Call the Midwife and the bleak road to Bethlehem

In Christmas Eve’s Daily Mail, Libby Purves writes a heartwarming piece about the Call the Midwife Christmas Special and how the series as a whole provides an island of emotional comfort in the cynical ocean that modern life has become.

It would be cynical of me, therefore, to point out that Purves, who predicts that BBC’s Call the Midwife’s Christmas Special will outperform ITV’s rival Downton Abbey offering, has been a BBC radio presenter since the 1970s and is using the article to curry favour with her managers.

But there’s a whole further level of cynicism to go to. Call the Midwife seems not just to be an evocation of a fondly-remembered past but also a reflection of how the Establishment works, in that it depicts middle-class professionals doling out largesse to a poverty-stricken and prejudice-ridden populace.

In fairness to the programme makers, that's not a million miles away from how the healthcare Establishment sees itself. A friend’s mother, as a staff-nurse in the 1960s, was reprimanded for “socialising with care assistants”, the latter being traditionally drawn from more working-class backgrounds as the professionals. In the 1980s as a student nurse myself, I had to endure a lecture from a ward-sister on how people from my part of Glasgow’s East End were uneducated, feckless and had too many children. Nowadays it becomes harder and harder for people of working-class backgrounds to become nurses as the entry level qualification is a degree – heaven knows why – and when was the last time you were treated by a senior doctor with an inner-city accent?

And sometimes the programme-makers’ own prejudices show through the slick production, now that the storyline has moved beyond Jennifer Worths original memoirs. For example, in the 2014 Christmas Special, we see a mother-and-baby home for unmarried mothers where the care standards are appalling. The doctor comments, “these places used to be run by charities, then they were taken over by the council”. In fact, the original National Health Service White Paper of 1944 envisaged control of services on the ground by local and borough councils, but with the 1946 National Health Service Act Aneurin Bevan expropriated the councils – and therefore the councillors and the electorates who voted for them – in order to nationalise the whole thing and place it under the control of predominantly unelected officials, ground-level services being entrusted to local health authorities, now trusts and clinical commissioning groups, which were and are almost completely outside of democratic control and oversight. The subtext of the doctor’s comment was, I think, that democracy was not the proper system from which to run services that reach out to “ordinary people”, as I believe we of the non-elite are now called.

I suppose this year’s Call the Midwife Christmas Special will provide an island of warm fuzziness in the bleak ocean of exclusion we all now founder in, and sometimes that’s what the doctor ordered. Programmes like Call the Midwife manipulate our brain chemistry to produce a sense of supported catharsis – a good cry, in other words. But sometimes it’s time to put down the tissues and see the world as it really is. As Mary and Joseph discovered on the bleak road to Bethlehem, the world is cold and unforgiving, and nobody comes to mitigate this. Sometimes the solution can only be that we have to create warmth and forgiveness by ourselves, because when nobody comes then each individual has to ponder whether it is he or she that has to act.

I hope you manage to draw what warmth and forgiveness you can from whatever source you can find this season. As the sun sets on freedom and democracy the road ahead is bleak, and I hope we find each other in the coming year. Resources A magical reminder of a time when those in need really felt cared for: As Call The Midwife is set to top Christmas Day ratings, we can learn something from a bygone era by Libby Purves, Daily Mail 24 December 2015 Call the Midwife Christmas Special 2015 BBC webpage A National Health Service White Paper of 1944 National Health Service Act, 1946

was Hilary Benn also referring to fascism at the British Establishment's heart?

There’s no denying the power with which Hilary Benn wrapped up his Syrian war speech, summarising why Britain should go to war and at the same time reminding his Labour colleagues that they are the inheritors of a proud tradition of facing down fascists.

But was the Shadow Foreign Secretary also referring to fascism elsewhere apart from Syria? I ask because the man whom the coda seemed to be directed against most, Jeremy Corbyn, took the position of Labour leader after an election in which there was no defined electorate, which would seem to be the sine qua non of any democratic process. Instead, you paid your three quid and you got your vote, leading to a satire-transcending farce in which even a journalist’s pet cat was sent a voting paper.

Significantly, a large number of Conservative party members voted for Corbyn, with the Daily Telegraph leading the charge in a strategy they claimed would "destroy the Labour Party", in a move that many Telegraph readers found a step too far, one writing:

Isn’t anyone feeling just a little queasy at a mainstream newspaper calling for a democratic election to be undermined and compromised?

I believe that the Telegraph, the Tories’ in-house paper, was lying about its motives. One key characteristic of the 2015 General Election was how similar the three main party leaders sounded (before the Lib Dems’ parliamentary collapse): in particular, on the subjects of open-door immigration and integration, David Cameron, Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg each became a Nigel Farage mini-me.

Suddenly, Miliband having fallen on his sword, Jeremy Corbyn comes out of the political outback to win the Labour Party leadership, his job to show the faithful that there really is a difference between the Labour Party and the Tories, in an “election” that both of these parties, Parliament’s biggest, participated. In order to keep the Labour party faithful on-board, it was imperative for them to believe that Corbyn represented a different sort of politics, and it was imperative to get the Conservative party faithful behind him to mitigate the effect of labour democrats upon the election. This, I believe, was the Telegraph’s true intention.

The Labour Party leadership election was an example, I believe, of the political cartel in action. This is a system whereby which party is in power takes second place to the “right people” the chosen few from the three main parties, being re-elected. Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s adviser during the PM's first term, took this even further in the Sunday Times and referred to our system as “a democracy in name only, operating on behalf of a tiny elite who are in power no matter the electoral outcome”.

So when Hilary Benn referred to the Labour Party’s tradition of facing down fascists, I have to wonder whether he is referring to the expropriation of the democratic process by figures on both his benches and those opposite. If he is, I hope he’s prepared to seek out friends among democrats of all political shades, as he’ll need them.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources Read Hilary Benn's closing remarks at Hansard (begins on column 486)

Ned the cat votes Corbyn for Labour leader – but llama family misses out - Aisha Gani, The Guardian, 21 August 2015

Why the Telegraph's call for Tory votes for Jeremy Corbyn will backfire - Roy Greenslade, The Guardian, 16 July 2015 (original Telegraph article: How you can helo Jeremy Corbyn win - and destroy the Labour Party, 15 July 2015, article attributed to "Telegraph Comment Desk")

Fascism's ascent through the Labour Party

Eric Hobsbawm said in The New Century that in the early 1980s left-wing activists started entering public services in huge numbers.

The timing is significant: in 1979 Margaret Thatcher won a convincing general election victory after a campaign aimed predominately at working-class people. It became apparent that democracy wasn’t working in the way hard-left figures wanted it to, in not delivering victory to socialist politicians whose plan was to bring the country to its knees financially in order to foment revolution. Post-revolution, democracy would be allowed to wither on the vine so that the middle-class revolutionaries could not be replaced by what they saw as their underlings.

It didn’t quite work that way: the electorate continued to vote Conservative through the 1980s and well into the 1990s in numbers that would be impossible to explain without votes from working-class people, who Marx’s lazy assumptions indicated should be becoming class-conscious and seeking to make the state, and therefore democracy, irrelevant.

Hence the Gramscian infiltration of public services by hard-left activists in what Gramsci’s acolyte, Rudy Deutsch, called a "long march through the institutions". Preparations were made to turn the country into what they claimed would be a multicultural society, which would have been a laudable aim, but was actually a Derridean attempt to deconstruct Britain and ended up giving us a nation of ghettoes. Most unforgivably, Lucaksian views that the state would fall more quickly with the implosion of the nuclear family were used to justify sexualising children, a view that allowed the far-left BBC to ignore Jimmy Savile’s paedophilia, if not tacitly condone it.

Harriet Harman, the interim leader of the Labour Party after Ed Miliband’s resignation, was a follower of the last view, as shown by her lobbying of the Callaghan Government in 1978 to decriminalise child pornography. Her successor, Jeremy Corbyn, became leader after an election without a defined electorate which Labour’s own senior figures where desperately trying to wreck until the last moment. But democracy – largely through their own efforts – had become as irrelevant within the Labour Party as it has outwith, as witness the voting figures for the 2005 General Election which indicate an enquiry as to its democratic probity is required.

The French-Jewish philosopher Élie Halévy, in his landmark 1936 essay The Era of Tyrannies, established that Marxism and fascism are both descended from socialism, which was constructed in the early 19th century to carry on the work of the French Revolution. If he is correct, and I believe he is, we should call a spade a spade and correctly identify the process that has brought Jeremy Corbyn only a short chain of events away from the premiership as fascism at work.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Letter from paedophile group links Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt to it AFTER they said it had been marginalized Daily Mail - shows picture of 1978 letter from Harriet Harman, proposing that child pornography only be an offence if the child pictured institutes proceedings

The Federalist Derivation by Kriss day on academia.edu. Go to p15 for figures indicating voting fraud in the 2005 general election. Free - sign in with Facebook, Google+ or email account