01 October 2011 11:53 PM
PETER HITCHENS: Caring for our sick relatives IS 'someone else's responsibility', nurse... it's yours
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Now Dr Peter Carter, the General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, wants us to start down the same path.
He thinks we have somehow ‘sleepwalked’ into thinking that taking an elderly relative to the lavatory, while he or she is in hospital, is ‘someone else’s responsibility’.
From now on, it’s going to be up to us. ‘The services need to gear themselves up to make people aware, “You are very welcome to come in and look after mum, dad, husband, wife, etc.” ’
I like that ‘very welcome’. What if we don’t welcome this arrangement ourselves? Will we then find ‘mum, dad, husband, wife, etc’ lying moaning in a pool of urine, afflicted with bedsores and unfed when we finally get away from work and struggle our way to the hos¬pital through the jammed streets and the predatory, expensive car park? I suspect so.
Sleepwalked? Someone else’s responsibility? The gulf between this character and the rest of us is too wide to bridge. Hospitals in civilised countries exist precisely because the care of the sick is a specialised activity.
It is not because of lack of money. All these billions cannot replace the conscientious Christian spirit of selfless service that once motivated the nursing profession, and which has now been replaced by smarmy platitudes and meaningless degrees.
In the hospitals of our liberated, non-judgmental, equality-and-diversity Brave New World, the most basic tasks are not done, or are done badly. People are beginning to dread going to them.
They should be booed off the stage with old cabbages and howls of ‘Why aren’t you at school?’, not indulged and fawned over by party leaders.
It’s for their own good. After all, look what happened to William Hague.
In any case, what was so great about Labour’s new child star, Rory Weal? His whingeing delivery and urgent finger-jabbing looked and sounded as if he had attended the Ken Livingstone School of Speech and Drama.
And what drama it was. The poor mite, formerly dwelling in opulent luxury, has been forced to live in a four-bedroom semi and attend a grammar school. He disapproves of them, of course, but not enough to commute to one of his beloved comprehensives. Truly, it would take Charles Dickens to do full justice to this tragedy of our times.
I am not sure quite how he owes his salvation from poverty to the Welfare State, but even if he does, that Welfare State has been lavishly supported by all major parties since the Thirties, and has never been the sole property of Labour.
He doesn’t know what he is talking about, and he proclaims it like a trainee commissar. Come back in
Frank says: ‘One house, near my home, has 11 feral children, nearly all from different fathers. Most are barred from school and they run riot by day and by night. I have had to ban them from my shop because of the thieving and abuse.
So Frank called the police. You would, wouldn’t you? They have proved most reluctant to act, fobbing him off with the ‘What do you expect us to do?’ attitude that has become infuriatingly familiar to so many ¬victims of this cruel anarchy.
One defeatist officer has actually told Frank that he doesn’t understand why he doesn’t pack up and move. His persecutors know this and have said to him: ‘We can do anything we like and you can’t do anything about it.’
As I read Frank’s graphic, terse letter, I suddenly noticed these words: ‘Such has been my despair, I sank to the level of trying to end it all last week – but I failed.’
Since then the police have finally acted for justice, order and the rights of the free British subject to live unmolested in his home.
Slipping out of the Labour conference for a break from politicians, I tried to look at some of the less obvious parts of Liverpool – not the sparkling new waterside developments or the majestic, endlessly astonishing Anglican Cathedral, but the bits in between.
It is obviously still a city in some difficulty. A favourite café, which used to serve a rather good breakfast, has closed for good. Even in the renovated centre there are streets of shuttered shops, or downmarket pubs once grand, now melancholy. There are also traces – not obvious at first glance – of the terrible bombing which Germany perpetrated here in the Second World War.
I believe that about 2,600 non-combatants died in this homicidal, criminal fury, deliberately aimed at civilian morale. But to this day it is not as well-known as it should be because strict censorship kept it hidden from the rest of the country and the world, whereas the London Blitz was impossible to hide and was instead turned into a propaganda victory of sorts, one which still succeeds, though the extent of its misery, fear and horror is beginning to become clear.
My mother, who spent her teens in Liverpool, did speak of the bombing once or twice, but only in that ‘Oh, we just managed. If it had your number on it, then that was it. If not, then you got on with your life and enjoyed what you could’ way. This was the defiant response to mortal terror of many of those who were young and unattached in those days. I rather admire this jaunty view, compared with our solemn self-congratulation over how calm we stayed when terrorist bombs went off in London a few years ago. Actually the authorities came close to panic, and we now know that the emergency services, penetrated by the fear of lawsuits and the absurd caution which accompanies political correctness and the culture of rights, in many cases failed to respond as well as they should have done.
But I am not sure that anyone with children or the responsibility for a family could have been quite so jaunty about bombs. As soon as you have anyone else to care for, this doesn't work. Also, the young think they are immortal, and proof against injury. When I was young, I lacked the imagination or the knowledge to work out what it must have been like to be in a city subjected to repeated night bombing. Until I managed to injure myself in a motorbike crash soon before my 18th birthday, I believed that wars and injuries happened only to others.
Oddly enough, one of the most telling descriptions of aerial bombing from the receiving end is entirely fictional and was written before the bombing even began. It is Nevil Shute’s 1938 novel, ‘What Happened to the Corbetts’ (published in the USA under another title that I can’t recall) . This dwells on the dislocation , squalor and selfishness that follow bombing of advanced civilisations, as well as on the devastation caused by bombs in the happy, ordered homes of normal people, and the almost casual death they bring to previously happy, safe people. Len Deighton’s ‘Bomber’ is also helpful in understanding such things.
Anyway, in the course of getting deliberately lost in central Liverpool, I found myself looking at a series of window displays , near the shell of a bombed out church. These were, I think, in an abandoned department store, and provided many distressing pictures of the dispiriting destruction of decades of human endeavour by aerial bombing. The scenes were of parts of the city that are still quite recognisable, and – as so often in bombed places – fill the heart with grief that so much carefully ordered beauty was lost, as well as so many lives. How often local authorities failed to restore what was destroyed, but instead just filled in the empty space with replacements not nearly as good. Some even took advantage of the wreck to destroy old buildings that could have been saved. Coventry, until 1940 a miraculously preserved English city, as lovely as anything in Europe, was the victim of this sort of opportunism. Only in tiny corners of it can you see the lingering traces of lost beauty.
As well as these pictures, there was a revelation which was somehow more striking than the destruction itself. We are inclined to forget the gloomy practical details of war. And here was one. What was to be done with the rubble?
In Berlin, they piled it up into miniature mountains, the only high ground in the city. In Liverpool, they carted it to the coast to bolster the sea defences against tidal erosion. On certain beaches, you can find yourself walking on smashed pillars, pediments, broken sculptures, doorsteps and other recognisable fragments of the buildings blown to pieces by German high explosive 70 years ago. They are all washed clean by the sea now, but I should not care to swim or picnic anywhere near them. These are smashed lives and hopes beneath your feet.
There were also descriptions of orphaned children weeping on top of the piles of bricks that had been their homes (one who saw this said he hoped that he might be able to forget this, above all the other terrible sights he saw in those times). There is much more, understated as you might expect from the England of seven decades ago, but scorching the heart all the same. How angry it still makes me that anyone could have considered it right or just to do this to the modest homes of the powerless.
Some way away from this memorial, in the waterfront churchyard of Our Lady and St Nicholas, there is another poignant and disturbing monument to those black, cold, frightening times - ‘The Spirit of the Blitz’, a sculpture by Tom Murphy.
I am not sure I like it as a work of art. But it delivers a great punch to the mental solar plexus. A young mother, with an infant in one of her arms, is following her small son up a spiral staircase. Her other arm is flung out, as if to try to call or pull him back. He, oblivious to the irony, is playing with a toy aeroplane. I think it is meant to express above all the howling, inconsolable pain of a parent who has lost a child (Rudyard Kipling expresses something similar in a verse in the ‘Just So’ stories about how his lost daughter has run ahead of him in the woods, ‘too far ahead to call to him’. When the true meaning becomes clear, it strikes you as hard as a ten foot freak wave on a quiet beach). The father, of course, is absent at the war, not even able to be sure that his family and home are safe, as would have been the case in almost all previous wars.
Now, some of you will know what is coming next, and some of you won’t. But I said, a few lines above, these words : ‘How angry it still makes me that anyone could have considered it right or just to do this to the modest homes of the powerless.’
And it does. And I absolutely cannot see how I can feel that about Liverpool and not also feel the same about the cities of Germany and Japan. Plenty of people have come up with ‘strategic’ justifications of this filthy and unChristian method of warfare, which they would reject in an instant as the casuistry they are, were they used to justify or excuse similar obliteration of Britain. Liverpool’s destruction, though appalling, was as nothing compared to the fate of its German equivalent, Hamburg – see A.C. Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities’ for the German casualty figures. And Hamburg was one of many.
Others will say of the Germans (or the Japanese) that they somehow deserved to be baked alive, suffocated, disembowelled, slowly incinerated in front of their families, shorn of their limbs and so forth , because they had ‘supported’ the awful regimes which had led them to war. This has always seemed to me to lack historical knowledge or understanding. Many in both countries disliked, even hated, their governments. the working class areas of Germany which endured most of the bombing were the strongholds of the Social Democrats who offered the last principled opposition to the national Socialists until they were savagely destroyed and suppressed as a party.
They were compelled by terror to be silent. Would the makers of this excuse, that they deserved to be bombed, be prepared to furnish us with a guarantee that under the same circumstances they would have spoken out?
And what about the German children, so many of whom died in ways too distressing to describe? Was Hitler their fault? Our country will not have grown up properly until it can admit that this form of warfare was wrong. I am all in favour of commemorating the aircrews who went out into that war. It was not their idea. They believed the assurances of their political leaders and commanders that the task was necessary. Their bravery is unimpeachable. They faced a horrific death themselves if shot down. Nor was such a death unlikely. The casualty levels tolerated by the unlovely Sir Arthur Harris (known to his men as ‘Butcher’, not ‘Bomber’) were comparable to Earl Haig’s profligate expenditure of other people’s sons, fathers, husbands and brothers on the Somme in an earlier war. It is the men in charge who must be criticised, and ought to be.
I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to do much cut and thrust here lately. I have been spending quite a lot of time attending the party conferences (not yet over) and nearly as much time reaching them via Britain’s endlessly torn-up rail network with its ‘engineering improvement work’ that leaves the trains slower and more unreliable than before, its fragmentation and its padded timetables, which cause travellers to spend long minutes sitting at stations for no other reason that the rail operators aren’t willing to risk being late, and being fined.
Once these are over I plan to return to responding in some detail to those comments which merit it (some just don’t – and may I ask some contributors, who manage to comment perhaps five or six times a day, generally saying very little, and that incoherent and ill-spelled, to restrain themselves a bit, or I shall have to consider a daily maximum number of comments from anyone person to avoid it? Such things bore and repel other readers, and they bore and repel me too. The British Boring Board of Control has been in touch, and I do so prefer self-regulation).
I’ll only take this opportunity to point out that ‘Wesley Crosland’ has still failed to reply to the personal letter I sent him on 1st August (about which he went public, jeering that the questions in it were childlike in their simplicity). The letter concerned his belief that everyone who doesn’t accept the vague speculations of the evolutionists about the distant past as unchallengeable fact is obviously stupid and ignorant. Before anyone tries to bracket me as an ‘ist’ or a ‘phobe’ or a ‘denier’ or some other sort of outcast in our supposedly tolerant society, I should say that in the letter I merely asked him to justify and explain certain statements he had made, in his usual confident manner, on this subject. I myself, as I often have cause to say, have no idea of the truth of the matter, believing we have insufficient data on which to theorise.
In the subsequent two months, despite the allegedly childlike simplicity of these questions, Mr ‘Crosland’ has not found time to answer, though he has found plenty of time to sneer loftily and rather repetitively at evolution sceptics with extraordinary frequency. He has generally done this without any real pretext, on threads where this subject has little or no relevance to the matter under discussion.
The childishly simple phrases ‘All mouth and no trousers’ or ‘Big hat, no cattle’ spring to my mind.
In the meantime, may I make a plea, especially to new readers who come here, as it were, in the midst of many long-running debates
This blog is unique, as far as I know, in having a full index of topics discussed, going back to its very beginning in February 2006. Perhaps that is why people don’t expect it to be there, and so don’t use it as much as they might. I spent many laborious weeks compiling this, and the subjects are helpfully listed on the right hand side of the page. New readers wishing to know my view of the Tories, or my advice on voting or on UKIP, or on grammar schools, or the Iraq War (for example) may look them up here. I acknowledge that there are inevitable imperfections, but it is still a very useful archive.
In many cases they may also be able to look up reports I have sent from various countries around the world. Also available are the subsequent discussions I have had with readers. I am willing to answer questions about such things, but only after readers have searched the index.
Dave vs Nick: As fake as Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks
This is Peter Hitchen's Mail on Sunday column
Despite all the grunts, squeals and crashes, as huge bodies were slammed, gasping, on to the canvas, we all knew it wasn’t serious. Of course, it must have hurt a bit. And occasionally the giant grapplers must have truly lost their tempers. But the louder it was, the phonier it was.
Mr Clegg helps David Cameron ensure that the Government remains pro-EU, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-tax, politically correct and pro-immigration. But he suffers from the bottomless stupidity of his Left-wing members and voters, who can never see when they’re well off.
Anthony Blair had the same difficulty. The Left were too thick to see that New Labour were the most revolutionary Leftist British Government since Cromwell. They thought – and still think – that Mr Blair was a traitor. Stupidity explains a lot in modern British politics. But that’s democracy for you.
So we have the ludicrous position we have now, where the real traitor, Mr Cameron, still commands the loyalty of his party.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, who have allowed Mr Cameron to ignore his voters and run a Leftist Government, have lost most of their Leftist support.
This is the reason for the silly fake fight, in which Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron pretend to be at odds about the 50p tax rate, or Human Rights, and various senior Liberals call the Tories rude names.
The Tory conference in Manchester next week will contain quite a few matching attacks on the ‘Yellow B******s’, which will be just as empty.
But the biggest fake of all will be the stage-managed split between the two, which I predict will take place by the spring of 2014.
There will be some pretext or other – probably spending cuts. The idea will be to make the Liberals look like principled Leftists and the Tories look like principled conservatives. The media will, as usual, play along.
The Liberals will then noisily leave the Coalition but quietly agree to maintain a minority Tory Government on the basis of 'confidence and supply’.
Mr Cameron will then find ministerial jobs for some of his friends. Mr Clegg may possibly go off to the European Commission – a seat falls vacant in 2014.
If he does, I suspect Vince Cable will become leader, a change worth many votes to his party. The Tories will try and fail to get a few ‘Right-wing’ measures through Parliament.
And at the 2015 Election, voters will be asked to choose between Liberal Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Liberal Labour candidates, pretending to disagree with each other.
The Liberal Democrats will then form a coalition with whoever gets most seats. And your wishes, hopes and fears will continue to be ignored.
Unlike the wrestling, this fraud isn’t funny.
It is deadly serious, and we shall all pay for it.
Words that have no place at Downton
Edwardians did not use the phrase ‘as if’ to express scorn for a suggestion. Nor did they say ‘ta da!’ when they successfully baked cakes. As for the much trumpeted realism of the trenches (pictured right),I’ve seen children’s play areas in urban parks more menacing and squalid than these neat, dry diggings.
But at least Downton is entertaining. This cannot be said for the awful, miserable cadaver that is the new film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I have explained just how bad this film is, and why, on my blog.
We learn that David Cameron has been entertaining Anthony Blair at Chequers, supposedly to get his advice on foreign policy.
Several questions arise. First, how did he get him to leave once he arrived? Gordon Brown spent ten years trying to evict him.
Second, of all the people in all the world to ask about foreign affairs, Mr Blair is the last counsellor any sane person would choose. Not only was he responsible, personally and deeply, for the worst British foreign policy blunder of the past 50 years, the Iraq War, but he is so ignorant he doesn’t know they speak Portuguese in Brazil. He has been the despair of foreign policy experts brought in to brief him, and recently revealed he had never even heard of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the leader of Iran famously overthrown by a joint MI6-CIA putsch in 1953.
Mr Cameron’s self-promoting speech about his Libya intervention is another worrying sign that he is turning into another Blair. Could Libya be Mr Cameron’s Kosovo – an apparent success (actually not as nice as it looks) that gives him a taste for bombs and bullets?
Yet parliamentary opposition has come only from Scotland, where the problems would be even worse than in England.
Are there no English MPs prepared to defend our freedom to set our clocks by our own meridian, instead of a German one?
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