When a bishop has to leave the Church of England to stand up for Christians, what hope is left for Britain?

An interesting exercise in differing perspectives today from Melanie Phillips, which moves from the resignation of the Bishop of Rochester to pursue missionary work overseas, through a number of slights and marginalisations of Christianity in public life through to this:

“With multiculturalism discriminating in favour of all who challenge the established values of this country, it would appear that it is Christians who have become the oppressed minority. “

It is worth remembering at this point that the head of state is also the head of the national branch of the Church, Christian religious leaders sit unelected in the second house of our legislature, the school system is predominantly a collection of Christian faith-based organisations, charity law allows tax breaks for organisations devoted to ‘advancement of religion’, our national broadcaster carries a weekly televised Christian service and Christian (and other religious) organisations have exemptions from various pieces of equality legislation allowing them to discriminate against people while still receiving public funds. For an oppressed minority, Christians do quite well for themselves.

So, how has Melanie got to the point where all the perks of Christianity are overlooked – what has generated this feeling of oppression?

“Yesterday, it was revealed that a Christian council worker was suspended for encouraging a terminally ill woman to turn to God. He says he was also told it was inappropriate to ‘talk about God’ with a client and that he should not even say ‘God bless’.

This follows the case of the nurse who was suspended for offering to pray for an elderly patient’s recovery, the Christian who lost her role on an adoption panel because she disapproved of gay adoption, and Christian adoption agencies which lost their public funding because they had the same approach.”

So, there seem to be a series of well publicised attacks on people merely for being Christian. It’s not quite Rome, but people are losing their livelihoods, merely for stating their faith. They might still have spiritual leaders in the Lords interfering with bills on science and health, but on the ground the secularists are winning.

Except, from another perspective, this isn’t what’s going on at all. The Christian council worker in question is accused by his employers of subjecting a woman who came to him to discuss her housing situation to an extended ‘religious rant’¹. Were this any other religion, or no religion, I’m not sure Melanie would feel as uncomfortable. If we give him the benefit of the doubt, and his comments were neither extended nor ranting, then rather than doing the job he was paid to do, he was proselytising, again something Melanie would probably feel less comfortable with were it on behalf of another god. Alternatively, imagine he weren’t proselytising at all, but suggesting an alternative remedy – would it be appropriate for a homelessness officer to suggest to a supplicant that they go home and eat goji berries because, even though the doctors say there’s no hope, you sometimes hear about people switching to the berries and pulling through? For a newspaper so often concerned by local government spending, the implicit claim that Wandsworth’s rate payers should be funding unqualified health advice with every housing consultation seems odd. The idea that someone should be considered persecuted because their employer expects them to do their job and leave their medical advice for after hours is equally strange.

In the case of the nurse, someone was sufficiently taken aback by her offer of prayer to complain about it – so Malanie is now asking us to accept that nurses should be allowed to make patients feel awkward and uncomfortable. The Christian who lost their job on the adoption panel did so because she wanted to base adoption not on the law or the scientific evidence which informed it, but on her private beliefs – Melanie is asking us to accept personal belief as a legitimate reason to ignore the rules which govern our jobs. The Christian adoption agency were allowed to continue to discriminate against couples on the basis of their private beliefs, but were no longer allowed to ask the taxpayer to fund that discrimination – Melanie is asking certain members of the community to happily stump up for someone else to persecute them.

In all of these cases, we can easily imagine the problems we would have were it not Christianity, but another set of private beliefs which were influencing the public behaviour. Were we to substitute racism in the adoption cases, for example. The issue is not, in this light, the persecution of Christianity, but the exclusion of certain private beliefs from the public sphere. It is not Christianity which is under attack, but the idea that private beliefs should influence your public duties.

In some ways, the confusion between the two is understandable – historically in this country, Christian private beliefs have coincided with public duties. When homosexuality was illegal on grounds of morality, the question of discrimination in adoption never arose. The problem Melanie is having is not that ‘multiculturalism [is] discriminating in favour of all who challenge the established values of this country’, but that not all the established views are universally held and that the acceptance of this necessarily implies a retreat of all private beliefs from the public sphere. The illusion that Christianity is being persecuted arises because Christian beliefs have further to retreat. This in no ways undermines her feeling that:

“Although most people may no longer be churchgoers, Christianity infuses all this country’s institutions, traditions and values.”

Even retreating to the private sphere, Christian values will still influence public life because the worthwhile ones are universal. Christianity does not have the monopoly on tolerance, decency and the Golden Rule². Christians will still be able to agree with laws based on equality and reciprocity of expected behaviour, and with institutions which foster the same. ‘Christianity’ will still be the basis for our public conduct and discourse, we will still indulge in ‘Christian behaviour’ in as far as that basis and that behaviour overlaps with ‘human’ behaviour. That basis and that behaviour will still tolerate the discussion of private beliefs which run against our desire for equality and justice in the appropriate fora, but will still believe that such fora are not the ones funded by the public.

Even when we’ve sorted the monarchy, and the Lords, and the education system, and the national broadcaster, and the charity law, and the opt-outs of equality legislation, Christianity will still have a place in public life. That place still won’t proselytising, or ignoring the law, at the taxpayer’s expense. That’s not oppression, that’s even-handedness, which the Christian god, among others, was all for³.

———————–

¹ I’m basing my comments on this on an article in the Telegraph - oddly, only they and the Mail appear to be carrying this story.

² It’s worth noting here that Melanie is discussing Christianity as if it were a uniform monolith – the brand of the faith that is failing to love homosexuals as they love themselves is arguably missing the point sufficiently to not merit the name and to allow that particular animosity into public life would be the failure to uphold true Christian values, not its exclusion.

³ Deut 10:17-18 – For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality nor takes a bribe. He administers justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing.

Strange Ontology: Week beginning 23rd March 2009

If you’d like to know what causes cancer, in real time, try this.

Note, in the causes in brief – if you believe the internet, tea can cure cancer. Too modest, Daily Mail, too modest.

This week, being a guinea pig at Porton Down DOESN’T cause cancer. Interestingly. Preventing cancer this week is letting your tea cool before drinking it (so, by implication, drinking hot tea causes cancer), giving a rare mention to oesophageal cancer, and oily fish is what you want to avoid prostate cancer..

Original research

25th March

Straight from the teapot, a golden anti-cancer brew

A report on: Nune et al. (2009) Green nanotechnology from tea: phytochemicals in tea as building blocks for production of biocompatible gold nanoparticles Journal of Materials Chemistry doi: 10.1039/b822015h

Eating oily fish once a week slashes prostate cancer risk

A report on: Fradet et al. (2009) Dietary Omega-3 Fatty Acids, Cyclooxygenase-2 Genetic Variation, and Aggressive Prostate Cancer Risk Clinical Cancer Research doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-08-2503

Ex-servicemen used as human guinea pigs by MoD scientists ARE more likely to die prematurely, study finds

A report on: Venables et al. (2009) Mortality in British military participants in human experimental research into chemical warfare agents at Porton Down: cohort study British Medical Journal doi: 10.1136/bmj.b613

27th March

Letting tea cool for four minutes ‘cuts risk of throat cancer’

A report on: Farhad Islami et al. (2009) Tea drinking habits and oesophageal cancer in a high risk area in northern Iran: population based case-control study British Medical Journal doi: 10.1136/bmj.b929

Causes in brief

23rd March

Floral, malty or chesty? Tea’s once again outselling coffee and there’s far more to it than one lump or two

“It’s not just the odd bit of flab – if you believe everything you read on the internet, tea can do everything from fight cancer to strengthen blood vessels, aid weight loss to sharpen concentration. It’s even said to prevent baldness.”

25th March

BBC facing viewer backlash over coverage of Jade Goody’s death

A BBC spokesman added: ‘Though Jade Goody was not the lead item on either the early evening BBC News bulletin or on the BBC News at Ten on Sunday, we did give the story appropriate prominence in our coverage.

‘Like other news organisations – we felt this was a big story both on the grounds of the level of public interest in the reality star, and the awareness of cervical cancer that her illness raised, and one which would be of interest to our audiences.’”

26th March

Pubs must offer smaller glasses of wine to cut drinking, says Government

“Last month, a report found that one large glass of wine a day can increase the risk of breast cancer by a quarter.”

(see Strange Ontology:Week beginning 16th February)

28th March

Beauty Bible; Beauty Clinic

“Using a sunbed once a month or so can increase your risk of skin cancer by more than half. When the tan fades, the damage remains.”

Noah’s a naughty boy … and we’re so thrilled, say parents whose child escaped deadly cancer

“The non-hereditary childhood cancer affects about 85 children in Britain every year.”

Other

23rd March

‘The Jade effect’: A legacy of other lives saved as hospitals report 20% rise in cervical smears

“Jade’s very public battle against cervical cancer had one unexpected yet positive outcome. Thousands of lives could be saved because of the uptake in cervical smears seen in recent months.”

Health news: Red wine can stop weight gain, anti-smoking drug is calming and band aid for chemo patients

“Acupressure wrist bands – which apply force to a pressure point on the wrist – are used to treat travel sickness.

But doctors at Liverpool University believe they could also help cancer patients.”

25th March

Potential cures for Alzheimer’s and cancer threatened by EU red tape

“New cancer treatments, which, like breast cancer ‘wonder drug’ Herceptin work by homing in on rogue proteins in the body, can also only be tested on monkeys and other highly-developed animals, the scientists said.”

27th March

NHS unveils ‘Robodoc’ the £1.5m mechanical surgeon set to revolutionise cancer treatment

“The groundbreaking ‘Da Vinci Surgical System’ has already been used successfully in 20 operations to remove the prostate glands of cancer victims.”

Twix bars, condoms and the betrayal of our young

Hidden beneath a piece on condom adverts is this from Amanda Platell:

“Lewis Hamilton is set to be our first sporting billionaire. He says of criticism that he is arrogant and superior: ‘I will take it on board and try to understand why it is being said.’ Here’s a hint, kiddo: perhaps people don’t like you because, the moment you hit the big time, you skipped the country to avoid tax. Now we’re in a recession, that bitterness will only grow.”

A couple of things: firstly, objections based on arrogance and superiority would seem to be conceptually distinct from objections based on tax status. While Amanda is right in suggesting that the animosity generated by the latter might give people an additional reason for airing the former, as indeed she is proving, her advice is flawed because removing one of the two objections does not remove them both. People will still think Hamilton arrogant and superior even if he returns to pay tax.

A second point is the injustice of attacking someone who leaves the country to protect their earnings. It is a solid Daily Mail principle that our tax money is routinely misspent (recent examples here, here and here). It is also a solid Daily Mail principle that people should contribute to pay for services that they use (recent examples here, here and here). So how can someone be blamed for wanting to pay their tax elsewhere, to the extent that they’re prepared to leave the country of their birth forsaking its benefits and services? It’s not as if he’s avoiding tax while living in the UK, and so not contributing to the upkeep of services he benefits from. Unlike Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail and General Trust’s chairman. In fact, describing his activities as ‘avoiding tax’ is misleading – Hamilton is merely avoiding paying it in the UK, it would be more accurate to say that he has chosen the tax regime he wants to live under. Which makes Amanda’s complaint look more like jealousy than principle.

Fred the Shred’s an easy target, but we should all beware of the nihilists of the Left… itching to reduce this country to anarchy

Here’s a cheery column from Stephen Glover:

“There is an emboldened nihilistic movement bubbling below the surface whose beliefs are profoundly anti-progress, as well as being injurious to the poor in the West and the Third World. In a way they are far worse than the old communist Left, which at least aspired to running an efficient state. This new lot abominates cars and aeroplanes and technology – in short, most of the achievements of the modern world.”

The attack on Sir Goodwin’s Edinburgh property was merely the first skirmish of a bigger war, one that threatens the very heart of our civilisation.

“Just remember that their prescription is not to introduce moderate reforms, but to pull the system apart so that, if they have their way, we will end up eating soya beans, riding about on donkeys and growing clumps of maize in our back gardens.”

The anarchists are coming. Be afraid.

There are a couple of things that we might want to consider before we start barricading our properties to protect ourselves against Swampy’s massed hordes. For one, how are we moving from a single attack on a media hate figure¹ to the overthrow of everything we hold dear?

“Listen to the statement made to Edinburgh’s evening newspaper by those who attacked Sir Fred’s house: ‘We are angry that rich people … are paying themselves a huge amount of money, and are living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless. This is a crime. Bank bosses should be jailed.’

Simple souls, no doubt. But also revolutionary ones. And they speak for a growing constituency of anti-capitalists whose analysis of the economic recession – if that is not too grand a word – is fatally encouraged by the Government’s and the media’s jihad against Sir Fred Goodwin and his ilk.”

So, Stephen makes two claims: that this view is revolutionary, and that it speaks for a wider constituency. Well, it’s not that revolutionary, it’s actually quite reactionary in as far as it is singling out a small group of people for special treatment as scapegoats, rather than addressing the causes of the imbalances in the system. It doesn’t overturn anything, it merely adjusts unfavourable outcomes after the fact. Revolutionary would be nationalising the whole banking sector and re-organising it as a collection of mutuals run for the benefit of their members and employees, for example. Retaining the same system with the same people at the top creaming off a little less is not a revolution. With that in mind, how broad a constituency do they speak for? Well, quite a large one – the Mail, among others, thinks it is high time we looked at remuneration.

Does this constituency necessarily overlap with those wanting to overthrow the capitalist system? No, not even Stephen can conclude that it does:

“A single attack on Sir Fred Goodwin’s Edinburgh house hardly signifies the beginning of mob rule”

So why the shoehorning? If you want to talk about the anarchist mob, why not just have a run at the Wombles preparing for the forthcoming G20? How can we justify the fear that the media is turning us anarchist?

“Is this really what the Government, even the BBC, wants? No one doubts that many bankers, Sir Fred among them, have made unforgivable errors. The sensible response is to introduce reforms so that the same thing cannot easily happen again. The anti-capitalist brigade wants to tear down the whole edifice. Alone, they were pretty harmless and peripheral. With ministers and the media acting as their helpmates, and declaring that capitalism has disastrously failed, they could become dangerous.”

Stephen is equivocating here on the idea of the failure of capitalism. Capitalism has failed: it has failed to pull the underclass up, it has failed to to prevent the gap between rich and poor from reaching such unpleasant levels, it has failed to provide stability or security to the middle classes. These aren’t things it was ever aiming to provide, or which, conceptually, it was ever likely to, but from a human point of view it is a system which fails to give us important things. This is not the same as the system failing in the sense that it doesn’t work – it still works better than controlled economy and people are still better off, in some senses at least, than they would be under anarchism or similar systems.² I have yet to find a media source or minister who is proposing an alternative to capitalism (I’m happy to be corrected on this, as ever). While they’re happy to talk about systemic failures, such as the inability to solve poverty, they do not talk about the system failing.

The media and government, rather, seem to be calling for exactly what Stephen is calling for – reforms to make the system a little less abhorrent. His conclusion, on this basis, is completely unjustified:

“Lay off the bankers. Stop exciting the mob. Let’s hear some robust arguments in favour of free trade, capitalism and open markets. They have produced enormous wealth before, and will do so again, while the policies (if they can be so dignified) of the protesters who will be on show in London next week would lead only to anarchy, poverty and chaos.”

This begs the question, because it automatically excludes reforms of banking pay as part of the solution. It excludes discussions of whether free trade does provide enormous wealth, or whether they lead for anarchy, poverty and chaos for some. These discussions are not ‘exciting the mob’, they are the necessary activities of democracy.

Stephen has conjured an image of rabid anarchists attacking the institution of private property³ to conclude that all arguments against the status quo are out of bounds and all critics are as bad as each other. The argument is poor even were the threat not so overstated. If Stephen wants to reduce the threat to bankers, there is no better place to start than looking at his own paper’s coverage of them. From there he can start thinking about how he can modify the capitalist system to be less piratical. Using the damaging of property of a media hate figure as a prop for the entire edifice of expropriation because you don’t want to discuss reform or your own approach to social problems is a much worse solution.

——————-

¹ Interestingly, Stephen feels that the BBC is largely to blame for the demonisation of Sir Fred Goodwin (“I freely admit that all newspapers have played their part in turning Fred the Shred into Public Enemy Number One, but the organisation which undoubtedly went further than any other was the publicly funded BBC, which is charged with being neutral and even-handed.”). Now, the Mail provides examples like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; and more throwaway lines as found here: 1, 2, 3, 4; throwing up your hands and saying ‘The big boy hit him harder’ in no way absolves you of the responsibility. This is a common enterprise across the media – the Mail has happily contributed to the construction of Sir Goodwin as a hate figure and the responsibility for people treating him as such lies squarely on their shoulders as much as anyone else.

² For very good libertarian and fraternal reasons, anarcho-syndicalism is still a ‘better’ system if you’re starting from scratch, but given our starting point in a capitalist system, there is no way you could achieve this without mass suffering. ‘Better off’ is relative to where you start, and from where we are, I’ve yet to see a better alternative to some form of capitalism.

³ Using Google Street View – “Incidentally, though there is no evidence that they played a role in this instance, Google’s new on-line street maps will be a marvellous aid for voyeurs, as well as for anyone who might want to burgle or damage your home. They show every house in 20 cities, including Edinburgh, and will be extended to many more. Where on earth is the public benefit?” – which Stephen wants to suppress, in spite, presumably, of robust arguments for free trade and capitalism.

I’ll be with my cat when he dies, so why do I let my mum suffer alone?

I’m a little late on this, but I came across Liz Jone’s Saturday column when I was looking for stories about cancer, and found it odd. It poses a question which, while it probably wouldn’t have occurred to us to ask, is a very, very good one:

“I’ll be with my cat when he dies, so why do I let my mum suffer alone?”

It’s a question I think Liz fails to answer, but in an interesting way. Take the cat:

“My cat is very sick at the moment. He is under the care of two vets – one holistic, the other conventional – and a psychic healer….I hand-feed him tempting titbits and give him Evian in a pipette and clean up his mess – he often throws up, like a cancer patient.”

Which may seem extreme, but I last came across Liz when she was in a famine-strewn part of Africa to raise money for donkeys, and in that context it’s actually quite refreshing. Too often Daily Mail columnists manage to take contrary positions in different articles on the same page, so it is good to see someone committed to a position across entire articles, months apart. Liz likes animals at home, she likes animals in Africa. This consistency is to be applauded. How laudable the is actual position she’s committed to is debatable, as are the methods she’s chosen in following it – I’d like to see the psychic healer work their magic on cats in some controlled conditions before I conclude she’s actually doing her best by the animal, or possibly some blind taste tests for cats to see if they can distinguish pipetted Evian from mere Highland Spring before I conclude she’s spending money wisely – but there’s no need to get too uptight about things. Liz is clearly caring and empathetic, which is a ray of light in some otherwise very dark pages. And beneath the seeming banality of an article about concern for cats, we have an article about dignity and mortality:

“Always at the front of my mind is that he should be allowed to retain his dignity – which he has, so far, just – and that when the time comes, when he has lost any point in being a cat, no longer has any enjoyment in life and is in pain, I will hold a conference call with his three professional healers and I will ask them to end his suffering.”

Liz is alert to the suffering and the dignity of her animal and will put it out of its misery when the time comes. Her mother, on the other hand:

“I hate seeing my mum with no dignity, but I could never help her end her life.”

And so we have this divergence, the mother on the one side, alone and unloved, not relieved of her lack of dignity or the pain of the memories that resurface through her dementia, and the cat on the other. So why this difference between them? Erm, not sure – the candidates are:

“I asked my friend Chris – whose young daughter is in a persistent vegetative state, who is blind and bedridden, cannot eat or talk, but who can certainly feel pain from an infected toe that was never the same again after she injected heroin into it – whether her daughter should be allowed to die and she fiercely answered: ‘No, of course not.’ Her daughter can still feel love.”

1. The capacity to feel love, which I would imagine Liz feels the cat has. Interestingly, in this respect it has the advantage over the patient in the persistent vegetative state, as that condition is marked by a complete lack of awareness; and:

“She is so selfless, she would be doing it for me as much as for herself.”

2. The fact that the mother might be able to desire death for multiple reasons. Which doesn’t answer the question either – in fact, it ducks it.It follows from ‘I could never help her end her life’, so is Liz’s reason for why the assisted suicide couldn’t happen, but at this point negates the point of the article, which is seemingly to discuss euthanasia:

“Patricia Hewitt, the former Labour Health Secretary, wants to legalise euthanasia. Would I make the decision for my mum to end her life, because she certainly cannot make it for herself?”

Now, Patricia Hewitt wants to decriminalise assisting suicide, which is different from euthanasia and which wouldn’t cover Liz’s mother since she is not capable of making the decision to die. The question of selflessness wouldn’t come into it – dementia patients don’t have the wherewithal to sacrifice themselves, even if they wanted to, which Liz clearly knows. The question is not whether Liz’s mother would want to die, but why Liz feels she should be treated differently from her cat and put down when life becomes too painful and undignified. Liz’s answer in the final sentences is to a different question from the one in the rest of the article.

The cat wouldn’t be covered by Hewitt’s amendment. Neither would Liz’s mother. The selflessness isn’t an issue, the capacity to love isn’t the difference. Having posed a question about euthanasia, Liz completely fails to answer it. Why does she treat the cat differently? Why is the mother not eligible for the peaceful death of the animal; or, why is the cat not sustained until the limits of its life? We still don’t know. Which leaves us one final question: apart from adding to the Mail’s growing dementia strand¹, what was the point of this column?

——————

¹ For recent examples, see here, here or here.

Strange Ontology: Week beginning 16th March 2009

A couple sneak in from last week’s list, owing to some slightly hasty compiling on my part. Cancer is this week caused by poor diet in childhood and night-shifts (possibly), but good news comes in the form of mushrooms (a first for this publication, I would imagine), HRT, weight loss and scanning to look for cancer. Breast cancer gets three studies, prostate and colorectal cancer one each.

While on my travels, came upon this. How exciting is that? That’s genius.

And here’s another interesting thing: spot the difference here, here and here. Tricky.

Andriole et al. (2009) is open access, as is Bere (2007).

Original research

15th March

Breast cancer is linked to bad childhood diet, study reveals

A report on: Jansens and Vanderloo (2009) Nutrition in Children and Breast Cancer, paper presented at ESMO Symposium on Cancer and Nutrition, 20-21 March.

16th March

Denmark compensates women who developed breast cancer after working nights… but Britain denies there’s a risk

A report on: Straif et al. (2007) Carcinogenicity of shift-work, painting and fire-fighting Lancet Oncology 8:1065-1066

Mentioning (I think – I can’t actually find a journal to match the refernce): Dauchy et al. (1997) Light contamination during the dark phase in “photoperiodically controlled” animal rooms: Effect on tumor growth and metabolism in rats. Laboratory Animal Science 47:511-8

Fresh mushrooms ’slashes breast cancer risk’

A report on: Zhange et al. (2009) Dietary intakes of mushrooms and green tea combine to reduce the risk of breast cancer in Chinese women International Journal of Cancer, 124 :1404-1408

Mentioning (I think): this.

Health news: New drug to ease agony of shingles, HRT cuts risk of colon cancer and a pillow that can cure acne

A report on: Johnson et al. (2009) Menopausal Hormone Therapy and Risk of Colorectal Cancer Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention 18:196

18th March

How four stones of extra weight can take three years off your life

A report on: Prospective Studies Collaboration (2009) Body-mass index and cause-specific mortality in 900 000 adults: collaborative analyses of 57 prospective studies The Lancet doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60318-4

19th March

Screening all older men for prostate cancer ‘could reduce deaths by a fifth’

A report on: Andriole et al. (2009) Mortality Results from a Randomized Prostate-Cancer Screening Trial New England Journal of Medicine doi:10.1056/NEJMoa0810696)

20th March

Billions of pounds spent on fight against cancer have failed to significantly improve survival rates, study shows

A report on: Sikora (2009) Was the NHS cancer plan worth the effort? The Lancet Oncology doi:10.1016/S1470-2045(09)70083-X

Causes in brief

16th March

Ask the doctor: What has caused my painful chilblains

“Helicobacter causes inflammation of the stomach lining, and this inflammation may lead to a stomach ulcer, which can turn into cancer. Therefore, the bacterium is regarded as a major carcinogen, like tobacco in the case of lung cancer.”

I asked my GP for a smear test SIX times – but was told I was ‘too young’ to have cancer. It nearly cost me my life

“Laura saw the first tell-tale signs of her cancer – which is most often caused by the HPV virus, a sexually transmitted disease which infects the cervical tissue”

17th March

Britain has a drink problem, country’s top doctor warns ministers as Brown rules out minimum alcohol price

“He suggested local authorities could refuse to license new bars and clubs in areas with high rates of liver disease and breast cancer, which are linked to heavy drinking.”

22nd March

Heartbreak as Jade Goody loses her cancer battle on Mother’s Day with Jack and her mum by her side

“Women can protect themselves against cervical cancer by always attending routine screening tests when invited by their doctor. These tests detect any changes in the cells lining their cervix early on, so they can easily be treated before cancer develops.’”

Other

15th March

Inbreeding makes pedigree cats diseased and deformed, animal welfare groups warn

“Cats bred with certain physical characteristics, such as flat faces and small legs, are at increased risk of getting cancer, kidney disease or joint problems.”

Reindeer and meatballs for dinner: Researchers promote Nordic diet to curb obesity

Another example of the Mail delving into research which is being started, rather than completed, hence its inclusion here, rather than in ‘Original research’. However, it mentions previous research: Bere (2007) Wild berries: a good source of omega-3 European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 61:431-433; (I think) Due et al. (2008) The effect of a high monounsaturated fatty acid, low glycemic index diet and a low fat diet on satiety, appetite regulatory hormones and glucose metabolism during a 6 mo weight maintenance period International Journal of Obesity 32:S204

19th March

Drugs to slow Alzheimer’s ‘just five years away’… but if they fail UK faces ‘disaster’ as sufferer numbers will double in 30 years

“Figures from 2006/07 show that £29.2 million was spent by the Department of Health and the government-funded Medical Research Council on Alzheimer’s, other forms of dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases. This compares with £246.6 million on cancer and £75.6 million on heart disease.”

Lock up your pies – here comes Sir Liam Donaldson

Another genuinely baffling piece, here from Keith Waterhouse:

“The good news is that Gordon has turned his stubbly thumbs down on a proposal by his chief medical adviser, Sir Liam Donaldson, to set a stiff new minimum price on alcohol.

Apparently, the alternative is that we are turning ourselves into a nation of drunks with sots on every street corner reeling about and yelling: ‘Hey, Jimmy, is it me you’re looking at?’”

Now, the Chief Medical Officer’s report is always a good read, as you would expect from the nation’s appointed medical expert. Reports going back to 1996 can be found here, with the current one being here (the bit relevant to Keith Waterhouse’s article starting on page 17 ). The case against ‘passive drinking’ is well put – Dr Donaldson notes the strong negative relationship between the cost of alcohol and its consumption, the differential impact of price increases on the consumption of light and heavy drinkers, the cost to society of drinking and a recent study by Sheffield University researchers into the likely effects of price changes. The conclusion is one that seems obvious – imposing an artificial floor on prices will have a large effect on those drinking cheap alcohol without adversely affecting moderate drinkers of pricey stuff. To take an example from Dr Donaldson’s report, the price of wine would rise to a minimum of around £4.50 a bottle, while a large bottle of cider would rise to £5.50. Readers of Waterhouse’s column, refined souls that they are, are unlikely to lose much on the deal. Meanwhile, ‘Binge Britain’ (eg.) is forced to behave a little more responsibly, not by having their rights or freedom’s in any way eroded, but through the regulation of the market (which we’re generally all for). Indeed, the position is identical in structure to Melanie Phillip’s planned re-regulation of drinking times, in as far as it hopes to give drinker’s less opportunity to indulge without taking their right to drink if they choose away from them, but actually with slightly less inconvenience to your average responsible drinker.

So what’s not to like? Well, this:

“‘Sir Liam Donaldson was self-satisfied to the point of complacency. ‘Tobacco puts nails in the coffins of 120,000 people a year in this country. Acting on second-hand smoke would put a further nail in that coffin.’

I have noticed that the more graphic the statistics, the less reliable they are likely to be. The National Guesswork Authority has no record of 120,000 coffin nails a year. Like all projected figures, they are better at guessing the future than recalling the past.”

Presumably, the point here is that we can’t trust Sir Liam this time when he says that acting on drink would be helpful because he made up his figures on smoking-related deaths. I can put Keith’s mind at rest here, the figure of 120,ooo deaths comes from an independent report from 1998, Sir Kenneth Calman was CMO at the time. Second-hand smoke is happily acknowledged by no less a Mail-friendly source than Cancer Research UK as a bone fide carcinogen. No ‘National Guesswork Authority’ is necessary – we know something causes harm, we know that harm causes deaths, we can reason that removing the something will avoid the harm and save lives.

This radical thinking seems to have passed Waterhouse by – he gives no consideration to the harm alcohol causes, just makes jibes at the Cheif Medical Officer:

“In case you imagine these were simply the ravings of a health fanatic – which, of course, they are – perhaps I should remind you that on such issues Sir Liam has form.”

Of course Sir Liam has form. He’s the guardian of the nation’s health. It’s his job. That’s why he stopped Keith from smoking in enclosed public spaces – it was harming people’s health. It’s why he’s seeking to find a way of stopping Britain from binging, as the Mail so often has it – that is also harming people’s health. You might disagree with his method, but how Keith manages to disagee with the motivation is beyond me.

Share her pain? No, this woman doesn’t deserve a penny

Even by his own standards, a somewhat repugnant column from Littlejohn today, which reaches its nadir about here:

“Where an earlier generation of public servant would have issued a heartfelt, grovelling apology before reaching for a bottle of single malt and a loaded service revolver, Mrs Shoesmith took the modern way out. She denied everything and reached for her lawyers.”

Although I can understand people disliking media hate figures, there’s something about wishing them dead which I find quite unsettling. It’s not just the implicit premise that justice requires blood, or the black and white claims of total guilt and total innocence which the desire implies, but the utter atavism of it. Leaving aside any questions about whether Littlejohn is right in apportioning blame solely and uniquely, and allowing a weak version of his claim that justice requires retribution, this is another human being he’s talking about. But for a slightly different conception of public service, it could have been him.

Hold that thought, because Richard doesn’t, quite, believe that Sharon Shoesmith is totally guilty:

“While the last breaths were being bludgeoned out of the defenceless Baby P, Shoesmith’s sentinels were busying themselves sitting in case meetings, ticking boxes, sipping fair trade coffee and scouring the jobs adverts in The Guardian.”

At least part of Richard’s claim is that the systems in place were inadequate and that by following them the social workers were inevitably failing to protect vulnerable children. Or, as he puts it later: “Theirs is a world where they are never to blame, provided proper ‘procedures’ have been followed, and even when their incompetence is exposed”. The thing about procedures is that they’re put in place to cover situations, to make sure that things aren’t overlooked. Without procedures, you have no way of guaranteeing that people are acting correctly, and no way of guiding them in unfamiliar situations. It’s harder than he thinks to blame someone for following a procedure that isn’t obviously wrong, one that covers most of the situation but still overlooks some things. It’s harder than he thinks to design a procedure that takes account of active deception on the part of the parent. But for a slightly different conception of public service, it could have been him.

Were it him, he would twice have gotten as far seeking legal advice on whether the baby could have been taken into care, and twice been told the legal threshold hadn’t been met. He would have repeatedly visited the home and found no trace of the two men who were living there who would eventually commit murder. He would have dealt with what seemed to all intents and purposes a co-operative mother, with a child who did not show the signs of violence that were so obviously present on its beaten corpse. He would have found himself trapped between a Daily Mail which believes in less State intrusion, and one that vilifies poor parents. He would not have found the evidence unearthed in a police investigation or the patterns which seem so obvious when you’re looking for them. It is very easy to fault procedures once they’ve gone wrong, and to sit in judgement from outside after the fact. It is harder on the ground, where all you have to guide you is a procedure which has, so far, brought you results. But for a slightly different conception of public service, it could have been him.

Were it him, his reaction would almost certainly one of extreme guilt and remorse:

“I don’t know how anyone could live with themselves knowing they could have prevented a vulnerable child meeting a ghastly death, but had failed to do so.”

We can be fairly sure of this, because of the reaction of Sharon Shoesmith, who it actually was:

“”You do consider how to stop it all, you know. You can just walk off the end of the tube platform and stop it all and I certainly did think about that on occasion, and there was certainly another occasion in the middle of the night when I gathered up all the paracetamol that existed in the house and there was nothing like enough.”" (“‘When a dead child is known to us, that’s the biggest horror. We knew the size of that’“, Friday, 6 February 2009, The Guardian)

But for a slightly different conception of public service, it could have been him.

The point here is not that Shoesmith is blameless or that Haringey Social Services are blameless. It’s more that Sharon Shoesmith is a human being, and that Haringey Social Services is staffed by human beings, and that sometimes human beings make mistakes, sometimes they construct mistaken systems, and sometimes the consequences of those mistakes are grave. That doesn’t negate their humanity, it doesn’t make them any less like Richard. Richard is clearly capable of imagining what it must be like to know that a child died on your watch, just as, in different circumstances, he would be capable of imagining how he would respond to a trial by media and summary breach of contract. Somehow, though, he doesn’t make the leap to imagining how he might reach that point. He just assumes that, because he has the knowledge after the fact, he would have had it before, that Sharon Shoesmith was uniquely fallible in a way he wouldn’t be. That is one hell of an assumption to balance a life on.

Strange Ontology: Week beginning 9th March 2009

The Mills et al. (2009) paper is open access. Cancer this week is caused by anti-perspirants and beer.

Original research

10th March

Can anti-perspirants harm women’s breasts? New study links deodorants to breast lumps

A report on: Mannello, Tonti and Darbre (2009) Concentration of aluminium in breast cyst fluids collected from women affected by gross cystic breast disease Journal of Applied Toxicology 29:1-6

(for Darbre’s other research in the area, see here)

also mentions: Mirick, Davis and Thomas (2002) Antiperspirant Use and the Risk of Breast Cancer Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 94: 1578-1580

11th March

Ovarian cancer screening step closer after promising trial detects 90 per cent of cases

A report on:  Menon et al. (2009) Sensitivity and specificity of multimodal and ultrasound screening for ovarian cancer, and stage distribution of detected cancers: results of the prevalence screen of the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS) The Lancet Oncology doi:10.1016/S1470-2045(09)70026-9

14th March

Just one pint of beer a day could raise risk of prostate cancer

A report on: Fillmore et al. (2009) Alcohol use and prostate cancer: A meta-analysis Molecular Nutrition & Food Research 53:240-255

Victory for Jade: Govt U-turn on cervical cancer screening for under 25s

Which mentions: F. Bano et al. (2008) Cervical screening in under 25s: A high-risk young population European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology 139:86-89

The plaster that warns you about staying too long in the sun … by going red before you do

A report on:  Mills et al. (2009) Flagging up sunburn: a printable, multicomponent, UV-indicator that warns of the approach of erythema Chemical Communications 2009: 1345-1346

The experts’ guide to menopause (and they should know … they’ve all been there)

Which mentions: Koomen et al. (2009) Estrogens, oral contraceptives and hormonal replacement therapy increase the incidence of cutaneous melanoma: a population-based case-control study Annals of Oncology 20:358-364

Causes in brief

8th March

The new bronze age: Fake it with a brighter shade of pale

“Not only did one unfortunate 14-year-old recently suffer third-degree burns after a mere matter of minutes in a tanning booth, but the sun’s link to skin cancer is well publicised.”

12th March

Leaky blood vessels in the brain ‘trigger a fifth of strokes’

“Around 110,000 people in England have a stroke every year and 50,000 die from it. It kills more women than breast cancer.”

Other

9th March

Concerns over safety of cervical cancer vaccine after 1,300 girls experience adverse side-effects

“Robert Music, director of cervical cancer charity Jo’s Trust, said: ‘I urge every mother to ensure their girls have the vaccine, because we believe the obvious benefits outweigh the risks. Quite simply, the jab could save their daughters’ lives.’”

10th March

Torch that spots cervical cancer faster than a smear test

Which pimps this.

13th March

Jade Goody battle signals U-turn on cervical cancer screening for under 25s

“A review of the benefits of cervical cancer screening for women under 25 in England was announced by the Government today.

In the wake of the Jade Goody cancer battle, the Advisory Committee on Cervical Screening will consider the available evidence of the risks and benefits of screening younger women, including incidence and death rates.”

A privacy law would suit Mr Mosley very nicely. Like his father he does not believe in freedom

Not sure where to start with this column from Stephen Glover, so I’ll bow to the obvious: the hypocrisy of a Mail writer attacking a man for not distancing himself enough from his father:

“Members hung on his every word, even if they were slightly discomfited by his endorsement of the far-Right beliefs of his father, the 1930s fascist leader and Nazi sympathiser, Sir Oswald Mosley (although the old man might have overdone it a bit, his son conceded).”

The late baronet Mosley lived a busy life – he served as a Conservative MP, crossed the floor as an independent on the Liberal benches, joined the Labour Party (in whose government he served) formed the New Party, who were corporatist, formed the British Union of Fascists, who were fascist, then, after the war, called for a single European state. He had a lot of beliefs. A lot of them were far-Right, such as:

“We will not tolerate within the State a minority organized against the interests of the State. Jews must either put the interests of Britain before the interests of Jewry or they will be deported from Britain.” (The Times, Monday, Mar 25, 1935; pg. 16; Issue 47021; col D – Fascist Policy)

which sounds not unlike:

“On precedent, even if the British Government pressed for his expulsion – which, of course, it would not, even if he started a bomb-making factory in Southall – the European Court of Human Rights would uphold his right to stay here on the basis that he might face unpleasant consequences if sent home to Ethiopia, which is no bastion of personal freedom.” (The Daily Mail, Wednesday, Feb 25, 2009; Torture is wrong but why, in the name of sanity, should we allow those who hate us to live here?)

They were also against “cheap slave competition from abroad.” (Moseley (1938) ‘Tomorrow We Live’, speech), which isn’t much unlike:

“Even in the boom years, this unprecedented influx put huge pressure on our public services and social cohesion. In this grim recession, the only responsible course for the Government is to shut the floodgates fast.” (The Daily Mail, Tuesday, Feb 17, 2009; The one-way traffic in British jobs)

They had no confidence in democracy, which seems a sensible extension of the Mail’s lack of confidence in our democrats, they were isolationist, like the Mail’s opposition to the EU’s open markets and they had strong Christian underpinnings, much like the Mail. It’s not surprising that the Mail’s position on them was not unfavourable – insert inevitable “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” (The Daily Mail, Monday, Jan 8, 1934; Hurrah for the Blackshirts) jibe here. One wonders whether Stephen is discomforted by his paper’s kinship with the far-Right views of Max Moseley’s father.

Moving beyond the obvious, how does Stephen conclude:

“Max Mosley wants rich and influential men to be able to control the way in which their lives are reported, so that they appear to us not as they really are, but as they want us to imagine them to be. A privacy law would be a charter for the rich and powerful – something that would have, no doubt, appealed to Sir Oswald Mosley. The son, like the father, does not believe in freedom.”

while also holding the belief that:

“I don’t want my e-mails routinely inspected, or my phone calls listened to, by someone sitting in Cheltenham GCHQ, and I am sure neither do you.

I don’t want to live in a country where that is possible. It would not be the country of our parents nor the one our forefathers fought for  -  nor the country that we were told, when we were children, that we were blessed to live in.” (The Daily Mail, Thursday, Oct 16; This will soon be a country more spied upon than Communist East Germany under the Stasi)

Why is it that rich and influential men should be allowed to have their lives pried into, while little people like Stephen’s audience cannot? Why should the Press have the power which Stephen would deny the State? Does Stephen not realise the obvious conflict of interests held by the Press, given its dual role in forming, as well as following, popular opinon? Judging by the following, he doesn’t:

“How very enlightened. Sweep everything under the carpet. Mislead the public. Don’t tell the truth. Pretend that men who are not virtuous are. Doubtless, Mr Mosley would extend this latitude to financial matters so that the secret shenanigans of public figures would go unreported.”

Virtue is a matter of private morality, it is not measured by external objective standards (unlike, for instance, lawfulness and honesty). If the Mail is seeking out the unvirtuous, it will find people who live what they believe to be virtuous lives. As such, its ‘public interest’ is persecutory, and aims at constructing a uniform conception of virtue. That’s not a public interest, but a private one – the homogenisation of private morality along the lines endorsed by the Mail. Whose interest is Stephen concerned for here?

“According to the judge, it is in the public interest for newspapers to report on public figures who indulge in Nazi orgies. But non-Nazi orgies, however degrading to the women involved, however perverted and nasty, can and should be enjoyed in privacy without newspapers having the right to report them.”

Whose standards of perversion (and so normality), degradation,¹ and nastiness are we applying? Moseley clearly thought that free, consenting individuals, harming no one but themselves were not doing anything untoward. The same appears to be true of the people he paid for 34 years for the pleasure. So in whose interest is the Press acting here? In exposing the acts of Moseley to public disdain and ridicule, it does the same for the law-abiding behaviour of a minority, indeed, it does the former through the latter. It is assuming a public interest that coincides with its own interest in rejecting this ‘perverted’ behaviour and uses this to intrude on the private sexual morality of not just Moseley, but any other law-abiding, consensual adults behaving in the same way.

This is not the pursuit of the public interest, but the legislation of private morality. In this way, it is clearly different from other cases that Stephen mentions (the hypocritical moral figure of the adulterous bishop or the cheating sportsman) and clearly different from the case the judge hypothesised about (in which Max Moseley completely failed to reject his father’s beliefs and pretended to be a Nazi – placing him in an odd position relative to his colleagues and clients). Indeed, the Press has a privilege, even on these reduced terms, that Stephen is denying the State – he does not want his private life intruded into even if he is suspected of criminal activity and one would have thought that crime would be the definitional public act. Stephen is already lucky to be able to pry into the lives of others to look for private hypocrisies, to insist on the right to judge private moralities is a step too far.

—————–

¹ And notice, here, that given the prositutes in question were regular contractors of Max’s able to choose the services they offered, Stephen is implicitly relying on the false consciousness of the women involed. Here the Press’ pursuit of the public interest extends to them determining private experience.