children in need of morally competent adults

In today's Telegraph, Christopher Howse speaks of the moral philosopher G.E.M. (Elisabeth) Anscombe, starting by quoting her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography - "all her children were told how to prepare meals".

Sometimes it feels that Minora and I are drifting apart, possibly like many adolescent girls and their Dads. There've been times when I should have been the bridge-builder after a spat, but in reality it is she who has eased the path with a culinary concoction, which may come from a range of books from my Granny's 1920 book of "Plain Cookery Recipes" from the Edinburgh School of Cookery and Domestic Economy to Maxima's Weightwatchers' Cookbook.

Food can be a strong tie between parents and children - case in point: parents passing fish and chips to their children through the railings of Rawmarsh community School in South Yorkshire when Jamie Oliver was brought in to oversee a school meals policy which, while it may have been ideologically healthy, was not at all popular...and I'd like to know why the Government hasn't yet noticed that chips are in fact healthy; they're made from potatoes.

Unfortunately, sometimes ties from children to parents aren't always reciprocated. During this year's Children in Need telethon, Terry Wogan said, "if you've read the papers over the last couple of weeks, you've an idea what can happen to children". This, I believe, was a reference to the awful case of "Baby P", a 17-month-old child who was murdered after being visited 60 times by services in Haringey, the borough in London where Victoria Climbié was slaughtered under the gaze of social and other services - and six months after former Haringey social worker Nevres Kemal wrote of her fears that another Victoria Climbié situation was waiting to happen to the then Secretary of State for Health Patricia Hewitt, copying her letter to then junior health ministers Rosie Winterton and Ivan Lewis, as well as local MP David Lammy.

Children in Need started in 1980 as "the telethon", presented by Terry Wogan, Sue Lawley and Esther Rantzen. The latter went on to found Childline, which played an invaluable role in providing children with the means to report abuse; but she came to regret that the concept of child protection was hijacked by "insidious jobsworths" who had an agenda to suppress competitive games and any risky activity whatever.

Of the three, only Wogan has remained with the yearly event, now in its 28th year, quickly replacing histrionics with hilarity - probably the most efficient way to break down barriers and facilitate empathy with people who are different to us.

And to open wallets. Last year, Children in Need raised £19 million on the night. It had been widely forecast that in the light of the economic downturn a more modest total should be anticipated, but by the end of the night of 14th November Sir Terry's humour, humility and happy surrealism had helped garner nearly £21 million - with the help of many friends, for example the soap opera Eastenders' take on several West End musicals:



The thing is, there seem to be more children in need every year. But what are they in need of? In some cases the answer is simple - motorised wheelchairs that enable participation in sports, for example, or nurses to look after one brave young chap who had survived a difficult birth with multiple disabilities, to be a source of inspiration and love to his family.

One vignette showed a boy in his early teens who had all but given up on his Dad, who was addicted to crack. One had the uncomfortable impression, in the light of recent news, that the lad was representative of a tsunami of anomie; but this young man was working to make his community a better place - he wasn't content to assume the victim status that much of the mainstream media demand in return for fifteen minutes of fame.

It occurs to me that Children in Need is unusual in the modern BBC, because it not only assumes but demands moral givens: that children have a right to childhood, and we have a duty to protect it. It is beset by many slings and arrows, for example the illusion that sexual "freedom" (which usually refers to men's freedom to love and leave women) has benefits which trickle down to children. While Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elisabeth Anscombe's mentor, averred that ethical statements belonged in the same realm as art and aesthetics, Anscombe beleived that, for instance, if you owed money, your obligation to repay the debt was as much a fact as the debenture's existence. She wrote in 1972:

If Christian standards of chastity were widely observed the world would be enormously much happier. Our world, for example, is littered with deserted wives - partly through that fantastic con that went on for such a long time about how it was part of liberation for women to have dead easy divorce: amazing - these wives often struggling to bring up young children or abandoned to loneliness in middle age. And how many miseries and hang-ups are associated with loss of innocence in youth! What miserable messes people keep on making, to their own and others' grief, by dishonourable sexual relationships!

It's not necessary to take such an overtly Christian view to maintain a moral outlook: Kant's moral imperative was categorical, ie one should do the right thing regardless of one's inclinations, and it should be assumed that any single situation which presents a moral dilemma must be addressed as if the solution to that situation constitute a universal law.

Maxima once suggested to me that the conflicts I have with Minora point to the freedom she has to have such conflicts. Freedom sometimes seems like British gold reserves - non-existent, but still widely regarded as valuable. But, year after year, Children in Need shows that many young people aren't content with fools' illusions - they want the real thing. And while Sir Terry is in charge of Children in Need, nothing but the real thing will do.


The Bill Children in Need 2008

BBC newsreaders perform songs from Mama Mia! Children in need 2008

Eastenders tribute to the Beatles, Children in Need 2007

BBC newsreaders perform All that Jazz from Chicago Children in Need 2007

Eastenders tribute to Queen for Children in Need

Coronation Street Stars perform songs from Oliver! for Children in Need

Hannah wins - but why was she forced to fight?

We are seeing a heartbreaking case unfold in front of us here in Great Britain. Hannah Jones, who suffers heart disease as a side-effect of treatment for her leukaemia, was offered a heart-transplant by Hereford Hospital, and refused. In an interview reported in today's Telegraph she said "I have been in hospital too often" and didn't want to have an operation which is at the best of times risky, and could risk a relapse of leukemia because of immunosuppressant drugs which would be necessary to stop her body rejecting a new heart.

The hospital disagreed, and decided she should be made a ward of court, so that she could have than be forced to have the operation. This is the point at which I start to wonder about aspects of the story.

The decision to have her taken to hospital is said to have been taken by a locum doctor; but for the court order to have any force it would have been necessary to prevent her parents - who are supportive of her decision - from being able to take her home. NSPCC research on Emergency Protection Orders states that police and social workers would have been involved - and indeed, locum doctor or not, it is unthinkable that Hereford Hospital's child protection team would not have swung into action, involving on-call senior nurses and hospital social workers who would contact the professionals involved with her treatment, for example staff at Birmingham Children's Hospital to whom she voiced her wish. Hannah's Mum, formerly a nursing sister in an intensive care ward, describes a proceedure more often used to separate a child from violent or negligent carers:

[The doctor] was saying, 'Bring her into hospital now or I shall send the police and an ambulance and a nurse to come and fetch her'. It was terribly frightening. It was in the evening and you can't get a solicitor and [Hannah's] social workers have disappeared for the weekend, and we have to tell the three young children they have to be good, and be quiet, and Hannah might cry, she might not want to go. But we have to let her go if they do come, because otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to visit her in hospital."

Hannah's maturity and understanding of a condition which would render many adults speechless ensured that a child protection officer sent to speak to her stopped the hospital's bid to mobilise the High Court dead. As her Dad states, "Hannah had been through enough already and to have the added stress of a possible court hearing or being forcibly taken into hospital is disgraceful".

Personally I'm not concerned that this case oils a slippery slope. Hannah has no obligation to undergo "heroic" lifesaving proceedures that may very well hasten her death. But my concerns about this case are those expressed by the Telegraph's George Pitcher - that the "assisted suicide" lobby will react like Pavlov's dogs to the phrase "right to die" and appropriate her heartbreaking case as a bolster for their own rickety structures.

But one thing seems to be getting overlooked. Chairman of the British Medical Association, Dr Tony Calland, states "I think obviously a child of 13 with these circumstances should be perfectly capable of making the decision and particularly when supported by the parents".

The operative words are "a child of 13". In England and Wales, this is the minimum age at which a child's consent to anything can be taken as meaningful, although this is not made public often. Despite the system of assessing a child's competence to consent to a proceedure, what in the end ensured Hannah's right to a natural death with some dignity is that she has turned 13.

In the age where 11-12 year-old girls are given vaccinations against sexually-transmitted diseases and sex education is planned for toddlers - with no indication that assessments of competency are planned for members of both these groups anyway - the government is trampling the law of the land underfoot and undermining its own obligation to look after children in the name of a warped sense of freedom, where freedom to choose what is not ideologically acceptable is not an option. This case, where a hospital was prepared to send in the troops to force a normal, loving traditional family to comply with its own way of thinking (but was foiled by a 13-year-old girl who loves Enid Blyton and Disney) is a perfect illustration.

Hannah clarifies her decision not to have the heart transplant that shows a wisdom through suffering that belies her age:

"I know there is a big waiting list for heart transplants...and I am happy to save someone else's life."

good taste back on the horizon - how mad are you? (part 1)

Go to blog on part 2

Related Post - Mental: a History of the Madhouse

BBC2's Horizon has long been my favourite documentary series, and tonight's, I think, was one of the most important documentaries they've ever screened.

How mad are you? saw ten people brought together in an English castle converted into a hotel - five with a diagnosis of a mental illness, and five without any such diagnosis, who were described as, for want of a better word, "normal".

They were not allowed to discuss any real or perceived history of mental health issues with each other or, more importantly, with the three leading mental health professionals, two psychologists and a psychiatric nurse, whose job it was to work out who had a mental illness and who didn't.

And what a team they'd brought together - Michael First, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University and editor of the latest incarnation of the world-famous psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM_V, psychiatric nurse Ian Hewlett, mental health advisor to the Royal college of Nursing, and Richard Bentall, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Bangor University.

It was a controlled rerun of a famous experiment conducted by David Rosenhan in 1972 which is summarised by the title of Rosenhan's 1973 paper, On being sane in insane places. Basically, "pseudopatients" - sane people pretending to have symptoms of mental health problems - were admitted to various psychiatric hospitals claiming that they heard an unknown voice of the same sex as themselves saying "empty", "hollow" and "thud".

The results still make surprising reading. While many patients in the psychiatric wards correctly surmised that their peers were not suffering a mental illness, each of the eight pseudopatents was diagnosed with a mental illness by psychologists - one with manic depression (bipolar affective disorder) and the rest with schizophrenia. Their in-patient stays ranged from 7 to 52 days, with one pseudopatient being detained for two months.

Our mental health professionals, who knew that this was a similar experiment, did well by the end of the programme, correctly identified a man with obsessive compulsive disorder - then fell over their own feet by telling a lady she was the "most normal" of the ten and unlikely to have a mental illness, only for her to inform them, "you're wrong", but felt unable to expand.

It wasn't their only gaffe in this invaluable study of how diagnoses are made. A lady whom the professionals supected of being depressed was given the task of leading a team through the forest in a paintball exercise - and suceeded, confounding their prediction that her conditional clause "if we lose" equated to an expectation: "we will lose" (their assumption, in my mind, being "because I'll make sure we do.")

When I started training to be a psychiatric nurse, we were told the most useful definition of psychiatry I've ever heard: "a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there". In my placements I saw many signs of hope in a profession that was struggling to pull itself up by the bootstraps, but also once witnessed a macho, preening staff nurse tell one of his charges, "you're a sectioned [detained] patient and you'll behave as such!". And there were, of course, the results of past prejudice: I saw some ladies in their last years who had been admitted for having had a baby out of wedlock, and one chap who had been admitted during the First World War with a diagnosis of "idle and lazy" - all had long lost their skills to function in anything other than a very controlled environment, and most, although sane when admitted, were (to use the documentary's word) mad.

Not all of the prejudice has gone. Coming up to modern times, I once told a colleague, a fellow mental health professional, that I had a diagnosis of manic depression. He eyed me intently and replied, "but you don't look manic depressive!" This not too long before the professionals working for Horizon opined that their mistake proved that you couldn't tell if somebody was mentally ill by looking at them.

There was a coda to the Rosenhan experiments. He informed a teaching hospital that pseudopatients were going to be admitted over a fixed period of time. In that duration, over 40 pseudopatients were identified, and again over 40 suspected to be pseudopatients but not proven. In reality, no pseudopatients had been admitted.

Rosenhan's critics protested that in making a diagnosis of mental illness it was necessary to listen to what the patients were saying. And there's the rub - during my first hospitalisation, I was in a ward where there was a policy that your named keyworkers would make contact with you once a day. And this they did - often by patting your elbow as they passed and asking "you ok?" It's contact, true, but in a way to which we are societally programmed to respond in the affirmative. This was the information on which the psychiatrist would make his assessment and diagnosis.

Eventually, when my wife found herself able to unload to me what she'd been told very soon after my admission - "he's a mental health worker and knows the right buttons to press to get attention" (in reality I spent most of that admission sitting by my bedside deteriorating) - the worker who said this had disappeared into the community, having done their regulation 6 months in an acute ward that qualified them for this. I was left wondering, was it the nurses who informed the psychiatrist's opinion on this, or did it go the other way round?

Thankfully I was eventually transferred to a ward where the Sister cared for her staff as much as her patients, resulting in a steady core of staff who had been there for many years. You could tell that the atmosphere was different shortly after walking onto the ward. May God bless her.

It is incredibly brave of all the participants to take part in this experiment, both the "patients" and the professionals. I look forward to next week's conclusion, and to the debates I hope will follow about what can go wrong in the mental-health diagnostic process and how to put it right.

It's ironic that with this documentary the BBC has shown how good its broadcasting can get, so shortly after the Ross/Brand case-study in how to run a contempt-driven service. In part 2 of How Mad are You? the mental health team will try to figure out which of the remaining eight have a diagnosis of mental illness, and which simply have ubiquitious character traits that no more comprise an illness than a headache does the Black Death. If the BBC were a patient, one wonders if it might emerge from the experiment with a diagnosis...corporate manic depression, perhaps, or maybe institutionalised personality disorder?



View the documentaries onBBC i-player until 23 December 2008:

How mad are you? - Part 1

How mad are you? - Part 2

You can also find many useful mental health resources with Ruby Wax at Ruby's Room.

they give their tomorrows for our today

I never know when it's going to start.

I've watched the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance for as long as I can remember, first with my Mum, then with my wife, now with our children. The tears start at a different point every year.

They came late this year: what set me off was two young children presenting a posy of poppies to Air Marshal Ian McFadyen, President of the Royal British Legion (RBL). Possibly I was thinking of the sacrifices that might be asked of our young people - to date 220 have died in Afghanistan and Iraq - which was to be underlined the next day at the Remembrance Sunday Service at St Gallicus, where Scouts, Cubs, Girl Guides and Brownies presented their standards to the altar together with the Royal British Legion and the Royal Signals. There's a Royal Signals Territorial Army barracks in Cambridge - the TA celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year.

The Remembrance celebrations are full of history.

For example, one of the many, many regiments and organisations represented the Albert Hall during the festival of Remembrance, and on Sunday at the Cenotaph where the Queen led officials, veterans and widows in laying wreaths, was the Royal Scots, which was formed in 1633 under a royal warrant from King Charles I in order to fight in what became the Thirty Years' War in France, and another was the King's Own Scottish Borderers, which was raised in 1689 to support William of Orange against the Jacobites, who wanted to restore the deposed Stewart dynasty to the throne. Also represented was my grandad's old regiment, the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, and the Cheshire Regiment, also raised upon the accession of William and Mary and, until its incorporatation into the Mercian Regiment in 2006 was one of the last unamalgamated regiments in the British Army (and the first three have been amalgamated into the Royal Scottish Regiment).

The Festival of Remembrance is for all the forces, of course, and it was amazing to see the Band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines perform an intricate march to the theme tune from Rocky, including a burning guitar solo.



Also present was the Bomber command Association, the subject of a campaign by the Daily Telegraph to have a medal struck in honour of the "bomber boys" bravery. This issue has been dodged by successive governments despite Bomber Command's 55,000 losses, possibly due to Arthur "Bomber" Harris' bombing strategies, which undoubtedly shortened the war - for example, with the Dresden raids the RAF showed by targeting the German city furthest from England that there was nowhere in the Reich that could be considered as safe.

This recalls a present campaign by the Royal British Legion for the Government to honour the military covenant, the agreement by which the government will care for wounded forces personnel and their families in return for their putting their lives on the line. David Cameron has appointed best-selling author Frederick Forsyth to look at how this covenant, which is "well and truly broken", can be repaired. Forsyth writes:

In the United States, men and women in uniform are applauded on the streets; in this country, some commanding officers have advised forces not to wear uniforms in public because it might create public hostility.

Indeed, in an episode of a series of "Power to the People" called The Battle of Trafalgar Square, presenter Tim Samuels told the story of a seriously wounded soldier who, upon his arrival at an A&E unit in Great Britain, was told to take his uniform off in case it offended anybody. If that's not bad enough, the "aftercare" was worse: "He was told there were no beds, given a walking stick and told to go and see his GP. "



The RBL records that the Poppy Appeal, whereby we honour the fallen and wounded by wearing a poppy on the jacket or shirt or blouse, started in 1921 and was inspired by John McCrae's poem In Flanders' Field. The motive force was an American War Secretary and YMCA worker from Georgia called Moina Michael (left). Gordon Brown instituted Veterans' Day in 2006, and I hope that again we follow America's example by declaring it a public holiday.

In the Draughty Old Fen, after the Service, we walked to the war memorial and the Royal British Legion laid its wreath, followed by the Royal Signals, then the Scouts and Girl Guides, then the parish council. There were a lot of families there, a lot of children - some of them forces personnel of the future - who did not forget to remember. A bugler played the last post while the sound of the wind in the unfallen autumn leaves recalled the falling poppy-leaves of the previous night's ceremony in the Royal Albert Hall. Rector Pellegrina had told the story of how poppies, which thrive in churned-up land, were found in abundance at the sites of battles in France. She had wound up her sermon with the hope that one day all the tears would turn to joy. Amen to that.

faith schools - teaching unions versus teachers

This August, as part of his series on The Genius of Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins interviewed Wendy Wright, President of Concerned Women for America, about the controversy surrounding the teaching of creationism in school as opposed to evolution. In my opinion, Wright displayed her greater cognitive agility by stating that in a controversial subject such as that of creationism versus evolution, pupils should learn both sides of the debate.

Today, Martin Beckford, religious affairs correspondent of the Telegraph, reported on a poll by teachers.tv which produced some unexpected but reassuring statistics. Although half of the teachers in the 1200 surveyed disagreed that creationism should be given parity with evolution in the classroom, a third - a very significant minority - thought that parity was appropriate - and indeed just under a third already consider creationism as equal to evolution.

Another statistic showed that the controversy over Professor Michael Reiss being ousted from his position as Director of Education at the Royal Society is far from dead (Professor Reiss opined that creationism should be taught in schools and was promptly ousted by a cabal of scientists whose figurehead was Dawkins; Sir Richard Roberts called Reiss's vocation "very worrisome"):

Nearly half (49.9%) of teachers also agreed with Professor Michael Reiss’ sentiment that excluding alternative explanations to evolution is counter-productive and alienates pupils from science.

What this figure suggests is that some of those teachers who disagree that creationism should be weighted equally with evolution support a place for creationism in the syllabus. Dawkins' retort to Ms Wright on the issue of teaching both was that he was all for teaching children to think for themselves, but there were limits. In neglecting to explain what he thought these limits were, he ceded the position of freer-thinker to Wright, who had probably held it all along.

This is in the context, I believe, of a rather loaded dialogue on the role of faith schools in society that has been going on for a couple of years in the open, but which bodies of a certain ideological shade have been pursuing covertly for decades.

The NASUWT (National Union of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers) brought out a consultation document this year called Keeping the Faith, which in the body of the text constructs a balanced argument about the role of religion in education, but in the conclusion comes out in favour of a British Humanist Association publication called A Better Way Forward, which concludes that all religions should be given equal weight: while a valid proposal for a phenomonological study, this is an insult to each and every religion so considered, no matter the religion/denomination of the school. Translating the argument into another sphere, can you imagine a physical education class in Texas which was looking into baseball and situated the Texas Rangers as being no different from the Yankees?

The above study involved only one religious group, the Catholic Education Service, despite the fact that in Great Britain there are schools of other faiths: the 2004 report by Dr Richard Stone, Islamophobia, stated that there were nearly 7,000 state religious schools in the UK, of which 33 were Jewish, 2 Sikh, 1 Greek Orthodox and 1 Seventh Day Adventist; of the rest, one paper puts the numbers at over 4,700 Church of England schools, and just over 2,100 Roman Catholic schools. As a member of the Church of England, I feel I detect an agenda: go for the Catholics first, then mop up the rest. This is a time to stick together.

The NUT (National Union of Teachers)has called for an end to funding of faith schools, and says in a typical passage in its document, In Good Faith:

Human equality in all its dimensions should be affirmed and celebrated. The importance of working for the elimination of any faith-based homophobia, transphobia and institutionalised prejudice towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is vital.

I am reminded of a robustly pro-gay friend who chose me as the first person to come to and voice her concerns about a circle of gay men, not well liked in the LGBT community, who were running a competition on how young a boyfriend they could pull. I hope that free-thinking gay people, should they read passages like that quoted above, will reply, "not in my name".

In case the NUT paper wasn't circulated widely enough, it was summarised on a Marxist website, by NUT activist Kirsty Paton, under the title, "Schools are for teaching, not for preaching". The author states that, having heard arguments from the Catholic Church and the Church of England in favour of retaining faith schools, "fortunately we then had the opportunity to listen to the views of the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society (NSS) and Women against Fundamentalism all of whom explained why faith schools should be opposed".

I am against fundamentalism in all its forms, which is why I am in favour of faith schools: if you believe that after a worthless life we turn to dust, then there are no limits to what you might do; if, on the other hand, you suspect that Hell might be possible, then you are an invaluable pointer to Heaven. God bless you.

what the hell was all that about?

CAVETE: DISCUSSES AND LINKS TO STRONG MATERIAL

Tomorrow night, Channel 5 will broadcast a documentary featuring a burlesque artiste with the name Voluptua with a title similar to the above, although being a fan of customisation I've chosen my own imprecation.

For those unsure of the situation, the Daily Mail's Melanie Philips published an article on 27 October detailing the implications of a situation that not many of us were aware of: on Saturday, October 18, Russell Brand had Jonathan Ross as a guest on his BBC 2 radio show. Andrew Sachs, a venerable veteran of TV and radio, was due to do an interview over the phone, but was unavailable, therefore messages were left. The messages were about sexual relations the pair, but especially Ross, claimed to have had with Sachs' granddaughter, Georgina Baillie (Voluptua), and an attempted apology in the form of a song was even more explicit; their view was the immature, sexist and even misogynist one that if a woman does a certain job then she is "fair game" - and so, apparently, is her 78-year-old granddad.

The show has an audience of about 400,000 mostly young people (compared with, say, 8 million of all ages for the station's Sir Terry Wogan), so comment on the show initially eddied lazily around various Facebooks, Bebo's, etc. Two complaints were made, after which the segment was pulled from the show's podcast and listen-again site.

After Ms Philip's article, complaints had reached 18,000 by 31 October, and around another 20,000 accumulated in another two days. The BBC called it a record number, but that record actually belongs to Jerry Springer - The Opera (63,000 complaints with no heads rolled).

To cut things short, on 29 October - a full 11 days after the incident, Brand and Ross were suspended, and Brand resigned. The following day Radio 2 Controller Lesley Thomas, who had worked her way up from the post of production assistant, resigned.

What the controversy was about was that the show was not broadcast live, but had been recorded beforehand so that a producer could check through for offensive material. None was marked up on the appropriate sheet. The two managers over the producer were on holiday - but isn't that what the on-call system is for?

Even so, the person there with the sheet should have known that putting Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand in the same room would require going through the recording with a fine-tooth comb, because both of these figures have form.

Jonathan Ross has sexually humiliated Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman and Halle Berry, among others, on his Friday night TV show. Russell Brand showed up for a show dressed as Osama bin Laden on September 12 2001, called George Bush a "retarded cowboy" on TV, and on the same MTV awards show claimed to have "won" a purity ring - a sign of a vow to remain chaste until marriage popular in the US - from a male star. (Could be that he was feeding his sex addiction, except he seems to regard sex with relish. Take it from a former addictions worker, Russell, if you experience significant positive reinforcement - ie if you enjoy it - it's not an addiction...)

The political reaction has been strong - so much so that the incident stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the American election and the recession in last week's Spectator. David Cameron said, "we need to know who made the decision to broadcast it? How high up the editorial chain did it go? Who examined it? Why did they conclude that it should be broadcast?" Having said that, Ross burnt his boats there when he made obscene remarks to the Conservative leader about Baroness Thatcher on his show; I'd like to know whether he merely wanted to take Cameron down a peg, or was also under instructions to do so.

The Prime Minister demanded that the BBC take "appropriate action." In the light of what a report by the "Stop BBC Bias" group in 2004 alleging a "cosy" relationship between the two organisations with frequent "job-swapping", including Tom Kelly, Martin Sixsmith and Bill Bush, what "appropriate action" might be makes the mind boggle.

Mary Whitehouse might not have approved of Baillie's burlesque group, the Satanic Sluts, but she would have known right away how to deal with Brand's and Ross's treatment of hte performer. She would have written to the Prime Minister to say that legally it was the Government who was responsible for the BBC - because they had no answer to this, then PM Harold Wilson's office's reaction was to "lose" the letters. In similar fashion, the BBC initially appeared to have "lost" Andrew Sachs' complaint about the Brand/Ross phone calls, but was later forced to admit that this was a lie.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson seems to be getting ready to go for the Gordon Brown award for mobilising lifeboats from the ship you've just scuttled by saying how quickly the BBC (eventually) reacted. No doubt, as in any monolithic organisation, he'll then proceed to airbrush out the truth by dissolving the facts in a deconstructionist substrate that leaves nothing but a series of narrative strands of equal (ie no) value. He will then invest in Ross and Brand's future by piling all the corporation's sins upon their back, thus facilitating their eventual return as victims. Except...it's happened again.

On Sunday night, a show that Jeremy Clarkson had pre-recorded and that was passed by BBC executives was broadcast, containing Clarkson's assertion that being a lorry driver is "a hard job - change gear, change gear, change gear, check your mirrors, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder" (possibly a reference to the conviction of a lorry-driver - the "Suffolk Strangler" - in Ipswich earlier this year for murdering five prostitutes).

We need to respond to the BBC's constant attempts to corrupt our children, attack our faiths and abuse uninvolved bystanders by complaining, complaining and complaining again - and not settling for the bug letter.

Apart from obviously Mr Sachs, the greatest injustice in this case seems to have been visited upon Lesley Douglas - I wish she hadn't seen, or been shown, the need to resign. The incident happened on Mark Thompson's shift as well as hers. She caused consternation with her decisions to hire Chris Evans for the drivetime show and Jeremy Vine to take over Sir Jimmy Young's talk-show, but was proved to have a sense for pure gold.

Part and parcel of being as senior as Mark Thompson is includes 24/7 responsibility - everything that happens does so on your shift; as the sign on US President Harry Truman's desk proclaimed, "The Buck Stops Here". Hopefully, as Mr Thompson realises that this isn't going to go away, he will realise the wisdom of inviting her back for some tea and humble pie.


Related posts:

the bug letter: when 1 is more than 63,000

strictly sociopathic - the BBC has bullied us enough

Fatal Misconception - The Struggle to Control World Population

Fatal Misconception - The Struggle to Control World Population
Matthew Connelly
pp520
Harvard University Press 2008

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana

I begin with this often-misquoted phrase from George Santayana because the story of birth-control as national and transnational policy seems to be that of recurring bouts of "collective amnesia", as Connolly puts it. For example, Connelly cites a screening of the pro-life film The Great Population Hoax at IPPF headquarters which caused activists to complain about arguments using distortions of the truth; manager Julian Heddy had to admit that these were actual claims made by earlier population-control advocates.

In order to test the prevalence of population control in recent times, after the prejudices, avoidable tragedies and wilful negligence, I leafed through today's Daily Telegraph. I found a story about how Pakistan is to receive a $9 billion (£5.6 billion) loan from the IMF, but would not like a full-blown IMF program because "it would likely come with painful conditions to cut government spending that could affect programs for the poor".

Wondering what these might be, I looked through some IMF papers for other countries, and found a Senegal Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper from 2006 which contained a statement on page 38 that one of the priority objectives of this was population control.

I've already blogged about how social Darwinism evolved into eugenics. I knew that Darwin himself was horrified by the former phenomenon, but it surprised me to learn that he complained to Annie Besant during her phase as a eugenicist (before she became a mystic philosopher) that eugenics interfered with natural selection. I considered myself quite informed on these matters, but this was only one of countless revelations in Matthew Connelly's intensely-researched tome on how population control was all about controlling other folks' populations. Shortly into my first session with Fatal Misconception, I realised I was reading one of the most important books of my life.

One of the key dogmas of eugenics was maintaining the purity of one's people. When Margaret Sanger realised that those concerned about this were coalescing into a discrete movement, two of the names she thought of calling it were "neo-Malthusianism" and "race control", before she decided on "birth control". An American, her British counterpart, Marie Stopes, stated that she wanted to recruit from "healthy, well-conditioned individuals only", and that "Constructive Birth Control will fill the comfortable cradles and empty the gutters".

The Birth Control Movement was ostensibly an internationalist movement seeking a world government in order to eliminate war. But what they were about was the future of the white race (whatever that is), and at the time eliminating the "yellow peril" (although at the International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference in New York in 1925, Indian nationalist Taraknath Das complained about the "white peril).

India was a target for Sanger and her followers from the start, and during Connelly's exposition of the whole sordid affair as a case-study I had to remind myself several times that I wasn't reading a horror story but modern history.

A measure of the morality of the Birth Control movement can be gleaned from his description of Margaret Sanger "criss-crossing" India dispensing spermicidal foam, almost totally unarmed with information as to its safety. It seems not to have bothered her that a similar foam, distributed to African Americans by "notorious racist" Lydia DeVilbiss, was causing side-effects, but finally sent her foam away for analysis upon learning that DeVilbiss' concoction had caused adverse effects when tested upon dogs.

Following the 1951 census, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru "called for free sterilisation and contraception when recommended on medical grounds, and suggested that where feasible it should be given for social and economic reasons as well". India would never be the same. (It should be noted that Hellen Keller, the deaf-blind pioneer, wrote to Sanger breathlessly congratulating her for founding the Planned Parenthood foundation in India in 1952. I find this rather strange, as Sanger referred to the blind, deaf and mute as "this dead weight of human waste" in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization - and Marie Stopes wrote her son Harry out of her will because he married a woman - daughter of "bouncing bomb" inventor Barnes Wallis - with hereditary short-sightedness.)

The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) had maintained a presence in India for two decades before Nehru gave them the go-ahead, and responded to their mission with a Neitzschean optimism: "India is the cauldron in which mankind will be tested". Farce ensued immediately - during their 5-year study in the Punjab husbands and wives would answer intrusive questions about their sex-lives differently, and by the time their trial on birth-control ended, the birth-rate was greater than when it began. (They weren't the only ones falling over their own feet; a Swedish trial in nearby Ceylon - now Sri Lanka - couldn't prove the effectiveness of contraceptives after two years.)

The degree to which the Indian population control program contributed to the Emergency and its conclusion will, I think, be a subject for debate until Kingdom Come. But abuses in order to increase "acceptors" were a part of the program from the beginning. Intrauterine Devices (IUD's), which had been found to be a cause of heavy bleeding and ectopic pregnancy in programs in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Pakistan and other countries, were being used widely, and the UN promised follow-ups in India to catch complications early, despite there being one health visitor per 40,000 people in India. Men who refused sterilization were denied pay-rises and promotions, and by the late '6o's payments were being made both to be vasectomised and to recruit others.

Mass sterilisation was praised in 1960 by Time, and when the Emergency was declared in 1975 Indira Ghandi's son Sanjay commented that it was an "appropriate atmosphere" for tackling what DN Pai, director of family planning in Maharashtra, called "people pollution". What was effectively coercive for poor people became mandatory. Connelly explains:

Sterilization became a condition not just for land allotments, but for irrigation, water, electricity, ration cards, rickshaw licenses, medical care, pay raises, and promotions. Everyone, from senior government officials to train conductors to policemen, was given a sterilization quota."

One of Sanjay's circle, Ruksana Sultana, demanded that Muslims who were begging her to have the demolition of their houses stopped - the idea being that sterilization certificates be produced to get alternative accomodation - produce 300 people for sterilization in return, and had to be rescued from the resulting riot by police who eventually gained control by firing live ammunition into the crowd.

However, Gandhi had two qualities that just about all senior population controllers at the time lacked: she was a woman and a mother. She became depressed over the suffering of her people and called an election - and was robustly defeated.

Another tragedy of India is that the population control could have been different. On December 3, 1935, Margaret Sanger had an audience with Mahatma Gandhi concerning population control, and told Time, "He just didn't know much about the subject." In reality, Gandhi was a proponent of natural family planning, which he thought strengthened self-control. Connelly speculates that she didn't publicize Gandhi's views on natural family planning because "it was endorsed by a growing number of Catholics".

Sanger was, in fact, deeply anti-Catholic, and indeed when she left the American Birth Control League "when she found she could no longer control it" she called its house journal, Birth Control Review, "no different from 'all the little Catholic papers'". Connolly continues:

Whatever their differences, Sanger insisted that all these [birth control] groups shared "one common enemy, one group of opposition objecting to everything we do or say - the Catholic Church".

This attitude still thrives: in September of this year John Smeaton highlighted tactics which were contrived to be offensive to Christians in general, but to Catholics in particular, and the British HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority) still excludes pro-lifers, which in some circles is taken to be a synonym for Catholic. There are, however, two things to be thankful for: firstly, Roman Catholics still swell the ranks of pro-lifers, and secondly, they have been joined by people of other religions and none - there are pro-life Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Protestants, Jews, Hindus, atheists, pagans - the list goes on and on and on...

Despite the abuses of the Indian birth control campaign, in 1983 Indira Gandhi, returned to power, shared the first United Nations Population Award - with Xinzhong Qian, Soviet-trained former soldier who was one of the masterminds of the Chinese population control campaign.

Birth control being what it says on the tin, ie control, it's surprising that it wasn't embraced wholeheartedly by a Communist country before China started considering it in the late seventies.

The IPPF's program in China, states Connelly, was "no secret". Stephen Mosher, later President of the Population Research Institute, brought back reports such as that from a Guangdong village:

Eighteen women who were at least five months pregnant, "red-eyed from lack of sleep and crying", were told they would have to undergo abortions, in two cases by Caeserian section. Through such means, China registered 7.9 million abortions, 13.5 million IUD insertions, and almost 7 million sterilizations in 1979...

Yet, though the riots in India had barely died down, it was as though they had never happened - despite the repercussions of the Indian fiasco reaching not just Pakistan, but also countries as diverse as Iran, Indonesia and the Philippines and contributing to the overthrow of more than one government. Yet, says Connolly, "senior IPPF staff had their eyes wide open" regarding the China campaign, whose aims, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) were not just to reduce "overpopulation" but to "raise the quality of population from the point of view of eugenics, education and ethics". With people who could remember newsreels detailing the horrors of Belsen, Auschwitz etc at the time of their liberation still in employment, eugenics was back.

And it's back this time without necessarily being imposed from above - witness sex-selective abortions in India and China facilitated by ultrasound machines. In the light of modern preoccupations with all things genetic, Connolly refers to people "faithfully reciting a eugenic catechism without the faintest idea of where it came from or where it can lead". For example, while in Australia a child has been born after surviving an ectopic pregnancy, in Britain doctors have been given permission to screen embryos for cosmetic defects, with a view to destroying the ones that don't match expectations, the defects including squints and even hair colour.

One thing gynaecologists and obstetricians have always agreed upon is that there is no difference between a baby before birth and one after. This is why in 2006 the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists proposed infanticide for the sickest babies on the grounds, among other things, of the costs of looking after them - and Connelly notes that the population control agenda gathered steam during the financial crises of the 1930's. In the US, Senator Barack Obama is reckoned to have voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which would protect babies who have survived abortion from being murdered. (In the UK, whose population is around a fifth of that of the US, fifty babies a year are estimated to survive abortion.)

What we're looking at here is an attempt to formally renunciate the broad medical concensus that once a baby has taken its first breath it is a human being. I'm reminded of Philip K Dick's 1973 short story The Pre-Persons, in which a child can be "aborted" up to the age of 12 , and even then is only safe if he/she can prove a certain degree of mathematical ability. I wish I could say it's still in the realms of sci-fi, but earlier this year Australian doctor and bioethicist Fr Joseph Tham estimated that infanticide would be "normalised" in 50 years. An online friend has alerted me to the philosophy of Dr Peter Singer, an animal liberationist who believes that animals are people but that babies can be killed up to 28 days post-birth. (Connelly refers to a pressure group called Zero Population Growth, which in 1969 wanted to exterminate humanity but give other primates an antidote so they would survive.)

What will happen? Will the "collective amnesia" of policymakers draw us to catastrophe once more, so that in the reaction we can once more cry "Never again"?

But population planners have an enemy that they cannot forever subjugate. Connelly describes how the Emergency ended - "Something more powerful, even more implacable, had finally defeated the ideology of population control: People voting, one by one."