Tag Archives: eugenics

Coronavirus discrimination: surgery asks chronically sick and disabled patients to refuse treatment

People with serious health conditions and disabilities who are registered with a GP surgery in Wales had a nasty surprise in the post.

The surgery sent them a letter saying if they caught the coronavirus, the best thing for them to do would be to reject treatment and wait for death – and it asked them to sign a form confirming it.

Llynfi Surgery, in Llynfi Road, Maesteg, sent the letter to patients with serious health conditions such as incurable cancer, motor neurone disease, and untreatable heart and lung conditions, on March 27.

It comes as further confirmation that people with disabilities will suffer adverse discrimination in the coronavirus crisis – that government guidance is to abandon them.

The letter states that people with these conditions are “unlikely to be offered hospital admission” if they become unwell with coronavirus and “certainly will not be offered a ventilator bed”.

It continued: “We would therefore like to complete a DNACPR form for you which we can share with the OOH [out of hours] GP services and which will mean that in the event of a sudden deterioration in your condition because of a Covid-19 infection or disease progression the emergency services will not be called and resuscitation attempts to restart your heart or breathing will not be attempted.”

Going on, it suggested that the “best option” for patients is to stay at home to be cared for by their family with “ongoing support from ourselves and community nursing services”.

It listed “benefits” to signing the DNACPR form:

  • “Your GP and more importantly your friends and family will know not to call 999”;
  • “Scarce ambulance resources can be targeted to the young and fit who have chance of surviving the infection”, and;
  • “The risk of transmitting the virus to friends, family and emergency responders from CPR (even chest compression alone) is very high. By having a DNACPR form in place you protect your family and emergency responders from this additional risk”.

The final line reads: “We will not abandon you but we need to be frank and realistic about what the next few months holds for all of us.”

Wales Online reported on this scandalous correspondence, saying that the local health board had contacted patients who were upset by the letter, to apologise and “answer any concerns”.

And both the Welsh Assembly member and MP have issued a joint statement saying this was “not a standard letter” and the board is working with the surgery “to offer compassionate and sound advice in the very best traditions of our health service”.

You’ll notice that there isn’t a single line in these comments that contradicts the suggestions in the letter.

If anything, it seems the authorities have simply been embarrassed that it has stated the facts about government guidance on long-term sick and disabled patients who contract the coronavirus in a blunt way.

The affair seems to be confirmation that the government is indeed using the coronavirus to cull “useless eaters”, in line with the eugenics beliefs of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings, and the Nazi-style persecution of people with long-term health issues that has been carried out by successive Conservative governments over the last decade.

Source: Surgery asks sickest patients to sign ‘do not attempt CPR’ form if they get Covid-19 – Wales Online

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Coronavirus UK: Are the Tories deliberately trying to increase the hysteria?

Only one element unifies the constant babble about coronavirus from the UK’s Tory government at the moment: it is contradictory, confusing and seems designed to increase hysteria, rather than reduce it.

For a start: what’s with the policy of drip-feeding information via individuals or single media sites, rather than broadcasting updates to everyone in regular press conferences and on the government website?

Today we see Matt Hancock – behind a paywall – on the Torygraph website, contradicting the government’s announcement last week that the Tories would be seeking to establish ‘herd immunity’ by allowing us all to be infected, thereby condemning the oldest and weakest of us to death.

Here is that article in full. The Telegraph‘s owners should be run out of the country for putting profit before lives:

That previous announcement was made by scientific advisor Patrick Vallance. His latest advice is in The Sun. I haven’t seen it because I won’t willingly visit that paper’s website and the physical copies are only good to be snapped up by people who need toilet paper as a result of the government-induced panic-buying we’ve all seen.

Robert Peston has been parrotting information he’s been given. Did he even know it was accurate before he repeated it? My understanding is no.

Is it, as Carole Cadwalladr suggests, an attempt to avoid these leaks being attributed to individual ministers who can then be questioned over the validity of their decisions?

Worse still is the claim that people attacking this strategy are “politicising” the corona crisis.

We had this after This Site pointed out the political implications of the Grenfell Tower inferno, back in 2017. I was vindicated, of course – Grenfell has been a scandal that has rumbled on to this very day.

The simple fact is that coronavirus is already political. As Grace Blakely points out here, people have already died as a result of political decisions and the only question is whether those decisions can reduce the toll.

At the moment, it seems that Boris Johnson and his government, by flip-flopping through the crisis, adopting one strategy for a couple of days and then denying it in favour of another, are doing everything they can to create chaos, boost hysteria and ramp up the human cost.

Consider South Korea, the country generally accepted to have got the best grip on the spread of coronavirus. Here’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha explaining to Andrew Marr that testing people for the virus is vital… followed by a tweet showing that the UK government has abandoned that vital testing:

Is this a death sentence for old and vulnerable people?

Oh – and apparently the old and vulnerable could be arrested if they don’t quarantine themselves:

So it seems we’re being faced with a situation in which the people most vulnerable to the virus are being told to hide themselves away from society for weeks at a time.

What happens then? Will we see government vans roaming our streets and suburbs, calling for you to “Bring out your dead”?

There will be a knock-on effect again food banks, most of which have already been harmed by the panic-buying spree:

So the “Bring out your dead” vans will remain gainfully employed, picking up the bodies of the underpaid workers whose wages the Tories have been sitting on for so many years.

Evidence is piling up to show that the National Health Service – weakened to a constant crisis point by 10 years of Tory underfunding – is simply unable to cope with the extra workload of thousands (if not millions) of COVID-19 patients. This is the opinion of the British Medical Association, as you can see here.

Already Hancock has admitted that the service doesn’t have enough ventilators:

So he’s trying to buy some more, or get manufacturers to make them:

But it’s an ill wind that blows no good to anybody: the Tories’ friends in private medicine are set to rake in £2.4 million every day, loaning out 8,000 beds to the NHS.

That’s more than 3,000 fewer beds than the Tories closed between 2010 and 2017 (I have yet to find figures leading up to the present day)!

Meanwhile, the crisis is revealing hard truths about ourselves:

There is only one conclusion to draw from the above: Don’t trust the Tory government. You’ll be putting your life in the hands of people who simply couldn’t care less.

I think it was Tim Fenton, on his Zelo Street blog, who said Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and their cronies simply aren’t equipped to provide information; they offer information warfare – strong on falsehood and misinformation. And they can’t seem to stop.

Call me a raging conspiracy theorist if you like, but the thought has crossed my mind that everything we’re experiencing right now could be a sign of Johnson putting those eugenics ideas into practise – you know, the ideas about cleaning the gene pool of weaknesses and impurities for which Andrew Sabisky had to resign his job as a government advisor. We have enough evidence to conclude that Johnson supports those views, as does Cummings.

So we can’t trust the government.

How about relying on something we’ve had a lot longer.

Where’s our common sense? People have had to cope with disease epidemics – of this very kind – for centuries. Why not go back to tried-and-trusted remedies, at least while the politicians and the medics try to sort themselves out?

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As ministers distance themselves from Johnson, he’s not even denying he’s as racist as Sabisky

All Nazis together: unrepentant Boris Johnson probably doesn’t even wish he hadn’t pulled this pose.

Senior Tories have been working hard to repair the damage Andrew Sabisky has done to their credibility – but it’s hard when their own prime minister is refusing to deny that he holds the same racist opinions.

Grant Shapps was the first to claim that Sabisky did not speak for the Conservative government.

He said over the weekend that Sabisky’s reported opinions were views that “neither I or the government share in any shape or form”.

But when a Downing Street spokesperson was asked whether Mr Shapps was speaking on behalf of the government, he replied that Johnson’s views were “well-documented”, adding: “The transport secretary was speaking as the transport secretary. I have answered the question on behalf of the prime minister.”

Of course it is impossible to deny that Johnson has those views; he has expressed them time and again.

For example, on the subject of black people’s IQs, shall we consider Johnson’s novel Seventy-two Virgins? Consider:

https://twitter.com/TheLabourLeftie/status/1229684979279552512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

And of course Johnson was forced to apologise in 2008, after he wrote an article in The Spectator saying that black people have lower IQs.

Meanwhile Mr Shapps has been joined in condemning this viewpoint by Kwasi Kwarteng, according to The Independent:

“Kwasi Kwarteng broke with Boris Johnson – who has thus far refused to condemn the departing aide – by branding his [Sabisky’s] past comments “racist”, “offensive” and “reprehensible”.

“Calling for an overhaul of recruitment, Kwarteng said: “I think we should prevent racists from coming into No10 or wherever he was working. I think we do need to look at these processes.”

“On Sabisky’s past writings, Kwarteng said: “It was completely reprehensible – they were racist remarks.””

Mind you, Kwarteng never had a word to say in opposition for the whole of the week that Sabisky was in position. Funny, that.

And Caroline Nokes, who was already on the record about this, attacked the prime minister’s office for being silent over Sabisky’s “abhorrent views”.

Again according to The Independent: “Unfortunately we had 48 hours of almost complete silence and no comment from Downing Street, who could have distanced themselves from his youthful comments at any point, but they chose not to do so.”

Nokes also said: “I think you want to have exciting ideas and energy around policy-making in Downing Street, what you don’t want is racism, sexism and the sort of abhorrent ideas that were present in this young man’s tweets.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what is in Downing Street – and will continue to be, for as long as Boris Johnson remains in office as prime minister.

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This fascist is Boris Johnson’s latest employee. If anyone complains, remind them who voted for him

Dominic Cummings did ask for “weirdos” – and that’s exactly what he’s giving us in the former of his fascist advisor Andrew Sabisky.

This maniac was handed a job by Boris Johnson, and has been sitting in on government briefings for a week already. His known beliefs, preferences and pronouncements should tell you everything you need to know about the direction of Mr Cummings’s government.

(Let’s be honest: Boris Johnson is just a figurehead and has been completely sidelined from policy management. The UK is being run by an unelected far-right extremist and now – it seems clear – his fascist helper.)

Consider:

That’s right: Sabisky wanted to sterilise poor people. According to the Huffington Post, he sent that comment to a website run by Cummings – who seems to share the same leanings.

There’s more:

Oh, and he thinks taking an allegedly brain-enhancing drug called Modafinil is “worth a dead kid”. According to the Daily Mail:

“In a 2016 interview Mr Sabisky talks about modafinil – a drug usually used to tackle sleepiness due to narcolepsy but often used as a brain-enhancer.

“Mr Sabisky – who calls himself a ‘super forecaster’ – addressed the drug’s side effects in children which includes a higher risk of Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a life-threatening condition in which a person’s skin dies and falls off.

“He told an interview with School’s Week: ‘From a societal perspective the benefits of giving everyone modafinil once a week are probably worth a dead kid once a year.’

“In the same interview, he said: ‘Eugenics are about selecting “for” good things.”

Eugenics – the policy of selective breeding to enhance some genetic traits and reduce others – was a prominent Nazi policy.

Oh, and he’s a sexist too: “Mr Sabisky Tweeted: ‘I am always straight up in saying that women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s.'”

The Mail on Sunday also reported that Sabisky did not agree that female genital mutilation (FGM) was a scandal.

“It is still unclear to what extent FGM represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins,” he wrote.

“Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic.”

This is the direction of your government.

Fortunately, someone in the train-wreck that we still call the Labour Party has got their act together enough to call for Sabisky’s removal – before he can do serious harm.

According to the Huffington Post (again): “Shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett said: “There are really no words to describe Boris Johnson’s appointment as one of his senior advisers a man who is on record as supporting the forced sterilisation of people he considers not worthy. He must of course be removed from this position immediately.”

“Number 10 has declined to comment.”

And there’s your problem.

Number 10 doesn’t have to comment – or do anything at all about this – because the UK electorate voted the Conservatives back into power with a thumping great majority, so the Conservatives are going to use it to give us a great big thumping.

With Cummings and Sabisky in the driving seat, you’d better get ready for perverse levels of oppression.

And if any Tory voter turns to you and complains, just remind them:

You voted for this. Own it.

This joke at UKIP leader’s expense is so wrong it’s good

Henry Bolton with Jo Marney [Image from Twitter].

Here you go:

Of course, this is on the day Princess Eugenie announced her engagement.

UKIP leader Henry Bolton has reportedly split from Jo Marney – and his party is trying to split from him (except he is refusing to go).

But if the claims about her social media life are correct, then calling her “Princess Eugenics” isn’t too far from the mark.

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Tory austerity may be responsible for one of history’s worst genocides

[Image: @ukdemockery.]


People really do have short memories.

Prominent in some news media at the moment is a report in the British Medical Journal that health and social care spending cuts by the Conservatives in government since 2010 have led to 120,000 excess – read “needless” – deaths.

The BMJ states:

“The squeeze on public finances since 2010 is linked to nearly 120,000 excess deaths in England, with the over 60s and care home residents bearing the brunt, reveals the first study of its kind, published in the online journal BMJ Open.

“The critical factor in these figures may be changes in nurse numbers, say the researchers, who warn that there could be an additional toll of up to 100 deaths every day from now on in.

“Between 2010 and 2014, the NHS in England has only had a real term annual increase in government funding of 1.3 per cent, despite rising patient demand and healthcare costs.

“And real term spend on social care has fallen by 1.19 per cent every year during the same period, despite a significant projected increase in the numbers of over 85s–those most likely to need social care–from 1.6 million in 2015 to 1.8 million in 2020, say the researchers.

“The spending restraints were associated with 45,368 excess deaths between 2010 and 2014 compared with equivalent trends before 2010.

“Most of these deaths were among the over 60s and care home residents. And every £10 drop in spend per head on social care was associated with five extra care home deaths per 100,000 of the population, the analysis showed.

“These associations remained after further detailed analysis and taking account of global and national economic factors.

“Changes in the numbers of hospital and community nurses were the most salient factors in the associations found between spend and care home deaths. From 2001 to 2010 nurse numbers rose by an average of 1.61% every year, but from 2010 to 2014 rose by just 0.07%–20 times lower than in the previous decade.

“On the basis of the trends between 2009 and 2014, the researchers estimate that an extra 152,141 people could die between 2015 and 2020, equivalent to nearly 100 extra deaths every day.

“The funds needed to close this ‘mortality gap’ would be £6.3 billion every year, or a total of £25.3 billion, they calculate.”

That’s nearly 200,000 people likely to have died needlessly between 2010 and 2020, due to Tory cuts in social care, and affecting mostly people aged over 60 and care home residents.

Those figures are bad enough – but we seem to have forgotten the deaths caused by the Department for Work and Pensions. Remember them?

Back in 2015, when my Freedom of Information request about the number of sickness benefit claimants who had died was finally honoured, we discovered that 2,400 ESA claimants had died within two weeks of being found fit for work. That was the headline figure, but it didn’t tell the whole story because it referred only to a two-week period when the DWP recorded what happened to these people, and only to those who had been found fit for work.

But we have a plethora of evidence that people have died after that two-week period, when the DWP had ceased monitoring their condition. This site has covered dozens – perhaps hundreds – of stories about such people.

And consider this: The number of claimants of any kind of incapacity benefit who died between January 2011 and the end of February 2014 was 91,740. It’s true that many of these people may have been likely to die in any case, due to the seriousness of their health condition.

But we know that the frequency of these deaths increased from 32 per day between January and November 2011, to 79.5 per day between January 2011 and February 2014. That’s a huge increase, for which no explanation has been put forward.

Evidence that the DWP tried to withhold from its response to my FoI request showed that fewer claimants died after the DWP suspended its intrusive and stressful repeat assessments of claimants’ capability for work.

The Work Capability Assessment itself caused a massive increase in mental health problems among benefit claimants who had to take it, leading to 590 suicides in a period covered by an Oxford University and Liverpool University report.

And claimants of both ESA and PIP, who admit they have mental health problems during the assessment, are routinely asked why they have not committed suicide in a modern-day permutation of the practice known as “chequebook euthanasia”.

Put all that together and the total – from deaths caused by austerity cuts in the Department of Health and just the sickness and disability component of the Department for Work and Pensions’ workload – must be a national scandal.

Several commentators have pointed out that the deaths are concentrated among the old and the sick or disabled, and have questioned whether they are evidence of eugenics-based social engineering by Conservatives including David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May.

I seem to recall, in previous articles, comparing Tory austerity deaths to the “harrying of the north”, in which William the Conqueror’s forces killed around 100,000 people after he took the English throne in 1066. This now seems a pitifully low estimate.

It’s time to be honest: UK austerity deaths are almost certainly causing one of the worst genocides in history.

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Were MPs right to approve three-person babies?

150203threepersonbabies

MPs have voted in favour of the creation of babies with DNA from two women and one man.

The technique would be used to prevent mitochondrial disease, which may lead to brain damage, muscle wasting, heart failure and blindness.

It uses a modified version of IVF to combine the DNA of the two parents with the healthy mitochondria of a donor woman.

This results in babies with 0.1% of their DNA from the second woman and is a permanent change that would be passed down through the generations.

MPs were given a free vote, because this was a matter of conscience rather than political allegiance, and supported the introduction of the technique by 328 votes in favour, with 128 against, taking into account support from British Nobel Prize-winning scientists and 40 leading scientists from 14 countries.

150203threepersonbabies2

However, the Catholic and Anglican Churches in England said the idea was not safe or ethical, not least because it involved the destruction of embryos.

This writer has doubts about it, too. Knee-jerk reaction was that this is eugenics – genetically engineering “better” human beings. But why should that be a bad thing if it doesn’t involve the deaths of people who were arbitrarily deemed inferior (as was the case with the Nazis)?

It is also interfering with nature – and do we really know what the results are going to be? There are unanswered questions.

That being said, if the technique exists, does anybody have the right to stop another person from using it – if the alternative is to have a child with disabilities and the attendant implications on quality-of-life?

Let’s have a poll.

[polldaddy poll=8629921]

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Has the Coalition set Labour an impossible task – to rescue politics from corruption?

Not a good egg: Ed Miliband was hit by an egg on his first campaign visit after returning from holiday abroad. The thrower, Dean Porter, said: "They do nothing. The government do nothing. The shadow government do nothing. I don't believe him at all. If you are poor, you are considered a burden."

Not a good egg: Ed Miliband was hit by an egg on his first campaign visit after returning from holiday abroad. The thrower, Dean Porter, said: “They do nothing. The government do nothing. The shadow government do nothing. I don’t believe him at all. If you are poor, you are considered a burden.”

Yesterday’s article, DWP denials: They would kill you and call it ‘help’ received an unprecedented reaction – considering it was only intended to prepare the way for a larger discussion.

In less than 12 hours the article went viral and galvanised many of you into vocal support, sharing your stories of government (and particularly DWP) ill-treatment and urging others to follow this blog – for which much gratitude is in order. Thanks to all concerned.

The aim was to show how low politics and politicians have fallen in public estimation. The general consensus is that our politicians aren’t interested in us. They make promise after promise before elections – and the party (or parties) in office often set up tax breaks for sections of society their focus groups have told them are needed to secure a win. After they’ve got what they want, they don’t give a damn.

Look at the Coalition. The consensus is that this is a failed government. That it has broken one promise after another. That its ministers are liars and its Prime Minister is the worst charlatan of the lot.

That its rallying-call, “We’re all in it together”, refers only to Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament and their close friends in the most lucrative (and therefore richest) industries, along with the bankers (of course), and that they have all dug their noses deep into the trough and are (to mix metaphors) sucking us dry. Look at the way Mark Hoban employed his former employers to rubber-stamp the DWP’s new plans for the Work Capability Assessment.

In short: That the Coalition government is the most incompetent and corrupt administration to blight the United Kingdom in living memory, and possibly the worst that this land has ever endured.

We fear that these tin-pot tyrants are carrying out a eugenics programme to kill off people who have become sick or disabled; we fear that their economic policies are designed to put anyone less than upper-middle-class into the kind of debt that current wages will never permit them to pay off – a debt that can then be sold between fat-cat corporations who will hold the masses in actual – if not admitted – slavery; that they will dismantle this country’s institutions, handing over everything that is worth anything to their buddies in business, who will make us pay through the nose for services that our taxes ought to cover.

And yet a recent poll suggests that we would prefer this corrupt gang of asset-stripping bandits to run the economy of the country (into the ground) rather than give Her Majesty’s Opposition, the Labour Party, an opportunity to restore the country’s fortunes.

Are we all going schizoid? Are we really saying that, while we don’t believe the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats could organise a binge in a brewery without stealing the booze from us while we’re drinking it, we do believe them when they say the current economic nightmare was because Labour mismanaged the economy?

(In case anyone hasn’t really thought it through, the current lie is that the international credit crunch that has cost the world trillions of pounds was caused, not by bankers (who have never been punished for it) but by the UK Labour Party giving too much money away to scrounging benefit cheats. In fact, only 0.7 per cent of benefit claims are fraudulent and, while they cost the taxpayer £1.2 billion a year, that does not justify the £19 billion the Coalition has given to its private, for-profit friends to make a pretence of dealing with it.)

Are we really saying that even though we all now know that George Osborne’s economic policy is nonsense, based on a theory that has been comprehensively rubbished, we’re all happy to give him and his miserable boss David Cameron the credit for the slight improvement in the UK’s economic fortunes that we have seen in recent months? It was always going to improve at some point, and the current upturn is more likely to be part of that kind of cycle than anything Osborne has done.

If we really are saying that, then we all need to put in claims for Employment and Support Allowance, on grounds of mental instability!

That’s not what’s going on, though.

It seems far more likely that the general public is having a crisis of confidence. As a nation, we know what we’ve got is bad; we just don’t have confidence that we’ll get better if we put our support behind the Opposition.

This is the Coalition’s one great success: It has damaged the reputation of politics and politicians so badly that nobody involved in that occupation can escape being labelled as corrupt, or liars, or worse.

And Labour is doing far too little to fight that.

A BBC article on the problems facing Labour states that the Coalition has sharpened up its messages on, among other things, welfare and immigration. The message is still the usual hogwash; the problem is that Labour has made no meaningful response. Her Majesty’s Opposition appears to have given up Opposing.

Is this because the main political parties are now so similar that Labour is now supporting Coalition policies? That would make sense in the context of statements made before the summer recess by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, in which Labour appeared to capitulate over welfare and the economy, even though the Coalition had lost all the major arguments.

When they did that damned stupid thing in that damned stupid way, Vox Political was the first to say “watch their poll lead disappear” – and it has more than halved from 11 percentage points to five, according to The Guardian.

This lackadaisical attitude from the Labour leadership has not gone unnoticed among the backbenchers and the grass roots, and the last few weeks has been notable for the rising chorus of dissent against Ed Miliband’s leadership. Some have described the Labour front bench as “Plastic Tories”.

Even Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham took a pop, saying Labour needed to “shout louder” and produce attention-grabbing policies by next spring – or lose any chance of winning the 2015 election.

Miliband’s response to that was to claim that Burnham was really saying the Labour Party was “setting out how we would change the country”. This is nonsense. He was saying that was what Labour needed to do, and Miliband rendered himself untrustworthy by suggesting otherwise.

It is very hard to put your support – and your vote – behind somebody you don’t trust, who seems completely unable (or unwilling) to fight your oppressor on your behalf; in short, someone who seems just as corrupt as the government in power. At the moment, Ed Miliband doesn’t stand for anything – so there’s no reason you should stand up for him.

What, then, should Labour do?

Easy. The party needs a clear, simple message that everybody can understand and get behind; one that members can support because it reflects Labour beliefs rather than whatever Coalition policy currently seems popular, and above all, one that comes from verifiable truth.

He could take a leaf from Paul O’Grady’s book. In a clip on YouTube, the entertainer says: “We should be vocal in our fight against oppression. We should let them know that we are not taking these draconian cuts lightly!

“We should fight for the rights of the elderly! Of the poor! Of the sick! And of the children!”

Rapturous applause.

Labour needs more than that – but a commitment to protect those who have been most harmed by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat doomsday spree would at least be a start.