The Perils of Campaigning

Last Friday, I spent the morning putting up posters in the Main St in Coatbridge. Today I walked through the street and they had all been taken down. But I'm not unhappy about that. Firstly, it means that someone is running scared of me. Secondly, the person that did it, was dumb enough to do it in an area that has CCTV.If the person that did this gives me the posters back in the next two days, I might not pursue it. If you don't, I will pursue it. You have been warned..

Once More Unto the Breach..

Some of you may have already picked this up via the North Lanarkshire Council website and Votewise, but if you haven't, there's a council by-election in my ward and I'm running in it. I brushed the dust off the rosettes and cable ties today and started the campaigning in earnest today.

Why am I running? A number of reasons. Health is not going away as an issue and there are big things happening right now, which will affect us for the next generation. Depending on which way things fall,it will either be very much better or very much worse. I'll be talking about these things in the next few days. Secondly, there are a lot of things happening in our area right now that are going to be extremely bad for public health. At the moment our council are attempting to build a school on an old town dump,they have allowed a company to dig an enormous hole in another dump at the top of town and it is open to the sky and they have just passed a planning application for an incinerator in Greengairs, just beside the super dump that the Scottish Environmental Protection Ageny is never away from. Basically, things are rubbish in Coatbridge, both metaphorically and literally, and it needs to change.

But there's a deeper reason for this. It is time for a new way of doing politics in this country. We are seeing the same old tired faces, the same names, seats passing from father to son. Politics needs re-invigorated with some fresh blood and fresh ideas. Politicians need to have to do more to hold onto their seats; they should not be a sinecure for the party on high to bestow on loyal members. We have proportional representation in Scotland; give it time and local politics should be like Australia's, where local councillors tend to be independents rather than party animals. I'm in the minority just now, but in ten, fifteen years people like me will be the norm. We will compete. We will go round doors. We will know the people in our area. And we will be directly accountable to them; our loyalties will not be split between party and constituents. That's the future and it's time to embrace it.

She Must Be Mad (2)

Yep, wrote another letter to the Herald and it was published today. You can read it here. It's all about why we should not introduce an assisted dying law..

Swine Flew?

Everyone else has written about swine flu this week. I feel a reluctance to do so, really because we're at the eye of the storm here in Monklands and there's actually very little indication that there's much going on. Half of Monklands hospital has been cordoned off, there are taxi drivers going round with face masks and Dettol sprays and the local papers for once have had some decent news; it's not every day that a potential pandemic comes to your front door. But apart from that, we are not in the grip of fear. We are not panicking. Maybe we're just a little slow, but it all seems rather unreal.

My head tells me that the government are right to prepare. Since the introduction of xenotransplantation, (using animal parts for transplant in humans), there has been a debate about whether we will become more susceptible to animal disease. It was also part of the debate of the hybrid embryo bill, where scientists would be deriving stem cell lines from animal/human hybrids. But at the moment, there is a grey calm hanging over everything and Monklands is taking its place in the media sun with a phlegmatic shrug.

I just hope this post does not turn out to be like the postcard a Russian sent his relatives in Britain in October 1917;

'There's been some trouble in the streets, but there's nothing to worry about.'

Indeed.

Oops, I just sneezed...

Is There a Split in Beeb Editorial Policy?

Something very odd happened today on the Six O'Clock News.

The normal procedure for the news, is that they do a trailer of the three leading stories in order, during the title sequence. They then report those three stories in that sequence when they go to the newsreader in the studio.

Only that didn't happen today. They reported the three main stories, and then they did the second and third stories first of all, then did the first story third.

So what, you might ask. Well, this was the first story, and as I've been pointing out for the past few weeks, there seems to be editorial pressure on stories of this type; Stafford disappeared off the radar with just a little less than indecent haste, and so did the story of the six people with learning disabilities that died of neglect in hospital. Btw, the other stories were nothing special; one was a story on the financial crisis, and the other was on the mass walkout at the UN when the Iranian president called Israel racist. Important, but not worth disrupting a news bulletin for.

So what's going on? Who's putting the pressure on the Beeb and are they finally resisting it? We'll have to wait and see. I'm just glad that this stuff is finally getting reported.

How Good (Looking) is Your Doc?

This has just got to be an April Fool, but it gives me an excuse to put up a picture of George Clooney (sigh..)

Martin Ryan - What Now for the Mental Capacity Act?

Now that I've calmed down a bit, I've had a look at the six cases involved in the Ombudsman's investigation. They are all appalling, but one that strikes me is the case of Martin Ryan, a 43 year old who had Down's. He was taken into hospital following a stroke, and as is normal in stroke, was unable to swallow food or fluids because stroke tends to paralyse the throat muscles. The usual procedure is to attach a drip or peg for feeding, but this did not happen. Instead Martin had a nil by mouth instruction placed on his case, and he was left without food for 26 days. By the time other staff were alerted to his case and had arranged an operating space to insert a peg, Martin had developed pnuemonia. He died shortly afterwards. The Ombudsman ruled in his parents' favour and awarded £40 000 compensation. However, the staff involved were not named in the report and if his parents take this to court, they could have a fight on their hands. That is because of the Mental Capacity Act and what it has to say about food and fluids provided by intravenous means.

The Mental Capacity Act came into law in 2007. Initially it had started off as a bill with wide support, because it sought to provide advocates for people who were mentally incapacitated. As the bill progressed however, more bits were added to it. Two proposals attracted a great deal of controversy. One was that permission could be given for medical research to be carried out on the mentally incapacitated if it benefited them or the disease that they suffered from. All attempts to change 'or' to 'and', failed. The second proposal that caused a huge reaction was the proposal to redefine intravenous food and fluids from 'basic care' to 'medical treatment.' This meant that drips and the like were redefined as medication and therefore could be administered or withdrawn as such; it was no longer a sine qua non under the terms of basic care.

The case that fronted this debate was that of Tony Bland, who was in PVS for four years after the Hillsborough disaster, and the idea of this legislation was to allow those in PVS to die, if that was in their 'best interests'. But those who were opposed to the bill pointed out that in the case of stroke, where someone could not swallow and could not articulate what they wanted, that this legislation could be abused. The non-treatment of elderly people with stroke by leaving them without a drip was becoming increasingly common in hospitals and it was felt that this legislation would give legitimacy to this kind of abuse. I fear that that is exactly what happened to Martin Evans. The fact that he was 43 with Down's would have militated against him, because the average age of death for someone with Down's is 50. The report states that because he had learning difficulties, the staff felt that they would not be able to attach feeding apparatus. But they didn't even try, not once.
He was not even administed aspirin, which is a standard treatment for stroke.

Now here's the problem. This happened in 2005, so a court might rule that the law re drips as basic care comes into play, and that therefore the law was broken. But if a court uses the Mental Capacity act, then it can be argued completely differently. The drip is medical treatment, so there is no legal compulsion for its provision. The staff might argue that it was in Martin's 'best interests' to avoid the possible distress that trying to fit a peg might involve for someone of his understanding. They might also point out that he was 43 and old by Down's standards and treating him for his stroke was not in his 'best interests' either. Which just goes to show what a total crock of s*** this particular part of the Mental Capacity Act is.

Iain Duncan Smith predicted in one of the debates that the Mental Capacity Act would return to Parliament for amendment. I think he was right and that the legislators need to close this particular loophole, or we will see more of this and be unable to stop it. In the meantime, I wish Martin's parents well, and hope that they are successful in their campaign for justice.