Alexander Tsiaras: Conception to birth — visualized

Check out this video on YouTube

Mark Reckless MP speaks the truth…

“Britain is more than just a star in someone else’s flag.”

Priceless.

There goes the currency…

I’ve been fulminating all day about BBC news online’s portrayal of the latest round of ‘Quantitative Easing’ as “Bank of England Injects further £75 Billion into the economy”, so imagine my relief when I read Dan Hannan’s analysis of this nonsense. George Osborne has let us down on this one – QE, printing money, whatever you want to call it, is like adding more water to already diluted cordial – it spreads the taste by weakening it. All the value in the money we had is now spread over an extra £75 billion, and that was already spread over £200 billion printed by the last lot. There is not one bit of extra value, so today anyone with any cash has very quietly been taxed yet again, but you won’t feel the pain until it turns into inflationary pressure in the not too distant future.

If printing money is so good for the economy, why won’t the government let all of us do it?

Stop Press… Someone who speaks the truth is on BBC News Online!

See here for Jamie White’s article, ‘Are Bailouts Immoral?’.
I particularly liked this bit “The monstrous quantity of debt in Western economies is the result of decades of deferring pain. Whenever an economic downturn looms, governments run deficits to “stimulate the economy” and central banks lower interest rates to encourage borrowing and investment. Public and private sector debt grows and the next emergency is even worse.”

Will you do a moral 180 in the next 30 minutes?

Watch this video and see if your worldview survives the 180 test…

Lancashire Police see the Light

Last week, Lancashire police visited the Salt and Light Cafe in Blackpool, but it wasn’t a social call. They’d received a complaint about offensive material there and had come to investigate. It turns out the offensive material was a set of Watchword Bible DVDs, playing with the volume down on a screen in the cafe so that, in time, the text of every verse in the Bible is shown at some point on that screen, and apparently some verses that were less popular reading to the homosexual community had helped one customer to leave with unresolved issues.

The officers talked to Jamie Murray, who runs the cafe, and ultimately advised him that he risked breaching the Public Order Act if he continued to play the DVDs, thereby censoring the use of scripture in a public place. When Mr Murray took advice from other Christians and lawyers it wasn’t long before the story was on the Christian Institute Website, and in the most recent Mail on Sunday, before going global.

As a Lancashire County Councillor, I don’t represent Mr Murray, but my constituents fall under the policies of the same police force, in which I was once a serving officer, so they are also at risk from such oppressive conduct. Hence I felt compelled to write to the Chief Constable, Steve Finnigan…

The problems of politically-correct policing…

…are well identified in this article in the Telegraph.

Learning more about local health

I’ve been in learning mode today, as under NHS reforms local authorities will have a greater role in how we address health issues, and the local Director of Public Health, and the estimated 4% of Health Service spending that is directed to ‘public health’ (keeping us well, as opposed to dealing with sickness), will be transferring to local authority control. So the aforementioned Director came into County Hall today to brief his new bosses.

I’ve worked with the Health Service for many years now, owing to my roles in crime and disorder partnerships and their links with, and occasional management of, Drugs Action Teams. At first I worried that I didn’t understand the Health Service, and then slowly I realised that hardly anyone outside it did, and precious few inside it too. Indeed it seems designed to confuse and obfuscate. The in-joke among Community Safety personnel was to call the Joint Commissioning meetings “spanish classes”, as it seemed we went there to learn a different language.

There are a few problems with how we treat health issues in this country. Firstly we have such an emphasis on a National Health Service, that there seems to be little in the way of local accountability. You may have concerns about your local hospital, or how long it will take you to get an appointment to see your GP, and you can complain all you like to your local Councillor or MP, but in truth they have very little say, and much less weight than certain health service managers. There is an “accountability and public involvement” strand to the new reforms, which involves more scrutiny or at least more reliance on it, but I have to say I am a sceptic. A year on the health scrutiny committee showed me little real accountability, and I’m concerned that unless it is radically different in the future then we will have dealt with a toothless system by merely providing it with more gums.

So a National Health Service works against localism and direct democracy. Perhaps as the police get a Commissioner to deal with crime issues and hold them to account, should we also have a local elected Health Commissioner, to bring a meaningful link to the people over the massive sums of money that are committed it the name of health care in his country?

One current concern in Health is the priority to tackle “health inequalities”. This isn’t simply about recognising that some people are healthy, and others less so, and if everyone were healthy they would be more equal – no, this is, in the words of one of the bullet points today “improving the health of the poorest, fastest”. I don’t know whether this is the manifestation of some well-intended charitable feeling toward the ‘poor’, or a reckoning that this is a way of investing in hot-spots which will return on the investment in a number of ways which would be more limited if the investment were in better-off communities. Perhaps it is yet another occurence of the idea that people who take responsibility for themselves, and achieve a basic standard of living, are not deserving of help, which must instead be concentrated on the victims of capitalism, who can be identified by their low incomes? How can we treat people equally if your health matters less to the government when you can be bothered to earn a decent income?

I am concerned that the concentration on ‘health inequalities’ is socialism in disguise, and brings with it the inevitable bad consequences of socialism, one of which is systemic inefficiency. Under this heading we may simply be investing in that part of the population most resistant to responding to such an investment, and achieving much less bang for our buck than investing in the more responsible. Decades of ‘regeneration’ programmes have left many areas simply dependent on regeneration funding, and especially vulnerable in times of austerity. Providing drug addicts with an endless supply of clean needles and methadone, telling generations of young women to engage in safe sex rather than waiting till they are truly ready, and flooding dingy health centres with posters and information leaflets to be studiously ignored by the local populace may simply be a way of spending money without having any real positive effect. Being poor is no vice, but neither is it a virtue, or always a matter of necessity.

There is a risk that, in pouring our health monies down the drain of a focus on the poorest, we will further establish a three tier system, where the richer can buy their way out of he health system, the poor spend their time trying to escape its attention, and the people in the middle yet again have the privilege of paying for a service which is not provided to them to the degree that they pay for it, and is simply another form of tax on responsible behaviour. As these taxes proliferate, there will be fewer reasons for anyone to be anything other than poor.

Free Gift for my readers!

You can be at the cutting edge of social networking. Forget Facebook and Twitter – I have invites for the beta test of Google+, the new social network from the world’s biggest search engine that allows you to be selective about who you share your information with, allows you to set up ‘hangouts’ where you can have video chats with mates who happen to be online at the same time, and much more. Click here for your invite (you’ll need to create a Google ID if you don’t have one) – and please don’t wait too long, or sign up if you’re not going to use them, as invites are in short supply at the moment.

Fed up of the EU

In all my days, I’ve never had a say in whether I want to be in the European Union and, as it happens, I don’t.