Hideous BBC Lies

Never have such falsehoods been published by the BBC. I am outraged.

One of the world's earliest locomotives has made its final journey - by road - from Manchester to Liverpool.

The 170-year-old locomotive, called Lion, ran between the two cities on the world's first passenger railway line.

The swine. Satan has ordered two tons of extra 'Coalite' and a carbon-fibre reinforced toasting fork especially for the person who wrote that.

Any fule kno that the world's first passenger railway, the Mumbles train, would have been 200 years old this year. It was scrapped in 1960 by the local council, all of whose members are now being toasted here. Ever since I can remember, Swansea councils have been corrupt, incompetent or both - and according to this blog the tradition lives on.

Had it survived it would have been a World Heritage site and the biggest tourist attraction in Wales.


Picture by John Davies of Swansea Camera Club. I think he's photoshopped the red onto a black and white photo.


I'm just old enough to have ridden the beastie. The terminus was at the back end of the long-gone Victoria Station, in what used to be a fascinating hinterland between station and docks. Railway lines ran in the roads between the warehouses and docksides - the Swansea of Kingsley Amis' novel 'That Uncertain Feeling'. Alas all gone, replaced by dual carriageway, retail sheds and a sanitised marina. What wonderful yuppie flats Weavers Warehouse - an early 20th-century brute concrete monstrosity, built over the river like a bridge, would have made !

The journey - along the sea front past the prison, the Vetch, the Slip (with its station, floral gardens, bridge and beach funfair), Patti Pavilion and St Helens, to Blackpill (where the accompanying main railway line turned off towards Gowerton), Oystermouth and the Pier - is still pleasant now, as a walk or bike ride on the path where the line ran. But it doesn't compare with a pasteboard ticket, a box of Paynes Poppets from the machine at the terminus, and a gloriously rackety journey. In winter the ride could be scary. The train always rocked a bit, but in a gale it would move disconcertingly. Upstairs, where the motion was accentuated, you'd wonder if it was about to fall over into the sea. Downstairs, with a stormy high tide the spray of breaking waves would slap against the windows - if you left them open you could get wet. We loved it.

Perhaps This'll Work

Immigrants should carry out community work before being granted UK citizenship, Gordon Brown will say. The chancellor is expected to tell a seminar on Britishness that the move would help new arrivals settle. Mr Brown's comments follow his earlier call for all incomers to learn English, and for the UK to have its own day to celebrate its national identity.

Of course he's always believed this. I well recall his many speeches on the subject in years past.

The chancellor will tell his audience in London that obliging migrants to carry out community work would help introduce them to the people they will be living alongside. It would also demonstrate to the host community that new immigrants will contribute to society as a whole.

Community work is what criminals are sentenced to do - I'm not sure what that says. It looks as though we're going to hear of lots of 'tough' tests and lots more 'Britishness', as he cozens and gammons the Native Brits. It's worked so far, so whu shouldn't it work again ? There's nothing he won't consider - except of course turning the flow of incomers off. After all, there's no upper limit to migration - and we don't have a population policy (the current default being that the natives are replaced).

Bwown's attitude to high levels of immigration is a bit like his attitude to high levels of taxation.

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back."

Lefty Luvvie Royalist Shock

When I saw the 800-odd hits for 'Helen Mirren' this morning I thought that Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov had probably won her Oscar.

"For 50 years and more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty - and her hairstyle," Dame Helen said.

"She has had her feet planted firmly on the ground, her hat on her head and her handbag on her arm. She has weathered many, many storms. And I salute her courage and her consistency and I thank her because if it wasn't for her I most certainly would not be here."

She ended her speech by holding up the Oscar statuette and saying: "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Queen."

UPDATE - 2,500 hits makes it another Mirrstalanche. And the Dumb One ponders the Oscars.

"For Future Generations"

Natalie Bennett's Philobiblon is an interesting read. She writes on history, theatre, politics, feminism, "cyberspace" - pretty much everything - and she writes well, which is why she does it for a living (and why I don't). Her politics are red/green.

Via her blog, this piece on the end of privacy - food for the thoughts of a parent with three avid bebo/msn users aged 9 to 17.

Ms Bennett is yet another intelligent, talented woman who's childless.

Finally, as a single, childless woman, with an active social and professional life, entirely happy in that status, she's pleased to write about that, as an antidote to the inevitable Bridget Jones stereotypes.

Maybe I read the wrong blogs, but I don't see many - if any - Bridget Jones stereotypes on the web.

So what, anyway ? She has no children. Big deal. Neither have a lot of other people. Are you going to trawl the web for childless bloggers to tag ?

No. I only mention it because of this piece on using the internet to resurrect women's lost history. In among the quotes from Barthes and concepts like "the stuffedness of the body" there's stuff that's relevant to all historians (and that applies to both sexes). She (correctly IMHO) identifies the enormous potential of the web in gathering together snippets from disparate sources to begin 'the reconstruction of a life' - something I think is happening above all in the world of geneaology, where a post on a local bulletin board, forgotten for a year, suddenly brings an email from Canada with information about your great-great grandfather. (If only this site had the source texts as well !)

I digress. When Lionel Shriver wrote her magnificent essay on childless boomers she generalised that they weren't very historically-minded.

We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don't especially care what happens once we're dead.

You couldn't say that about Ms Bennett.

The second reason why silicon immortality is important to feminists is that it offers many women the opportunity to contribute to the resurrection of women of their own and other ages, when other avenues are closed to them. Norma Clarke in The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters asks why Jane Barker, Sarah Fielding, Eliza Heywood, Delavrier Manley, innovative, popular, admired writers, were almost forgotten, while the men who were their compatriots – Milton, Pope, Steele, Swift – have got as close to immortality as any person who spends their life laying pen to paper could reasonably expect. I’m angry, sometimes, that these, my foremothers, like so many of their compatriots, did not do enough to ensure their own survival into the future (my emboldening - LT), and I have to ask: why ?

Trouble is, the 'survival into the future' not only depends upon the preservation of these women's stories, but on the continued existence of people who'll want to read about these women. As Ms Bennett writes :

If a memory of, or knowledge of, a person exists within a single human body/mind, then the person remembered has an existence, albeit a tenuous, wraithlike one ...
This alternative, embodied view of immortality chimes with a longstanding 'commonsense', pre-silicon-age view, which also holds that a person lives on whilesoever their memory is retained in that of another (my emboldening - LT). Making this “life” possible is often, consciously or not, the aim of historians, as Lerner says in explaining "why history matters … the dead continue to live by way of the resurrection we give them in telling their stories".

In this context a look at the demographics is instructive. As the ONS 2005 Poulation Trends summary (pdf) tells us :

As many as two in five secondary or medium educated women born in England and Wales in the mid-to-late 1960s were still childless going into their 30s, and almost half (46 per cent) of higher educated women were still childless at age 33. Among the generation of women born in the 1960s in France and Norway, fewer than one in three women of secondary and higher educational attainment were respectively childless entering their 30s and at age 33.

This isn't only a UK phenomenon. "Expected family size varies inversely with wife’s education" says this US presentation. The same's true in Japan and in Latin America (though in the non-welfare Latin American states both "the least educated and the best educated women share the small family norm").

The UK population is going up. Not all the new Britons will have the same attitudes to historical inquiry. The number of natives is going down - and they're ageing. And perhaps the natives producing the most children aren't rearing so many who'll read about seventeenth century lady jailers for pleasure and profit.

What have you done today to preserve a woman’s life – even your own – for future generations ?

A good question. Another good question is 'what future generations ?'

Underwater Rugby ?

Your Supervision Order Gunman Tonight

At the end of a two-week trial, John Laidlaw, of Holloway, north London, was found guilty by an Old Bailey jury on three counts of attempted murder and two firearms charges. The jurors were not told that 19 days before the shootings Laidlaw had been convicted of racially aggravated actual bodily harm and using racially threatening or abusive words, and given an 18-month supervision order.

Stabbing someone ?

Scott Howard has one previous conviction dating from March 2005 for possessing an offensive weapon, and committed the latest offence while subject to a community order – having appeared before magistrates three days earlier for breaching it.

No prison for you, my son.

Stabbing someone to death ? Three whole years.

A 16-year-old boy who stabbed another teenager to death in a children's play area in south London has been sentenced to three years' detention. Last month Adam Eastmond was found guilty of manslaughter after stabbing Gavin Brown, 17, in the neck with a commando-style knife in October 2005. Gavin's mother Anita said she was "appalled" by the sentence.

Chlorine Bombs

I've not seen coverage of this in UK media.

The gas cloud in Baghdad, meanwhile, suggests possible new and coordinated strategies by bombers trying to unleash toxic - and potentially deadly - materials. "Terrorists are using dirty means," said Brig. Gen. Qassim Moussawi, an Iraqi military spokesman.

In Baghdad, a pickup truck carrying chlorine gas cylinders was blown apart, killing at least five people and sending more than 55 to hospitals gasping for breath and rubbing stinging eyes, police said.

On Tuesday, a bomb planted on a chlorine tanker left more than 150 villagers stricken north of the capital. More than 60 were still under medical care on Wednesday. Chlorine causes respiratory trouble and skin irritation in low levels and possible death with heavy exposure.

In Washington, two Pentagon officials said the tactic has been used at least three times since Jan. 28, when a truck carrying explosives and a chlorine tank blew up in Anbar province. More than a dozen people were reported killed.

Nasty.

My feelings about the troop withdrawal are mixed. I can't but agree with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, as quoted by the BBC.

"The most significant implication behind Blair's Iraq pullout is political, not military... Blair understands very well the importance of staying in Iraq... in order to prevent the country from splitting apart... He knows that an exit in defeat means an added crisis for the world and not Iraq only... That is why it is a surprise that he insisted on staying in January and then decided to withdraw three weeks later." Syria's Tishrin says 'this withdrawal is definitely the start of the actual defeat in Iraq'.

What's particularly depressing is the possibility that

a) Blair's trying to get out while saving as much face as possible

b) that course is approved by the British people

EU Referendum says it pretty well - neither one thing nor the other. A little retreat. As Richard North writes :

Loathsome though the newspaper is, it is very hard to disagree with the general thrust of the front-page headline in the Independent today, or the tenor of their story, which begins:

It is an admission of defeat. Iraq is turning into one of the world's bloodiest battlefields in which nobody is safe. Blind to this reality, Tony Blair said yesterday that Britain could safely cut its forces in Iraq because the apparatus of the Iraqi government is growing stronger. In fact the civil war is getting worse by the day…

Meanwhile our troops are still being killed in under-armoured Land Rovers, while the Government spends £500 billion a year on other things.

Mill Hill Boys

People are throwing things at your house. You ring the police. The missiles continue for over an hour. No police come until they've gone.

TEENAGE yobs bombarded the homes of frightened residents with mud for more than an hour during a bizarre attack. A gang of 12 used a homemade device to scoop mud from a nearby field and fired dozens of clods of earth at houses in Exeter Street, on the Mill Hill and Ewood border in Blackburn. Residents, including pensioners, said they felt under siege and terrified during the attack, which was the latest in a series of incidents involving teenage gangs in the Mill Hill area.

However, seven calls were made to police by residents during the mud throwing on Monday night, but officers did not attend until after the offenders had fled. Residents criticised the police response, but bosses said there were other incidents which meant they could not send any officers right away.

Not the first time :

MEMBERS of a gang of car vandals have been leaving behind their "calling card" in the form of a graffiti logo. Police said that over the past three weeks a number of vehicles have been damaged around the Stephen Street area of Mill Hill. Hundreds of pounds worth of damage has been caused after the gang poured paintstripper on vehicles or scratched paint off door panels and other parts of the bodywork. The letters MHB and other logos are usually spray painted on a wall nearby. MHB is believed to stand for Mill Hill Boys - a local gang.

Now police are urging residents to come forward with information about possible gang members in a bid to put an end to the trail of destruction.

Possible gang members eh ? Difficult ...

"I dont know wat 2 say so ill jus write about myself, my name is phil kenyon + im 16 from blackburn england. im interested in sport and i love hangin with ma m8s (MILL HILL BOYS) wat can i say theres not much 2do in this world. inabit cya.. ps plz sign da guestbook and leave a mesage inabit..."

Hopefully Not Both At The Same Time

The government today dismissed calls from Britain's leading Islamic group for schools to do more to accommodate Muslim pupils who want to wear a headscarf or grow a beard.

Ian Blair - Foot In Mouth Again

Calling the Royal Ulster Constabulary 'paramilitaries' is all in a days work for the PC publican (Wrekin College, fees 10-21K) who :

Thinks that Haringey residents are happy to leave their doors unlocked and open; not everyone agrees;

Can't understand why the Soham murders were in all the papers.

Who says "If you’re not broadly against the police when you’re a teenager, you’re not much of a teenager."

And who thinks that people who pay for private security guards are 'crazy'.

By their friends shall ye know them.

Don't Send In The Clowns

I don't think that's funny.

Charlotte Bradshaw

Is she the world's most incompetent journalist, or was she just obeying orders ?

The killing by Mohammed Riaz of his wife and four daughters has been widely reported.

The Telegraph said that 'a father killed his wife and four daughters in their sleep because he could not bear them adopting a more westernised lifestyle'.

The Manchester Evening News (owned by the Guardian) reported that 'Mr Riaz has been furious over his wife's determination to bring up the children with a western outlook and her refusal of arranged marriages'.

The Johnston Press-owned Lancashire Evening Post said 'a bitter rift had developed between conservative Muslim Mr Riaz and his wife over her determination to bring up their children with Western lifestyles'.

Even the BBC reported that 'Mr Riaz, a conservative Muslim, disagreed with his wife over her determination to bring up their children with Western lifestyles'.

But the report written by Charlottte Bradshaw for the Lancashire Evening Telegraph and repeated on other sites owned by Newsquest (parent company Gannett of the US) such as Asian Image, the Blackburn Citizen and This Is Lancashire, strikes a different note.

The hearing heard that the motives behind the killings may never be known.

Could have fooled me, Charlotte. Even the Indie titles its report 'Muslim husband who killed his wife and children because of their Western ways'. The Indie's is actually the most detailed report I've seen in terms of motive.

Police investigations revealed how estranged Mr Riaz, a traditionalist and a practising Muslim who grew up in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, had become from his vivacious wife, a high-profile community worker who had co-founded the local Aawaz women's group, mentored teenage girls at a high school in nearby Rishton, and was a school governor and board member on several diversity groups.

Turns out Mrs Riaz had an English mother - but still she 'was sent back to Pakistan for 15 years after completing primary school'. And Mohammed Riaz wasn't by any means a perfect Muslim, even ignoring the mass murder.

The pressures drove Mr Riaz to drink heavily. Sclerosis of the liver was found after his death.

London

Just another news day in our great capital.

The elderly commuter fighting for his life after being attacked on a train.

A man was seriously injured when he was attacked by three passengers on a train in south-east London. It is believed the victim, aged 61, was knocked unconscious when he was pushed from the train as it stopped at West Dulwich station at 2140 GMT on Monday.
A doctor treated him at the scene before emergency crews took him to King's College Hospital - he has since been transferred to another hospital. A 19-year-old man from Brixton has been arrested by police.

The woman who crashed her car - and the Bad Samaritans.

Two "Good Samaritans" who went to the "aid" of a dazed woman motorist after she crashed her car stripped her before trying to rape her, police revealed today. Cops were alerted by passing motorists who spotted the distressed 42-year-old woman semi-naked at the side of the road late on Tuesday night.

Police said "It appears at this early stage that the 42-year-old woman had been driving along nearby Carterhatch Lane when she was in collision with a traffic island. It is alleged that two men, driving separate vehicles, had offered to assist the woman before getting her away from her damaged vehicle and sexually assaulting her in Theobolds Park Road, near the entrance to Wildwoods House. Police arrived at the scene and two men, aged 25 and 38 years, were arrested in connection with attempted rape. They remain in custody at north London police stations."

Reminded me of about ten years back when a young woman accepted a lift in London one night. I can't recall, but I think she might have come down from the sticks for a concert. She was raped and dumped in the street in South London at 3 am. She stopped the first people she saw for help. They raped her too.

Apparently not enough people are welfare dependent.

More people are being encouraged to claim state benefits. Lambeth council plans to spend £220,000 of council tax payers’ cash on a campaign to encourage more people to claim welfare.

The seventeen year old who stabbed a mother to death gets ten years. A cautionary tale of the company you find yourself in when you mix business - welfare officer at a centre for excluded children - with pleasure - sleeping with 'a former pupil at the centre'.

But funnily enough it's this one that bothers me most. No dead, just an eighteen year old beaten up in his own bedroom and having his nose broken after someone kicked the front door down.

Joseph Boxall pleaded guilty to inflicting actual bodily harm at Dartford Magistrates' Court on February 12. He also pleaded guilty to using violence to secure entrance to a premises.
Boxall was given 200 hours' community service and ordered to pay £400 to David Alexander for the injuries he suffered. He will also have to pay £150 to Allan Alexander for the damage to the door.

200 hours community service ? It's a good job they're only sending violent people to prison, isn't it ?


UPDATE - I blogged the other day about the Lord Chief 'Justice' and his decision to slash sentences because the jails were full, speculating about the superbly named Trigger Seed's crime.

Glassing the girlfriend, according to the Guardian. Apparently it 'slipped out of his hand'.

Posting

At B-BBC.

Sorry ...

for a lack of original posting and a surfeit of depressing news stories. Busy.

Take a look at :

This little post from Unenlightened Commentary.

Links to two fine David Thompson pieces, on Islam and Guardianista culture, at Mick Hartley.

And I've been meaning to put something together on the lines of 'black gun crime is the bastard child of the Scarman report'. The Pub Philosopher has written it.

The government continued with its policy of tying the hands of the police and not allowing them to take the measures that would have enabled them to win back control of the streets from the rioters. Had this been done at an early stage, the riots could have been controlled. The feeling that black youths could attack the police and get away with it would not have spread and there would probably have been fewer copycat riots. The myth of insurrection that led to the curbing of police activity in Afro-Caribbean areas would never have taken hold ...

The Thatcher government's unwillingness to fight this street war makes some sense. The government was deeply committed to an economic battle with the unions at the time and needed to prepare for the inevitable industrial unrest. Taking on the street gangs and the so-called anti-racists as well was probably seen as too much of a risk. In any case, the people who were being abandoned to the rule of drug-dealers and unelected community leaders were mostly poor and black, not the sort of people who were likely to vote Tory.

Twenty years later, the sons and daughters of those who rioted in the eighties are shooting at each other. Two decades of sensitive policing have allowed a generation of black youths to graduate from cannabis and machetes to crack and machine-guns. Those who once cheered the rioters are now asking what the police and the government are going to do about the violence.

There's an interesting comment on the Janet Daley piece that PP links to :

"A black man phoned a 5 live phone-in on this subject, he said it was a cultural problem and that the BBC, in an attempt to be inclusive, have been peddling this violent black rap culture at the tax-payers expense for years. The show’s host took objection to the fact that he thought it was a black problem and cut him off – that’s all you need to know."

The great John McWhorter wrote about this years ago.

True Brit

Tales of London are tales from another world. Note the severity of the six-year "life" term. I have a feeling we'll be hearing from Mr Iskander again :

Even more sinister were his diaries in which he not only fantasised about notorious child murder cases, but in which he graphically plotted what he was going to do and how he had tracked the girls and knew their every movement for at least 18 months. He even described how the police would arrive when he dragged the 11 year-old off the street.

Mr Carr said: "He goes on to compare himself with others convicted of high-profile similar crimes. He fantasises about the Soham murders of Jessica and Holly and having sex with them in their Manchester United shirts.

"He also fantasises about the Belgian paedophile, Marc Dutroux."

British-born Christopher Iskander, who has a Turkish father and German mother, had one previous conviction for attacking a pal with a hammer. He was jailed for two years for that attack which was also planned and written up in his diaries.

Iskander pleaded guilty to charges of trespass with intent to rape, oral rape and attempted rape relating to the attack on the nine-year-old and two charges of having a sawn-off-shotgun with intent to rape the nine year-old and sexually assault the 11-year-old girl and one of kidnapping the older girl.

He was given a life sentence for public protection of which he must serve at least six years before consideration for parole.

Rainbow London

Somalis vs Asians - One Lithuanian dead.

There's a lot of soul-searching about shooting 15-year-olds. Kicking 13-year-olds to death seems to be off the Blair and Cameron radars.

A 13-year-old schoolboy was beaten to death by pupils of a rival school when two gangs of youths clashed, the Old Bailey heard today.

Lithuanian Deividas Strizegauskas was punched to the ground and kicked in the head "like a football" after being surrounded by 15 youths aged between 14 and 15 and set upon by outside a rival school, the court was told.

The court heard the row had escalated after Strizegauskas's Somali school pal from Brampton Manor School in London's East End confronted an Asian pupil from the rival school, which cannot be named for legal reasons.

Brampton Manor School had a number of Somali pupils whereas the other school had a large amount of Asians - and "these groups didn't always get on with each other".

This bit's pretty sad. Note the deadly weapon the boy carried - and the absolute authority that a teacher wields.

The court heard that Strizegauskas was spotted with a plastic Hoover attachment up his sleeve and was confronted by rival pupils, but a teacher on duty outside the schoolgates managed to intervene and tried to confiscate the 'weapon.'

Strizegauskas refused to hand it over, and walked around the corner when violence between the two groups erupted, leading to Strizegauskas falling to the ground and being repeatedly kicked, the court heard.

The attack was over in minutes and the teacher and another boy tried to help Strizegauskas to his feet, but he collapsed and fell into unconsciousness. The Hoover pipe was found in his sleeve and had not been drawn.

"Good fathers and loving families"

Hey - all that stuff about fathers and gun crime ? This Times report blows it out of the water.

"Lawyer’s killers had good fathers and loving family. They chose a life of crime."

So they came from the traditional nuclear family that us throwbacks are always on about, did they ? One mum, one dad, still married ?

Not quite. Delano Brown's father had children by three different women. Delano lived with dad and stepmum - until they split up and dad moved to the States.

Donnel Carty's mother and father never married and did not live together. Donnel's father and grandparents raised him.

Ho hum.

Elsewhere Donnel Carty's mates face sentence.

The court heard today how the men had a string of previous convictions for offences including robbery and burglary. Judge Blacksell, QC, said: "Carty and Brown were tried at the Central Criminal Court on two of the counts and also another count of murder, sadly for the same sort of thing that this jury has had to listen to, that led to the death of the victim." The group rampaged along trains in West London at night, using the interconnecting carriage doors to steam through the train and target potential victims. They would alight from the tube after the thefts, although on one occasion, jumped through the interconnecting doors onto the track when the train was halted in between stations after the alarm was raised.

During the trial Syed Hussnain described how he was one of the first targets as he travelled along the Bakerloo Line into town from Harrow in December 2005. He told the jury he saw a group of five to six boys wearing "hooded caps" walk past before a number of them demanded his phone. He said: "I resisted for 15 to 20 seconds, I held it tight. One of them hit me on the head, he hit me with a punch and my glasses were on the floor. I resisted for another few seconds before they took out two knives, and so when I saw those knives, I then gave my mobile to them."

In the same carriage a young woman had her handbag stolen. When her boyfriend attempted to stand up to the gang he was beaten. The following day Uthayakumar Kulasegrampillai was slashed around the face with a knife by Dennis. Mr Robinson called the attack a "particularly nasty assault", although the courageous victim still gave chase. Mr Robinson said: "The man who did the stabbing, Aaron Dennis, was handed the knife by someone else. He said, 'I have the knife. I'm going to kill you.' He extended it shoulder-height and slashed him in the face. "Dennis then stabbed him in the neck. he was bleeding profusely, but thankfully the injuries weren't as serious as they could have been. It was a particularly nasty assault. "Mr Kulasegrampillai ran after them on the train. He managed to get hold of one of them at the foot of the stairs and struggled with him to keep him there. He was asking for help from passers-by, but sadly none was given."

Britain 2007. Dont'cha just love it ?

Boom ! Boom !

From the B-BBC comments :

I hate Livingstone's obvious Jew-baiting and find his politics infuriating, but he has been quite a useful Mayor and still is managing to get things done. Public transport has improved under him, in spite of the part-privatization of the Tube forced on him by that damned Scot (who never got a vote in London in his life) and there is a general sense of things getting done and decisions getting taken.
Fabio P.Barbieri | 18.02.07 - 1:07 pm |



You've just described Hitler.
Anonymous | 18.02.07 - 1:35 pm |

Brave New World ...

According to a Scottish wide survey, one fifth of LGBT people have children. Some children will have been born or adopted into heterosexual relationships before a parent had ‘come out’ and some are born into samesex relationships or adopted by an LGB individual. Individual circumstances lead to varied family structures and parenting arrangements. It is important to be aware of this. When talking to children, consider using "parents", "carers" or "guardians" rather than "mother" or "father".

Gusidance for NHS staff issued by the "NHS Inclusion Project - Working for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Health - And Sod the Rest Of You !"

There was a silence; then, clearing his throat, "Once upon a time," the Director began, "while our Ford was still on earth, there was a little boy called Reuben Rabinovitch. Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents."

The Director interrupted himself. "You know what Polish is, I suppose?"

"A dead language."

"Like French and German," added another student, officiously showing off his learning.

"And 'parent'?" questioned the D.H.C.

There was an uneasy silence. Several of the boys blushed. They had not yet learned to draw the significant but often very fine distinction between smut and pure science. One, at last, had the courage to raise a hand.

"Human beings used to be …" he hesitated; the blood rushed to his cheeks. "Well, they used to be viviparous."

"Quite right." The Director nodded approvingly.

"And when the babies were decanted …"

"'Born,'" came the correction.

"Well, then they were the parents–I mean, not the babies, of course; the other ones." The poor boy was overwhelmed with confusion.

"In brief," the Director summed up, "the parents were the father and the mother." The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys' eye-avoiding silence. "Mother," he repeated loudly rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, "These," he said gravely, "are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant."

Hat-tip - Ian Dale.