The evils we place on the shoulders of our forebears

 Subject: The evils we place on the shoulders of our forebears

The prefabricated scandals continued to churn off the UK production line.  This morning it was the blood contamination scandal, a week or so back it was the sub-postmasters scandal, amongst a long litany of other misdemeanours such as the wholesale phone tapping to elicit stories for the press.

It seems there are no depths that highly placed people won’t stoop to avoid being caught out and, with the weight of the legal brief behind them, they often win their day in court. The Hillsborough disaster was another dark day for officialdom and the thread which runs through them is the contempt those in power have for the common man.

I suppose that I as an individual can make these claims openly in our society is at least some sort of testimony to the freedoms we have unlike China or Russia but the report out today regarding the known contamination of blood products we bought from America to treat haemophilia patients in the 1970s  and the follow up amongst HIV patients in the 1980s where that cohort of homosexual men amongst who HIV was spreading, were looked on in askance  as hardly worthy of treatment and who could be used as guinea pigs for treatment. I remember the fear of HIV being transmitted, toilet seats, hand shaking, the HIV patient became the equivalent of Hindu untouchables and were feared and detested in equal measure. Princess Diana  did a great deal to break the taboo on her trip to Africa seen cuddling a young HIG infected child in front of the cameras.

Our ignorance might be forgiven but the doctors and health officials never, nor the politicians who were briefed by the medical profession and so their refusal to take action on the importation of contaminated blood must have been, in no small part due to prejudice. The phenomena of gay people went against the values of common decency at that time particularly, when portrayed in the clubs and pubs of Soho where the extravagant flaunting of male upon male sex made many ‘straight sex people’ bork at the sight and there was deep prejudice in much of society.

Rightly / wrongly a great wrong has been done and today we are left wondering at the inhumanity of that time  . But of course in todays world, ‘children sent up chimneys’, the ‘death penalty, the malingering effect of slums and the ‘work house’ are now behind us, although no doubt’, were in their time simply features of the social landscape which bewilderingly is ever evolving