Exclusive: MPs were misled on alcohol deaths
Liberal Conspiracy has uncovered evidence that strongly suggests that a parliamentary committee which, last week, came out in favour of introducing a statutory minimum unit price for alcohol, was given misleading evidence on the scale of alcohol-related deaths in the UK.
We’ve found that that official government statistics for alcohol-related deaths, produced annually by the Office for National Statistics, have routinely been inflated by anything up to 1,100 deaths a year by the inclusion of deaths from liver diseases for which alcohol was not identified as a cause on individual death certificates.
One of these diseases, biliary cirrhosis, which accounts for around 160-180 deaths a year in the UK, was initially linked to coeliac disease in the late 1970s (Logan RF 1978) and was clearly identified as being caused by an auto-immune disorder by the year 2000 (Nakanuma Y 2000). It was not, however, excluded from official statistics for alcohol-related deaths until 2006.
However, there is also clear evidence that, overall, official ONS estimates fail to show the true extent of alcohol-related mortality in the UK by excluding mortality data for a significant number of causes of death in which alcohol use is known to be a significant causal factor, including several common cancers, road traffic accidents and alcohol-related violence.
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How the Tories u-turned on NHS plans
A few months ago I was hanging out at the back of a fringe event at the Tory conference, bored and exhausted and frankly wondering whether I could justify going home, when Mike Penning said something that suddenly made me start listening.
Penning, a shadow health minister, casually mentioned that a Tory government would take from the poor and give to the rich.
He didn’t put it in those terms, of course. But that, nonetheless, was the implication. The government, he said, had done all sorts of iffy things to the formula that distributes money around the NHS. They’d over-emphasised poverty. They’d under-emphasised age.
They’d done this for political reasons, to redirect cash to their own voters, and as a result a lot of sweet old ladies in nice, Tory constituencies were snuffing it with distressing speed.
The Tories would correct all that. They’d “de-politicise” that formula. No longer would those old ladies have to die.
So I looked into this. Yes, a press officer told me, this was actual policy.
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The Tory NHS: Lies, Libels and Price-fixing
If you were to ask David Cameron to sum up the content of the Conservative Party’s draft health manifesto in three words then I dare say he’d reply, ‘decentralisation, accountability and transparency’.
Read the manifesto for yourself, and you’ll quickly find three much better words to describe it, ‘lies, libel and price-fixing‘.
Now, admittedly, you do expect that political parties will be somewhat economical with the truth in setting out their manifestos, but by any reasonable standards, the lie contained in this manifesto’s introduction is a whopper…
We understand the pressures the NHS faces. In recognition of its special place in our society, we are committed to protecting health spending in real terms – we will not make the sick pay for Labour’s Debt Crisis. But that doesn’t mean the NHS shouldn’t change. When you’re more likely to die of cancer in Britain than most other countries in Europe -
You are not more likely to die of cancer in Britain than in most other European countries as a peer reviewed study of estimated cancer incidence and mortality rates in 39 European countries, which was published in 2007 in ‘Annals of Oncology’, clearly demonstrates. continue reading… »
Campaigners – get your hands off our lunchboxes
The process of producing a good lunchbox is one of trial and error; claim & counter-claim; constant negotiation between producer and customer. My brother and I weren’t easy customers to please.
For a few years we were quite happy with Dairylea in our sandwiches, until we discovered that Dairylea was cheese, and ‘Mum, we don’t like cheese!‘ We went our separate ways after that: Jon took a shine to ham & tomato ketchup; I developed a thing for Bernard Matthews turkey slices, which she sprinkled with salt and sprayed with barbeque sauce.
But it was always the deserts which caused the most angst. Did we want Wagon Wheels or Chocolate Rolls? Jam Tarts or Fondant Fancies? Yoghurt or fromage frais? How do you keep yoghurt cool without resorting to an ice pack which’ll make your sandwich soggy?
Were it not for love, my mother wouldn’t have bothered. Each tacky little Tupperware box we carried to school was an expression of devotion, and that she constantly evolved the menu to serve our fickle tastes was a sign that she wanted to send us to school with something from her to us.
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Daily Mail hypocrisy in slamming Swine Flu ’scare machine’
Six months ago Britain’s tabloids were tolling the bell of a looming Armageddon.
The Daily Mail headlines ranged from IS SWINE FLU ALREADY HERE?; and SWINE FLU: IT’S GETTING SERIOUS, to SWINE FLU NOW THE BATTLE TO CONTAIN IT, and KILLER FLU IS HERE.
And that’s without counting the paper’s first page warnings that “65,000 could die [and] one in three could get infected”, printed in the 7 July 2009 edition.
So you will excuse us if we laughed out loud this morning when the same paper published what is already on course as the most ridiculous article of 2010, a faux-outraged piece by Christopher Booker that states: After this awful fiasco over swine flu, we should never believe the State scare machine again!
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The Tory confusion over NHS laid bare
Here’s some text from the Conservative NHS manifesto
British patients should be among the first in the world to use effective treatments, but under Labour they are among the last. The current system lets Ministers off the hook by blaming decisions on unaccountable bureaucrats in NICE, the agency which approves drugs for the NHS.
That’s right, damn those ‘unaccountable bureaucrats’ at NICE! The Tories will ensure that accountable ministers will instead make decisions so you can punish them if necessary.
Quite uncharitably, Alex Massie at the Spectator says to that: “The best one can say about this is that it’s total gibberish.” Doh!
But let’s assume we want these decisions to be more accountable. A good idea in theory right? But what’s this?
With less political interference in the NHS, we will turn the Department of Health into a Department of Public Health so that the prevention of illness gets the attention from government it needs.
Less political interference? But I thought that was more ‘accountable’ surely?
Can we file this under the Steve Hilton award for ‘Progressive Gobbledegook’?
Revealed: Cameron meets NHS ‘advisors’ who want to completely undermine it
David Cameron spent some time in a House of Commons private office with Nurses for Reform earlier this month seeking inspiration to remodel the National Health Service.
We are told he wanted to discuss NFR’s ideas on the future of health policy and have them present a range of ideas.
We already know what Daniel Hannan thinks of the ‘60 year mistake’ but what does Cameron think? He would have us believe he ‘loves the NHS’ and it is ’safe in his hands’ and surely consulting nurses proves this? However it’s worth examing the people associated with Nurses for Reform, which is:
growing pan-European network of nurses dedicated to consumer-led reform of British, European and other healthcare systems around the world.
Stop supermarkets from wasting food on our behalf
contribution by Claire Spencer
Summits like Copenhagen can be frustrating because, by necessity, they place all the cards for positive (and negative) change in the hands of world leaders and delegates. The rest of us can only watch as our path to the future is pulled apart, rearranged and stuck back together. And when it all goes wrong, we feel more disenfranchised and powerless than ever.
But we do have power – and furthermore, we have the capacity to make meaningful change on an international level. Recently, I was inspired to act by Tristram Stuart’s Waste, an amazing narrative that uses reams of data to put our food wastage in a global context.
In the West, 10 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions come from producing food that is never eaten. In the UK, 752,290 tonnes of CO2 is used to produce our waste food, and 87,767 hectares of our land.
Personal profligacy is obviously a factor, and it clearly never hurts to keep an eye on how we all purchase, store and consume food. But it is a drop in the ocean compared to the waste generated by our major supermarkets.
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Doctors and nurses
If I hadn’t, a quarter of a century ago, in the heat of the moment, cast aside the class-based distinctions, built into the NHS rules, which said I must wait upon a doctor’s order in spite of what we both knew or didn’t know, that diabetic gentleman slipping into coma would have suffered brain damage. Perhaps he would have died. Class could have killed him.
I used to work as a nurse. One evening, I was just doing a last walk round the ward, checking on anyone I had particular concerns about, having a laugh with one or two of the regulars, making sure people were settled before the night shift nurses came on.
As I came to the bed of the gentleman who’d just been transferred over from A&E a few minutes before, it took me a second to work out something was wrong.
His pyjama top was soaked and for a second I looked to see if he’d dropped the water jug as he fell asleep.
But then it clicked. I grabbed a lancet and the blood test strip tube from my pocket and stabbed for blood, but even before the blood was on the strip I knew there was no sugar in there to change the colour; the sudden drenching of sweat could only mean he was in hypoglycemic shock and heading swiftly for coma. continue reading… »
Let’s talk about sex
The Government has announced plans today to make sex education in schools compulsory for all pupils between the ages of 15 and 16. Under the new proposals, all schools will have to teach personal, social, health and economic education to pupils from the age of five, but until those pupils reach 15 their parents will retain the right to withdraw them from classes. Staggeringly, considering the age of consent in this country is actually 16, that right currently exists for parents right up until their children hit 19.
Predictably, a good proportion of the commenters over at the Daily Mail have got their knickers in a twist about all this, as has Norman Wells, the director of the Family Education Trust, a group which believes that “behind the plausible-sounding arguments and innocuous-sounding words there is a specific agenda at work to undermine the role of parents and to tear down traditional moral standards” and that “Sex education is an ideological battlefield on which a war is being waged for the hearts and minds of our children.”
And equally as predictably, I wholeheartedly disagree. In fact I think sex education, or PSHE (or is it PSHEE now?) should be compulsory for all pupils, including those still at primary school.
That’s not to say that I think children as young as five should be learning about sex, but I do believe that even the very youngest children have a right to know some basics, like the correct terminology for parts of the human anatomy for instance, or the fact that it’s perfectly normal for both boys and girls to feel emotions and to cry. (I also believe it’s tantamount to neglect that in this day and age a girl of 16 can find herself pregnant because she “only did it the once and everyone told me I couldn’t get pregnant the first time,” as happened to a friend’s daughter.)
Prof. Nutt: Death by a bar chart
News update: Two govt advisors have now resigned in protest. Others considering the same ‘en masse’
* * * * * *
I don’t suppose there are many dignified ways of being sacked by your employer, but ‘Death By Bar Chart’ must be one of the least savoury ways to go. In his lecture to the Centre for Crime & Justice Studies, Professor David Nutt included this rather inconvenient illustration of the level of harm caused by a range of dangerous substances:
As you can see, Nutt’s table had alcohol and tobacco ranked as more harmful than a whole host of intoxicants, including cannabis, LSD and ecstacy. From this little illustration, a sprawl of tabloid stories was spawned and the government’s chief adviser on drugs had unconsciously secured his own sacking.
Given his stormy relationship with the Home Office, the sacking itself had an eye-rolling inevitability to it, but when you read the careful, methodical and rather unremarkable content of Nutt’s lecture, you’re really left wondering what all the bloody fuss was about.
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Spectator tries to airbrush out AIDS denialism screening
Yesterday I revealed that Spectator magazine had hastily cancelled its screening of the film House of Numbers.
In the spirit of openness and transparency that they constantly demand of others, the Spectator abruptly deleted the event page off their website (see the Google cache) and remained very quiet about it on their blog.
No mention of the cancelled debate and no explanation. Complete silence. Although you can still watch the video on the ‘AIDS debate’ on their website.
Last night I emailed its editor Fraser Nelson with the following questions:
Do you regret hosting the screening of the film?
Should the Spectator really be giving space to films that have been contradicted with so much evidence? Isn’t this reminiscent of the MMR stuff? I’m just curious as to what prompted you guys to screen the film.
No response at all.
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They hate our prosperity
The Legatum Prosperity Index is a free market think tank which ranks 104 countries according to nine different measures of prosperity.
There are some predictable results – four of the top five countries are in Scandinavia, and Zimbabwe is last, just behind Sudan. But it is interesting to see what they say about the UK.
The Daily Mail writes on a daily basis about a UK where business is stifled by regulation, the economy is burdened by a bloated public sector, we are run by a corrupt politicial elite, terrorists and violent criminals menace the law abiding public, the traditional family is under assault, ancient freedoms have been taken away, our universities teach ‘mickey mouse degrees’ and our health service is inefficient.
The research suggests that every single one of these are right-wing myths.
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We shouldn’t help starving people, apparently
Rarely can the standard neo-Malthusian rightwing orthodoxy on development have been expressed quite as bluntly – or quite as nastily, come to that – as it is in The Times last week: ‘Do starving Africans a favour,’ runs the headline over a piece by the paper’s former Africa bureau chief Sam Kiley. ‘Don’t feed them.’
Well, they do say the first rule of good journalism is to cut to the chase, and Kiley certainly does that:
The Horn of Africa is in the grip of the worst drought for 47 years! Some 23 million people are threatened with starvation! When you see children on TV with distended bellies keening over their dying parents, it would be inhuman not to be moved to tears. But do them a favour. Sit on your hands.
There follows a spot of quibbling over the statistics. The compassion industry routinely ramps up the disaster stats on its press releases, the better to gull the guilt trippable into emptying their wallets. That 23m figure is ‘humbug’, he argues. Nobody is in a position to count.
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HIV – AIDS denialism at the Spectator
The new editor of Spectator magazine, Fraser Nelson has a blog-post on the magazine’s website titled ‘Questioning the Aids consensus‘.
Like a true right-wing maverick who questions the consensus and asks why people are so “vociferous” in the discussion:
Is it legitimate to discuss the strength of the link between HIV and Aids? It’s one of these hugely emotive subjects, with a fairly strong and vociferous lobby saying that any open discussion is deplorable and tantamount to Aids denialism. Whenever any debate hits this level, I get deeply suspicious.
Which is why the below clip – from a documentary which The Spectator Events division is screening next week, called House of Numbers – aroused my interest. The film picked up awards at various American film festivals, but has since been denounced as backing Aids denialism. Yet the footage shows Luc Montagnier – who won a Nobel prize last year for his work on Aids – saying that many HIV infections can be shrugged off by a healthy immune system.
He finishes with: “let’s have your thoughts”, and promptly gets eviscerated in the comments.
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Time to ban junk-food ads aimed at kids
Companies spend an estimated £480 million a year on advertising products that are high in sugar, fat and salt on TV alone.
The fact that they continue to do it is evidence that psychological manipulation sells. Now that the government has decided to allow product placement in the film and television industry, this problem is only going to get worse.
Childhood has become saturated with junk food advertising. Do you remember the General licking his fingers on the Kentucky Fried Chicken adverts? The sultry Cadbury’s caramel bunny batting her eyelids on purple velvet, or Tony the Frosties tiger with his bright orange They’re Grrrrrrreat! smile?
Unlike most of the cartoons kids watch, the aim of these characters isn’t to offer education or entertainment.
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On progressive causes, Obama continues to disappoint
Yesterday’s Times reported that, in his speech to Congress, Barack Obama made a ’strong case’ for the so-called ‘public option’ (the part of his healthcare reforms that offers government-run insurance to people who cannot get affordable healthcare). Frankly, the writer must have been watching another speech. Here’s what Obama said:
It’s worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I’ve proposed tonight. But its impact shouldn’t be exaggerated – by the left, the right, or the media. It is only one part of my plan, and should not be used as a handy excuse for the usual Washington ideological battles.
Obama failed to give unequivocal support for the public option. In fact, he signaled that he is not really committed to it at all, and invites proposals to replace the public option. Those who want to scrap it will be emboldened.
This is just the latest maneuver by Obama to have disappointed the left. There is, also, e.g., his failure to stand up for a decent stimulus. And his heart-breaking capitulation on LGBT rights.
Liberals assumed, when Obama entered the White House, that he would be a transformational president, able to reorient America’s politics leftwards. That hasn’t happened.
And this is because Obama’s political strategising has been all wrong.
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Creating the ‘Prime Mentalist’
So. Rumour has it [well, Guido has it] that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is taking a course of mood-stabilising anti-depressants. Several blogs and broadsheet columnists of all stripes have gone public with the allegation that Gordon Brown is taking “heavy duty antidepressants known as MAOIs (Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors)”.
This rumour, along with what Guido reminds us are “the stories of rages, flying Nokias, smashed laser printers, tables kicked over and crying Downing Street secretaries subjected to foul-mouthed tirades”, have led many in the national press to suggest or imply that Brown’s leadership is inherently undermined by his alleged mental health difficulties, as well as by the medication he supposedly takes for those difficulties.
We have no way of substantiating this rumor, but let’s for a moment run with the assumption that Brown is taking anti-depressants.
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What’s really worrying about Tory health plans
The more I think about Tory health plans, the more they worry me. And I’m not talking about Daniel Hannan.
Hannan does worry me, of course, because there’s clearly something wrong with him (a case study in the dangers of under-funded mental health services if ever there was one). But he will, at least, be a very long way from anywhere he can do any real damage.
The people who’ll decide the fate of the health service in any Conservative administration will likely be David Cameron and Andrew Lansley. And what they’ve decided, it seems, is to keep throwing cash at the NHS.
That is what worries me.
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Why Republicans are bashing the NHS
contribution by Josh Mostafa
Once people have had a taste of a proper public healthcare system, they won’t give it up. It’s a one-way street. In the UK, which is in general more closely aligned to the politics of the US (a neoliberal consensus on the centre right) than the mainstream of Europe, the NHS is the one public service on which the political classes dare not ravage with market fundamentalism.
Even the Tories have to pay lip service to the NHS, even going so far as to pose as its defenders from Labour’s cuts: ‘Mr. Brown’s short-sighted cuts and closures are damaging the NHS – we must stop them’. There may be grassroots mutterings, but a Tory manifesto that threatened the NHS would be an act of political suicide, and the top Tories know that.
The American Right are therefore correct – in strictly political terms of ideological self-interest, of course, not ethical ones – to oppose even the extremely timid steps being proposed by the Obama administration.
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» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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