What Do You Call A Trustafarian In A Suit ?

Remarkably - nay, amazingly sensible chap is Judge Nicholas Price. I'm just not used to judges wth judgement :

Gilmour, who apologised afterwards for his behaviour, had claimed he had not realised the significance of the Cenotaph - an excuse the judge scoffed at.

"For a young man of your intelligence and education and background to profess to not know what the Cenotaph represents defies belief," he said.

That's a call any reasonably educated Brit could make. Say what you like about Oxbridge, their intake are neither dim nor ignorant. But judges these days seem to be chosen for their gullibility towards the defending counsel and scepticism towards the prosecution.

Remarkable sartorial transformation the law induces. From the tracksuited scally redeemed by a Burtons suit, to the twisted firestarter turned into what looks like an actuarial student.

As the prison gates clang shut, we should draw a veil over this lamentable and amazing episode*.

Fair play to Mr Gilmour Sr. though, standing by his adopted son as a father should. If people were unloved on the grounds that they were self-centred idiots, what a cold world this would be.








* at any rate until the stories of drunken parties and hot and cold running women start emerging from whichever open prison he's in - which will be a few months yet.

Well Colour Me Cynical ...

... if I suggest that in (inshallah) twenty or thirty years from now, when I'm likely to need them, proposed Government 'care credits' are likely to be as much use to me as the assorted Woolworths, Index and Thresher gift vouchers somewhere in my desk drawer.

In Japan, the system, called Hureai Kippu, was established in 1991 and has been expanding ever since as a way of helping to manage the country's rapidly ageing population. Literally translated as "Caring Relationship Tickets", it allows a volunteer to "bank" the hours they spend helping an elderly or disabled person in their personal Time Account. Different values apply to different kinds of tasks. For instance, more credit is given for helping at anti-social hours or with personal body care. Household chores and shopping command less.

These healthcare credits are guaranteed to be available to the volunteers themselves later in life, or to someone else in need, within or outside their family. The local and national government has even set up a nationwide electronic clearing network, so that a person can provide help in Tokyo, while their time credits are available to their parents anywhere else in the country.

The clue as to why they'll be useless lies in the phrase 'in Japan'. The UK is not Japan. I think they're a great idea - if they'll be honoured. But just as liberalising drinking hours produced more drunk people, but didn't produce a Continental cafe culture, mechanisms for expressing intergenerational solidarity are likely to be more effective in Japan than here. The UK's post-war history is one long tale of ripping off the frugal, the virtuous, the far-sighted, and supporting the spendthrift, the antisocial, those who take no heed for the morrow - pretty much the exact opposite of the previous two hundred years. The chances of a few hundred 'care hours'* clocked up in the next ten years entitling one to corresponding hours in the year 2035 are minimal, unless some kind of cultural revolution occurs.

Now it could of course be that said cultural revolution has arrived, in the shape of George Osborne and his outrageous plans to reduce Housing Benefit to a maximum of only £20,000 a year, a policy which it is feared will cleanse Kensington and Queen Anne's Gate of all their minimum-wage householders. The Big Society will reward the deserving, and the undeserving will be made to attend frequent interviews with outsourcing companies - or something like that, anyway. That's the theory. Do you believe ?

To paraphrase Apocalypse Now :

"Do you not approve of the Big Society ?"

"Sir, I don't see any society"




(* don't think Laban is a basically selfish chap. I spent fifteen hours one day last week, of which nine were driving, picking up an aunt (who's had a stroke) from Banbury and taking her to Gower for the afternoon to visit her sister. Don't get me started on how much diesel that was. I just can't see a 2035 government sending anyone round to do the same for me.)

Some Fell On Stony Ground ...

Laban adds his four penn'orth to the Great Tiger Woods Debate, as channeled by Zoe Williams.

Surely if this affair tells us anything, it is that in 2009, in the Southern states of the USA, with Obama as President, a white person can still beat up a black man without charges being brought.

Was it for this that Rosa Klebb refused to give up her seat on the bus ?

It's wasted on them, I tell you. Wasted. Does Magna Carta mean nothing to them ? Did she die in vain ? I'll make an exception for commenter Col1000.



(something I didn't know - Rosa Parks was beaten and robbed in her own home by a young black man in 1994. She was 81. But they do things differently in the Land of the Free. Over here you can torture an old lady for two days then kill her, and you'll only get eleven years plus a free change of identity - in order to protect the baby you conceived on one of your many 'days off'. A 'minor crime' like hitting and robbing an old lady in her own home would probably be community service in the UK. Joseph Skipper got an 8 to 15. He was still inside when Rosa Parks died 12 years later. He's since been released and is on the rob again.)

"as though any one mattered as much as all that"

The nurse stood irresolute, looking now at the kneeling figure by the bed (the scandalous exhibition!) and now (poor children!) at the twins who had stopped their hunting of the zipper and were staring from the other end of the ward, staring with all their eyes and nostrils at the shocking scene that was being enacted round Bed 20. Should she speak to him? try to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind him of where he was? of what fatal mischief he might do to these poor innocents? Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry–as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas about the subject, might upset them into reacting in the entirely wrong, the utterly anti-social way.

Poll Pot is the latest to bang the euthanasia drum. BBC news covers little else these days. Laban chips in :

a) the population is ageing, because the baby-boom generation now moving into retirement didn't have enough children, preferring to outsource the production of the next generation to immigrants

b) older people need more medical care to keep them upright

c) medical care is very expensive

d) our wonderful Government has run out of money - they seem to have been having a few financial difficulties of late

e) taxes will have to rise, both because of Government incompetence and because the base of net tax payers will have more elderly people (net tax recipients) to support

f) if history is a guide, these tax increases are likely to be resented

g) the resentful taxpayers will be all colours and cultures. The elderly recipients of the tax-funded medical care will be hideously white native Brits.

h) and the Guardian, BBC and the rest of our liberal masters have decided that now seems like a good time to add euthanasia to the available NHS options.

i) Naturally it will only be used on demand in ultra-special cases - just like abortions were going to be really, really unusual and rare when the law was changed back in 1967.

j) Hmm. This is one of those rare occasions when conspiracy theory and Occam's Razor both point in the same direction. Follow the money. Motive - saving all that cash. Opportunity - via new legislation.

"A writer is always selling someone out"

Joan Didion's words of forty years ago : How true they are.


(and forty years on Joan is still at it; here's a review of the book she wrote after a year of family tragedy)

Lancet - New Figures Shock Horror

In the most shocking shock issue since the last one, Lancet editor Richard Horton fearlessly exposes the price that British children are paying for George W Bush's War For Oil.

• Horton and series editor Richard Turner reveal that child maltreatment in the UK has risen by over 6,000% since the start of the Iraq War, with over 950,000 preventable deaths. A child conceived in England and Wales has about a one in four chance of being killed before its first birthday.
  
• Aussie social worker Dorothy A Scott recounts the hidden threat that landmines pose to school sports.
  
• Top paediatrician Carole Jenny calls for more support for top paediatricians - especially those making outrageous allegations against innocent parents.
  
• More top paediatricians call for support for top paediatricians - and for smacking to be made illegal in non-Muslim countries.
• Ruth Gilbert, Cathy Spatz Widom, Kevin Browne, David Fergusson, Elspeth Webb and Staffan Janson reveal that despite the 'surge', car-bombs are now the biggest contributor to death and injury in English primary school children from low-income families.
• Ruth Gilbert, Alison Kemp, June Thoburn, Peter Sidebotham, Lorraine Radford, Danya Glaser and Harriet L MacMillan call for troops to be withdrawn and Tony Blair to be charged with war crimes.
• Harriet L MacMillan, C Nadine Wathen, Jane Barlow, David M Fergusson, John M Leventha and Heather N Taussig on 'Israel and Internet Grooming - who profits ?'.
• Richard Reading, Susan Bissell, Jeffrey Goldhagen, Judith Harwin, Judith Masson, Sian Moynihan, Nigel Parton, Marta Santos Pais, June Thoburn and Elspeth Webb
  suggest a program for action - "Parents, leave those kids alone (with TV and the internet) !"
  

In a major development, the heads of all UK children's charities said in response that more money should be given to children's charities. Social work heads thoughout the UK have welcomed the report, saying that it underlined the need for more resources to be devoted to social services.

Coming Here Soon

"Theirs was the generational dream: do well in school, get a degree, get a good job, buy a home, do better than their parents. But, now, for the first time in the history of our State, the Government has ensured they will have a lower standard of living than their parents."

Enda Kenny, Fine Gael (i.e. opposition) leader in Ireland, on the Government budget - a government which includes the Green Party - which will among other things introduce means-tested healthcare for the over-70s.

I'd say it's already the case in the UK that the dream is gone. House prices on their own would have seen to that, even without deindustrialisation and the education disaster.

"Supporting Parents"

A senior nurse at a leading public school has been sacked after smacking her 10-year-old son at home.

Susan Pope, 45, was investigated by the police who decided she had done nothing wrong after she hit the boy on his bottom. But the £25,000-a-year boarding school said that because social services remained involved in the case, it could damage the school's reputation. It fired her for alleged gross misconduct. Mrs Pope, who has three children, is taking the school to an industrial tribunal claiming unfair dismissal.

The row is likely to reopen the debate about smacking children. Mrs Pope said she hit her son on the bottom after he was abusive and repeatedly swore at her. Her elder son, who was 15, called the police. Mrs Pope and her husband, Folker, a chartered surveyor, were arrested and held in a cell for 32 hours. They were released without charge and officers contacted them to say no action would be taken. However, Worcestershire social services, called when the couple were arrested, placed the 10-year-old and his younger sister, who was eight at the time, on the child protection register. Malvern St James, one of the country's leading girls' boarding schools, said it could not risk damage to its reputation if word got out that the senior nurse's children were on the register. Mrs Pope said: "I feel I have done absolutely nothing wrong and yet have seen my reputation, career and life shattered by this.

Well, whatever your feelings about West Mercia Police, or Mrs Pope's son (a little English Pavlik Morozov) and daughter, the behaviour of the Malvern St James school makes it plain that the leadership are either moral cowards - why not stand by their staff member ? - or that they have an anti-parent agenda. Rosalind Hayes, BA (Hons), MA, PGCE, FRGS should be damn well ashamed of herself.



It could be worse, however. You could send your daughter to this school.

Alison Hughes, the deputy head of the Queen Elizabeth School in Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria, was so concerned that she detailed the "catalogue of disasters" in a two-page letter to parents, warning them about the sexual activity, violent behaviour and alleged drug abuse that took place.

She wrote: "We have had to help a disturbingly high number of girls through the aftermath of having unprotected sex that evening, most of whom have told us they were too drunk to be in control of themselves. The risks are real. Assume the worst."

Intergenerational Warfare Part 3078

Obviously there's no way these kids should be in prison :

Lewis Wiles, aged 80, was confronted by two youths after his son Mick, who runs Wiles Newsagents on Langsett Road, Hillsborough, asked them to leave when they became abusive.

They had been arguing with him when he refused to sell them single cigarettes instead of an entire pack. Lewis, a retired steelworker and electrician, from Hurlfield Road, Gleadless, followed the pair outside and, according to Mick, an argument broke out and he was pushed to the ground. Police were called to the shop at around 12.35pm to reports of Mr Wiles lying injured outside.
He was rushed to the Northern General Hospital for treatment but died from his injuries a few hours later.

Demonising The Kids

One-way intergenerational warfare continues :

Witness Lisa Collier told the court she saw a hooded boy grab Mr Greenwood by his clothes and pull him down on to the floor before aiming at least three or four kicks to his head. "From where I was it looked like he was directly kicking that person in the head," she told the jury. Miss Collier said she heard "muffled thuds" as the boy kicked Mr Greenwood "forcefully" before he and another boy, who she did not see taking part in the attack, left the scene.

After the attack, Miss Collier watched as Mr Greenwood used a set of railings to pull himself to his feet and made his way "unsteadily" towards where she was standing. "He was swaying from side to side," she said. "He's done some big sways then stumbled towards the road and then just fell on to the road."

So far, so par. Just another couple of kids kicking a middle aged man to death. Nothing unusual about that in twenty-first century England. It was this that really said something :

Mr Greenwood told Miss Collier he was on his way to visit his children when he was attacked. He said he did not see his attackers' faces because his eyesight was so poor. Miss Collier said: "He needed to apparently use a white stick but he told me that he chose not to because it attracted attention from people and he'd been attacked before."

Hat-tip - Bodo in the comments. Those of you still not depressed enough - try John Trenchard's British Crime Blog - logging violent incidents as recorded by the BBC (i.e. nowhere near all of them - even some murders don't get reported. Like the death of James Houliston. Also recommended - Somebody Got Murdered - monitoring UK murders. I found this last week then forgot the name. If the owner keeps it updated it could be a valuable resource.)


James Houliston memorial in Shoreditch Park.