Mid Staffs masscre and baby deaths: a sinister agenda?

In the mid-1990s my friend worked in a nursing-home in Grantham and was asked to write a report about failings on a shift where a patient was scalded by hot tea. He declined as he hadn’t been on that shift, but receiving an offer he couldn’t refuse wrote about systemic failings that had led to somebody unsuitable being in charge of the shift. His boss replied the report was unacceptable, and to rewrite it. He refused. It later transpired the report had been rewritten with his name appended.

So I can sympathise with the officials of the Care Quality Commission who found their reports about failings in the discredited (but still functioning) clinical standards inspector suppressed.

It’s been rotten from the start: its first chair, Cynthia Bower (right), was formerly CEO of the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority and had studiously looked away from the ongoing corporate massacre of 1200 people at Mid Staffs Hospital, as well as being in charge when babies were dying unnecessarily in Cumbria. That’s the sort of negligence that can only be cultivated over the course of years of disorder and misrule.

I say so advisedly: many people comment on the caring nature of almost every ground-level doctor and nurse in the NHS, without reflecting that there are nasty pieces of stuff in all walks of life – where are the NHS’s?

The answer is they’ve been promoted. The NHS always had a habit of kicking troublemakers with loud voices upstairs, but the adoption of a target-and-tickbox culture has sucked the buggers into management in previously unimaginable numbers. It’s since been shown that targets cultures attract psychopaths, who excel at both producing ticks in boxes and erasing the chaos created.

There seems to be another dimension to this crisis, though. Look through your history books – older people and babies are the traditional prey of eugenicists. It’s where they always start. This perhaps explains the untouchability of the guilty parties.

Charles Bond
300 words

Resources

Inundated with complaints from all over the UK - Cure the NHS, Feburary 17, 2013; scroll down to third comment, which refers to "Disc 1", alleging the complicity of "public officials in the NHS, Home Office [and] chief constables" in the NHS cover-up

Cynthia Bower omitted from report into Cumbrian hospital baby deaths - Guardian, 19 June 2013

NHS Watchdog accused of hospital 'cover-up' still not fit for purpose, chairman admits - Telegraph, 18 June 2013

Name the NHS staff responsible for hospital cover-up, minister says - Telegraph, 19 June 2013

And still the NHS cover-up goes on - Telegraph, 19 June 2013

Baby Joshua: the death that led to police enquiry

Targets and psychopaths - 300 words, 8 January 2013

Where are they now? - Tales from a Draughty Old Fen, March 18 2009

Patients subjected to abysmal workhouse conditions - Telegraph, 18 March 2009

Nick Ross' Crime

If you’re reading this review of Nick Ross’ Crime: How to solve it – and why so much of what we’re told is wrong, chances are it’s because of the Daily Mail's manufactured furore misquoting that passage about rape.

I don’t agree with 100% of what Ross writes, but would hope that holds true of any thinking person reading any text. Ross deplores rape utterly, and he goes nowhere near the Mail’s recurring theme, based on "evidence" that would never have met his rigorous standards, that women are to blame for being raped; they only have themselves to blame; it’s the victims’ fault.

As an ex-drugs worker I was interested in his positing non-punitive detention for drugs users. I remember the US once imposed this on a man thought (wrongly) to have XDR (extremely drug-resistant) TB. Human rights concerns were raised, and rightly so, but in the face of the prospect of a treatment-resistant illness that evokes fears of horrible suffering these were somewhat restrained.

Ross consistently attacks criminology and its disciples for their determination to blame society for individuals’ criminality at the expense of victims’ needs and anxieties, which I think is seen as his real crime; but he doesn’t let right-wingers, pointing to personal responsibility, off lightly. Chicago’s stock exchange has as many cocaine-users as its poor black areas…guess which ones are easier to catch? By way of his thesis that opportunity to commit crime facilitates its occurrence he cites something close to my heart: the explosion of postal voting.

If you’re angry at what you think Ross has said about rape but haven’t read Crime, I would suggest you’re not quite angry enough to engage your own critical faculties. Buy or borrow Crime, read this ground-breaking text on the causes of and solutions to crime, and make your own decision.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click for reviews of Crime on amazon.co.uk

the crimebook.com - an internet supplement to the book

Blog attached to the above - catalogues what one post calls "the rape row"

Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London - co-founded by Ross, dedicated to the memory of his Crimewatch co-presenter; a multi-disciplinary approach to evidence-based solutions to crime

anathema and the New Fascist Inquisition

There was a time in the Catholic Church when to be anathematised for holding unsanctioned beliefs was to be declared apart from the church. Since the church then composed the major part of society, this meant that the excommunicant couldn’t buy or sell or take an active part of the community. When the Inquisition came on the scene, anybody anathematised/excommunicated lost the right to freedom and even life.

Use of exclusion as a control strategy, when practiced by later regimes, would be known as fascism. The Inquisition is back, is situated in secular life, and is no less fascist for its main driver being known as “Unite Against Fascism”.

In this week’s Sunday Telegraph Andrew Gilligan exposes how the UAF practice fascism, under the leadership of Muslim supremacist Azid Ali, to deny a voice to those they disagree with on the basis of the circular argument that people they disagree with must be "fascists".

In the name of anti-fascism, says Gilligan, they desecrated a war memorial in Oxford; and the Cambridge News unquestioningly quoted Cambridge UAF leader Richard Rose as saying that we’d be "goose-stepping" through the town to remember Gunner lee Rigby at our war memorial. So where was the picture of EDL members goose-stepping? Perhaps there are none?

The new fascist inquisition doesn’t stop at persecuting patriots; if you dare dissent from, say, the authorised opinion on Europe, foreign affairs or the causes of climate change, the cry of anathema sit! arises. Remember when David Bellamy was branded a paedophile on the grounds that his changed views on climate change were harmful to children?

We cannot allow the new fascist inquisitors to push us out of community and political life. To their attempted cleansing of dissenting voices from each and every aspect of public life we must respond with ¡No pasarán!

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

fetish and phobia: time to be shocked a bit more

There appears to have been a cult of Islam, a fetishisation of the religion by non-members, for some time. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first occurrence of the word "Islamophobia" in 1926 in the Journal of Thelological Studies, indicating the author regards it as preventing fair comment on Islam. The second quote, from the International Journal of Middle East Studies, is similar: "a non-Muslim…is compelled, under penalty of being accused of Islamophobia, to admire the Koran in its totality."

Little wonder, then, that even constructive criticism of practices undertaken by Muslims is handled with kid gloves. Witness BBC Radio 4’s long-term Born in Bradford project, in which health-workers investigate why Bradford’s Pakistani community, who comprise 20% of its population and have 50% of its babies, bear children with genetic disorders. It’s not rocket science – as any student of the Habsburgs' decline knows – but one doctor told of resistance at the highest levels to offending Pakistanis by campaigning on the dangers of marrying relatives as close as first cousins.

Therefore I admire Charles Moore, Telegraph commentator and former editor, for his candour in berating the British establishment and populace for being shocked "not quite enough" at Lee Rigby’s murder. His honesty is courageous and astounding:

If we attack the EDL for being racist, fascist and pro-violence, we can do so with impunity, although we are not being strictly accurate. If we make similar remarks about Islamist organisations, we will be accused of being racist ourselves.

He writes of us having an "air of menace", but that’s mild compared to the Mail and the Sun, whose comment sometimes might be cut-and-pasted from ours, but whose reportage labels us thugs.

So I’d like to throw him a friendly challenge: do his honesty and courage extend to publishing interviews with EDL members?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Woolwich outrage: we are too weak to face up to the extremism in our midst - Charles Moore, Telegraph

Born in Bradford page on bbc.co.uk

Born in Bradford NHS page

Born in Bradford page at Bradford University

The Habsburg Lip - msu.edu

My James

The most harmful delusion liberal intellectuals have foisted on society is undoubtedly that everybody has an inner liberal intellectual which will emerge when treated in a civilised manner. It sounds anodyne, but the preponderance of liberal intellectuals in the top reaches of the police, prison, probation and judiciary renders this attitude lethal.

Literally: in Ralph Bulger’s book about his murdered son My James, written with journalist Rosie Dunn, we hear of a man who killed himself in Scotland because people thought he was Jon Venables and were understandably keen to administer the justice that the state sabotaged.

James Bulger’s 1993 murder shocked the world through both its brutality and the age of his killers: ten. John Major was moved to say we needed as a society to "condemn a little more and understand a little less".

Said liberals didn’t listen and arranged for Venables and accomplice Robert Thompson to be given new identities before being released in case adult prison should undo their rehabilitation work. Ralph’s thesis is that they didn’t want to believe such young children could sexually abuse and torture an infant – and they weren't the only ones; when he was eventually allocated counselling (something the killers got without having to beg) the psychiatrist fled, unable to bear what Ralph told him about James’s death.

My James is no academic discussion about crime and punishment; Venables may have fathered a child during his taxpayer-funded new life, and was returned to jail after being found to have accessed sickening child pornography, which is by its nature produced by abusing children.

My James cries out to be read because of Ralph’s heartbreaking insights into the topsy-turvy values produced by ivory-tower liberals who view victims of crime as distractions from their pet projects. Just have tissues and a punchbag to hand.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click for reviews of My James: the heart-rending story of James Bulger by his father on amazon.co.uk

the BBC's choice

English Defence League Tommy Robinson’s excellent performance on Radio 4’s Today has already been skilfully parsed on Kafir Crusaders.

The only thing I’d add is that interviewer Sarah Montague seemed to be somewhat unprepared. When she asked Tommy about representing the views of white working class people, I genuinely don’t think she was trying to trap him. She seems in thrall to Greg Dyke’s doctrine that the BBC is "hideously white", with the BBC predicating the epithet of society at large. Tommy, of course, replied that the EDL represents "non-Muslim communities in Britain". Anybody on a housing estate can tell you that doesn’t necessarily mean white.

Tommy is of course right to complain "no-one wants to sit around tables with working class people in this country". Our sharp-elbowed political classes, ascending through Society’s ethereal heights, position us on the receiving end of an apartheid with mainstream politics as the meadow we look on but whereupon we may not graze.

But I suspect the BBC is paying far more attention to the EDL now than it ever has because it’s not just blue-collar people who nod earnestly when we talk about two-tier Britain, or how ordinary Muslims are Sharia’s first victims. People from all social strata and ethnicities want to make up their own minds about what we say.

The day before Tommy’s interview, Oxford West MP Nicola Blackwood – a tireless campaigner for justice for child-grooming victims – indicated on Today there is another grooming scandal waiting to break. She spoke of Asian victims who weren’t coming forward "because of fear of retribution from their families and communities".

I can understand their alienation: the BBC wasn’t interested in victims of honour-killings until a white girl was murdered. If it comes to a choice between Jihadis and their co-religionist victims, who will the BBC stand beside?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Today, Radio 4, Monday 10 June 2013 - go to 0:53:40 to hear Nicola Blackwood's interview

Today, Radio 4, Tuesday 11 June - go to 1:35:30 to hear Tommy Robinson's interview

Click for Kafir Crusader's analysis of the above interview, contains the interview on YouTube

Nicola Blackwood MP homepage

MP Blackwood granted child exploitation debate in Parliament - Oxford Post

the blasphemy law is dead: it must rest in peace

In the late 1800s, the National Secular Society published a pamphlet featuring a cartoon Moses meeting God on Mount Sinai. God, whose lower half we see, is pictured wearing a nightshirt billowing out behind him: he’s farting in Moses’ face.

To observant Jews and Christians this is shocking. But it’s part of the long, often unhappy conversation between church, state and citizens about what is acceptable comment and what strays into criminality.

Thus, in latter times, we’ve had The Love that Dares to Speak its Name, a poem about a centurion sexually abusing Christ’s dead body that was published by Gay News in 1977 in defiance of Britain’s blasphemy law. In a reading of the poem in 2002, Peter Tatchell said "The blasphemy law is now a dead letter. If the authorities are not prepared to enforce the law, they should abolish it". (It was, by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.)

What worries me is that we are accruing a blasphemy law by stealth, an undead version if you will, that is used to justify persecution and even murder of those who insult Islam. In the recent trial of the six would-be Dewsbury bombers, the defence attempted to justify the terrorists’ intention to bomb an English Defence League demonstration by playing a CD of EDL members chanting “who the **** is Allah?”

It might not be the most elegant sentiment, but it’s nothing compared to the content of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which the BBC refused to apologise for in the face of over 60,000 complaints, saying "nobody has the right not to be offended".

Now watch the contortions of so-called "antifascists" who will argue that some people do have the right to be offended and to act on this, and also attempt to deny that we inhabit a two-tier Britain.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Blasphemy Law Is Dead - petertatchell.net - scroll down for The Love that Dares to Speak its Name

Six would-be terrorists were responding to EDL provocation, court hears - The Guardian

Governors' Programme Complaints Committee finding on complaints against Jerry Springer - The Opera - bbc.co.uk

Symphony: Dvořák and nationalism

You never forget your first. This applies to all sorts of things, not least music. My first classical record was the one on which so many people brought up in an environment where the genre was virtually unknown cut their teeth: Dvořák’s New World Symphony.

So it was fascinating to see Dvořák mentioned in Symphony, Simon Russell Beale’s exploration of the perennial form that lets composers rip up the programme to let the music bare their souls.

In Dvořák’s time his native Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the folkish elements in his music – for example the Furiant, a Slavonic dance with a complex time-signature he’d have seen performed in his father’s inn – was looked on with condescension. However, while Wagner’s works were admired by the aristocracy and Vienna’s Musikverein (left) was built for the edification of the middle classes, Dvořák’s nationalist populism fired the patriotic sentiments of his people to whom his music spoke.

I don’t know how well Czech nationalism translates into American nationalism, but patriots can often appreciate the sentiments of their peers from abroad. Thus when Dvořák – now head of New York’s National Conservatory of Music – adapted negro spirituals (such as Swing Low Sweet Chariot), incorporated sentiments of the admittedly Rousseauian fable of Hiawatha and inaugurated rolling passages that would inspire Copland, his New World Symphony (no 7) was a hit. Add to this the two-octave prototype for the walking bass snuck in at the very end of the symphony that would inspire first swing then rock’n’roll, and you have an epoch-making work.

The demotic output of Dvořák’s fecund mind made him, if I may mix art-forms, the Tom Clancy or Peter Robinson of his day. It’s so sad, therefore, that his music is largely dislocated from blue-collar culture. Are we ready for another outbreak of nationalism in musical form?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Symphony homepage on BBC4

Open Learn - Open University on the BBC: Symphony

Antonin Dvořák at Classical.net

EDL silent walk to war memorial, Cambridge 1 June 2013

"We don’t want you here!" spat one of the so-called "Unite against Fascism" protestors as the English Defence League silent procession approached the war memorial to lay flowers in memory of Gunner Lee Rigby.

The woman wasn’t shouting at us, though, but at a pensioner who had come independently to meditate on the short life and brutal death of the off-duty soldier.

On Thursday 30 and Friday 31 May the Cambridge News published stories attempting to raise concerns about the EDL to the level of hysteria. We’re used to its being biased, but on those two days it surpassed itself, presenting UAF opinions as fact in an exercise in disinformation that I’m sure will provide future cub reporters with plenty of material when learning how not to write articles.

Because of the News’ venom, our facilitators decided it would be prudent to process from a different place from the one advertised. There were about 30 of us, all of us uninterested in the 4 seated UAF protestors engaging in a silent protest (silent, that is, unless a pensioner happens to express an opinion they dislike).

After we’d laid our floral tributes we left, as the main body of the UAF counter-protest had seen us and was coming up the road: there were rather a lot of them. The News had quoted Richard Rose of Cambridge UAF as predicting that we were going to be "goose-stepping" – no wonder his flock were fired up.

I agree with what the woman who shouted at the pensioner wrote on her placard – "no place for racism here". That is why the English Defence League continues to oppose those who seek to trade genuine multiculturalism for a system that listens to the grievances of one religion’s abusive wing at the expense of all other groups within our shores.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Rsources

Police prepared for EDL war memorial rally - 31 May - contains remark about EDL "goose-stepping"

Confronting the rise of the far right - 31 May: "If there were just three old men putting a wreath on a war memorial we would probably not oppose it but the organised hard right has to be opposed"

Police describe EDL walk in Cambridge as "peaceful" - 1 June