I can't add anything, so here's the article:

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1129827.ece

Charged for quoting George Orwell in public

In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big Brother Legacy", which were confiscated by the police. "The implication that I read from this statement at the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material," said Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor, wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were used in evidence under the Act.

Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically motivated' material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated area is not regarded as 'politically motivated' and evidence of conscious law-breaking."

Scotland Yard has declined to comment.

Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested

In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony Blair's Government has quietly and systematically taken power from Parliament and the British people. The Author charts a nine-year assault on civil liberties that reveals the danger of trading freedom for security - and must have Churchill spinning in his grave.

By Henry Porter
29th June 2006

In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.

Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair's Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman's permission.

The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.

On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. "If you will not fight for the right," he once growled, "when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always revered the ancient tradition of Britain's "unwritten constitution". I imagined him becoming flesh again and walking purposefully toward Downing Street - without security, of course - there to address Tony Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as the guardians of Britain's Parliament and the people's rights.

For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago as the embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of optimism in Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that respects neither those rights nor, it seems, the independence of the elected representatives in Parliament. And what is remarkable - in fact almost a historic phenomenon - is the harm his government has done to the unwritten British constitution in those nine years, without anyone really noticing, without the press objecting or the public mounting mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British democracy became subject to a silent takeover.

Last year - rather late in the day, I must admit - I started to notice trends in Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime Minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total surveillance of society.

There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts - at least 15 of them - and to write about them in my weekly column in The Observer. After about eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it be known that he was displeased at being called authoritarian by me. Very soon I found myself in the odd position of conducting a formal e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I sitting in my London home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation, the Prime Minister in No 10 with all the resources of government at his disposal. Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for action against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.

The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between the Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two other journalists and complaining about "the pernicious and even dangerous poison" in the media.

So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British Government, but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack the media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten something right. I might add that this column also comes with the more serious warning that, if rights have been eroded in the land once called "the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any country where a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security.

Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is, that ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of experts, which makes up one half of the British constitution - is often well concealed. Many of the measures have been slipped through under legislation that appears to address problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the law banning people from demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and search people in a designated area - which can be anywhere - and by antisocial behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone from a particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five years. Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - designed to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation - is being used to control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as harassment.

There is a demonic versatility to Blair's laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way they are being used. "What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming," he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up."

Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offence - the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the phone and internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence against him - house arrest in all but name.

Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is now being used to patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old graduate of Balliol College named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the direction of two mounted police officers, "Mate, you know your horse is gay. I hope you don't have a problem with that." He was given one of the new, on-the-spot fines - £80 - which he refused to pay, with the result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later the Crown Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic remarks likely to cause disorder.

There are other people the police have investigated but failed to prosecute: the columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging aside about Welsh people on TV (she referred to them as "little Welshies"); and the head of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who said that homosexual practices were "not acceptable" and civil partnerships between gays were "harmful".

The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting that my countrymen's opinions - their bloody-mindedness, their truculence in the face of authority, their love of insult and robust debate - are being edged out by this fussy, hairsplitting, second-guessing, politically correct state that Blair is trying to build with what he calls his "respect agenda".

Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few people being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite whirlwind who runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of increasing ferocity add up over time to a society of a completely different flavour". That is exactly the phrase I was looking for. Britain is not a police state - the fact that Tony Blair felt it necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - but it is becoming a very different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of Commons agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights and civil liberties, David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the terrorist threat. "The age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive government has always been to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify their actions," he says. "I am not one to underestimate the threat of terrorism, but I think it has been used to justify measures which have no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively." And Bob Marshall-Andrews - a Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on Blair's side of the House of Commons, is deeply worried about the tone of government - says of his boss, "Underneath, there is an unstable authoritarianism which has seeped into the [Labour] Party."

Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains: "If you throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will sensibly jump out and save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold water and gently apply heat until the water boils they will lie in the pan and boil to death. It's like that." In Blair you see the champion frog boiler of modern times. He is also a lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the processes of the law. In one of his e-mails to me he painted a lurid - and often true - picture of the delinquency in some of Britain's poorer areas, as well as the helplessness of the victims. His response to the problem of societal breakdown was to invent a new category of restraint called the antisocial behaviour order, or Asbo.

"Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are people whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2 am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a park where children can't play because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans hanging around.

"It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which the police could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve in each case a disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for what would be, for any single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they can now use an Asbo or a parenting order or other measures that attack not an offence but behaviour that causes harm and distress to people, and impose restrictions on the person doing it, breach of which would mean they go to prison."

How the Asbo works is that a complaint is lodged with a magistrates' court which names an individual or parent of a child who is said to be the source of antisocial behaviour. The actions which cause the trouble do not have to be illegal in themselves before an Asbo is granted and the court insists on the cessation of that behaviour - which may be nothing more than walking a dog, playing music, or shouting in the street. It is important to understand that the standards of evidence are much lower here than in a normal court hearing because hearsay - that is, rumour and gossip - is admissible. If a person is found to have broken an Asbo, he or she is liable to a maximum of five years in prison, regardless of whether the act is in itself illegal. So, in effect, the person is being punished for disobedience to the state.

Blair is untroubled by the precedent that this law might offer a real live despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle legitimate protest, and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to suggest that he was considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious criminals to "harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country". It was significant that nowhere in this rant did he mention the process of law or a court.

He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical context of the criminal-justice system. "I believe we require a profound rebalancing of the civil liberties debate," he said in a speech in May. "The issue is not whether we care about civil liberties but what that means in the early 21st century." He now wants legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human Rights, was originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested it as a means to entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.

Blair says that this thinking springs from the instincts of his generation, which is "hard on behaviour and soft on lifestyle." Actually, I was born six weeks before Blair, 53 years ago, and I can categorically say that he does not speak for all my generation. But I agree with his other self-description, in which he claims to be a moderniser, because he tends to deny the importance of history and tradition, particularly when it comes to Parliament, whose powers of scrutiny have suffered dreadfully under his government.

There can be few duller documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005, which is perhaps just as well for the Government, for both vastly extend the arbitrary powers of ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament. The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.

One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set its terms, suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and terminate it without explanation. Under this Act, the reports of government inquiries are presented to ministers, not, as they once were, to Parliament. This fits very well into a pattern where the executive branch demands more and more unfettered power, as does Charles Clarke's suggestion that the press should be subject to statutory regulation.

I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has been trying to smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just say that its original draft would have allowed ministers to make laws without reference to elected representatives.

Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the Congress in this manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet until recently all this has occurred in Britain with barely a whisper of coverage in the British media.

Blair is the lowest he has ever been in the polls, but he is still energetically fighting off his rival, Gordon Brown, with a cabinet reshuffle and a stout defence of his record. In an e-mail to me, Blair denied that he was trying to abolish parliamentary democracy, then swiftly moved to say how out of touch the political and legal establishments were, which is perhaps the way that he justifies these actions to himself. It was striking how he got one of his own pieces of legislation wrong when discussing control orders - or house arrest - for terrorist suspects in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated into British law under the Human Rights Act. "The point about the Human Rights Act," he declared, "is that it does allow the courts to strike down the act of our 'sovereign Parliament'." As Marcel Berlins, the legal columnist of The Guardian, remarked, "It does no such thing."

How can the Prime Minister get such a fundamentally important principle concerning human rights so utterly wrong, especially when it so exercised both sides of the House of Commons? The answer is that he is probably not a man for detail, but Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph, now a columnist and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, believes that New Labour contains strands of rather sinister political DNA.

"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in ideology - well, actually it is more Leninist." It is true that several senior ministers had socialist periods. Charles Clarke, John Reid, recently anointed Home Secretary, and Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, were all on the extreme left, if not self-declared Leninists. Moore's implication is that the sacred Blair project of modernising Britain has become a kind of ersatz ideology and that this is more important to Blair than any of the country's political or legal institutions. "He's very shallow," says Moore. "He's got a few things he wants to do and he rather impressively pursues them."

One of these is the national ID card scheme, opposition to which brings together such disparate figures as the Earl of Onslow, a Conservative peer of the realm; Commander George Churchill-Coleman, the famous head of New Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist unit during the worst years of IRA bombings; and Neil Tennant, one half of the hugely successful pop group Pet Shop Boys.

The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity theft, and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised database - the National Identity Register - will log and store details of every important action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped as someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance company, those details are retained and may be inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities, customs, and MI5, the domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the national system of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on British highways and in town centres, and understand that the ID card, under a new regulation, will also carry details of a person's medical records, you realise that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find out about the most private parts of a person's life.

Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as being about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being between £10bn and £19bn - few think that it will attack the problems of terrorism and ID theft.

George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of time. "You and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a terrorist isn't going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours."

Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and voting for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that we are going to create a society where a policeman stops me on the way to Waitrose on the King's Road and says, 'Can I see your identity card?' I don't see why I should have to do that." Tennant says he may leave the country if a compulsory ID card comes into force. "We can't live in a total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to disrespect us."

Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour's former home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute book of British law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is there for all to see. But two other factors in this silent takeover are not so visible. The first is a profound change in the relationship between the individual and the state. Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state's entitlement over the average citizen more than the new laws that came in at the beginning of the year and allow anyone to be arrested for any crime - even dropping litter. And here's the crucial point. Once a person is arrested he or she may be fingerprinted and photographed by the police and have a DNA sample removed with an oral swab - by force if necessary. And this is before that person has been found guilty of any crime, whether it be dropping litter or shooting someone.

So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no reason to be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference speech, Blair said this: "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first." The point of human rights, as Churchill noted, is that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict equally: "These are the symbols, in the treatment of crime and criminals, which mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in it."

The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the police support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes, but it should be pointed out to any country considering the compulsory retention of the DNA of innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of all black men are represented on the database, while just 10 percent of white men are. There will be an inbuilt racism in the system until - heaven forbid - we all have our DNA taken and recorded on our ID cards.

Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal critics of Blair's new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the City University, London, in April she gave a devastating account of her own party's waywardness. She accused government ministers of seeing themselves as the embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants of the state.

"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest standard. By removing trial by jury and seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by introducing ID cards, the Government is creating new paradigms of state power. Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."

The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people. "We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom."

Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of impending danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope from the picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young eccentrics swell and swell over the coming months, for their actions are a sign that the spirit of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead in Britain.

This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair

Charged for quoting George Orwell in public

In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big Brother Legacy", which were confiscated by the police. "The implication that I read from this statement at the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material," said Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor, wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were used in evidence under the Act.

Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically motivated' material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated area is not regarded as 'politically motivated' and evidence of conscious law-breaking."

Scotland Yard has declined to comment.

Enemies of the state?

Maya Evans 25

The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person to be convicted under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which requires protesters to obtain police permission before demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament.

Helen John 68, and Sylvia Boyes 62

The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of Defence police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US military base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or fined £5,000.

Brian Haw 56

Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating Tony Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being arrested, he refused to enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates' court entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in May.

Walter Wolfgang 82

The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his speech to the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That's a lie" as Mr Straw justified keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by stewards and ejected from the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.

I sent this letter today.

Dear Ms Hewitt,

As you appear to under the impression that the NHS is getting better and better, I thought I would bring the closure of specialist mental health physiotherapy services to your attention. I have helpfully cut and pasted the following from the Norfolk Eastern Daily Press. This is not a publication which sets the Government agenda (unlike such esteemed organs as the Sun and the News of the World), but it is highlighting a cut in what the government says is a priority area

Yes to staff, no to patients
MARK NICHOLLS

26 June 2006

A mental health trust covering central Norfolk has defended its decision to retain a physiotherapy service for its staff while axing a similar scheme for patients.

In a bid to cut costs as it endeavours to plug a £5.2m shortfall in funding, Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health Trust has come up with a number of schemes to save money, including the proposed closure of its physiotherapy department at Hellesdon Hospital.

Mental health patients, who relied on physiotherapy at the hospital with a specialist team skilled in dealing with such people, will now have to access general physio services through GPs and primary care trusts where they may face a lengthy wait of around 12 weeks.

Despite the cuts, the mental health trust has decided it is still cost- effective to keep a specialist physiotherapy service for its staff.

[snip perfectly reasonable explanation for keeping staff physiotherapy]

Mental health patients will now access physiotherapy through the same route as other patients, via their GP.

“The trust has taken this step because of financial reasons and cost pressures,” added the spokesman

Other cuts being considered by the trust include reducing the number of hot meals served each day, and ending free car parking and on-site hairdressing services for patients.

While the mental health trust has confirmed it is planning to close its physio service for patients in the next few weeks, primary care trusts say discussions are still continuing over how the physio for mental health patients will continue.

Clive Rennie, acting head of Joint Commissioning (Mental Health) at Norwich PCT, said: “We are currently in discussions with Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health Trust regarding cost savings to both parties. All options to achieve these savings are being considered, of which the physiotherapy service is one identified area. Discussions continue and a firm decision is anticipated by early July.”

The PCT says that as with other clinical services accessed via GP, the waiting time for community-based physiotherapy will depend on the severity of the problem.

In Norwich, the average wait for routine referrals is 12 weeks but those whose need is deemed urgent by their GP will usually be seen within two or three weeks.

This closure would result in patients with mental health problems being discriminated against. Patients requiring physiotherapy will have their needs met unless they have a mental health problem, in which case their needs will not be met. Mental health physiotherapy is a specialist service. Would you know what to do if a patient had a panic attack in your office? Would you know what not to do if a psychotic patient began to act upon his delusions in your presence? No, and nor would a general community physiotherapist. They can expect to experience those kinds of incidents a few times in their careers. Mental health physiotherapists deal with them every day. Treating a patient with back pain is one thing. Taking into account the anxieties she might have about uniforms, machinery, and even the way she is looked at is another thing altogether. No wonder general physiotherapists will treat the non-attendance (or other form of refusal) of a patient with mental health problems as a reason for discharge. In fact, non-attendance is a signal that something is going wrong.

I find it utterly reprehensible that the government will be funding ‘drop-in’ services for the working well, whilst a group that is already discriminated against in so many ways is being deprived of a vital service. As I’m sure you realise, these drop-in centres are lucrative cash cows for government-friendly private companies, pandering to those who aren’t ill enough or worried enough to take a day off to visit their GP. Patients with mental health problems don’t ‘drop in’ anywhere. They usually have to be coaxed.

More importantly, they aren’t vocal and they often don’t vote, so it is all too easy to pick on them. If this Labour government is serious about meeting the needs of the most vulnerable in society, now is the chance to prove it. It is time to recognise that the internal market you have created isn’t working, is obsessed with meaningless targets (does it matter if a time-waster with a cut finger waits for more than four hours in casualty?), and merely provides a get-out clause for the government – ‘it’s not us, it’s the Primary Care Trust’.

Your NHS ‘reforms’ and ‘modernisations’ are increasingly disadvantaging the most vulnerable in society: the elderly and the mentally ill. You must feel very proud.

Yours Sincerely,
Karen Field (ex-mental health physiotherapist, very ex-Labour Party member)

I wonder which would be worse: living next door to a paedophile hostel next door, or next door to a free-range chicken farm? That must be a tough one for Sun journalists to answer, given their preoccupation with paedophiles and bird flu (a paedophile with bird flu - that would possibly be the perfect Sun story).

This is one of those issues where I get into trouble, so I'll first off say that of course it is really sad about Sarah Payne, and all the other children who are abused and even killed by stranger paedophiles. But the way the newspapers go on, a person has something wrong with them if they don't think that sex offenders (not all of whom are paedophiles) should be branded and painted orange so we all know who they are. And then shipped off to live on an uninhabited island somewhere.

What none of them stop to consider is that not all paedophiles are known to be such, and most sexual (and other) abuse of children is perpetrated be people known to the family, or indeed family members. [Switches on 'old lady' mode] In my day, we were told about strange men, and told not to let anyone mess with our 'privates'. We were told never to get in a car or go off with anyone even if they said they knew our parents. Then we were left to it, in a dangerous world full of flashers and perverts. Except that we thought that was normal, and we laughed that younger kids should need a cat who couldn't talk to tell them to beware of the man with the puppies [switches off 'old lady' mode].

In a way, it is like universal precautions in hospital. Universal precautions means that you always wear gloves and pinnies for certain procedures, and for more dangerous ones you wear gowns and masks, maybe even goggles, too. You do it for everyone, so you are protected from everyone's germs. Periodically staff would moan and say they wanted to know if people had HIV or whatever. I always argued that I was happy that the level of precaution I took with everyone was sufficient to protect me from everything, so why would I need to know a person's HIV (or HepB, or whatever) status? It would make no difference to the barriers I was using. Actually, come to think of it, the people who wanted to know most were the ones who hardly bothered to use universal precautions. And what if someone was HIV clear, but unbeknownst to anyone had TB?

That's the situation we're in with paedophiles, I think. We're looking helplessly at the government and shouting 'protect us!' instead of teaching our children to look out for the signs of danger from anyone.

There's no need to go mad about it. When Little 'Un is in the bath, I'll periodically remind him that his 'jumblies'(!) are private, and they are only for getting out in the bathroom, the bedroom, and the doctors (if asked). They are for him and no one else, and if anyone else tries to mess with them, then he must tell mummy straight away. No big deal. He must hold my hand when we are out shopping because there are a very few nasty people around who might want to snatch him. No big deal.

The people whose children (often younger than Little 'Un) are running blythely around the shopping centre are probably the ones who want to know where the paedophiles are. What are they intending to do with that information? Do they imagine that paedophiles don't have cars, don't go to shopping centres, don't go on holiday, don't visit friends and family?

Knowledge isn't always power. Say you find out that a paedophile lives next door. How does that change how you or your child should react to him? Are you going to move? Maybe even unwittingly move next door to another paedphile who hasn't been caught yet?

We can't protect our children 100%, and nor can the government. Sometimes they have to do part of the job themselves.

I really am beginning to be a grumpy old woman. But here goes anyway.

'EFFECTIVELY'
Now I really don't mind this word when it is used in the sense of completing something thoroughly, well, and having the expected result. I am getting more and more pissed off when it is constantly used in place of 'in effect'. It's not even an incorrect usage, it just can cause confusion due to the double meaning. For instance, if we say, 'the government's actions have effectively privatised parts of the NHS,' this can either mean they intended to do this from the start and have accomplished it, or it has happened as a result of their actions, with or without the intention. There is no such problem when you use 'in effect', which refers to outcome only.

What is the matter with me? I am annoyed by something that is not even wrong!

So whilst I am in pedant mode, I might as well go onto another one that has me grinding my teeth when I hear it. Every bloody year on Big Brother, the housemates will talk about 'being up for nomination', when they mean 'being up for eviction'. Let me make this clear for all future potential housemates, for the sake of my sanity. On Monday, all housemates are up for nomination. On Tuesday they are given the results of nominations, and at least two housemates will have been nominated for eviction. For them then to say they are 'up for nomination on Friday' is annoying and makes my hackles rise. Should I ever be a housemate, I wouldn't be able to keep this to myself, and this alone would piss off so many people that I would be out immediately.

On the subject of Big Brother, Suzy is only 2 years older than me, so why does she act like my mum? She gives over-40s a bad name. And that is my job.

Ali Smith The Accidental
This one was brilliant, I was really surprised. I picked it up as I happened to see it just after some bookgroup people had raved about it, but I didn't have any great expectations, as I hadn't really been listening.

A family rents a house for the summer, but they bring their problems with them.

The book switches between points of view - the only slight irritation was one of the points of view where I felt she took lazy shortcuts, but that was a minor criticism. The characters and their situations were believable - even if some unbelievable things happened, I was very willing to suspend disbelief. There were a few points where I thought 'aaaaaah, yes!', and I like that in a book. It is really well written too -literary but still an easy read.

A lovely summer book too.
(86/100)

Margaret George Mary, called Magdelene
I absolutely loved Margaret George's Memoirs of Cleopatra, Autobiography of Henry VIII and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. Her huge talent is in her meticulous research (certainly in the Mary Queen of Scots one there is nothing that couldn't have happened), and the new light she throws on her subjects: Mary isn't a bag of emotions, Henry isn't a selfish despotic fat lecher, and Cleopatra isn't a manipulative whore.

So this was a massive disappointment. Mary Magdelene is as she is in the Bible and only in the Bible. So she's not a prostitute (that's not Biblical, that's Catholic), and she's not interesting. It's all taken Biblically literally: there's been no attempt at historical research and no mention, let alone integration of the many theories surrounding her.

Jesus is plastic and sounds about as inspiring as a limp cheese sandwich. The disciples are a mixture of varying forms of tedium. Only Judas shows any spark of life - so we don't get much of him.

It is all slightly more boring than an Anglican Sunday service. Without the singing.
(18/100)

Max Barry Jennifer Government
This one is an interesting contrast to 1984. It's set in a time when everyone is corporate, and takes their surname from their corporation - hence the title. Corporations have enough power to do anything to promote their products - even kill. The government, in comparison, is powerless. Jennifer has a grudge.

This would make a brilliant film, and apparently Steven Soderburgh and George Clooney have optioned it. Unlike the execrable Da Vinci Code though, it is written as a book and works as a book. It's a page turner that is also thought-provoking.

My only reservation is that sometimes Jennifer doesn't act as a woman would - well, not the women I know. Though considering she was written by a man, she's no more masculine than the women written by Kathy Reichs and her ilk.
(77/100)

George Orwell 1984
This is brilliant. When you first read it you are too into it to notice the excellence of the writing, and for me this was the first time I'd noticed how touching parts of the book are. The overwhelming dread will always be there, and this time through it is even worse because you can see our future there.

Winston Smith lives in Airstrip One (England). There is never-ending war, and also fears of a hidden and shadowy enemy - never seen but constantly on the telescreens. The Party and Big Brother rule all. Winston's job is re-writing history. Party members are constantly monitored and the majority of the population, the proles, are distracted by lotteries, porn and meaningless entertainment and news (ringing any bells yet?). Those who rebel are caught, confess, repent and then disappear.

There has never been a time in my memory when a government has been so like that of Oceania, when it can use the never-ending 'War on Terror' as an excuse to take away the freedom of the populace. There is more Newspeak and doublethink going on all the time. The only difference is that our government is much more sophisticated than Oceania's.

When writing in his diary Winston Smith notes 'Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.' This reading was the first where I'd wondered which we are.
(94/100)

NON-FICTION
Lawrence Gardner The Magdelene Legacy
This is really interesting, it suggests that 'Magdelene', 'Mary', 'James' and 'Joseph' are titles rather than names or places, and from that comes up with a picture of Mary as a leader more on a par with Jesus than his other disciples. Christianity of course turns out to be pants, but in a less ludicrous way than the Da Vinci Code.

Thing is, some of his history seems a touch dodgy to me, so I'm reluctant to accept it without further reading.
(54/100)

There's not anything you can say, is there? Suicide being called an act of war, or a PR stunt, is so ludicrous and so vile.

I suppose you have to spin things in your head if you are to somehow justify your actions to youself, let alone others. Detention without trial and torture are otherwise unconscionable (sp?). I'd love to hear these people's descriptions of Gandhi.

I don't usually blog at weekends, but I couldn't wait to tell everyone about Alastair Campbell's World Cup Blog, because you will all surely be as excited about that as I am.

It's anti-press, it's pro-Sven (the most crawly-players' bum-lick England manager ever), it's pro-Tony (the most crawly-President's bum-lick Prime Minister ever), it's pure Campbell, and I now have a reason to enjoy a World Cup (haven't done since Bobby Robson left. Now there's a manager who takes no shit from his players).

Unflattering photo adorning it though. I have some much better ones than that.....

Turns out that while we've all been laughing at Nikki on Big Brother, we should have been ashamed of ourselves. After all, she is suffering from an illness.

From IOL

Chicago - If you've witnessed someone become enraged beyond what seems called for, or have gotten unnecessarily angry oneself, you are not alone, researchers said on Monday.

Strangely, I didn't need researchers to tell me that. I have research tools myself which have proved invaluable in the past. They're called 'eyes'.

Sixteen million American adults, or more than 7 percent of the nation's adult population, could be diagnosed at some time in their lives with "Intermittent Explosive Disorder", a seldom-studied mental illness, their study said.

"If people think these explosive outbursts are just bad behaviour, they are not thinking of this problem as a serious biomedical problem that can be treated," said study co-author Emil Coccaro, a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.

Biomedical problem? Isn't that something you can treat with drugs?

Mood-stabilising and antidepressant drugs can raise the threshold of people prone to out-of-proportion rages,

Yeah, thought so.

and cognitive talk therapy helps patients recognise the triggers to their uncontrolled outbursts, co-author Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School said.

But hardly any one can ever get Cognitive Behavioural Therapy because of cost, waiting lists and lack of therapists, so guess what that leaves them with?

Explosive disorder typically shows up first in adolescence

Because until then we call it 'temper tantrums'.

Shame or embarrassment that follows an explosion of anger can deter sufferers from discussing the problem or seeking help, said the report published in this month's issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. Also, therapists can miss the diagnosis by focusing instead on secondary symptoms like anxiety or depression.

Explosive disorder typically shows up first in adolescence - age 13 in boys, 19 in girls - and can lead to depression, alcoholism and violence toward others or destruction of property, the study said.

In any given year, nearly nine million US adults are affected by the disorder, based on mental health surveys of 9 282 people conducted between 2001 and 2003.

A diagnosis requires three major episodes in a lifetime where a person became significantly more angry than most people would in the same situation. A severe form of the illness, where three or more rages occur in a year's span, can often result in assaults on people or damage to property, the report said.

And the biochemical part of this is....?

And that would be a cause rather than a correlation, would it? Mood and actions affect brain/body chemistry just as much as the other way around.

The diagnostic criterion is arbitrary and laughable. Typical with mental health problems - because they aren't illnesses, they are responses: to life events, to social circumstances, to personality and bodily problems. But let's label them and medicate them anyway.

And the more you label, the more you medicate. Hey! Everyone's a victim and no one's responsible!

Not so much 1984 as Brave New World.

The hardest job I've ever done was as a physio at Birmingham Accident Hospital: it was heavy work, you were constantly under pressure of time, and it was mentally taxing too. It was also my favourite job - although I wouldn't want to do it now.

Being self-employed, I do any old odd jobs people want as well as physio. I always put physio first, but if I've got time (I almost always have) then I do things like dog-walking and cleaning, ironing or whatever. Every little helps. So I've just come back from a full morning cleaning, and it is the most physical work I've ever done - I am knackered. Physio is heavy in short bursts - you hoik people about then you put them down. Cleaning is just constant physical labour. Physio - it takes time to see people get better (not long enough for my bank blance!). Cleaning is instantly satisfying. I really enjoy it. If only it paid better, I'd do it full time.

Ooops, missed this one before:

From The Times May 29, 2006

US study supports claims of MMR link to autism
By Sam Lister, Health Correspondent

THE safety of the MMR innoculation, the combination vaccine given to young children and widely supported by scientists, will be questioned again this week in a presentation that claims to provide proof of a link to autism.

Actually, this isn't quite true. The researchers are not saying that MMR causes autism, however, they are highlighting an area that needs more research, and replicating a finding that health 'experts' and drug companies said couldn't be replicated.

American researchers say that their study supports the findings of Andrew Wakefield, the discredited gastroenterologist who raised fears that the measles, mumps and rubella injection might be causing autism.

Uptake of the vaccine decreased sharply after Dr Wakefield suggested that MMR should be avoided in favour of single vaccinations. His research, published in The Lancet in 1998, detected traces of the measles virus in the guts of 12 children with autism.

The latest study, led by Arthur Krigsman, of New York University School of Medicine, involved 275 children. Serious intestinal inflammations were found in some of the autistic children and biopsies of gut tissue were performed on 82 of them. Of these, 70 are said to have shown evidence of the measles virus, which so far has been confirmed in 14 cases by more stringent DNA tests.

Steve Walker, assistant professor at Wake Forest University Medical Centre, North Carolina, who analysed the gut samples, said the work mirrored Dr Wakefield’s study. All the children involved were diagnosed with autism and had come to Dr Krigsman and Dr Walker seeking help for symptoms of serious digestive problems for which no explanation could be found.

The research, which is being presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Montreal this week, has yet to be published in a scientific journal and subjected to peer review.

Mainstream science has repeatedly examined the theory of a link between MMR and autism and found no evidence to back it. Supporters of the theory are accused of interpreting two biological occurrences as a causative relationship that does not exist.

No evidence has been found because researchers are careful not to do research that might find it.

Uptake of MMR, which was introduced into Britain in 1988, has improved in recent years, but remains as low as 70 per cent in the wake of ongoing questioning of its possible side-effects. The World Health Organisation recommends 95 per cent coverage, and the shortfall has been blamed for contributing to rising rates of measles and mumps in recent years.

A recent analysis of 31 MMR studies by the Cochrane Library, one of the most authoritative sources of evidence-based medicine, showed no credible grounds for claims of serious harm.

The study above has been criticised for not having a control of 'normal' children. I don't see that this invalidates it: normal children may have pollen in their lungs without bronchospasm - that doesn't mean that asthmatic children don't respond to it.

We don't know the relevance of measles virus in the gut, because the research isn't there. It is unlikely to be there any time soon, because drug companies and health chiefs are au fait with Tony Blair's policy of only enquiring if you are sure you'll get the outcome you want.

Two more similar gut studies are due out soon.

Someone just pointed this out to me on my e-mail 1984 discussion:

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really
talking about peace."

Remarks by US President Bush on Homeownership given at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Washington, D.C., June 18, 2002.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020618-1.html

Did anyone see God’s Next Army on Channel 4 last night? Almost as scary as 1984.

From Channel 4:

God's Next Army investigates Patrick Henry College (PHC), set up five years ago in Virginia, near Washington DC. Its mission is to train young fundamentalist Christians to become the next generation of America's cultural and political leaders. Though the separation of church and state is enshrined in the US Constitution, with financial backing from the evangelical community the college aims to 'rechristianise' America; to 'preserve the world from the sinfulness of man'.

PHC students are an isolated group who come from close-knit communities where everyone prays together and shares moral certainties. Most have been educated at home and have had no contact with either the social diversity or the political and intellectual cut and thrust of mainstream schools. Derek Archer, a prospective PHC student believes home-schooling has protected him from the 'moral decay of the world'.

Once at the college, the students ceremonially sign a covenant which commits them to a strict behaviour code: no alcohol, drugs or obscene literature; sex will be reserved for marriage; personal conflicts will be resolved biblically; the students will be above reproach, will uphold the tenets of evangelical Christianity and lead the nation for Christ.

Everyone at PHC, including the academics, also signs a statement of faith which includes these assertions:

The Bible in its entirety … is the inspired word of God, inerrant in its original manuscripts, and the only infallible and sufficient authority for faith and Christian living.

Man is by nature sinful and is inherently in need of salvation, which is exclusively found by faith alone in Jesus Christ and His shed blood.

Satan exists as a personal, malevolent being who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom Hell, the place of eternal punishment, was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.

There are political as well as biblical imperatives. The students are highly trained in political debating techniques for which they win national trophies. The college is extremely well-connected in Washington, and students are propelled towards internships working for top politicians.

God's Next Army shows students taking their first step towards power, canvassing for a key Republican candidate. They visit a conservative lobbying company which is opposing the payment of compensation to people affected by asbestos, and is trying to repeal estate tax because 'the earth is the Lord's'.

Helped by the institution's friends-in-high-places, PHC has already provided the current White House administration with more interns than any other college in the USA, and more are in the pipeline – on the way to becoming 'key players in a Christian republic'.
sertions:

The Bible in its entirety … is the inspired word of God, inerrant in its original manuscripts, and the only infallible and sufficient authority for faith and Christian living.

Man is by nature sinful and is inherently in need of salvation, which is exclusively found by faith alone in Jesus Christ and His shed blood.

Satan exists as a personal, malevolent being who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom Hell, the place of eternal punishment, was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.

There are political as well as biblical imperatives. The students are highly trained in political debating techniques for which they win national trophies. The college is extremely well-connected in Washington, and students are propelled towards internships working for top politicians.

God's Next Army shows students taking their first step towards power, canvassing for a key Republican candidate. They visit a conservative lobbying company which is opposing the payment of compensation to people affected by asbestos, and is trying to repeal estate tax because 'the earth is the Lord's'.

Helped by the institution's friends-in-high-places, PHC has already provided the current White House administration with more interns than any other college in the USA, and more are in the pipeline – on the way to becoming 'key players in a Christian republic'.

I was reminded of the 1984 quote, "Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

These students almost universally had no idea how to learn (as opposed to how to be indoctinated), as they have been brought up in environments (including PHC) that discourage questioning and free thought, and reward blind obedience. How many of them even have any idea of the evolution and compilation of their own Bible? How many have even read it all through? To continue to believe in its infallibility when confronted with its numerous contradictions requires a special kind of unconsciousness.

Much of what they believe is arbitrary even when looked at using the ever-contradictory Bible. It's one sect's interpretation.

Only an unconscious person could think that Jesus would approve of them opposing workers' compensation for asbestosis because ot would be bad for big business. Only an unconscious person would believe that the man who rebuked his disciple for defending him by cutting off a soldier's ear would approve of a gun-toting nation (they approve of a fully armed population). Only an unconscious person could read Richard Dawkins and then still believe in creationism - but then, reading Dawkins is probably a sin in itself - second only to having an independent thought.

But they are way above having any animal ancestors. Humans are really something special in their eyes. There they were, decrying the abortion of a ball of cells, whilst stuffing their faces with an animal that lived, felt, was treated horribly and then killed for their gastronomic pleasure.

Satan is such a handy excuse for human actions. Faith is such a handy excuse for personal prejudices - does Goddess really care who we love? When fundamentalists of any type start spreading their thoughts on the evils of homosexuality, or the 'Truth' that only they hold, I want to get them, Muslims and Christians, and sit them facing eachother, then say, 'look. That's you that is.'

Surety is always frightening. When you are so loud in your condemnation of others, how can you hear the still small voice telling you 'no'?

I can remember the feeling of being a troubled teen. I can remember the feeling of being an overly-worried child. I cannot for the life of me remember what it felt like to be a fundamentalist Christian. I read my diaries from that time and it's like I was someone else; a person I no longer recognise. I only remember the struggle to unbelieve. Maybe I'm like an ex-smoker who really turns.

Thing is, I can't believe anything without question now. I can't believe that a faith which asks you to believe without question is anything other than damaging. Being alive is about using your brain, it's about questioning and seeking truth even if there may not be any truth to seek. Blind, unquestioning faith must mean being half dead already.

That isn't Christianity, it's something else entirely. Makes you wonder who they're really worshipping.

Anyone know how to clean a parquet (sp?) floor? I've had mine ages now, and the most I've done is sweep it and rub off any major muck with a cloth. Now it really needs a damn good clean. Beeswax makes it too slippy (did that on one of the mucky marks). I only use Kim and Aggie cleaning stuff like lemon juice and vinegar and so on (don't like nasty fumes). Anyone know what I should try?

When I worked at Birmingham Accident Hospital, something always commented on by junior doctors was the lack of scanning equipment - we didn't even have a CT scanner, even though we were the brain injuries unit for the area. The consultants never pushed for it either, because they said that having a scanner meant that you would use it, rather than using clinical judgement to make the right decision at the right time. For example, when someone has come in with head trauma you need to know if you need make a burr hole (to relieve pressure on the brain), rather than sending the patient for a scan which takes time in which they could be bleeding more and thus becoming more brain injured. When you assess a person's injury after head trauma, you should be able