Baby RB and the misery of medics

Bones stares at the grim scene lifted out of his memory by Spock's wayward brother Sybok: the young doctor reluctantly switches off his father's life support system at the latter's pleading. Now back in the present, he turns to his companions and informs them that a cure for his father's disease was discovered shortly afterwards.

Faith that the future will provide something we lack at present is a defining characteristic of our species. For example, this month's Reader's Digest tells the story of how Professor Graham Hughes, founder of the London Lupus Centre, noticed a biochemical similarity in patients suffering from an inexplicable paralysis in Kingston Hospital, Jamaica, and patiently tracked down the cause: an antibody that attacked phospholipids on an autoimmune basis, causing a coagulation disorder, which he called antiphospholipid syndrome but has been renamed Hughes' Syndrome by the medical profession.

When he first presented his findings, a surgeon sitting next to him, recognising the symptoms, whispered "my first wife died of this", then both listened to the testimony of a woman who, having been the first to be diagnosed with Hughes' Syndrome and treated, had given birth to her first child after nine miscarriages.

Sometimes miracles happen: in June, six-week-old Grace Vincent continued breathing after her life-support system was switched off to let her "incurable" meningitis take its course, and she defied odds of survival that doctors had put at less than one percent.

So it's sad to see a court battle over the future of Baby RB, who was born with congenital myasthenic syndrome which, explains the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, is "a muscle weakness that limits the movement of his limbs and his ability to breathe on his own". His father wants his life-support to remain on, and his mother wants it to be switched off on the basis that she would rather cope with a mother’s grief of losing a child than to see her son’s "intolerable suffering".

Michael Mylonas, representing the NHS Hospital Trust representing Baby RB, stated "Clinicians at the hospital are against this because in their view even with a tracheostomy, the quality of Baby RB’s life will be such that in fact he has a miserable, sad and pitiful existence". He added the following astounding statement:

The argument before you is the fact that he has normal cognitive function and normal brain would weigh in his favour.

But the Trust is concerned that his awareness will simply make his own plight all the more unbearable - not so much now, but as he gets older and catches glimpses of what others can do.

His reasoning puzzles me: is there anybody who hasn't looked jealously at others' abilities and compared them to their own? Failure, misery and pain are so bound in with the human condition that the above argument does not so much rationalise extinguishing a baby's life as provide grounds for genocide.

Baby RB is unable to move his limbs but can wiggle his body to indicate, his father asserts, pleasure, and has been filmed enjoying toys. The Muscular Dystrophy Campaign said in a statement,

"Baby RB's parents find themselves in and that unfortunately the resolution of this case will inevitably be devastating for all parties involved...The Muscular Dystrophy Campaign is here to provide support for all families affected by muscle disease through our freephone information support line and care team. We also continue to invest over £1million each year into pioneering research to find treatments and cures for muscle disease."

Its rather ambivalent stance may be due to the chairmanship of Professor Martin Bobrow, non-executive director at Cambridge's Addenbrookes Hospital, Deputy Chairman of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and a member of the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, who has declared himself in favour of pre-implantation genetic diagnoses. This would prevent such messy court cases by preventing the birth of babies with neuromuscular disorders, and would also render the many wonderful services provided by the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign unnecessary.

I don't wish to demonise Baby RB's mother with all this, Heaven knows she must be under enough pressure as it is, for example with a marital split whose "amicable" nature may be the good cop to the trial's bad cop. But she's not being helped by doctors who predicate "a miserable, sad and pitiful existence" of a 13-month-old child. Doctors are there to perform medical and surgical interventions, not to use their eminence in order to misrepresent their opinions as facts. (I'm reminded of the case of Baby OT, whose life support was switched off this March, in spite of legal protests by both parents, by doctors who spoke of "empathy" and "distress" instead of doing medicine.)

John Smeaton, Director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, quotes the society's communications manager, Anthony Ozimic, on the matter:

Whenever there is doubt about life-sustaining medical treatment, everyone should act with a presumption in favour of life. The value of a person's life, and the protection due to that life, should never be judged according to opinions about the person's quality of life. An ill or disabled person's life should never be regarded as not worth living. Doctors should not confuse the possible burdens of a medical intervention with the priceless worth of a person's life.

In fact, in a dramatic intervention, it's been announced that Baby RB's father has found a doctor willing to perform a tracheostomy on the child, but doctors have countered that this would necessitate "painful" surgery. If surgery's painful, fire the anaesthetist; I think I'd have more respect for them if they came out and honestly complained about "costly" surgery (in a research paper, Alison Davis of No Less Human refers to a British government publication that mentions that "caring for the handicapped can impose great burdens on our society").

It's not impossible that RB's condition may one day be treatable, perhaps even before the third birthday that doctors say he will struggle to reach, not stopping to think that for all of us there are times when it's a struggle to envisage getting up the following morning.

Take Baby Z (above). The Telegraph's Bonnie Malkin reports that the newborn was cured of molybdenum cofactor deficiency, which usually kills in around three months, by a medicine Professor Günther Shwarz had been working on for 15 years. Contacted by the family, he sent his entire stock of the experimental compound.

Does something like this await Baby RB, should the medical establishment suffer him to live? I don't know, but we live in hope - it's what we do.

Related post - Sympathy and distress - bad medicine for Baby OT

cannabis policy's in no more chaos than usual

I'm not accustomed to find myself in agreement with anything the Government does, but today I must laud their decision to finally rid themselves of Professor David Nutt.

Until Friday 30 October, Nutt chaired the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, a body set up by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 to do what it says on the tin: advise the Government on drug-use and strategies to control it.

Nutt is no stranger to controversy, most famously this January when he published a paper in the Journal of Psychopharmacology called Equasy - An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms, in which he described a group of symptoms in a woman

who had suffered permanent brain damage as a result of equasy-induced brain damage. She had undergone severe personality change that made her more irritable and impulsive, with anxiety and loss of the ability to experience pleasure. There was also a degree of hypofrontality [lower metabolic activity in the frontal regions of the brain causing impaired concentration] and behavioural disinhibition that had lead to many bad decisions in relationships with poor choice of partners and an unwanted pregnancy. She is unable to work and is unlikely ever to do so again, so the social costs of her brain damage are also very high.

Equasy turned out to be Equine Addiction Syndrome - horseriding (does the author have a Jilly Cooper habit?); and Nutt showed a little later in the paper why he had been such an ideologially beautiful choice for the Labour Party to head a quango: "Violence is historically intimately associated with equasy – especially those who gather together in hunting groups; initially, this was interspecies aggression but latterly has become specific person to person violence between the pro and anti-hunt lobby groups."

He was forced to apologise by then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for trivialising the dangers of ecstasy, but has continued to insist it is relatively harmless in the face of damage caused by other drugs, particularly alcohol.

I don't know any drugs worker who would disagree with this. One question commonly used in training is to ask what would be the major cause of substance-related conditions you'd see if you sat in a busy Accident and Emergency Ward (or Casualty, Emergency Room, etc) from Friday night to the wee hours of Monday morning. The answer, duh, is alcohol - with maybe a few heroin overdoses and overheating/dehydration and heart palpitations caused by ecstasy and other stimulants - hence the current debate about how to control alcohol consumption by people prone to binge-drinking.

What seems to have done for Nutt, however, is his allegation that Prime Minister Gordon Brown reclassified cannabis from a class C to a class B drug, after it was taken down from class B to C by former Home Secretary David Blunkett under Tony Blair in 2004, for political reasons.

Nutt's gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick. That first reclassification, in my view, was the political move. Votes were perceived in easing up on cannabis smokers and so, in the teeth of opposition from the police, the drug was placed into the lowest class of illicit substances. Almost immediately, people were popping up all over the place saying that cannabis had been legalised. Shortly afterwards, public and professional concerns about the link between cannabis and mental illness began to mount.

This was no knee-jerk reaction. In the early 1970s, when Nutt graduated from medical school, cannabis contained 1-2% THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, or to give it its Sunday name, Δ⁹-Tetrahydrocannabinol), the drug's main euphoriant. Now, the "super-strong" version of the weed called skunk, which has been selectively bred to increase the THC present, has up to 15% of the stuff. Skunk started appearing on British streets in the early 1990s, long after Bill Clinton did not inhale or some future British politicians did, as they used to push each other out of the way to tell us.

The thing is, if you increase the amount of one substance in the plant, other substances will be present in smaller proportions - one being Cannabidiol which, asserted Zuardi et al in a 2006 paper, actually functions as an antipsychotic. So people whose genetic trigger predisposes them to developing a psychotic condition are more vulnerable to having it pulled by cannabis.

And there's the rub. The UK Cannabis Internet Activists association resuscitates the uncaring utilitarianism of Mill Senior that Mill Junior had tried so hard to kill by looking at the number of people who would have to be discouraged from smoking cannabis to prevent one case of psychosis, concluding that "around 3,000 heavy cannabis users, or 150,000 light users" would have to be prevented to achieve this goal. [Update 2 Nov: they were quoting research from various universities - see their comment at bottom; my apologies.] If they want to use the NNT (number needed to treat) measure, though, it shouldn't be considered solely for a single issue: perhaps it might shed light on the effectiveness of the HPV vaccination, or the medicines being thrown at the swine flu. Or, indeed, we might look at the number of arrests needed to turn one burglar onto the straight and narrow, and conclude that theft should be legalised. And I suppose it's sweet that the Government doesn't persecute and slander every group denying establishment orthodoxy - in the UKCIA's case, that cannabis can cause schizophrenia.

But psychosis isn't the only risk of cannabis use. There's also the phenomenon - whose existence is admittedly disputed - of amotivational syndrome, where somebody feels a reduced desire to work or sometimes even get out of their chair - indeed, government drugs helpline Frank used the tagline "Have you become an expert of antique furniture, gardening and daytime cookery programmes?" on one of its posters raising awareness of the amotivational effects of cannabis. There was, it's true, a famous study on labourers in Jamaica who smoked "ganja" heavily that dismissed amotivational syndrome by showing that they did more work when on cannabis; but what's less often mentioned that the work done in between using cannabis was often found to have been carried out with impaired concentration and not quite finished. My own experience of middle-aged people who had used cannabis since their teens was of blank faces asking "what have I done with my life?"; and their partners, if they'd stayed, asking "what have you done with my life?"

I don't know why Nutt ignored all this in his demands for cannabis to be legalised - perhaps for ideological reasons, or possibly he wanted to be perceived as being "down with the kids". This chocolate teapot of a functionary fails to deal with the fact that only a government set on populating psychiatric wards and prisons would legalise skunk, therefore the cannabis "factories" - houses where every square foot possible is dedicated to growing strong cannabis, which can pull in £20,000 per month with overheads diminished if the "gardeners" are trafficked children instead of adults paid with the drug - would have no impetus to close down.

Ultimately, despite claims to the contrary, British drugs policy is in no more of a state of chaos than it usually is for Nutt's departure. The hiring and firing of senior public servants is a function of government, and if we don't like a government's choices, then we change the government at the soonest possible opportunity. As Daniel Hannan MEP states in a Telegraph article entitled Perhaps we should abandon democracy and be ruled by Prof David Nutt, "Have we really lost confidence in our ability to govern ourselves through the ballot box? What fools our fathers were if this be true."

Related post: Rizla - a smoke or a toke?

top 30

Top 30 - 2 November 09

Halloween: don't grudge horror from Japan

The first really scary film I remember watching with my Mum on TV was Lewis Allen's 1944 The Uninvited, starring Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey. It reproduced the feeling of the hairs on the back of your head standing up when you're convinced somebody - something? - is following you, even though you've looked behind you repeatedly and seen nothing there, only strengthening the feeling that something is hiding.

I spent decades trying to find a film as scary. I watched many horror films, from the set-pieces of Hammer to Clive Barker's Hellraiser series. The genre, like any other, wasn't static: the Hammer films became ever more sexualised and realistically violent, occasioning Christopher Lee's disgusted departure from the company; and the Hellraiser franchise drifted into formulaic blandness.

Eventually I stopped watching horror films, because the genre came to the point where "horror" was no longer interpreted as rising tension leading to a macabre catharsis (as in Brian de Palma's 1976 interpretation of Stephen King's Carrie), but rather what Takashi Shimizu, director of The Grudge and The Grudge II, called a "splatter-boom". I can sympathise with him - from Romero's Night of the Living Dead through The Evil Dead to Thirteen Ghosts (I refuse to write THIR13EN unless imprisoned in parentheses), cinema-goers have been robbed of horror by self-aggrandising directors and tantrum-prone stars.

Which is where Takashi Shimizu comes into his own. His story starts with a three-minute horror film starring Takako Fuji as a "ghost"; this developed into a Japanese film series called Juon, the first of which - uniquely - was remade in Japan using the same crew, much of the original script and some of the original actors starring with American players, as The Grudge.

Shimizu eschews special effects, except where he cannot but employ them. For example, in The Grudge there's a scene where a detective is watching a corridor on CCTV; progresively, lights fail as a spectral figure advances until the screeen goes dark, and suddenly a pair of eyes appears on the screen. To achieve the effect, Shimizu had painted Fuji's face black, so that when she opens her eyes to reveal her trademark huge globes, you are scared because you know this is no SFX: you're looking at the real thing. Similarly, when she hobbles hands-first down a flight of stairs as if her joints are set at obscene angles, it's really her moving - she's a woman of many talents. Most of The Grudge and The Grudge 2 could have been made by the team behind The Uninvited.

The Grudge, like The Grudge 2, terrifies because it is more cerebral than visceral. There are references to an old Japanese myth where a king plays chess with a servant, who beats him: he has the servant, his wife, their son and his cat killed. The latter two combine into a demon and travel over the land. Although it's a Japanese tale, Shimizu hits home worldwide because he knows how to film the international iconography of irrational fear.

Both films also set up a dissonance from the onset as they start in the middle of the story, then progress forward and backward, until we are faced with the gruesome initiation of the murder of Kayako, her son and his cat against the ghastly consequences of her shade's rage at its treatment upon anybody who has been unlucky enough to step inside the cursed house.

It's not fair, and in a sense that's the point. Classic horror stories and classic detective stories have something in common in that they're about breaking a natural law and the subsequent retribution, be that at the hands of Scotland Yard's finest or the ethereal forces patrolling fictional firmaments - so that there's a similarity in that sense between The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Hound of the Baskervilles, while the tale of Jack the Ripper, who was unfortunately all too real, slips between them into a disturbing space that is too crowded today. I'm reminded of Tom Clancy's remark about the difference between fact and fiction - "Fiction has to make sense". Draw your own conclusions.

The Grudge and its sequel, on the other hand, do not give us any safe spaces where narrative can be expanded. It's a staccatto stream of disturbing images that leaves you too scared to scream in case you miss something that might calm you down. And yet...out of both films I can only recall one scene where blood flows. Like other Japanese horror - which is becoming so well-known in the West that it's called J-horror - it is fuelled by the fears of the beholder. Was that a flash of light on the window, or a face? Are strangers looking out at me from photographs? What is it that I'm running from when I belt out of my front door?

Have a frightful Halloween, and a holy All Saints' Day.

top ten songs about thomas

There's a charity in North-East England called Thomas, which stands for those on the margins of a society, that works "at the cutting edge of social exclusion providing therapuetic and practical support to the drug addict, ex-offender, homeless and others suffering various kinds of social exclusion". I think the acronym says it all - please click the link to the right and have a look at their page; I'd like to concentrate in this post on people who are socially excluded in Cambridge, and who are about to lose an invaluable service which has blossomed into a whole system offering people who are or have been homeless, in the words of the Big Issue motto, "a hand up, not a handout".

In Cambridge we have a magazine produced for and by presently and formerly homeless people called the Willow Walker which is under threat because its funding has been removed; an Autumn issue is forthcoming thanks to the good graces of Cambridge University Press, and editor Kirsten Lavers is presently raising funds through justgiving.com to produce the annual calendar.

The Willow Walker provides the unique service of getting the voices of homeless people into the services which commission and provide services for them. It speaks not only about needs and tragedies, but about aspirations and successes. Cambridge City Council seems to think at the moment that other services duplicate this, but I'm not aware of any.

I thought, as my monthly "top ten", I'd post ten songs about homelessness and responses from within and outwith the communities of people who are excluded in some way. There are as many songs that I could have posted as there are pathways into exclusion, so here are my choices, which are arranged without the usual numbers.

Witnessing and abuse

Fish voices the distress a neighbour feels when listening to a neighbour and her children get beaten by her partner - and the temptation to escape from that distress through fantasizing about being a "rescuer", literally a knight in shining armour, which leaves him in a guilt-walled cell where "I become an accessory/and I don't have an alibi".

This is a very harrowing song at the best of times; if you're feeling vulnerable because of domestic violence issues, please click the link to the left.





Violence

In the Autumn 2006 edition of the Willow Walker, Big Issue founder John Bird told Nick Dominguez, who is one of my favourite blues singers as well as a great writer, that - in the time of the infamous London landlord Peter Rachman - he was trying not only to survive a violent father but an "ideology of failure" imposed upon certain families by Social Services. Here is No Son of Mine by Genesis:




Relationships

While one hopes that one's relationship is forever, poet Cate Wiliams wrote for the Willow Walker of the sad truth that some go to hell in a handcart with the lines:

The loser and the winner
Are playing the same game
And the hopeless young beginner
Will do it all the same.

However, she finishes her verse in the hope the downwards is not the only motion:

At the foot of every mountain
The path tells us to go
To keep on climbing upward
And never answer no.

This is Abba's song about about "the loser and the winner" from the film Mamma Mia, where Meryl Streep plays a woman who has lost in love in every sense - but suspects little the reparative action that life has in store for her.



Labelling

Sometimes when homeless people become housed, they face criticisms of still forming part of the street community that is spoken of in negative tones. This legendary song by the Shangri-Las encapsulates the difficulty of getting the streets out of one's mind once one has bodily emerged from them.



Illness

Many people on the streets have an illness, but some would say that this reflects the prevalence of mental illness in society as a whole - ie more than some quarters would like to admit: in Cambridge alone, we've seen the closure of two acute psychiatric wards; and the Cambridge Clubhouse, part of the Clubhouse movement, which helps people rehabilitate themselves from chronic illness and the effects of hospitalisation, was closed down and replaced by the Cambridge Mental Health Resource Centre, which itself is now to be closed. As a fellow Clubhouse alumnus told me, more folks than should be the case will end up being ping-ponged between prison and the wards as each argues the case for the other to be responsible.


Here's Jane Torville and Christopher Dean skating to Olympic gold to to Ravel's Bolero, which - it has been asserted - reflected his incipient manic-depression in the repeated phrasings.



Horace speaks from the past

One of the tracks on the critically-lauded album Both Sides of the Tracks by Street Voices is Horace Odes Book 3 Verse 29 recited by Geoff Coombe. It contains the lines written by the 1st century BC Roman poet:

Though storms around my vessel rave,
I will not fall to craven prayers,
Nor bargain by my vows to save
My Cyprian and Sidonian wares,
Else added to the insatiate main.
Then through the wild Aegean roar
The breezes and the Brethren Twain
Shall waft my little boat ashore.

The best song I can think of to represent Horace's maritime metaphor for life is Paul Simon's Bridge over Troubled Water: here it is sung by Eva Cassidy.



Hope

Lee Jay wrote his first poem in custody, and his stanzas take no prisoners. His poem Regrets, published in the Willow Walker, begins:

He sits alone, on his own
In a lonely place
As he wipes a tear from his eye
As he looks life in the face.
And he wonders why he lived his life!
The way he lived his life,
And he wipes another tear from his eye.

In Madness' hard-hitting and symphonic One Better Day, we hear of the hope that many people in the street community have that things will get better - getting out of that lonely place one day at a time.



Exclusion

This poem was written by a former alcoholic who had recovered but seemed to feel imprisoned by others' assumptions. It begins:

I am put away
I am discounted
I'm unwanted, don't fit,
I have no "house", of my "own",
Outside the city I sit, homeless.

Rejected, as I pay no tax, a social leper I,
A great assumption made.
That I am of no value...

When I read these lines, the first thing I thought of was Labi Siffre's Something Inside So Strong with its video based on Nelson Mandela's imprisonment, because of Mandela's refusal to remove himself from the consciousness of those to whom his existence was an embarrassment.



Building Oneself

The Willow Walker, with the English Churches Housing Group, sponsored a scheme in 2007 shrewdly called "the self-build": it both highlighted the breadth of talent languishing on the streets and in hostels at this time when we need as many people working as possible, and provided a parable in wood and nails of building oneself up as a person. The Self-Build motto is you'll always get what you've always got if you always do what you've always done:



On a constructional theme, here's The Who singing Pete Townshend's Dig.



Beatitudes: turning things upside down

I found this beautiful video on Revd Bosco Peters' Liturgy blog - it's the monks of the Russian Orthodox Valaam monastery singing the phrases from Matthew 5:3-12, helping us to try to identify that hardest of questions, who is the neighbour that Moses' book of Leviticus tells us we should love as ourselves, a task Rabbi Akiva called "the greatest principle of the Torah. I hope the present and future bodies looking at funding the Willow Walker will see that helping presently and formerly homeless people both fits in seamlessly with the Judaeo-Christian principles upon which our country is built, and makes sound econonomic, social, political and humanitarian sense.



Click here to view and download issues of the Willow Walker.


Other posts related to the Willow Walker:

Homeless not hopeless

Catching Street Voices

Both Sides of the Tracks

Save the Willow Walker

The Willow Walker looks for a funder



Related posts on music: click here for more top ten songs about...

there's nothing British about Nick Griffin on Question Time

This week's Question Time on BBC 1, starring Nick Griffin of the white-supremacist British National Party, went off with all the brilliance of a damp squib.

Professor Calculus and I usually don't watch TV (except for the odd snooker or cricket game) when we meet to put the world to rights over a glass of wine, but we watched QT to see the newly-elected MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside crumbling in the face of real politicians, only to see what Cranmer called "the Nick Griffin show". Griffin certainly faced some hard questions, but smirked through them - and at one point was challenged by host Jonathan Dimbleby for smiling when talking about Holocaust denial - and, in the words of James Bethell, founder of the blog There's Nothing British about the BNP, "retired wounded but on his feet, fit to fight another day".

The BNP leader is never on better form than when playing the victim for the mainstream media - for example, when protestors massed to raise awareness that Griffin was speaking at the Oxford Union with fellow Holocaust denier David Irving, they did their job so well that Griffin was able to grandstand on the national News about "people coming hundreds of miles" to be offended by him.

Having said that, the killer comment of the programme came from a young chap wearing a Kippah (skullcap worn by Jews), who stated, in response to Griffin's claim that Winston Churchill would have been a member of the BNP:

Sir Winston Churchill put everything on the line so that my ancestors wouldn't get slaughtered in the concentration camps. But here sits a man who says that is a myth just like a flat world was a myth.

Griffin stated the law prevented him from disclosing why he had "changed his mind" on the Holocaust, at which Jack Straw, as Justice Secretary, said he wasn't aware of any law which would punish him from doing so.

For me, the best bit was Baroness Sayeeda Warsi stating that Britain needed a cap on numbers of immigrants coming into Great Britain, which echoed a Telegraph article written by Labour's Frank Field and the Conservatives' Nicholas Soames, co-founders of the Cross-Party Group on Balanced Migration which states in its title that Cowardice on immigration has allowed the BNP to Flourish and adds that the asylum system, designed to identify individuals in genuine danger of persecution or death should they return to their own countries, has "collapsed". The story defining its collapse has to be that of a Bolivian man whose appeal against deportation was upheld by Judge James Devittie because he'd bought an English cat. In a startling exclusive, the Telegraph's Tom Whitehead reports that Andrew Neather, who had been an advisor to Jack Straw, former Home Secretary David Blunkett and former Prime Minister Tony Blair claims that mass immigration - the Bête Noire of the BNP - was "partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and rub the Right's nose in diversity". (Baroness Warsi's comments on immigration start at 2:38 in the video below.)



True to form, Griffin is again playing to the gallery with a complaint that he faced a "lynch-mob"in the Question Time audience, and that the programme's format had been changed so that it focussed almost entirely on him.

The BNP has a Hitleresque tendency to build a delusional system around a truth, and this is no different. Griffin has a valid complaint here, and Professor Calculus and I agreed that we would've liked to see him drawn out on issues like, for example, Lord Mandelson's manipulating the Post Office strike to soften up the organisation for privatisation, and British banks' reactions to the global financial crisis.

The other "lynch mob" that protested outside BBC Television Centre in London showed socialism's deep-seated ambivalence about fascism, in that they were protesting against a man elected to the European Parliament almost totally by Labour voters disaffected by the Government's ideological method of government that has turned their country into a place they no longer recognised. I wonder if any of them were related to the trade unionists who took to the streets in support of Enoch Powell's 1968 address to Conservative Party workers at Birmingham's Midland Hotel (mis-named the "Rivers of Blood speech"), in which he anticipated Labour's silence on immigration:

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: "If only," they love to think, "if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen."

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

Or, indeed, if they were descended from the freedom-fighters who fought at the Battle of Cable Street in London's East End against black-shirted fascists led by Oswald Moseley, the Independent Labour Party MP who, disappointed by his party's response to unemployment, left in 1930 to form the New Party. Gordon Brown, in Maxton, his biography of the hard-left Scottish MP, records that when Moseley left James Maxton said that "he ought not to be condemned but thanked [because] his actions showed a deeper sense of responsibility about the unemployed and might lead to a 'new direction' in government policy". And just as the Nazis' response to Germany's economic woes was nationalisation on a massive scale, the BNP's website (which describes the three main parties as "liars, buggers and thieves") proposes nationalisation as a panacea for Britain's. One gets a sense of the political spectrum not as a line but a circle, where "hard-left" and "far-right" occupy the same space.

So whither the BNP? I hope that former Labour voters in north-west England who sent Nick Griffin and Andrew Bron to the European Parliament will withdraw from the abyss come the General Election and vote for the non-fascist party of their choice. But what worries me is the party's attempts to woo the forces, some of whose members, under-resourced and viewed with suspicion by the Government, may seek solace in their empty promises. I finish with a video (sorry, Pam!) from the Nothing British Operation Stolen Valour. Please click the link and visit the site to view the fightback against fascism in Great Britain.



The episode of Question Time discussed can be accessed on the BBC's i-player on the Question Time Site. If you're unable to access it, it's available in parts on YouTube - click here for part 1.

tenacity in the face of eejits

As somebody who has a great respect for tenacity in the face of eejits, I just had to bring you verbatim part of this review by Tim Challies, who contributes to the blog Discerning Reader as well as maintaining his own at Challies Dot Com; he's just brought out a book called The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment.

Challies, as Joe Carter explains on First Things, "finds a way to focus on the positive, finding something worthwhile in otherwise lackluster books". Then he quotes the pertinent part of Challies' review of Karen Armstrong's The Case for God:

It is a rare occasion that I find it difficult to point out any redeeming features in a book—when I struggle to find a single positive to write in a review. Unfortunately Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is one of those books—one that is so monstrously bad, so hopelessly awful, so wretchedly miserable, that it took concerted effort just to finish it. Heck, even the cover stinks—a pile of religiously-significant books hovering at a strange angle over a plain background. I tell you what: I will concede the font. The book is set in Granjon, a very nice, classical font that is very consistent with the earliest Garamond type faces. It is classy and classical but without being antique. But that is as good as the book gets.

I remember the former nun's sententious fingerwagging on discussion shows in the 80s and 90s, where she would be introduced as representing the Christian or even the Roman Catholic viewpoint. Her indifferentism as regards very different religions does none of them any favours, and I believe her being given the Rossevelt Institute's Freedom of Worship Medal is a slur on the great man's legacy.

Challies continues in his review: "I can save you thirty-five bucks and many hours of your life by telling you that 99% of what Armstrong has to say about God and religion she squeezes into the Introduction and the Epilogue, which together take up just 23 of the 340 pages of this book. There she spews forth what she really believes about God and those who seek to follow him."

I have to voice my respect for Challies - I haven't got the stamina to start anything by Armstrong, let alone finish it.

'Nuff said.