Thursday, January 05, 2006

Motes And Beams

Blogging Bromsgrovian Trust People points out that there's a strange contradiction in David Cameron's speech on healthcare.

"Try and buy a newspaper at the train station and, as you queue to pay, you're surrounded by cut price offers for giant chocolate bars.

The check out staff have all been trained to push this product, whatever the customer is actually trying to buy."


This might sound better if it didn't come from someone who until recently was being paid by these people.

According to Edward "A vital part of the Urbium stable was the notorious Tiger Tiger chain. They've been keeping the cash rolling in by paying incentives to their bar staff who meet sales targets. 50% on top of your regular salary seems a pretty good way of getting booze thrust upon bingeing drinkers.Even now, London Tiger Tiger has a two hour Happy Hour flogging cocktails for £3.10 , jugs for just £8.50 and £2 off doubles of spirits.

Then chairman John Conlan called Urbium "a highly reliable and substantial cash-generating machine".

One Urbium bar is Sugar Reef. Yes, that's it, the one drunken West Ham players were chucked out of after one urinated on a bar top and another was sick."


Perhaps Mr Cameron could make another speech, linking such promotions to the rise in cirrhosis.


There's another line that rings a little hollow. Remember the Civitas pamphlet on political correctness ?

"... the exponential rise of HIV in Britain since Labour was elected in 1997. Figures from the government’s Public Health Laboratory Service were being published showing a 25 per cent rise in just one year, with almost all the increase being among hetero-sexuals. The government and media had been warning for years about the dangers of the new complacency among heterosexuals, ever since the number of heterosexual cases had swept past the number of homosexual ones, a well reported and much commented-on phenomenon. The government minister was responding on the Today prog-ramme to the latest increase with a new sexual health campaign telling people to practice safe sex. If teenagers would just wear condoms, it would put a stop to the rise. But the trouble is that the increase in HIV had virtually nothing to do with British people practicing unsafe sex—it was almost all the result of HIV positive people (mainly Africans) coming to the UK, and being diagnosed with HIV once here.

One of the government’s own medical advisers phoned me up secretly from within the Department of Health thanking me for highlighting the issue, and urging me to carry on: Britain was facing a massive explosion in HIV and ministers and civil servants simply refused to discuss the cause of it. ‘Ministers just won’t listen because they think it is racist’ he said, ‘but the public deserve at least honesty.’"



This is the Cameronian view :

Government should play a leadership role when it comes to public health.

The last Conservative Government's hard-hitting HIV/AIDS campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s showed the way.

An environment was created in which everyone was made aware of the dangers of sexually transmitted infections.

This campaign helped hold infection rates constant until the mid 1990s.

But they have soared since the campaign ended: new diagnoses of HIV have increased by 168 per cent since 1997.

The lack of anything like the HIV/AIDS campaign since the early 1990s is indicative of a public health apparatus which has fallen into disrepair.


Oh dear.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's beginning to look as if the best we can hope for is that Cameron somehow wins the election but on his first day of cycling to work as P.M. has a nasty encounter with one of Ken's bendy buses.

Martin said...

Laban,

I don't know how old you are - I'm 35.

I can vividly recall the 'Safe Sex' campaigns that appeared from about 1984 onwards. They must have been the most well-funded public service adverts of all time, because I remember them being wall-to-wall for several years.

Without wishing to sound in need of Thorazine, that volume of advertising directed against that activity at that age can have something of an impact. Do you really suppose that the historically high number of women now in their '30's not having children is all down to them wanting careers?

There is a direct parallel between HIV propaganda then and now. Then, the lie was that we would all catch it. That was never likely to be the case. The two groups always at most risk of infection were intravenous drug abusers and gay men.

With the benefit of hindsight, the funny thing is they didn't care. Junkies will shoot up for as long as they have veins, and Chris Smith contracted HIV in 1987, right at the height of the propaganda boom. They were always going to be continue with business as usual and they would always be treated on the NHS, at everyone else's expense - win, win.

But they were both preferred minorities.

Now, the propaganda is being manipulated in favour of other prefrred minorities, Afraican immigrants. Again, they will be treated at everyone else's expense. And again, the truth of the situation has been withheld from the public by government.

Why must the interests of preferred minorities always trump the telling of the truth?

Anonymous said...

g-gnome are you seriously suggesting young women didn't have children becaue they were afraid of catching AIDS ? and that the government created this image on purpose?

The concern of foreigners AIDS is certainly a serious problem, the way young people treat sex in this country it wouldn't take much for things to escalate of control. Our government is betraying us once again.

Another note, the foot-n-mouth problem a few years ago probably came from a foreign meat sounce but the government try to downplay that also.

Nothing is allowed to get in the way of the multi-culti dream.

Martin said...

Dave,

I wouldn't say the result was created on purpose, but given that volume of material constantly warning of sex being a 'dangerous practice' must surely have made some of them think twice.

As for the rest of your comment, I agree with you absolutely.

DJ said...

Actually, I do wonder about that 1980s AIDS campaign myself. It's certainly true that thirtysomething women have a weird aversion to sex. At least all the ones I meet do.

Anonymous said...

OT: I don't wanna go off-topic on Labans blog, but g-gnome if we wanna talk about the lack of children of white-British descent I suggest comments on threads like this - BBC have your say "Is Earth too crowded?" - are more indicative of attitudes.

There are people posting attacking Brits who have children..
As if Brits are somehow breeding like rats, when they are actually breeding below replacement already.
To these people white-brits + baby = problem.
And yes I do think its an issue of race, these same leftists / 'feminist' types who try to convince white-brits not to reproduce would be totally horrified if conservatives were to make similar kind of suggestions to minorities.

Anonymous said...

..Earth too Crowded? - the lead story on at least two BBC radio news bulletins on Friday was that a leading scientist from the British antartcic Survey had announced that without severe measures to counteract "excessive poulation growth" global warming would never be fought successfully etc etc oh and I have just got to say that all the comments about women going off sex due to the AIDS awareness ads are hilarious, especially considering the rates of of STD infection...

Martin said...

Dave,

Yes, I do think you've gone a little bit off topic.

Anonymous,

Firstly, I don't buy into 'global warming'. Climate change has transformed from being a fact of our planet's history - the geological record shows the Earth to both warmed and cooled many, many times - into a matter of policy, something the Left naively believes that human beings can influence. If the Earth is getting hotter because of us, it will one day get hotter despite of us. The more people around, the better - some of them might even bring some sense to the climate change debate.

Secondly, please advise precisely what was so funny about my suggestion? I was suggesting that wall-to-wall propaganda 20 years ago telling teenagers that sex was a dangerous practice had had an impact on the attitude of few/some/many of them towards sex, and that this in turn may have influenced their decisions to have families. That had absolutely nothing to do with rates of STD infection now - which, as Laban's original post clearly points out, the reporting of which are muddied by political correctness.

Edward said...

Fair and interesting addition on the HIV point, Laban.