Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

OH NO MR GOVE!

Hectoring and evasive - yes. But prissy, priggish, self-important, insufferable, pompous and precious too! You should not sell yourself short.

take a look at the wholesale gas price chart. It started the year at around 8 and is now about 9. which is say 11%. So why is retail gas prices up 50%?

given the price now why do we not keep it and store for the winter. Isn't because the govt don't think it important to have storage ? which means we have to sell it to european energy companies who will store it then sell it back to us in the winter when demand outstrips supply.

whoever the govt is working for its not the british people.

Why not ask John Reid to comment on Gove
and you could also maybe slip in a question
about the row reported in Ms Jackie Ashley's
'Guardian' column today between the Celtic
Chairman and No 10 over his decision not to mixup politics and football in Glasgow E
by ordering Celtic fans to save Brown' skin?

Chilling investigation is right. Angus should be given a medal for exposing this shocking and horrifying brutality in the mental degradation meted out to these people. How many more stories like this exist, but are hidden away by bureaucracy ? Terrifying to think that this was still going on in 1992 !

ON THE SUBJECT OF DRIVING PEOPLE MAD

Tonight you took a tragic echo of the past, the Long Grove typhoid saga, and 'did a number' on it. Once again the video magic of Ray Ling (that virtuoso of the semi-obscured shot) was let loose, and we had pathetic pairs of books-on-end to - guess what? - semi-obscure the subject as the camera floated past! Why? Was it because the 'tinkling piano in the next apartment' (another stroke of madness) was insufficient, on its own, to add gravitas to this over-light subject?
There is a degree of OBSCENITY in all this. Do you have NO ONE on hand to register the truth of it, and to tell you to desist?

'Newsnight Scotland' had a confident and down-to-earth interview with MSP Charlie
Gordon who is trying to find names to let
him enter the Labour leadership contest
in Scotland as a candidate. Quite cutting
comments on Brown, too, from Labour MP
Katie Clarke - on her first TV appearance?

Where have these people been hiding I wonder as their party was taken over?!

The Newsnight London quote of the day
from Michael Gove may also have inspired
Charles Kennedy MP when choosing his
anecdotes about the passing (in Paris)
of Lord Russell-Johnson [Highland MP
Russell Johnson] who 'actually spoke
to constituents' - an innovation says
Charles Kennedy in The Highlands in
the early 1960's!

A great pro-European as well as a Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Ruler, Russell Johnson apparently also once told a Liberal-Democratic Conference: 'What do we want? Moderate progress! When do we want it? In due course ...'. [see I Player]

#2 bookhimdano

Several suitable sites for gas storage have been identified around the county, the trouble is that the eco-fascists always turn up and whip up local opposition. The planning wrangles have cost an absolute fortune and gone on for years, perhaps the new planning laws will thwart the eco-fascists and we can have the benefit of cheaper energy.

The piece on women typhoid victims being then made compulsory, lifelong victims of psychiatric care was an eyeopener, but I would suggest it needs to be taken a lot further.

The evidence was initially only from records rescued from a vandalised hospital in the1990s. Only the records on women were found. I would suggest that men must equally have been imprisoned, perhaps elsewhere, or perhaps just recorded in a different book which was lost.

They all came from London and probably represented the entirety of female typhoid carriers from there during that time, so their fate was probably down to the London County Council Public Health Department, and later the Greater London Council's. They were democratically controlled so their decisions are on record. Their records still exist, complete.

Was the hospital entirely a LCC establishment? The years of operation mentioned suggest it might have been. Its costs would have been covered in the LCC accounts, and keeping it filled, rather than using alternative methods, would have been financially convenient. That then raises the question why its records, showing these terrible policies, were not officially archived by the GLC residuary body after the GLC was abolished by the Thatcher government, but left in an abandoned and unguarded building. Could it have been that those who implemented them wished them forgotten? Those who closed the hospital should still be around.

If the LCC did this, based on lies that women including qualified teachers were mentally incapable of abiding by health precautions, it is very likely other public health departments did the same, in many countries.

And finally the big one; the voiceover listed other groups known to have been locked up in institutions equally inhumanely in the name of societal good, even strange ideas of public health. Unwed mothers were mentioned, rightly. But I was astounded that the Newsnight is either not aware that sexual minorities also suffered the same fate, right through to the 1970s, or else considered them not worth mentioning.

Again with them, those considered institutionalised by the experience (perhaps wrongly, as one of the women mentioned in the piece clearly was judged by the nurse interviewed) were also probably kept there after, until they died.

People we now term transsexual, transvestite, gay or lesbian, and we are now gradually including within human rights, were locked up in psychiatric wards in large numbers, from young children to the elderly. Mostly there were additionally tortured by the use of electro-convulsive shocks and nausea inducing drugs in misguided attempted "cures". Some are still alive.

The book 'Gender Shock' has several accounts of children being so treated in the US in the 1950s and 60s, for years and years. It certainly happened in the UK too. It probably happened at that same hospital.

And the excuse was similar - that they were a danger to public health, in their case because they were seen as potential victims and carriers of sexually transmitted diseases, incapable, because of what the medical profession classed one of a range of mental disorders (paraphilias/psychoses), which all shared certain (fictitious) characteristics, such as sex drives so high that many orgasms a day were needed, of complying either with morality or disease limitation.

All those who joined the armed services, the medical professions, or the police were subjected to training on those "facts". By the 1930s that was by use of films. It caused huge fear and and hate-fueled violence.

The confinements started to end in the 1960s in the UK when homosexuality was decriminalised. Then the international manuals of mental disorders removed homosexuality after pressure from the lesbian and gay communities. The UN's ICD removed it in 1993, around when the Epsom hospital closed. No one received any compensation, of course.

Were these just sexual perverts who deserved all they got? Is it all now old history deserving Newsnight's blind side? Well, actually no. Leave aside that more than 40 countries still count homosexuality as illegal, some terminally so, many because of UK colonial laws which have not been reformed, and some of them still provide the same "psychiatric care", especially for children if families demand it. That's surely obvious. No, more shocking is that even in the US and the UK, the same "medical" beliefs that propped that up are still official teaching, and the next versions of both the major mental disorders manuals (the US DSM, and the UN's ICD), are fully set to include all the same sexual minorities as in the 1960s in their next editions (transvestites, masochists, transsexuals, pre-homosexual children).

The people lack the pure political clout to have them removed, and it is impossible to scientifically prove the negative, that they are not disordered, as opposed to merely sexual minorities. It is a nice little earner for psychiatrists, even NHS funded. Especially when families demand psychiatrists "cure" children.

Yet, just as back when those typhoid victims were locked up, It is a misuse of psychiatry. A profession that seems very reluctant to set its house in order - as the retired psychiatrist interviewed about the typhoid carriers who always thought that had been wrongly locked-away but apparently said nothing at the time, exemplified. And the media are rarely bothered.