suppressed?

 

As a parent  myself,  I sympathised then, and sympathise now with those parents who were worried. It is a very heavy responsibility to authorise an injection, in the fear that it may unpredictably do permanent and irreversible damage. The chance may be very small. The authorities may be saying that it does not exist. But if it is your child, you won’t necessarily be convinced by such words. Any parent will know this. Many non-parents will simply not understand.

 

 

I say now what I said at the time and have always said. If the true aim of the authorities was the maximum possible level of immunity, they should have authorised single jabs on the NHS while the controversy was still continuing. My view is that events show that , if maximum immunity was their true aim, they went about it in a very odd way.  The predictable ( and predicted) effects of what they did were – as we now know – a significant number of children who were never immunised.

 

It seems to me that what they wanted above all was to get their way. The fact that this involved a number of parents refusing the MMR,   could perhaps be blamed not on their inflexibility, but on the wicked media. QED.

 

The current events in Swansea and elsewhere were entirely predictable 12 years ago, and I predicted them.  Exhortation and official reassurance were never going to work. A significant minority of parents would not let their children have the MMR, but would unhesitatingly have given them single jabs. Had this happened, there would now be no Swansea measles outbreak, or it would be much smaller (no injection has a 100% success rate, even when given twice,  as the MMR is).

 

Here I will reproduce the very first thing I recall writing on the subject, and the earliest of my writings about it that I can find in any archive, which was in the Mail on Sunday on 28^th January 2001.

 

It was published under the headline ‘ Is it Really Our Duty to risk our children’s lives with this Jab?’, and it followed Anthony Blair’s refusal to say if he planned to let his small son Leo have the injection, at the height of the controversy over its safety.  It read

 

‘Many mothers would die to save their children's lives, and many would kill anyone who threatened their young with danger. But now they are being asked to risk their own offspring for the sake of others. You may be worried about your own child, say the authorities, but your fears are groundless and actually rather selfish. Be responsible. Overcome them.

 

Trust us, for we know better.

 

This is an astonishing piece of State bossiness in an age that has seen a catalogue of mistakes, panics and mysteries in the world of disease and medicine.

 

They told us thalidomide was safe. They said that we would all get AIDS. Official advice on avoiding cot death switched from 'babies must lie on their fronts' to 'babies must lie on their backs' with barely an apology. The wise person responds with deep caution to the words 'Trust me, I'm a doctor', and with even more caution to the words 'Trust us, we're the Government'.

 

The same authorities who refuse even to consider that there might be a risk from the Mumps, Measles and Rubella (MMR) vaccine have embarked on a massacre of cattle, and on slaughter and hygiene regulations which have crippled the entire beef industry, when there is still no actual proof that eating BSE-infected meat leads to CJD.

 

But they demand conclusive proof of danger before they will even entertain doubts about MMR. They shout 'bad science' at Andrew Wakefield, the consultant who has persistently raised questions about MMR. Yet nearly half the health professionals questioned by the British Medical Journal say they have concerns about children being given the second of the two required MMR jabs. Surely they, with their long and careful training and education, can recognise 'bad science' when they see it? And what about Tony Blair, who refuses to say if he will follow his own Government's advice when little Leo comes up for his first MMR any day now? If it's so wonderfully safe, why not give a lead to us all?

 

This weekend the triple vaccine is being urged on every parent of small children through a £3million propaganda campaign, mounted at our expense in breezy defiance of unproved but frightening suggestions that MMR could be behind a sudden increase in childhood autism. Most GPs back the Government line, though this may have something to do with the fact that doctors can increase their annual income by £860 if they achieve a 70 per cent take-up of the jab, and by £2,580 if they can reach 90 per cent.

 

The pressure is strong. If you don't let us immunise your child, says the Government, you could help cause an epidemic of measles. And don't imagine that measles is just a few spots. This is a serious disease which can kill. The Department of Health speaks of the 'devastating brain-destroying impact of measles in young children', known as SSPE, which sometimes accompanies measles.

 

Yet it is the devastating brain-destroying impact of autism which is so worrying for the parent who hovers at the surgery door, wondering whether to submit a cheerful, healthy toddler to MMR.

 

There is no proof that MMR causes or has ever caused autism, or the severe bowel disorder Crohn's disease which can lead to brain damage.

 

But both of these afflictions have become more common since the triple MMR was introduced in 1988, and they have brought unutterable misery to many families. Heartbroken parents speak of how they have 'lost' their children even though they are still alive. Toddlers who were alert, responsive, full of laughter and recognition, suddenly went quiet, and retreated into an unknown world where they are no longer the people they were or might have become.

 

Imagine wondering for the rest of your life whether you were to blame for such a thing happening to your own child.

 

You cannot know, but you will always suspect. Because the decision on whether to inject or not was yours alone, this would be far worse than coping with the random, unpredictable ravages of a disease. It is an awful choice, and those who must take it need not propaganda, but help.

 

Why do they not get help?

 

Why do parents have to take this decision at all? The alleged autism risk is linked entirely to the joint use of the three vaccines in one go. If there is a connection it is possibly because three viruses at once overload the child's small frame. While we find out for certain, why not let worried parents have single vaccines, spread over time?

 

The official answer to this is astonishingly thin. Parents are told that huge studies - especially a recent one in Finland - have shown no link between MMR and autism. But the Finnish study, it turns out, was not really looking for any such link so it is no great surprise that it did not find one.

 

Asked to explain its rigid refusal to leave a loophole for worried mothers and fathers, the Health Department brusquely proclaims: 'The Government recommends the use of MMR because the evidence is that combined MMR is better for children than separate vaccines. There is evidence that separating the vaccines puts children unnecessarily at risk of diseases that have serious complications. Recommendations on MMR vaccines are categorically not based on financial considerations, nor do they aim to deny parental choice. We cannot offer parents the choice of an unsafe and unproved option when a safer and more effective vaccine exists. The Department must make recommendations based on the best scientific evidence and the advice of experts and this is that MMR is the safest way to protect children against these diseases. For this fundamental reason we cannot support the use of single dose vaccines.' Dr Jayne Donegan, a sceptical London GP, says the official position about this is confused and self-defeating. The reason for the current panic is that fears of MMR have led to a severe drop in the take-up, down to levels of 75 per cent, which are not enough to insure against an epidemic. If this is so, she points out, then the urgent task is to get as many children immunised against measles as possible. By making the single measles vaccine available easily in this country, the Government could get levels back up to 90 per cent. Even with a six-month gap between jabs, toddlers could then be immunised against the more distant dangers of rubella and mumps within less than two years.

 

And she asks: 'Why is it safer to give them together?' It is true, she says, that the old Berna-Rubini single mumps vaccine had a poor record. But there is no reason why the new and effective Jerryl Lyn mumps immunisation could not be given on its own. However, you cannot readily get it here except as part of the MMR.

 

The Department's fierce statement that the single-vaccine alternative is 'unsafe and unproved' does not seem to be founded on much, and an unkind person might well suspect that this assertion was 'bad science'.

 

Dr Donegan used to be an enthusiast for vaccinations of all kinds, but experience has turned her into a doubter. She believes that the medical establishment is in the grip of an intolerant orthodoxy that will not listen to questioning voices.

 

'They think that people who question the vaccine are socially irresponsible. If I say anything critical about vaccines it's as if I were saying that God was dead.' Certainly an act of faith is required. The claims of an MMR risk have not been proved, but nor have they been disproved. There is no reason for either side to be certain, and every reason to be cautious, especially if the future of a tiny child is in your hands. Yet the use of emotional strong-arm tactics comes just as much - if not more - from the pro-injection lobby as it does from the antis.

 

Are their scares valid? The MMR enthusiasts make much of recent measles epidemics in Ireland and the Netherlands which involved several thousand children.

 

Dr Donegan says measles is indeed deadly if it attacks badly nourished children living in dirty conditions, or if it affects those who are already seriously ill. She says most health improvements, even the ones credited to vaccination, are really due to the march of civilisation. In an advanced country with clean food and water, fresh fruit and vegetables readily available, and modern, spacious housing, she believes measles is unlikely to be fatal for healthy youngsters.

 

Normal, fit people can suffer severely or even die from measles, but such deaths are rare. The Netherlands recently suffered an epidemic in the country's rural 'Bible Belt', where vaccination of all kinds is frowned upon.

 

There were three deaths among the 3,300 who caught the disease. One two-year-old had underlying heart problems, but the two other victims, a three-year-old and a 17-year-old, died from measles complications.

 

The two measles deaths in Ireland's epidemic last year suggest that Dr Donegan has a point. One of the victims was a 12-month-old baby girl from a very poor family living in grim conditions on a large Dublin housing estate and was, incredibly for a European capital in the year 2000, malnourished. The other was also exceptional and seriously ill before he contracted measles. He was a two-year-old with a severe malformation of the throat which linked his windpipe with his oesophagus and who had to be fed by a tube let into his stomach.

 

The Irish epidemic also revealed another unsettling fact for the 'MMR at all costs' lobby. At least ten per cent of those who developed measles had been given the MMR jab. One in ten is a pretty high failure rate for a treatment that is being pressed on the public as a great social duty.

 

And it is that idea of social duty which really lies at the heart of this argument. The lofty view that 'the health of the people is the highest law' seems to have shoved aside all other thoughts. The authorities, who take more than a third of our income in taxes, are not delivering very much that is good or laudable in return, as the NHS decays into Third World conditions.

 

They are anxious to prove to us that they are still benevolent and good: the abolition and defeat of diseases is one of the few ways they now have of doing so. They have made a calculation which leaves no room for doubt and they think we are obliged to help them. Luckily for us, they cannot - yet - make us vaccinate our young. I bet they wish they could, but in the meantime they are forcing the parents of Britain into a deeply unpleasant and completely needless dilemma which may have the opposite effect to the one they intend. If there is a measles epidemic in this country, the rigid minds of the Health Department will have to share the blame for it. ‘

 

I have deliberately emphasised my original final sentence.

 

I still think that, given the state of knowledge when this was written, this is a reasonable summary of the case. I was the only journalist to track the measles deaths in Dublin and find out the true circumstances from the Irish authorities. This would have been impossible in Britain, where my requests for such information on a measles death was brusquely refused, on the spurious grounds of patient confidentiality. I never sought to identify anyone so that cannot be the reason.

 

 

It is useful to recall that Andrew Wakefield’s original paper in ‘The Lancet’, suggesting that the MMR (introduced in 1988) might have risks, had been published in February 1998, almost three years before I wrote the article. The concerns about the safety of the MMR had already taken hold in the public mind long before I ever uttered a public word about it.

 

 

In fact, they go back further than the famous press conference which began the controversy. Using an electronic library database, I found that fears over the MMR being linked with autism and bowel disease  were raised in newspaper reports in March 1994, January 1996, November 1996, June 1997 and July 1997. In 1992, two of the original MMR vaccines had been withdrawn because of a separate concern over the safety of the mumps component.

 

I am not going to attempt to go into the rights and wrongs of this controversy now.  I can only say that it seemed to me that some legitimate concerns had been raised, and that parents were entitled to be worried. Some personal experiences of mine have made me worry about all claims of total safety for vaccines. Nor is it just personal experience, nor the ghastly experience of Heather Edwards and her son Joshua,  which I have often written about, and which haunts me to this day (Joshua had severe reactions after *both* his MMR injections, suffering both regressive autism and grave bowel problems. No, this doesn’t prove anything. But it is surely worrying). 

 

As I noted in July 2007, ‘ I am hugely grateful to Vivienne Parry, a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which advises the Government on the controversial MMR injection, for finally explaining the true attitude of the authorities: “There's a small risk with all vaccines,” she says. “No one has ever said that any vaccine is completely without side-effects.”

 

“But we have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks. If we had measles, it would kill lots of children. If you have a vaccine, it will damage some children, but a very small number.” ‘

 

As I wrote then: ’It's not really true about measles, a rather minor risk to a healthy child in an advanced country. But what a refreshing change this candour is from the woodenheaded assertions by the medical establishment that the MMR jab is proven to be completely safe.’

 

The problem here is that governments may regard the ‘small number’ who are damaged as unimportant. But the individuals who are personally and directly affected see it in a very different way.

 

 

I don’t think I have ever met or communicated directly with Andrew Wakefield, though I have corresponded with many people,  whose children suffered from bowel complaints and regressive autism, who did meet him and who had and continue to have a high opinion of him as a doctor and a man.  I note that many modern accounts of the controversy describe his actions as ‘fraudulent’ or ‘false’ or as a ‘hoax’, suggesting a deliberate attempt to deceive. I don’t personally think this is fair. 

 

Another doctor ( I won’t name her in case it brings extra trouble to her) who dared to sympathise with worried parents, and whom I believe to be a fine and ethical professional, was also dragged before the General Medical Council for daring to give evidence on behalf of such worried parents. I am glad to say that she was cleared, but not until after she had been put through a professional and emotional ordeal which would have crushed many people.

 

One of the things which always made me sympathise with the worried parents was the intolerant fury of the pro-MMR campaign, which to this day exaggerates the dangers of measles.  The prevalence and dangers of this disease (grave among malnourished people without access to clean water) had already fallen precipitately before the first vaccine was introduced in 1968.

 

Annual Measles deaths in in England and Wales ranged between about 9,000 a year and 12,000 a year before the First World War, rose to a peak of nearly 17,000 in the harshest period  of the war (during, and perhaps caused by, the now-forgotten severe food shortages of that period) , fell after the war, at one stage to fewer than 3,000, then rising again to nearly 6,000 before beginning a long, jagged fall to around 100, a level reached in the mid-1950s 13 years before the introduction of any vaccine at all. During the first 60 years of the century, its victims fell from more than 300 deaths per year per million to about two per million.  (Older figures show a far higher death rate in the 1840s – 700 per year per million; and again in the 1880s – 600 per year per million. There is a data gap in the 1890s

 

In the five years immediately before the first vaccine, deaths were as follows : 1962:39; 1963:166; 1964:73; 1965:115; 1966:80; 1967:99; 1968:51.  To give an indication of the range of possible variations in those times, deaths in 1956 were at 30, while the previous year there had been 176 and in 1957 there were 96, and in 1958, 49.  The width of the variation did narrow after 1968, but not vastly.  Nor can we be sure that the vaccine was responsible, or wholly responsible, for the subsequent continuing fall in the number of deaths to zero or very near zero, which has been maintained since then. General standards of housing, nutrition and public health were all continuing to rise in that period, which saw the final removal of some of the worst slums.

 

Deaths in subsequent years fell even lower, falling to 6 in 1979.  This is obviously an advance. But a) it is really quite small compared with the changes wrought by better nutrition, housing conditions and hygiene achieved in the previous 60 years. And b) it is very hard to say whether it is attributable to the vaccine, or to the continuing improvements in public health which had already had so much effect.

 

Let us all hope and pray that there are no deaths or serious illness as a result of the current measles outbreak.

 

As always, the subject is illuminated more by thought and facts than by dogma and emotion, though it is, in my view, kind to respect the fears of others, and foolish to ignore them.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morality is Central to Political Economy

I am dismayed by the narrowness of the discussions on the health service  and on welfare reform. Today, in a discussion on the NHS, I was assumed to be in favour of scrapping the NHS because I was critical of it. No doubt others will assume that I wish to persecute (or write rude things about) individuals who live on state handouts.

 

In both cases, my would-be critics are wrong. I think some sort of state-supported health service is both just and necessary (actually even the USA has extensive means-tested health care for those who qualify, which I simply state as a fact, rather than because I particularly approve of those arrangements, before anyone jumps to conclusions). It’s just a question of how best to do it, and of what you are trying to achieve.

 

The person who made this assumption was bandying the expression ‘free at the point of use’ as if it was some sort of panacea. I pointed out that it mattered much more what exactly it was that was *free*, and what the *point of use* was. Of course it’s not *free* in any other sense, as it absorbs a huge amount of taxation, and is not *free* at any other point.  But if what’s free is a dirty, neglectful dump in which there’s a substantial risk of leaving iller than you entered, or of dying unexpectedly while there,  with a hospital-acquired infection, the fact that it is *free at the point of use* is not that important.

 

Quite how one overcomes these problems, in a heavily unionised industry run at least partly (some would say mainly) for the benefit of its many employees, is also hard to work out.  Things such as cleanliness and efficiency in large buildings with large workforces can only really be achieved by one kind of discipline or another - dedicated self-discipline, or external discipline enforced by authority. Nothing else will do it.

 

These problems are of course less serious in smaller units than the NHS prefers (it has an almost Soviet drive towards gigantism and centralisation, a few enormous Pharaonic hospitals, on which resources are concentrated). There’s also the unavoidable problem which our secular society does not like to discuss, that we must all die in the end, and that most of us will encounter the NHS only when we are already seriously ill. I believe the statistics show that the vast majority of NHS care that any of us will receive is concentrated in the final weeks of our lives. This, of course, is the moment when the drugs and other resources of modern medical care are of least use.  That’s why the NHS is really a National Sickness Service.

 

A National *Health* Service would encourage and help people to take exercise, lose weight, eat a wise diet ( tax-breaks for those who do this would be a good idea) . Plenty of  swimming pools, convenient to workplaces ( and not made virtually unusable by play sessions and other distractions, just set aside for straightforward swimming) , would do more for health than any number of hospitals, as would cities designed to make cycling and walking pleasant and easy. It would be based on the idea that people have some sort of duty tolook after themselves.

 

It would be absolutely free for emergencies, children (about whom parents should never hesitate to seek medical advice) , the chronically ill, the old  and those with catastrophic illnesses  (people often neglected by private insurance).  But otherwise I see no good argument against a small payment for each GP appointment, for those in work – or a substantial bill for anyone who arrived in A&E as a result of getting drunk (a bill which could also be paid off by a stint doing satisfactory orderly and cleaning work in A&E). There are dozens of ideas of this kind that could be considered to make it into a *Health* service, but almost nothing can be discussed until we get out of our heads the fiction that the NHS is some kind of sacred institution that cannot be criticised, and that those who do criticise it are axiomatically its enemies. As it is, all we get are two dogmas – one the nationalisation fetish, and the other the privatisation market fetish - battling away pointlessly as the hospitals themselves get worse.

 

As for welfare, you cannot possibly start sorting it out by tinkering with the method of delivery. The problem is the ethic at its heart. Since Harold Wilson’s revolutionary government reformed it in the 1960s, the benefit system has been an *entitlement* , a project for income redistribution and social change (and incidentally a state-sponsored rival to the married family). Before then it was genuinely a safety net, there to support those who ran into trouble.

 

It is this belief that people are morally entitled to other people’s money which lies at the heart of the brilliant, but deeply misleading,  Labour propaganda about a ‘Bedroom Tax’.

 

I personally see little value in penalising people for having extra bedrooms (what real chance is there that this will lead to a fairer distribution of social housing? Virtually none). But the idea that Housing Benefit is an entitlement, justified by egalitarian morality,  and that reducing it is therfeore a form of taxation, is at the root of this.

 

Iain Duncan Smith’s changes make no real effort to counter this idea. That is why ( as he actually admits) his changes will fail to reduce the bill. As long as the nation wants the benefit system to enforce egalitarian ideas about social justice, and to support new forms of household  it is bound to get bigger and bigger. And that will not be the fault of those who collect the benefits.

 

The politicians are the ones who have corrupted the population with these payments (which also, incidentally , subsidize low-wage employers, another part of the apparent policy of turning this into a low-wage economy, an interesting and unexamined change in our way of life) . They can hardly turn on their victims and berate them for accepting what is offered.  After all, once the Protestant Christian morality of the past (along with its hatred and fear of debt and its shame at accepting something for nothing) had disappeared ,  why should anyone object? And the state has done nothing to protect or uphold that morality; rather the contrary.

 

Morality lies at the heart of all political economy.

  

 

 

 

 

 

What Went Wrong With Nursing?

My beloved Aunt Ena was a nurse almost all her life. She was tiny, fierce, immensely generous with her small possessions, secretly charitable,  happily self-sacrificial with no thought of reward, funny, full of poetry (she could quote at will from the English poets), profoundly and seriously Christian (her Bible, which I inherited, was soft from frequent and careful reading) selfless almost beyond belief (especially since she possessed the Hitchens temper, which in moments of stress is as hard to control as Chernobyl). She learned her calling in the great old London hospitals, under terrifying matrons who had probably met Florence Nightingale and in whose sight no speck of dirt, no badly-made bed, no bedsores and no sloppiness could survive. She learned even more in the Queen Alexandra’s military nursing service, as she followed close behind the Allied Armies as they fought their way into Germany after D-Day. As time has gone by, and I have learned more about what is important and what is not,  I have come to think that she was the greatest human being I have ever met or am likely to meet, though of course almost nobody (apart from her friends and relations) has ever heard of her , or ever will

 

She became, in the end, a Sister Tutor, passing on her knowledge , wisdom and experience to hundreds of others.  Soon after she retired, she became seriously ill and, I am sorry to say, was taken to hospital, where she died. I was present at the moment of her death, and one day I might be able to bring myself to write about that extraordinary and moving occasion, though it would need the pen of Charles Dickens (whose books she loved, and who had been born in her battered but strangely loveable home town, Portsmouth)  to describe it properly. I am still not sure , even at this distance, that it is not too private.

 

She was plainly not very impressed by the standard of nursing she encountered, though too kind and self-effacing to make a fuss about it. Nor was I, though I knew so much less than she about how it should be done.

 

By that time (it was the late 1990s) many people had begun to notice that something had gone wrong, In our minds we had a picture of what a nurse should be,  much like what my aunt had been – disciplined, devoted, always there, putting the patient first at all times, but it plainly wasn’t quite like that.

 

In a very interesting letter published in ‘the Times’ (of London) on Saturday, Dr Brian Posnee refers to Project 2000’, the scheme to turn nursing into a ‘graduate’ profession which was cooked up by Mrs Thatcher’s Health Secretary, the long-forgotten John Moore, in 1988.  ‘The consequences were so predictable that it was difficult to believe that this plan was a serious proposal’, Dr Posnee wrote.

 

‘The excellent, caring nurses, many not academic, were marginalised’ he added. ‘The driving force behind this concept was a desire for status, which permeates much of modern society’.

 

Well, I agree that the idea was obviously flawed, and I seem to remember getting some smug spokesperson on to my Talk Radio programme, who loftily and dismissively pooh-poohed any idea that it would lead to lower levels of care.  I thought to myself then ( much as I thought when the drink licensing laws were destroyed a few years before) that I was powerless to prevent something which was obviously wrong. It was the old Curse of Cassandra, being right but not being believed, which is actually a reflection on humanity’s general unwillingness to listen to timely warnings. It seems that most of us have to wait until the Greeks are inside the walls of Troy, before we realise that we have been betrayed. It’s yet another argument against that daft experimental system of government, universal suffrage democracy (results of the experiment have been in for years, and conclusions available – i.e. it leads inexorably to war, national bankruptcy and social breakdown – but there seem to be no plans anywhere to act on this information).

 

Actually Project 2000 only put the lid on something that had already begun long before, though I suspect it put off a lot of the kind of women (and yes, they mostly were women), who didn’t fancy themselves as students of thought, but who knew more about duty, kindness and human beings than a thousand ‘graduates’. Modern ‘equality-at-all-costs-and-in-all-things’ militant feminism had for years viewed nursing as a demeaning occupation for women. The old starched uniforms were derided as making their wearers look ‘like waitresses’ or ‘like serving maids’ (a mistake most people were unlikely to make, it seems to me). I think what the feminists really didn’t like about those uniforms was the strong suggestion of owing something to a religious order, which of course they did.

 

The interesting thing about Ann Clywd’s terrible experience, which brought this subject into public consciousness for a short while, is that there is nothing at all new about it . Remembering my frustrating exchanges with official spokespersons years ago, I plunged into the archives and found that there had been a major row about this very subject in 1998, sparked off a by a pamphlet called  ‘Come Back, Miss Nightingale’ written by a nurse, Janet Warren, and a doctor ( a GP) Myles Harris. It traced the decline to , yes, the 1960s, when the profession began to be ‘stridently combative, right-based and feminist…in an expanding consumer economy focused on youth and the contraceptive pill, traditional nursing would seem out of date and irrelevant…Having to dress yourself up as a Victorian serving maid, cloister yourself in a nurses’ home for three years and take orders from ruthless old maids in the form of the traditional ward sister was unlikely to attract recruits of the Beatle generation’

 

My own memories of hospital, of the old Cronshaw Ward of the then Radcliffe Infirmary in  Oxford after I smashed my ankle in a motorcycle crash in 1969, are of pretty dedicated nursing, though it is astonishing to recall patients smoking in the ward.  Can this have happened? I think so.

 

Warren and Harris identified the key moment as 1993, when new arrangements for nurse recruiting took full effect – with the introduction of university diplomas that no longer provided immediate attachments to hospitals.

 

‘Young women who want to nurse want to join a profession , to share its ideals, to be loyal to it. Twenty years ago, student nurses could do just that. Today they are faced with spending 18 months of their three-year training on the campuses of often very minor universities. Many feel at sea with subjects such as sociology and psychology’

 

They concluded ‘Nursing’s collapse is a cultural and spiritual one, a failure of the notion of charity and compassion, not the result of failed pay bargaining rounds’.

 

I suspect that much of fury directed against Margaret Thatcher is a rage against this sort of loss, which became more and more obvious during her period in government, but which was not necessarily caused by her policies or acts. Pre-1980 Britain was much less affluent than it became, but also much gentler and kinder. The economic storm came at about the same time the big social, educational and cultural changes of the 1960s began to make themselves felt. I don’t think the Thatcher government cared much about all this, or understood it, and I have many criticisms of it. But the thing people really didn’t like about the 1980s was the ‘cultural and spiritual ‘ change that came then with such force.  And that had its origins in the 1940s, 1950s and above all the 1960s, with the launch of the permissive society

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mystery of Breast Cancer

It is distressing to read that many women have been more or less railroaded into surgery and other radical treatments for breast cancer. These are, all too frequently, surgery and treatments which may well not have been necessary.

These operations and therapies (like many of the remedies for cancer) are often vary taxing, painful and disfiguring. Even when fully justified and successful, they leave inward marks and mental bruises which may never go away. No doubt a case can be made for the screening policy, and for erring on the side of safety.

I do not know what I would do in these circumstances. The pressure is great, and the worry that the wrong decision might be literally fatal must be hard to bear. Some members of the medical profession can be quite cold and ruthless when their wills are thwarted, as they have an almost totalitarian belief in the goodness of their actions. Again, this is understandable. But can it be right?

Men can only look on and wonder, and there is a sort of assumption that this is a problem they really ought to shut up about. But I have another worry, and I don’t think I am disqualified from it by my sex. What are the reasons for what seems to be an epidemic of breast cancer? Was there always so much of it? If not, why is there so much now? Shouldn’t we be more interested in preventing it, than in engaging in heroic, but often painfully radical, efforts to deal with it once it has developed?

In the case of several other cancers, it is increasingly recognised that there are lifestyle reasons for their greater prevalence. Yes, you can contract lung cancer if you never smoke, but you are far more likely to do so if you have. Is it beyond possibility that the near-epidemic of breast cancer (and who does not know someone who has fallen victim to this disease) might also have some lifestyle connections? And is it possible that modern medicine does not want to explore them very much, as the implications would challenge one of the most powerful (and intolerant, and angry and repressive) dogmas of our age?

 

I am not here making any simple, crude connection between breast cancer and any one of a number of things that have become much more common in the past 40 years. I would simply point out that the female breast is part of the reproductive organs, and is linked to them in many ways. In an age where the following practices have recently become much more common, would it be unreasonable to wonder if there might not be a connection? Oughtn’t there to be rather more research into this than there seems to have been? And why hasn’t there been such research?

1.Pregnancy is increasingly delayed into later life. 2.The western world has experienced near-universal use of contraceptive pills, pills which cause the reproductive system to function abnormally 3. The prevalence of abortion as a back-up form of contraception, and in many cases of multiple abortions, is a new development 4. The inability of many women to breastfeed their babies for any great length of time, because of the urgent need to return to paid work is anotehr stark difference from the past.

These things all have another thing in common. They are more or less essential to the sexual revolution, by which women have been shifted, in their millions, from their former role as nurturers of children, into their new role as wageslaves, as active in the labour market as men, if not more so.

 

You might add to the above list the general health problems caused by bad diets and obesity, and by lack of exercise in the lives of millions of people, and you might be on to something. But these, too, are essential elements of the sort of society we have been persuaded to believe we want, and which it is risky to question. 

 

Normally, we would be more interested in prevention than in cure, as we are in the cases of heart disease, skin cancer and lung cancer. But in this case, we seem for some reason to concentrate on screening and cure, rather than on probing too deeply into how the disease might be prevented.

Quibbling with The Guardian

 

I just thought readers here might not be aware of a brief exchange I have just had with ‘the Guardian’. (I read it, so you don’t have to). On Monday their media column said I had only ‘quibbled’ about the Olympic opening ceremony. Today(Wednesday) they have published my letter in response, which reads:

 

‘You know how to hurt a man. You say (Media Monkey's diary, 6 August) that I "only had quibbles" in my Mail on Sunday article about the Olympic opening ceremony. Quibbles such as "It was a social worker's history of Britain", or "It is a strange sort of nation that can turn a hospital bed into a symbol of national pride, especially in an era when you can die of thirst in one", or "most people under 40 have been taught not to have pride in their country, so the Health Service is all they've got left. They have been cheated of any real knowledge of history". I don't regard these as "quibbles" and I shouldn't think most of your readers would, either.’

 

Actually, ‘The Guardian’ is quite good at allowing people to reply to attacks on them in its pages, or correct the mistakes it has made.

PETER HITCHENS: Caring for our sick relatives IS 'someone else's responsibility', nurse... it's yours

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Here we go, full speed ahead into the Third World. In the poor countries of Africa and Asia, people move into the bare, harsh hospitals where their sick relatives are being treated, bringing food and clean sheets and taking on much of their care. If they don’t, those relatives will die of neglect.

Now Dr Peter Carter, the General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, wants us to start down the same path.

He thinks we have somehow ‘sleepwalked’ into thinking that taking an elderly relative to the lavatory, while he or she is in hospital, is ‘someone else’s responsibility’.

From now on, it’s going to be up to us. ‘The services need to gear themselves up to make people aware, “You are very welcome to come in and look after mum, dad, husband, wife, etc.” ’

I like that ‘very welcome’. What if we don’t welcome this arrangement ourselves? Will we then find ‘mum, dad, husband, wife, etc’ lying moaning in a pool of urine, afflicted with bedsores and unfed when we finally get away from work and struggle our way to the hos¬pital through the jammed streets and the predatory, expensive car park? I suspect so.

Sleepwalked? Someone else’s responsibility? The gulf between this character and the rest of us is too wide to bridge. Hospitals in civilised countries exist precisely because the care of the sick is a specialised activity.

People go to hospitals because they are too ill to look after themselves, and because their own close families lack the skills to do the job.
Gigantic sums of money are spent on building, staffing and equipping these places. Yet they cannot do the most basic tasks any more.

It is not because of lack of money. All these billions cannot replace the conscientious Christian spirit of selfless service that once motivated the nursing profession, and which has now been replaced by smarmy platitudes and meaningless degrees.

In the hospitals of our liberated, non-judgmental, equality-and-diversity Brave New World, the most basic tasks are not done, or are done badly. People are beginning to dread going to them.

This is where we are, and where we are going. No wonder that the ‘right’ to be put down like a sick pet is becoming a popular cause. If the country plans to commit deliberate suicide, then it’s not surprising if many of its inhabitants feel they might as well join in.


You should have thrown cabbages, Ed, not shaken his hand

I've never understood why we should be keen on young people getting involved in politics, itself a form of mental illness.
Since they’ve never earned a living, paid tax or been parents, they are generally insufferable self-righteous ‘idealists’, full of fancies about how to spend other people’s money.

They should be booed off the stage with old cabbages and howls of ‘Why aren’t you at school?’, not indulged and fawned over by party leaders.

It’s for their own good. After all, look what happened to William Hague.

In any case, what was so great about Labour’s new child star, Rory Weal? His whingeing delivery and urgent finger-jabbing looked and sounded as if he had attended the Ken Livingstone School of Speech and Drama.

And what drama it was. The poor mite, formerly dwelling in opulent luxury, has been forced to live in a four-bedroom semi and attend a grammar school. He disapproves of them, of course, but not enough to commute to one of his beloved comprehensives. Truly, it would take Charles Dickens to do full justice to this tragedy of our times.

I am not sure quite how he owes his salvation from poverty to the Welfare State, but even if he does, that Welfare State has been lavishly supported by all major parties since the Thirties, and has never been the sole property of Labour.

He doesn’t know what he is talking about, and he proclaims it like a trainee commissar. Come back in

40 years, Rory. Then you might have something interesting to say.


Squalid Britain, seen from a corner shop

Anyone fooled by the brief flurry of ‘toughness’ after the so-called riots should study the following case, which could be anywhere in Britain. I won’t say precisely where, as it might make things even worse for the victim.

The owner of a small corner off-licence (let us call him Frank) is 60. He works 15 hours a day, every day. He had a major heart attack two years ago and is waiting for knee replacements. The shop is also his home.
When he opened it 23 years ago, the neighbourhood was res¬pectable. Now it has fallen under the shadow of our moral decline (the one I am always told I am panicking about). Bit by bit, the consequences of our mad school and social policies, and our unhinged subsidies for fatherless households, have borne their grim fruit.

Frank says: ‘One house, near my home, has 11 feral children, nearly all from different fathers. Most are barred from school and they run riot by day and by night. I have had to ban them from my shop because of the thieving and abuse.

‘My shop windows have been broken three times. My van – vital to my business – has also been attacked. Its wing mirrors have been torn off twice, it has been scratched deliberately
50 times and has bodywork dents from kicks and punches. The cost of fixing this damage – the van is leased – will bankrupt me.’

So Frank called the police. You would, wouldn’t you? They have proved most reluctant to act, fobbing him off with the ‘What do you expect us to do?’ attitude that has become infuriatingly familiar to so many ¬victims of this cruel anarchy.

One defeatist officer has actually told Frank that he doesn’t understand why he doesn’t pack up and move. His persecutors know this and have said to him: ‘We can do anything we like and you can’t do anything about it.’

As I read Frank’s graphic, terse letter, I suddenly noticed these words: ‘Such has been my despair, I sank to the level of trying to end it all last week – but I failed.’

Since then the police have finally acted for justice, order and the rights of the free British subject to live unmolested in his home.

They have threatened Frank with prosecution. Why? Because when one of his tormentors called him a ‘fat faggot’, he put his arm across the teenage monster’s chest. That’s all. I feel a moral panic coming on.

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What would you call a society that made adoption incredibly hard and abortion incredibly easy? I’d call it sick at heart.

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