A profound difference of opinion

A profound difference of opinion 

 

The word oratory usually conjurers up memories of Churchill or a debate in Parliament where "our finest public school boys" trained in the Machiavellian art of debate toss words to and fro as if in a joust, the formulation and delivery of the words more important than their meaning. Clear enunciation aided by an upper class accent does wonders in confirming the mystification we have in this country of the importance in our lives the upper class have if only to be able to listen to the musical intonation of a speech well delivered.
This morning I was brought up short as they say. The man speaking on the radio, clearly no Etonian, his accent placed him from Liverpool was speaking from somewhere within his mind set, his truths were his own and his wife's as he articulated the case for obtaining the release, from Alderhay Hospital of his baby boy to be brought home and be cared for by his Mom and Dad.
Alfie Evans a baby over who's life the Courts have pondered and pontificated their judgement, refusing the parents the right to go aboard and seek other expert medical help from other doctors who are perhaps less rule bound and more willing to try other alternatives as a last ditch chance to save the baby.
It's a rerun of the scandal where the parents of Ashya King were refused the opportunity
to take their child to Prague where a Proton beam machine would it was claimed give the 5 year old child the opportunity of delicate brain surgery not available at the time in this country. The parents of Ashya took matters into their own hand and secreted the boy onto the continent. The harrowing and disgraceful attempt by British police to have the parents arrested in Madrid turning them into criminals was finally overturned and the boy allowed to undergo surgery in Prague. He is now fully recovered from his cancer and one wonders what the high and mighty medical authority  in the U.K. now think when they consider their actions, especially since the first Proton beam machine has now been installed in one of our hospitals and another due to start soon.
Once again unedifying sight of the 'might' of our medical establishment  preventing a child from receiving treatment, not available in this country but available in another, especially gulling since the treatment would not cost the NHS anything.
Unfortunately they have the power of God Almighty, once you are in their hands. The 'risk averse conformity' which seems bred into all professional services here, doctors, teachers, civil servants, invested as they are with the fallacious story that "we are the best" and "know what's best" only magnifies their blinkered short sightedness and can cause untold grief when the parents are hamstrung and impotent, unable to seek help elsewhere for the thing they love most, their child.

In this mornings interview Alfie's father Tom had an eloquence born of this love. His clear sighted dismissal of the sanctity of the medical opinion and his belief in what he thought was best for his child was concise and spoke volumes where the professional could only pontificate.

Being disgarded

 Being discarded

Economics and economists have of recent times got a bad name. Their failure to spot the banking crisis and the wild claims regarding the effects of the Brexit vote has led them to be bracketed with the 'false news' artists. They are now seen as part of the manipulative process which, through government and media, is more about persuading us along a course of action rather than as an academic analysis of what will happen if so and so become the norm.
One of the recent and interesting claims is that the text books which the economists receive their training are stuck in a paradigm, more fitted to a classical economic theory where value was largely seen as measuring productive work based on the making  of widgets. So often these days widgets are made thousands of miles away and irrelevant to the sum of "our" actions and without the source of economic activity being based on our own doorstep it has forced economists to question the "other " work which our society does but which was never counted as productive. The housewife, adding value to society by looking after the family and the children, perhaps caring for the elderly, the musician who provides pleasure, the artist who cements our understanding of the human condition under which we live, the writer who allows us to see outside the box. All are undertakings which escape the economists gaze and lie at the periphery or outside his or her calculations. The problem of how to evaluate the the impact of a classical concert, how to weigh the impact of wellbeing on an individual or a society and how to place a value on its effectiveness and importantly our happiness.
Of course it could be argued that none of this pays the bills, none of this can be counted as a form of Gross Domestic Product, and placed in a ledger of income and expenditure and yet in our reality it's more and more, "what we do" as the widgets get fewer and the robots become more human.
'Value' has to be reexamined otherwise we, the majority will become worthless, in the economic sense  and  the fear that being worthless is we will feel worthless, eventually reaching a stage where we will be discarded.

Getting it wrong

 

Subject: Getting it wrong.

Guilty or not guilty and the calamity which lies in between.
Rule books are written by or in an academic atmosphere, an attempt to be a catch all in the interplay between humans. Written in the cold heart of day they set out on a presumption that something is or can be wrong or that a vulnerable person needs protection at all costs, and in this, most of us would agree. Vulnerability is of course a two edged sword in that the vulnerable make others around them vulnerable to stand accused of doing the wrong thing and the arbiters or the people gifted the job of enforcement often see the unseemly, unpleasant side of life on a daily basis and become accustomed to judging in an atmosphere of disintegration and perversion.
Social services acts in an area where most of us thankfully never have to go. From the  old, suffering dementia to the child who's parents can't cope and place their own child in danger. It's in this uncomfortable, complicated make up of human relations where the Social Services on offer can be distracted by a draconian reading of documented rules which are supposed to cover an extremely complex area of human care.

We all remember our horror of the story of Baby P, a little boy subjected to terrible acts of infantile torture which went unnoticed despite repeated opportunities for social services to pick up the abuse. The bruises on the child were excused by the mother of Baby P in a complex web of lies which were accepted by the social workers and the medical staff who examined the child. The woman in charge of the local social services office was dismissed from her job but amazingly reinstated because the politician who had dismissed her had breach employment protocol. The women became the most hated person in Britain for a while especially so since she subsequently sued the service for over a million pounds for wrongful dismissal.  

Yesterday I listened to a panel discussion over the dreadful trauma a mother had undergone when, what were taken to be bruises on her babies body, social services took action to demand that at 8.30 in the evening, not withstanding the mother had only just returned from the hospital that afternoon, voluntarily taking the child in to ask the professionals what was causing the marks on the babies body they demanded she return the baby to hospital to begin a traumatic tug of war between the mother and the authorities as to the supposed best interests of the child. Eventually it took the expertise of a dermatologist to recognise the discolouration was a normal skin disorder. The reading the rule book got in the way of common sense, it didn't allow the joining of the dots, and presumed guilt under the guise of child protection.
How do we, can we in fact draft any legislation to cover the multitude of extraneous reasons for anything. The law is, dispute its high flown academic refinement a blunt instrument when getting to grips with the human condition. Placed in the hands of people who often only see the downside of the human condition, can it be any wonder that we get it wrong so many times.

Downright disingenuous

 

Subject: Downright disingenuous 

I don't get out much in the sense of night time entertainment, happy with my own company after 7pm, the tele a book and bed.
Part of watching current news is the repeated call by women's groups highlighting their inferior position regarding wages and advancement in business whilst the other major theme is their exposure to unwanted harassment from men.
From Harvey Weinstein's casting couch to the unwanted hand on the knee or a salacious pat on the butt the air has been so shrill with their cry of indignation and men seem cast in an aura of shame and perversity.
On Sunday, having been to Sainsbury's for some margarine and a loaf of multiseed bread, such is the domesticity of my life, I thought it a good idea to pop into the local pub and watch the second half of the FA Cup semi final between Chelsea and Southampton on the pubs  TV.
It was another hot day, I ordered half a pint of shandy and having said hello to a couple of Andrews friends from his school days I settled down to watch the game. There were the usual crowd, a mixture of old and young, predominantly men here to watch the match. The chatter was of the match, a groan or a cry at a near miss and the usual punditry and advice to the Ref.
Suddenly the door burst open and in crashed a babble of young women who's interest was certainly not the football but instead the young lads watching the game. With shrieks of high pitched self assured narcissism  they announced themselves, oblivious of the match, to focus solely on the young men watching the game..  'We are here' they cried  as they paraded themselves in revealing cut away skimpy clothing, (leaving little to the imagination) in the rush to grab their particular boy fancy. There sexuality subsumed the game, their targets, sitting as a cohort of young masculinity quietly watching a game of football was corrosive. The atmosphere was electric with pheromone  as these young women sought to wrest away from the men their interest in the football for an interest in them.
Would this overt display counter or be countenanced by the women who are so damning towards men. Would these young women be appalled by an improper comment or is their impropriety leveraged by who is doing what.
Of course it has always been so but the undisguised nature of women who apply their sexuality when they want to and yet seek favoured nation status at other times is confusing, if not downright disingenuous  

Enoch Powell a prophet or a demagogue

 

Subject: Enoch Powell a prophet or a demagogue. 

The anniversary of Enoch Powell "Rivers of blood" speech has awakened the condemnation, freely expressed in the media and the middle classes of the damage to "race relations" the speech made.
Britain had embarked on a mass immigration campaign, not only from the West Indies and the 'Windrush' but also from India and Pakistan where many thousands of people were being encouraged to come over to fill the jobs which it was said were made vacant by the toll on the indigenous male workforce due to the carnage of the War. An alternative view was that the Establishment were using the manpower shortage as an opportunity to import cheap and easily manipulated labour to enable and procure higher profits for the owners of industry.  There was also the growing competition from Asia, especially Taiwan in the production of cotton and the alternative, artificial fibres, not only because they had the cheap labour but had invested in new factories to produce the yarn at half the price the labour intensive mills in the North of England were able to produce. Investment has always been the Achilles heel of British thinking. The factories were traditionally running on manufacturing practices invented fifty years and more before. The market for wool and cotton in the world was thought largely to be sown up and that the 'quality' of the cloth, unsurpassed anywhere, would continue to provide a market for all we could produce. The advent of synthetic fibres and the durable cloths they produced turned the mill owning world upside down and they were of a mind set unable to respond and move forward with more mechanisation.
The solution was to cut costs and try to bring the finished product in line with the foreign competition  by introducing cheap labour and attract labour from the Commonwealth. We tarted it up with the rhetoric that we were doing it to thank these nations for standing by us in the war but it was capitalistic forces within the nations decision makers which held the actual sway.
The decision was met by a great deal of natural hostility from the working class who's jobs and pay packets were to be undermined but when, if ever, have the working class been listened to.
Powell speech represented what was on the majorities mind the people who lived in the areas most effected by immigration. What upset the Establishment the most was that one of their own was voicing the fears of an aggrieved populous.
His words are still an anathema to the liberal conscience of this country who abhor any sense of racism. As a country we have apparently grown, or been coerced into acknowledge the importance of multiculturalism and the indifference we must show to different cultures as they line up in competition to our own. Our persuasion that "all will come out in the wash" and that our own culture has much to make us feel apologetic about has grown traction by what could be termed, propaganda.
Today we are coming to terms with the problems of fake news especially if propagated by a foreign power but think how so much more insidious when the false news and the propaganda comes from within, from the very people you were brought up to respect and trust your very governance to.
When I walk the streets of East London today I am very much in the minority. It's the same in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Bradford and Bolton. The white skinned so called indigenous population are now in a substantial minority and the cultures and dress code could excuse you for thinking you were living aboard. None of this would matter if the cultures which accompany the immigrant weren't so oppressive and at odds with our own. It's at odds with the star struck, multiethnic paradise envisaged by the modern view of society, a society of individuals, each with rights for which it is our, the indigenous populations responsibility to up-hold, irrespective of the fear that there would be little reciprocation  if the proverbial boot was on the other foot.
So was he right, or will our propensity to muddle through prevail. Our kids have rightly become colour blind. For them there is no issue since multiculturalism has seen their own culture modified to such an extent that they would be hard pressed to articulate what their intrinsic culture is. Not so the immigrant who more and more demand recognition of their cultural space and tradition. Theirs  is a forward looking policy to reinvent their culture on foreign soil and never, never to dilute their own ethnicity.
I sight the Jewish uproar at the moment in Parliament for protection against as they see it racialistic slurs and the increasing hold of Muslim rights in our inner cities with their demand for the recognition of Sharia law and the observance of their faith above all else.
It's seems "we" the Englishman who dates his family in terms of not more that two generations have no rights, other than to apologise for our past.
The under-laying charges made by Powell  are contested by opponents of Powell in well rehearse appearances on mainstream TV by people who come from and represent the immigrant population. As I write a man has just been proclaiming on Sky News that the immigrant numbers which Powell said would swamp the indigenous population have not taken route anywhere in the country and yet when we walk around the streets of these inner city wards our eyes tell another story. It's the old old story, if you keep on repeating a falsehood and importantly given the media time to do so then the lie will stick. His opposition the 'Far Right' are banned from virtually all media outlets and so his comments go unopposed since it's more than the media presenters job to get into an argument about minority claims.   His smug remark, that the current sitting MP is a black woman, as if that were the end of the claim of racial preponderance or that the destabilising effect of large numbers of people who are naturally attracted to move into areas where their brothers and sisters live, skews the electoral make up of what once was a predominantly white area and has been an important element in her election. The very fact that a black person has been chosen to represent them in Wolverhampton or a Muslim man represent predominantly Muslim areas is proof that racism is alive and well but of course it's not called racism rather the normal will of the representative process of people electing their own ethnicity in the hope that they will have a fuller, better understanding of their particular needs.
It's this wholesale 'slight of hand' when discussing the effects of immigration which gets my goat. White people are always portrayed as being either apologists, on the back foot or as members of a far right neo-Nazi group. The immigrant or first generation black or Asian is seen as down trodden, deserving of our hospitality irrespective of our abhorrence of the black gang knifing culture rapidly expanding across the country or the abhorrence we have of the way Muslim women are treated in a patriarchal society. These institutionalised norms are waved away as being outside the cohort of white people to comment and a voice like Powell would today be in danger of imprisonment for racial instigation.

The disgrace of the home office

Subject: The disgrace of the Home Office.

Occasionally one sees the under laying colour of a persons deep seated belief. It is often hidden under a scab of presumed righteousness which people in power have towards the rights and legislative position of people who have less power than themselves and  come from a different background.
Yesterday the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd had to apologise in Parliament for the plight of the Caribbean  people who came over on the ship named The 'Windrush' back in 1947.
As is usual in this haphazardly managed country, no papers were issued to these arrivals  on their arrival, papers which our own citizens were required to hold if they wished to go abroad. It's an accepted  bureaucracy which is in place across the globe to identify people either passing through or people wishing to settle in any country.
Was it a matter of not properly acknowledging the transfer of these able bodied men and women from their home to fill the spaces caused by the ravages of the Second World War in our workforce or perhaps it was thought to be, only a temporary expedient, a 'stop gap' which once the normal birth rate picked up the population growth would gathered pace and the workforce would heal naturally and the immigrant, somehow disappear.
The immigrants were of course dissipated into the regions far from Whitehall, far from the elite of our public school system who gravitate, as of right, into the civil service to become our Guardians. Some Guardians if you happen to live in Bolton or Bradford but then the system was never designed for you and like the 'black holes' of interplanetary physics, light and matter having entered never again saw the light of day.
Until, that is Mrs May our esteemed Prime minister sought to appear tough on the immigrant population living here and evoked new laws to ensure that everyone within the boundaries was kosher. With few if any checks on our boarders to acknowledge who is coming in and who is leaving, it was not before time to do an inventory but the almost invisible bookkeeping system of the past meant that large numbers of people who had been encouraged to come in had not been given even a simple entry document.
And so we see these people who have lived here all their lives and the children who they produced whilst living here were treated by the Home Office Official as illegal and deported back to the Caribbean. The belated call to sort matters out by entering  the portal of the Home Office to discuss their plight is likened to a Russian invited in to the KGB for a chat.  They were smothered rather in bureaucratic non speak where the inalienable logic of an explanation including, proof of work, a NH card and scores of people willing to vouch for them hits the immovable face of the rule book. Without an actual Document you don't tick the boxes and your out chum.
It should never have happened but with people living on different planets as they do in our heavily differentiated class system is it any wonder that what we the ordinary man and women in the street find obnoxious is beyond the comprehension of the public school bred mind with its singular rather than pluralistic mind set.

Who knows how far a politician will stoop

 

Subject: Who knows how far a politician will stoop

Venal politicians. There is no other description of the political faces who were hauled in front of the television cameras to answer why British soldiers, now in their seventies, who 40 years ago, on active service and under the command of the Establishment in Whitehall are now being investigated for wrong doing on the streets of Northern Island.
90% of the killings in the time of 'The Troubles' were carried out by civilians. Civilians  on both sides the divide, the IRA and their Protestant counterparts, and yet no IRA /Provo soldier has been convicted, let alone brought to court,  whilst in the recent past and now the current investigations being initiated against the British soldiers, they alone are in danger of state action.
I say again not one IRA / Provo man or woman has been challenged in a court and there is no move to do so since it is politically inexpedient 

So not for the first time, the easy frame up of political expediency trumps all. The men and women who take the ‘Queens shilling’ and risk their lives in combat, not combat of their own making but supposedly combat to protect the issues which are seen to threaten the political sensibilities at the time. Not for them the fanaticism of a cause or the hatred of fratricidal policies dreamed up in the crazed turmoil of a civil war.

The thing which got to me most was the sight of the young well scrubbed MP representing  government policy, incapable of seeing further than his nose or the immorality in perusing one side only. The sitting duck, the soldier who's record of active action is part of the army's daily reporting procedure which now, outside the heat and fear of the conflict, are being -to see if, by modern standards (sic) he did the wrong thing. This 'politically' warped specimen fresh from the parliamentary benches  who spends much of his day debating matters, most of which are well outside his field of competence or 'hands on' experience, is now given the power to reigniting issues current before he was born. Perhaps the cynic in me might suggest it's all to find leverage in the 'boarder negotiations' with the South brought about by Brexit.
Who knows how far a politician will stoop ?