ChristopherWhite.info

Two women involved in legal action against Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust have found themselves banned from visiting patients, including an elderly family-friend receiving treatment in a local hospital.

Nadia Feldmeier, 32, and her mother Ellinor had attempted to visit Lucie Walters, an 86-year-old long-standing friend of the family with no relatives in the UK, who was admitted to Barry Hospital in August 2007 after complaining of memory loss and balance problems.

They were initially allowed to do so, but were ejected from the hospital and threatened with arrest after returning for a second visit two days later. In a meeting with hospital staff that took place on 15 April this year, a member of NHS management told them that the Trust was excluding them as visitors pending their civil case.

“It’s a vendetta against us, and by depriving an elderly lady of her visitors they’re punishing an innocent third party,” Nadia said.

Nadia and Ellinor began a malpractice claim against the Trust after the death of Nadia’s grandmother, Ruth Feldmeier, in 2005, following several stays in the Heath Hospital in Cardiff and Llandough Hospital in Penarth over a number of years.

Last year, the pair received a restraining order from Cardiff Crown Court to keep them out of Llandough and Heath hospitals, with the aim of preventing continuing protests against Dr Colin Gelder and Dr Joseph Grey, who had been responsible for treating Ruth Feldmeier.

However this document not only doesn’t apply to Barry Hospital, but specifically permits them to enter even the former hospitals for the purpose of visiting patients or receiving treatment. The Feldmeiers are challenging the legality of the Trust banning them from a publicly funded organisation without a further court order.

A senior manager from the Trust, Ann Morgan, said: “We don’t randomly ban anybody from our premises That being said, we’ve got a duty of care to the people who use our establishments. We’ve got a duty of care to the patients, to our staff, and to visitors as well.”

When asked if allowing the Feldmeiers onto hospital premises would put any of those categories of people at risk, she added: “I’m not saying that. I’m not implying there is danger to anybody here, but what I’m implying is that we have a duty of care to our staff, our patients and our visitors who come into our premises.”

Mrs Morgan further claimed that to reveal any more risked breaching patient confidentiality. However she also confirmed that the Feldmeiers’ visiting ban is not restricted to Mrs Walters, and that they are in fact not allowed to visit any hospital-patient in Cardiff or the Vale of Glamorgan.

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You might expect that buying naming rights to the second oldest football league in the world would cost a small fortune – certainly enough cash to count out your average punter. But the new name of the Northern League is up for grabs for possibly as little as £250.

The 119-year-old league, the home of 44 teams in the north-east of England, is need of a new sponsor after the withdrawal of the incumbent, the construction company Arngrove. The pull-out was officially due to illness of its owner, Brooks Mileson, who also owns the recently sunk Gretna FC, although it was reported as long ago as March that three of Mileson’s other companies were in financial difficulty, owing more than £370,000.

In hard financial times generally and for small football clubs in particular – stories of teams folding being painfully commonplace – finding one man to stump up all the required cash was always likely to prove difficult. The league has hit on an innovative solution: a raffle.

They intend to raise up to £40,000 by selling a maximum of 160 stakes at £250 each. The winner of the right to choose the league’s new name will be drawn at a dinner on 6 August, with all stakeholders becoming “Friends of the Northern League”. According to the chairman, the Northern Echo journalist Mike Amos, they’ve had 42 takers at the time of writing, and are hoping to shift at least 80 before the dinner.

In a bid to buy three or four stakes themselves, Amos and the league chaplain, Leo Osborn, are planning a sponsored 20-mile walk around Whitehaven, whose team is a newcomer to the league. Being sensible chaps, I’m sure their choice of name should they win, will be fitting to a league with this kind of pedigree – certainly more so than I suspect many suggestions will turn out to be.

And there’s the rub: the league has said that it will accept any name so long as it contains the words “Northern League” – a decision bound to attract one or two ‘hilarious’ inappropriate names.

The potential irony will not be lost on fans of one of the league’s members. Spennymoor Town was formed in 2005 from Evenwood Town and the ashes of the Unibond League’s Spennymoor United. (“Ashes” almost literally, too: Spennymoor’s clubhouse burned down on Christmas Eve 2003; it has not yet been rebuilt as there are newts living in it. Most pubs have regulars they can’t get rid of, but Spennymoor is perhaps unique in this respect.)

Despite the name change, the club is still known to its fans as United; the iron-wrought words “Spennymoor United” remain above the entrance to the Brewery Field and a recent book on the team’s history was entitled We’ll Always Be United in reference to supporters’ defiant terrace chant. But they were forbidden from formally reverting to their original name in 2006 when the FA blocked the proposal while the Northern League rejected a continental-style iteration with “F.C.” as a prefix.

Is this a chance for the Moors to gain the ultimate revenge and have the entire competition named after themselves? Possibly, though £250 is perhaps out of their, er, league.

To find out more or to buy a stake contact Northern League chairman Mike Amos on mikeamos81@aol.com

Gary Andrews is away

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Christopher Hitchens’ antitheistic polemic provides excellent argument-fodder

How lucky are our American counterparts. The audiobook version of God Is Not Great will be out in time for Christmas on the other side of the Atlantic, whereas Brit audiences must wait until February.

Slipped onto the iPod, Christopher Hitchens’ plummy Oxbridge tones iconoclastically sermonising on the myriad evils of religion would have made the perfect substitute for, and antidote to, the annual borefest of midnight mass or the Queen’s Speech. But the e-book on the laptop will suffice, or the dead-tree version for real traditionalists.

It’s just that, in audio, the melody and rhythm of the words make Hitchens’ arguments that much easier to regurgitate later. And, whether those arguments are needed online or in the street with the chaps who ask you if you want an IQ test before furnishing you with Christian propaganda, arming the reader with rhetorical ammunition on why “religion poisons everything” seems to be mostly what the book is for.

In that respect, it could probably have been written by nobody else alive today, despite the fact that, of the entire ‘New Atheist’ crowd, Hitchens may appear to be the least qualified. AC Grayling (Against All Gods) and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell) are both philosophers; Sam Harris (The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation) has studied neuroscience, and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) is a feted biologist. Christopher Hitchens is an author and journalist, and rather an opinionated one at that.

But Hitchens acknowledges within his text that he’s been writing God Is Not Great his whole life – and it’s because his experiences as a journalist have allowed him to see first-hand the things he’s writing about.

When he describes North Korea as being the nearest thing on earth to a pure form of theocracy, it’s because he’s been there and seen the servility of the people, and their blind worship towards the personality cult of Kim Il-Sung – still legally the President despite having been dead since 1994.

And when asked by religious broadcaster Dennis Prager whether, if approached by a large group of men in a strange city, he would feel safer or less safe, Hitchens can tell him how he actually did feel in precisely those circumstances. “Just to stay within the letter ‘B’, I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad,” he responds. “In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.”

There’s a personal account such as this every few pages – though it’s not to everyone’s taste. Ross Douthat of The Atlantic magazine wrote on catholiceducation.org that, “Hitchens’s argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly.” In this he is, therefore, equally convincing as many of his opponents, who also tend to argue from personal experience.

To take just one example, a friend and I once found ourselves in a late-night discussion with one of the aforementioned street-preacher types. He “knew” there was a God because the Almighty had spoken to him many years ago. (The fact that he was self-confessedly under the influence of class-A drugs at the time, and had just witnessed a woman being hit by a train, apparently didn’t colour his recollection of the moment.)

Anecdotes, textual criticism, and especially satire – as per Douglas Adams’ 1998 speech Is there an artificial God? – can be the best arguments to use, if for no other reason than that they’re more difficult to willfully misunderstand, whereas the scientific arguments can be, and frequently are, misconstrued.

Richard Dawkins’ popular biology books contain the clearest, most beautiful explanations of Darwinian natural selection we’re ever likely to see, and the latest in his canon, The God Delusion, features some substantial, science-based refutations of the ‘God hypothesis’. But even those few willing to read, or listen to, Professor Dawkins’ work will often contrive to misunderstand it.

Much the same is true of physical explanations of the origin of the Universe, on which this writer, as an astrophysics graduate, is more qualified to comment. The best/worst instance of these is probably Moses Didn’t Write About Creation!, a self-published tome in which Herman Cummings, who claims he is the only man on Earth who ‘really’ understands Genesis, unintentionally shows the extent of some creationists’ failure to grasp even high-school physics.

The average debate on religion hasn’t time to fit in three years’ tuition in biology and another four in physics. It’s far simpler, and more useful, to have a debate based on anecdote — and about ‘morality’, such as when Hitchens dismisses all the good done by religiously minded people as also being possible by atheists.

“We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion,” he writes. “And we know for certain that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.” The fact that Moses’ laws — used as a base for all three major monotheistic faiths — features hundreds specific commandments against idolatry but not one against rape strongly suggests either that the religion is man-made (man as opposed to human) or God has his priorities entirely wrong.

Stealing Hitchens’ arguments outright would be largely pointless, of course: it would be contrary to the principle of free-thinking that he’s trying to promote, effectively replacing one Bible with another. The important thing is to have the debates at all, and, as Hitchens says of those such as Hawking and Darwin, “men are more enlightening when they are wrong.” God Is Not Great doesn’t have all the answers – or perhaps ultimately even that many – but it still makes a superb rock on which to smash the church.

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Maggie’s End
Gala Theatre, Durham
Mon 15 – Sat 20 October
Ding dong, the witch is dead. Set in the summer of 2008, Maggie’s End tells the story of one north-east family after Margaret Thatcher dies, reigniting old passions and dividing the country in two all over again. Their domestic disagreement serves as a microcosm of the national conversation, as middle England descends into a bout of emotionally onanistic mourning not seen since the death of Princess Diana while working-class regions erupt with street parties unmatched since VE day.

Tyneside-based writers Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood were inspired to make the move from their usual outrageous comedy to political satire after a real-life BBC report of leaked plans to give Thatcher a state funeral led them to speculate on the discontent such a move might cause in the areas devastated by the nasty party’s policies during the 1980s.

Such material will inevitably be considered controversial nationally, but is far less so for a Durham audience often referred to as Geordies, but for whom the correct demonym is ‘Pit Yackers’ – and the county’s former mining communities know firmly which side their (brown) bread is buttered where Mrs Thatcher is concerned.

Among the millions of workers she ruined is the play’s protagonist Leon (Michael Gunn), an embittered and cynical Orgreave veteran and poll tax martyr now working as an ‘overly political’ politics lecturer. His daughter Rosa (Arabella Arnott) is a New Labour MP for an Islington safe seat, and a government minister following a fourth electoral victory. She’s also having an affair with Home Secretary Neil Callaghan (Jonathan Hansler), whose constant display of contempt for the working classes gives away his true political affiliation even if his true blue tie – the Conservatives’ team colours – doesn’t.

The ambitious politician rarely sees eye-to-eye with her idealistic father, and the gulf between parent and progeny becomes unbridgeable when Rosa gives her full support to plans to give a state funeral to the hated Thatcher, while Leon’s militancy of yore is reawakened with a little help from wife Suzy (Jane Holman) and senile Uncle Arthur (Harry Herring) – that the most touching and lucid moment of clarity in the play comes from an old man in the grip of dementia is presumably because the rest of the world has gone mad.

In places, Maggie’s End is laugh-out-loud funny. Callaghan’s sheer venality recalls Rik Mayall at his best, and his closing statement simply is Tony Blair in one of his more demagogic moods. He’s bested in quality of ranting, however, by Leon’s vitriolic and resentful politics lectures – a useful way of delivering a monologue without resorting to having a character talking to himself.

Unfortunately, such moments are also the wheat among rather a lot of chaff. Too often the writers resort to cheap jibes (‘Why won’t Maggie Thatcher be cremated? Because the Lady’s not for burning.’), clichéd snipes at the Daily Mail, and jokes at the expense of Arthur’s illness. Leon’s diatribe about the apathy of young people comes almost in the same breath as complaints about the government’s refusal to listen to a million anti-war marchers, and when Callaghan insists that New Labour’s key supporters are 50 swing voters in Hampstead with holiday homes in the Algrave rather than marching and banner-waving types, it’s a point that hits a sore spot, but also one that has been heard many, many times before. With much of the material re-treading old ground, it’s just not especially innovative as a piece of satire.

Or rather, it isn’t innovative as far as the declared premise is concerned. The first of Leon’s lectures that the audience gets to witness is largely themed on the increase in state control of our lives – CCTV, ASBOs, control orders and all the other incremental losses of civil liberties with which Blair has left us. This idea returns with a vengeance in the second act, and is eventually the means of Leon’s downfall. It appears as though the writers wanted to script a play about the dismantling of our basic freedoms, and shoehorned it into this one instead – although sneaking it in through the back door might be appropriate given that that’s how we ended up with much of such legislation in the first place.

Leon’s ultimate defeat has something of a tragic inevitability about it. After his dream of a socialist paradise was shattered he gave up fighting, and once he didn’t protest he soon found that he couldn’t protest. In politics there’ll always be a fight to be had – even long after Maggie is dead and buried.

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After the first parliamentary meeting organised by bloggers from across the political spectrum, could ‘open-source campaigning’ take off?

It’s easy to dismiss blogging. Bloggers are often waved away as self-important navel-gazers talking to themselves. They’re ignored by politicians, ripped off by the media, and sneered at by activists – because while they’re happy to sit and whinge, they don’t actually do anything. Until now.

Last week, a meeting was held in parliament to pressure the Government into making special asylum arrangements for Iraqis whose lives had been threatened for working with British forces. It was the result of a blogger-driven campaign.

The principal speaker was Mark Brockway, a former Warrant Officer in the Territorial Royal Engineers, who had employed a number of interpreters during his tour in Iraq, and knew of many who had been murdered as ‘collaborators’. He got the story picked up by Channel 4 news in May this year, after which it was naturally also picked up by bloggers. But while the mainstream media’s news agenda moves on, bloggers don’t have to.

Campaign organiser Dan Hardie, 30, first saw the story on the blog Blood and Treasure (bloodandtreasure.typepad.com). “I read it on a Friday evening and really lost my temper,” he says. He then drafted a letter to his MP urging intervention, and initially left it as a blog comment. Hardie and another blogger, Daniel Davies (d-squareddigest.blogspot.com), then decided to begin a mass letter-writing campaign involving as many other bloggers as possible in what was later termed ‘open-source campaigning’.

As the idea got picked up by more people, the campaign ended up with over 40 participants writing to their MP, and encouraging their readers to do the same – and many MPs had letters from constituents who weren’t bloggers themselves, but had read Hardie’s draft letter on the web.

The result was a campaign involving every end of the political spectrum – from both pro-war and anti-war left to the libertarian right – and, interestingly, many supporters who had never been involved in any sort of activism before.

“It’s easier to get people involved via blogs because of the essential nature of the English character,” claims participating blogger JonnyB (jonnybillericay.blogspot.com). “One can feel strongly about something but have an abject horror of standing in the street shouting simplistic slogans. A blog allows a person to articulate his or her thoughts while remaining a private, non-aligned individual.”

And one suspects politicians are more likely to pay attention to a group of disparate individuals than a standing campaign group. But while there was support from all three main parties, both at the meeting and for an early day motion for a full parliamentary debate on the subject, the Government still need convincing. “The key is getting the Government to admit that there’s a big problem here that they need to sort out,” says Brockway. It always is.

If not the Government themselves, it’s been easier than expected to get the political classes in general on side. While Hardie expected to have to jump through hoops to get his MP, the Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone, to sponsor last week’s meeting, he found he’d gained her support almost immediately. “It’s something that pulls on your heartstrings, and doesn’t need much analysis,” she says. “And something that all of us, on all sides, can rally round.”

That there is such a clear moral case for a change in policy may show the limits of this kind of campaigning. Just as it’s easier to get MPs on board, a non-partisan issue makes it easier to get a range of bloggers involved, who would normally disagree on a great deal of issues.

For example, Hardie had had a long-running, strongly worded disagreement with another participant, Justin McKeating (chickyog.net), and yet the two buried the hatchet to collaborate on this campaign, with McKeating keeping a handy log of MPs’ replies to constituents’ letters. On less neutral issues, it may be harder to get as much involvement, and a large number of high-traffic blogs are necessary to spread the word. The ‘blogosphere’ sometimes appears to be a second layer of the establishment media, with a tendency to cliquishness thrown in.

Yet in cases such as this one, having such a wide knowledge base is an obvious advantage, and Hardie was first put in touch with Brockway through another blogger via the Army Rumour Service website (arrse.co.uk). “This kind of campaigning is the best kind,” admits the Refugee Council’s Bob Diffee. “You get people who know what’s going on on the ground, which we don’t.” But there’s no obvious reason why they shouldn’t.

The three prime movers of this campaign – Hardie, Davies and David Cole (unoriginalname38.blogspot.com), with whom Hardie spent an evening phoning hundreds of MPs – plan to publish what they’ve learned once this campaign is over. Whether blogger-led campaigning takes off or not, it’s sure to be a must-read for all campaigners.

Mark Brockway’s campaign website is WeOweItToThem.com

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