Hi. I have just joined so forgive me if this is in the wrong place. Firstly just to introduce myself. I am an established professional artist and campaign on a variety of libertarian issues including smoking, foxhunting, the use of fur in fashion, ID cards and freedoms such as the islamic right to wear a veil. You can read my blog at www.myspace.com/davedent . Some of you will not agree with all of it but we must recognise that liberties are being taken away on all fronts by a moral minority who want to control our every decision. These people tend to come from the petit bourgeois professional classes. This article exposes why they do it and why they vilify smoking for instance.

Oh yes....I think women who smoke can be really sexy too! I think that when you surpress something (as in prohibition of alcohol) it is given an incredible allure. Keep up the fight and I hope this helps:


I am writing this letter to several Members of Parliament, Medical Bodies and newspapers, because I am greatly concerned over the direction being taken over the past 9 years by the medical profession, but also by other Government funded sectors such as Policing and Education. Namely, the emphasis being put on "Preventative" measures to address social ills such as illness, crime and failing children , I believe is a mis appropriation of taxpayers money and also embedded within the notion are the roots of the policy's futility and ineffectiveness at dealing with these ills. Furthermore, I would go as far as saying preventative measures are actually cynical, sinister, veil real problems, and perhaps even responsible for the decay of society itself.

I will first attempt to show how this is possible through the example in medicine of the Helicobacter pylori bacteria, and how bad science has been used to justify preventative remedy, and as a result caused a great deal of suffering.

Helicobacter pylori: a case of mis diagnosis of cause
I was prompted to write this after a bitter personal experience of the health service ineptness at dealing with a personal medical condition. My symptoms started at 11 years old, and include agonising stomach pain, wind and crippling back ache. Early attempts to diagnose the problem put it down to association with my asthma and eczema as being due to stress and dismissed as nervous related. The symptoms have flared up about three to four times a year all through my life for the last 34 years. Ten years ago I was finally sent for an ultra sound scan which revealed nothing, and the doctor put it down to strained muscles in my back, again possibly to do with tension, and the inflammation affecting the stomach, creating wind.
Just recently, I again went to the doctor who on hearing of my symptoms, decided to test me for helicobacter pylori, something which I had never heard of. Let us call him "good" doctor B,
for he was the first doctor who correctly interpreted the symptoms of which I had complained.
The results came back positive for helicobacter, and I went to the doctor again, a locum on duty, to discuss the findings as requested. We shall call him "bad" doctor J. He, immediately on telling me the positive result, asked me if I smoked. I answered that I did, but I started to tell him that for most of my life I haven't, and that I have experienced these symptoms all my life. "DON'T TELL ME MY JOB!!!" he interrupted rudely. "It's a complete waste of time for me to prescribe you this course of two anti biotics if you continue to smoke : smoking is a major factor in creating excess acid in which the organism thrives. If you smoke, it will return". I pressed him on the apparent lack of logic in this, asking from where helicobacter is contracted, and if smoking causes the bacteria(which clearly it does not). I further asked if it was likely that I had had this infection since childhood, and pointed out that my mother had a severe stomach ulcer which burst causing great loss of blood and almost death, and my father died of a rare form of stomach cancer. He became frustrated, said he couldnt comment as he was just a locum but it was a waste of money to prescribe these expensive drugs if I did not quit smoking, and asked me to leave( I was there for less than five minutes, and had waited an hour for him to see four patients in front of me). I did as I was asked and left.

HELICOBACTER: A MEDICAL BETRAYAL

Now I feel somewhat betrayed at this news, not because I have suffered needlessly (the infection and associated stomach ulcer is easily treated with antibiotics) but I started to wonder if the health of my mother and father, both of whom had complained of similar symptoms all their adult lives, had been compromised by ineffective diagnosis, or even negligence, of the medical community.
Well I began to do some research on the helicobacter infection, which it turns out is responsible for 90% of stomach ulcers and 80% of gastric cancers. But apparently it is claimed, it was only discovered by two Australians in 1982, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall.
Well perhaps then, it couldn't have helped my father (whose cancer was particularly associated with the infection) who was diagnosed in 1984; as not enough may have been known about it.
However this claim is FALSE. The bacteria was first discovered in 1875 by german scientists but dismissed by the medical community, who for years claimed that nothing could live in such an acidic environment, and continued, wrongly, to claim stomach ulcers to be caused by stress and spicy food, and as early as 1950, by smoking.
By perpetuating these claims, hundreds of thousand of people may have suffered needlessly through the application of bad science and preventative medicine.

But surely this was not intentional on behalf of doctors and scientists, and is just an isolated incident because they didnt know about the infection?

Well I hope to establish that such science practised by doctors is not the exception, but rather, the norm. Furthermore, that preventative medicine based on such bad scientific basis, actually incriminates the medical profession in the suffering of patients in a variety of diseases, and even worse, that their outrageous claims and the money wasted in trying to support and justify them
is in fact a danger to public health as a political ideology has grown around them, that can be easily compared to the witch-hunts of the 18th century.

The Medical Profession and witchcraft, Phrenology and Nazi ideology: the False Prophets

In our trust of the medical profession in the Nanny state, we forget that medical science has a very poor history. Doctors have long based their remedies and ideas on poor scientific thinking; it is an indisputable social phenomenon. Early doctors used what amounted to witchcraft themselves, and to question them was to question the gods. As the power of religion diminished after the middle ages, they used "quack" science to justify practices such as blood letting and the use of mercury in medicine, all apparently based on the new science, rather than biblical precedent, and science became their new power base as they preyed on the ignorance of kings and nobleman to establish influence.
Then from the Spanish inquisition to the witchcraft perges from the 16th century, doctors were called on to justify the most hideous persecutions based on scientific theory. It was such wisdom that was sent up by the Monty Python sketch:
"If a witch floats, she must be made of wood, and therefore she must be burned." Hence the ducking of witches in the village pond.
Things have changed little. Now most illness is not blamed on witchcraft; now the scapegoat is smoking. People who suffer from smoking related disease have only themselves to blame, don't they? Well what about the people who die of smoking related disease who never smoked? The lack of will for the medical profession to get to the root causes of their disease has an uneasy parallel with the poor unfortunate souls who drowned as they weren't made of wood.

Let's move onto the 19th century and the obsession of the medical profession with the science of Phrenology: it wasn't long ago that doctors were claiming that all medical conditions could be explained by the study of cranial shape and markings. It is hard to believe now that such hokum was practised as scientifically sound.

It is perhaps even more hard to believe, that only 60 years ago, some of the greatest medical minds on the planet, responsible for many great advances in medicine, gave their praise and support for a political ideology for which such scientific support led to the Holocaust. Yes, the eagerness of the medical profession to support racial supremacist theories, the concept of strength and health through joy and fitness, (and even the condemnation of smoking!) provided an undisputed "scientific" basis for Hitler's social policies, and the extermination of the jews.

So dare I question a doctor on how to do his job? You're damn right I will.

It is a dangerous situation when you have such a body as the medical profession being the moral guardians of society, and their relationship with power and the state has a very dark history which has supported unimaginable horrors.
It is artists and poets who should be the moral watchmen; doctors do not have the ethical, philosophical or training in evidence analysis to take on this mantle. Clinical judgement can be a cruel God, and a false one.

Preventative medicine: the witch-hunt on smokers

As doctors eagerly clammer to blame the bulk of illness on the patient, whether sexual preferences being responsible for HIV (as was and still occasionally is) smoking as the cause of cervical cancer and when this was proven wrong then promiscuity was(and still is) blamed, or smoking causing illness even in non smokers, and as these claims are used to influence and back up government policy, great evil can result. Millions suffer as a result of the trust the state places in quack medicine.
The State becomes a willing bedfellow in this, as they try to encourage public health being the patients responsibility, therefore perhaps seeing some quick results, and saving money,but unfortunately taxpayers money becomes transfered from Primary care and cure to Preventative medicine, and the NHS we know and trust becomes transformed into an instrument of moral guardianship and political ideology. In the meantime, the REAL causes of disease go unchecked.
And the State? Well they have an excuse to raise collossal sums of money from "guilt" lifestyle choices, whether it be smoking, polluting the environment or being fat. My prediction: that foods containing sugars and fats, fast food etc will be next in line for taxation.

It is worth remembering, as doctors become reluctant to treat smokers as patients and seek the moral justification for such heartless actions, that the claim that smoking costs the NHS a fortune should be looked at in the light of these figures:

Cost of smoking to the NHS : an estimated £1.4 - £1.7 billion.

Revenue raised through taxation on smoking: £9.6 billion.

In other words, the NHS would probably collapse without smokers.

But are my claims justified? Well let us just come back to the example of helicobacter. You may remember the claims of my doctor who reluctantly gave me the anti biotics to treat my
infection. He stated that the bacteria thrived in acid, and smoking produced acid. I checked the latest research on the bacteria, and surprise surprise, the assumption appears to be wrong.
Helicobacter does NOT as previously thought thrive in acid conditions. On the contrary, it appears it neutralises acid with the enzyme urease, which converts urea into ammonia and bicarbonate. I had started to tell the doctor that I had NEVER suffered from acid indigestion, as he claimed was a direct result of smoking...he dismissed it out of hand. Now it appears that
helicobacter may actually be responsible for PREVENTING some forms of oesophegal cancer as it reduces the expulsion of acid into the oesophagus. It is NOT the acid which causes ulcers either, but rather the tendency for the bacteria to burrow into the stomach's lining.
To blame smoking is both irresponsible and negligent, as it veils the real cause of ulcers and stomach cancer which is PURELY the result of helicobacter pylori infection.
You may also remember my previous question about the source of helicobacter infection. Doctor J stated that " you probably picked it up from a house where it was present." Not only is this patronising, it is unscientific, and fails to identify the true source.
Only recently, because of the undue emphasis put on factors such as smoking and stress, has
any research been done into the real culprit, helicobacter and its source. At the XVII the International Workshop on GESTOINTESTINAL PATHOLOGY AND HELICOBACTER in Vienna IN 2004, the conference concluded that the most likely cause of infection in children is the bacteria being present in the mother, and to a lesser extent the father, or the primary childcare agent. Remember that if this had been known, bearing in mind my fathers death and my mothers severe gastric ulcer, I was at risk from this bacteria, yet for 34 years it has gone without a doctor thinking of testing me for it until now. And remember it was "rediscovered" in 1982....23 years ago. How many others have suffered from such conditions because doctors have been conveniently, irresponsibly and negligently blaming them on lifestyle and smoking: these are NOT factors without the precence of helicobacter.
Certain forms of stomach cancers are 6 times more likely to develop in infected people, and ulcers are COMPETELY (with some exclusions from damage from drugs like aspirin) the fault of helicobacter.

Medical negligence through propagation of folk devils: the fallacy of Preventative practice

Well what about other forms of cancer and disease; surely smoking is a factor in many of them? Well yes. I am not claiming that smoking is harmless; just that it is grossly irresponsible of the medical profession to blame the patients lifestyle, and folk devils such as smoking for dieases, as this PREVENTS funding and research into other REAL causes aswell as patient care and cure.

For years it was claimed, and shockingly it still is by many doctors, that cervical cancer was linked to smoking as a cause. IT IS NOT. Without the presence of human papilloma virus, it is IMPOSSIBLE to develop cervical cancer. It also appears tp be a factor in Anal, penile, orophygial, bladder, and skin cancers. Lack of research into just how much of a factor can again be put down to the obsession with smoking, or sexual practice for that matter, as factors without being scientifically verified.
Likewise, the incidence of Adeno viruses and the link with genetic inheritance in Lung Cancer go unresearched next to the huge amount of unscientific research and finance pumped into establishing links with smoking.

THE "POOR SCIENCE" PHENOMENON

Science in isolation from other disciplines, is a dangerous creature. This has long been well known. It used to be a pre requisite for a Nurse to have o level history, as a discipline balance to the doctors training.
It was once proven in scientific tests, in an attempt to debunk scientific thinking, that ice cream caused hot weather. Time after time, ice cream sales were found to be highest when the weather got hot. It was easy to assume the relationship of cause and effect being turned upside down. Likewise, smoking may not cause cancer, but factors causing cancer may predispose certain people to smoke. As unlikely as this may seem, a quick look at poor socio economic groups reveal it indeed to be a factor.

Let me take another topical example. The case of global warming. Scientists have long been testing the hypothesis that greenhouse gases are responsible for global warming. These studies, many of which have been funded by wealthy groups such as the Tides foundation with a vested interest in alternative energy development, test the hypothesis, and come up with the obvious (and requested)results. However, hugely important other factors are NEVER taken into account as only ONE theory is being tested. This is the usual problem with scientific discipline: linear thinking and testing single hypotheses. History training requires the analyses, like detective work, of a number of possible causes and effects. A scientist would test "was Miss Scarlett in the room at roughly the time of the murder?" If she was , then the scientist would condemn her. The historian or detective on the other hand, would ask "Who else may have been in the room? Were ther fongerprints on the murder weapon? What was the motive? etc etc.
How does this apply to global warming? Well, there is on mighty big spanner in the argument of the scientists, and the warning comes time after time from a different scientific discipline :astronomy. If global warming is the fault of carbon emissions, why are we seeing exactly the same rate of Polar ice cap shrinkage on Mars as on earth?

Now what a tragedy it would be if in 100 years time, that global warming was found connected with solar flare activity, and that if in fifty years a giant deflective screen could have been placed between us and the sun on a satellite, but by 100 years it was too late?

This is exactly what happened in the case of Helicobacter, which doctors and scientists dismissed 130 years ago, and pursued their preventative medicine based on changing lifestyle instead. Hundreds of thousands have suffered and died because of bad science, and it is doctors and the state which allowed it.

Carol Thompson, who is making a name for herself as a protector of smokers rights in the USA, recently presented a paper to the Center for Disease Control which has led to them undergoing a radical rethink on causation of cancers. The paper stated:

"Its the anti smokers that lied about the health risks of smoking. They falsely blame smoking for disease caused by infection including ulcers, stomach cancer, cervical cancer and estecially cardio vascular disease.they purposely omit these infections from their studies or use deficient detection of them , to falsely implicate smoking by means of what epidemioligists call "confounding"".
Furthermore she claims if infectious risk factors are taken into account, there is "no risk" associated with smoking.

As a result, the CDC has recently WITHDRAWN Ulcers and stomach cancers from their list of smoking attributable diseases. Some cardio vascular diease may follow . Chlamydia pneumonia infection is found to be present in a large proportion of deaths from cardio vascular disease.

The truth of the matter is, diseases like ulcers, stomach cancers and cervical cancers at the very least, are TOTALLY PREVENTABLE by eradicating the true causes. So why isn't it being done? because we are allowing the medical profession to continue to blame, completely unscientifically, the scapegoats. If A patient becomes re infected with helicobater, it wont be because they smoke: it will be because they have become re infected with a bacteria which by concentrating efforts on eradicating at source, could render these diseases obsolete.

Smoking, Accountability and the Abdication of Responsibility of the Medical profession

Now I am still not claiming smoking is not a factor in disease; merely that it is wildly overstated, and stops us discovering the real causes, and prevents money being spent on effective treatments, even if that is just sympathetic patient care.
For doctors to blame patients for their own disease, and in some case refuse treatment is an utter criminal abomination on which a responsible government should act now.

Let us imagine for a moment that their claims are true. As we have seen, the high price paid in monetary terms by the smoker deserves at the very least some acknowledgement and accountability: smokers pay on average about £2000 a year more tax than a non smoker, and this DEMANDS some respect and accountability; any taxpayer should be able to expect this.
Remember the slogan of the American revolution: No Taxation without representation.

But does the smoker become a burden on the National health Service?

Well you can't have it both ways I'm afraid.

The only reliable research in this field has been conducted by the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, which has established that the average cost to society of a smoker is $72 700 ..... and $83 400 for a non smoker. (source: BBC news online network).
So it appears that it is the NON SMOKER who becomes a burden on society, not the smoker.
Perhaps it is because they live shorter years and therefore do not require long term care as elderly patients with hip replacements etc. It appears that smokers do on average live 6 years less than non smokers...however this figure fails to take into account the higher incidence of infection and genetic factors in lower socio economic groups. What does appear very clear however, age factors dfferentiated for, is that smokers who do live till a ripe old age are much less likely (40%) to develop disease associated with senility such as Alzheimers; therefore they are less likely to require long term intensive care as pensioners.

So we have seen that in their evangelical zeal to persecute smokers and blame smoking for all
sickness, that Doctors are not only abdicating their responsibility to heal, but also weaving a tangled web of conspiracy ; evolving propaganda with the state to save money, and divert it from front line care and treatment, and shift the emphasis of fault on to the patient. This could be acceptable of it were true; however the fact that in the case of many medical conditions it is NOT, not only changes the emphasis of medicine from cure to prevention, but in doing so prevents progress in diagnosing and curing disease, and actually undermines the notion that we are a caring and civilised society.
Similar such charges were made against patients suffering from M.E. It was claimed that these patients were suffering as a result of something that was their own fault; call it laziness, depression, anything..., but don't bother looking at pathology. The most diabalical experiments reminiscent of the Nazis, were conducted to try to prove that excercise was the solution. Some children even DIED as a result of this particular witch-hunt, sickness benefit ceased for a year or so, in many cases leading to severe hardship and deterioration, leaving patients unable to afford dietary supplements etc. It wasnt until Britain got a severe dressing down by the World Health Organisation at its bad science and lack of respect for the human rights of patients that this process stopped. As the government tries again to reform the sickness benefit system once more, this will shortly rear its ugly head again.
The USA treats the condition and claims an 80% cure rate by application of a cocktail of drugs... Britain, its doctors and so called specialists, comtinues to ignore the pathology and the apparent cure.
Similarly, the case of some forms of meningitis being transferred to humans by insects such as ticks and mosquitoes : this is still not recognised in Britain and goes untreated. In Eastern Europe it has been identified for many years and a bite is treated accordingly. In Britain, it is often associated with dirt, bad water, students living roughly, etc and again the fault is blamed on the patient with no attempt to identify true causes of infection.

But it's not only medicine which is part of this process....it is an ideology which, with twisted logic, is permeating the whole of society, threatening its very foundations. It may have begun with Thatcherism and its obsession with quantifiable results, but 9 years of New Labour has turned the obsession with prevention as a quick fix for society's ills into a new religion and ironically, it is making them more manifest and spreading like cancer unchecked. And it is the Police federations, the teachers Unions, and the Medical Bodies that are a party to it as it lets them all off the hook.

CRIME PREVENTION AND THE ABDICATION OF RESPONSIBILITY OF THE POLICE

Crime prevention has become the focus of policing in recent years.
If you leave your valuables unattended, then you get what you ask for.
If you leave your car or home unlocked, then you deserve to be robbed.
If you dress in a partcular manner, you deserve to be attacked.
If you walk home a certain route regularly, then you set yourself up to be mugged.

What is this nonsense? It is regrettably, official police poilicy for dealing with crime. Look at their advertisements, look at the role of their victim liaison officers. Listen to them talk about "Victim " culture.
And while they pursue this as policy, their figures are kept down. But it is not true that crime is falling, merely that most people have now come to take it for granted that it's their own stupid fault if they get robbed so fail to report it.
I was recently informed, to my utter disbelief, by a police sergeant acting in an official capacity re victim liaison, that it was my own fault I had been attacked in the street. A similar experience has occurred to several acqauintances recently, including an elderly lady, a Bangladeshi waiter, and the singer of a band, Russell of "Novacaine" fame.
The police officers concerned informed all of us that it was our own fault. in my case, I has had the audacity to wear riding boots and a barbour in the high street. "Ah well you see, that would associate you with hunting, or posh people with horses, so you become a target then see."
So it was my own fault then? "Well yes. We tell the same thing to everybody lately...there's always a reason people are attacked....an old lady who takes the same route home from church, a goth kid wearing all black and eyeliner, a seikh with a turban and strange garb. We tell everyone that they should wear street clothes to look inconspicuous, tell the old lady to vary her route home....it's the same idea as not leaving valuables on show in your car."
What are you saying I said, that its not the criminals fault, it's the victims? "well yes, that's the new thinking on preventing crime."
New thinking? Isn't that like the old chestnut that a girl is "asking for it" if she wears a short skirt and make up? I put the example to the officer. "Now I didn't say that" he retorted, but oh yes, he did.
On another occasion, I held three shoplifters at my art Gallery at Chepstow racecourse. They were extremely abusive, defensive and threatening in the few minutes I held them having caught them red handed, until the police arrived. They were arrested, and subsequently two were released without charge, a third merely cautioned. Again I had a phone call from the police, who asked me if I should really have the items on show where they can be picked up? Ah....my fault again.
Russell had been singled out for attack because of his individual style. The bangladeshi waiter had been singled out for attack because of his dress (or perhaps his colour or religion). The elderly lady for wearing a fur coat. All their own fault then, not the fault of the louts that attacked them.

The Police policy on these matters is encouraged and reinforced by government policy. As New Labour sneer at the rural community and their culture, and they force their prejudice into law, and demand that ethnic communiities conform to avoid prejudice(Race relations head honcho)and attack, and sneer at those with ostentatious cars, clothes or fur coats, so they give justification to the criminals. Hand in glove.

It is victims who cause crime, and to prevent it they must conform. Wear street clothes the policeman said, then you blend in. All Nike trainers baseball caps sportswear polar fleeces and jeans.Then crime goes down. Or does it?

What is actually happening is we are, as a society, becoming more tolerant of crime. We accept these "prevention" tactics, and as a result we are a more intolerant society of drones, all dressed the same and part of Blairs zombie drone culture. Again look to Art for guidance on these issues. Look to the resurgence in Romero's movies as a parody of such society. If you are different, you will be attacked by the zombies; and inevitably civilisation collapses. And look to the hope offered by the popularity of Vettriano's paintings as people sit trapped in their homes, afraid to go out, and dream of a bygone age; an age of gentile elegance, an age when you could leave your front door open all day.

Society has become more crime infested and violent as we tolerate the activities of criminals,
let the police off the hook of catching and punishing as victims thenselves are blamed in the culture of "Prevention".

It is not alcohol that causes crime; it is criminals. We have tolereted urination in the street, verbal and physical violence, while the police stand back and refuse to act. And look for scapegoats. Alcohol is the latest one, and police federations feel justified, wrongly, in calling for preventative action on licencees while the louts escape unpunished.


EDUCATION EDUCATION EDUCATION: FAIL FAIL FAIL

The roots of the failure of the education system also lie in the notion that if, somehow , you can prevent failure by working class children by intervening at home, or with education specially adapted for them, then all will be good. Again the ideology is based on Prevention.

The latest absurd manifestation of this is that the state should intervene by teaching basic skills at two years old in pre schooling. This is compensatory education, another old left wing/liberal idea that proved a costly failure , both financially and socially, to the black communities in the USA. It is a desperate idea; born out of a government bankrupt of ideas and coming up with ill thought out "spin and soundbites".

It doesnt work. The real problem is not with the children, but with the teachers!!!
It is a ridiculous waste of money to send children to school for 11 years and still they leave without basic literacy skills let alone any other knowledge or thinking skills.
And we allow the teaching profession and politicians to say that the fault is in social deprivation....in low ego, in poverty, even in genetic inferiority.....all of which give an impoverished background from which to learn. Not the teachers fault then.

Often the solution is seen to have low expectation, and teach vocational skills, to children who have low aspirations. This idea, rooted in educationalist and teacher frustration at having to teach working class children at all, is simply about lowering expectations: it is a measure geared at preventing failure by setting the goals lower. And still it fails!!! The city technical colleges and calls for more vocational training for example, are just another word for secondary modern schooling.

It is a betrayal of the ethos of Comprehensive education, and the root cause of failure of the idea can be squarely laid at the door of incompetent teachers. The problem was, in 1970 very few teachers had any idea of how to teach effectively...they were either subject graduates or vocational trainers who received their emergency training after the war. Few had the qualifications and training necessary to handle mixed ability teaching for example, a skill which even now evades all but a few dedicated teachers with the 4 year BEd degree. By 1995 still the majority of teachers didnt have this training, though many claimed it after a 1 year post grad course and in service training, the fact is the motivation was to receive more money rather than get adequate training. We still have a woefully inadequate teaching profession, and this coupled with the lack of discipline enforcement in schools, are the real causes of educational failure.
Until we get a highly motivated teaching profession with the skills needed to teach effectively, this will continue, and the working class will continue getting the blame therefore encouraging "preventative" measures which fail to address the real problems.
Sadly the old adage "those who can do, and those who can't teach" is probably true in the vast majority of cases. I was recently asked by a teacher, to my horror, "have you had your horse since it was a pony?"

But surely it is true that the working class, because of their social disadvantages, are in need of measures to prevent their failure, and it's not all the fault of the system?
Well let me once again speak from experience; though it is anecdotal, it raises important issues. As a schoolboy brought up on a council estate in Cwmbran, I didnt get very much from school , apart from the great expectations of me and other kids by an Art department led by Mike Organ. I found much of the other lessons patronising and I took little interest, and found some of the teachers actually beneath contempt. They were in my eyes failures, with few social skills and quite often giving erroneous information as fact. To try was to fraternise with the enemy. Middle class morality which often stood against what I had been taught at home reinforced my, and others, contempt for the prison on which we found ourselves. We played desk top subbuteo in physics claiming we were practising the angle of incidence to our teachers fury,and ran a football pool in maths. Our urge was for competition , immediate gratification and entrepreneurial escape; something alien to the middle class world of the teacher. I was put down to cse in every subject due to my lack of deferred gratification, respect (which I had been brought up with the idea had to be earned and mutually interchangeable)and stubborn and perssistent questioning of everything. But my art teacher, and my strong willed mother, stepped in to support me and insisted I be allowed to sit the O levels. Without any work at all, I sailed through them and got 10 good passes. When going for "careers" advice, I had been told to set my sights on manual labour, as I would fail....they had after all told me two years before that I should have taken up car mechanics, technical drawing
and woodwork and metalwork (though I was profoundly useless and disinterested in all and was determined not to go into a servile training). Never, in my schooling did I ever encounter the level of academic discipline training I experienced in my life outside school.
I was brought up from a young age reading Rudyard Kipling( and my incessant quoting of him in History and English got me in no end of trouble) Batman and Raymond Chandler. I was able to work out any perm on a yankee, goliath or heinz (though my maths teacher couldn't). I studied the behaviour of foxes, badgers, bats and life cycles of butterflies, moths, newts and frogs and was utterly bewildered at my Biology teacher's ignorance of such things. I excavated ruins with my father, visited roman sites regularly and researched the various uniforms, tanks and aircraft of WWII from primary sources when I NEVER saw a primary source in 7 years of History at school - just copied endless notes. I studied the stars and planets with my telescope, and drew and painted endlessly. But my academic education was not, and still is not, complete. I still resent every moment spent on some chunk of wood or metal I was required to shape into some useless ornament, and wish I had had the opportunity to learn latin so I could have easily learned most languages; play a musical instrument or learned to ride a horse.

The experience of most working class children, I suspect, is similar. Though they may have had different interests and culture to mine, the point is, whatever it is, whether learning to bash hell, well, out of drum kit, bunking off to go fishing with their dad, being able to reach incredible levels on a playstation game,or even having to learn to cook for three small brothers/sisters while their drug addict mother lies in bed.....these are skills and learning experiences that schools, in their attempt to judge such children ,compensate or provide vocational for, ignore their talents and culture. To the middle class teacher, everything from the dubious morality of the children to the unspoken belief in their genetic inferiority, and their social deprivation, causing him to demand attention in terms of preventing failure in other ways than his...."What can you do with such children?" the teacher often asks. Well they could try teaching them. A good, truly Academic education for all is a basic human right; if they can achieve such goals in their personal life outside school, a truly academic education is not above them and, if enforced, would be the greatest social liberator in history.
In addition it must be with the support of a strict, disciplined environment with mutual respect and responsibility encouraged, just as it is, or at least used to be before the nanny state interfered with it, in the working class home. Again, the removal of corporal punishment is a ridiculous notion based on inappropriate middle class values.

And so we see again, the laying of blame at the door of the pupil, rather than the teacher, and again, we see attempts to remedy the situation with social work initiatives when the only real solution is education itself. Putting thousands of middle class hippies into working class environments as youth and social workers, and all the other social experiments to try to deal with it has failed abysmally to address the real problems, which are with the very nature of schools themselves.

CONCLUSION: THE INEVITABILITY OF FAILURE

Again the teachers and educationalists, like the police and judiciary, like the medical profession, are let off the hook and as a result society crumbles, and only the middle class elite who populate these professions, thrive. A petit bourgeois class who have taken over from the upper classes but without the same social conscience ; a professional class who continue to let down the vast majority who pay for them to do a job, the responsibility for which they abdicate.
And a vast bureaucracy set up to justify them, statisticians and public sector workers whose union power has replaced the once mighty miners and steelworkers who demanded their accountablilty. Now nobody holds them to account as their power grows, and the public are let down by policy designed to entrench their position and force "preventative" medicine down our throats. And all, 50 years down the line, these absurd notions will be looked at as disastrous failures; causing needless suffering among patients, failure of the education system, and utter lawless mess on the streets. This will be the legacy of Blair, and perhaps Thatcher. In the search for accountability, they have allowed these public services to make themselves unaccountable and shift the blame for their failure onto patients, victims and failing pupils , when it is professional ineptness that exacerbates the problems.

But, as they grow, and their preventative measures grow, so it has an increasing burden on the economy. There is no hope left in the proles because they are never going top question what they are given; but the truth is, no economy can support such a nanny state for long; the seeds of its destruction are in its conception. Eventually we shall, and must start again and ask the servants I have talked about to serve us. If Doctors don't cure, Police don't police, and Teachers don't teach we will lag behind the rest of the world and the cost of paying them to apportion blame, rather than get on and do the job, will become prohibitive.



David Dent

Thanks for the thoughtful and informative post. Regarding the Helicobacter pylori, the truth is even stranger than you imagined: maternal smoking reduces the H. Pylori transmission to child fourfold.

Here just one abstract of a scientific paper on that subject:


Does maternal smoking hinder mother-child transmission of Helicobacter pylori infection?
BRENNER H. (1) ; BODE G. (2) ; ADLER G. (2) ; ROTHENBACHER D. (1)
1. Department of Epidemiology, University of Ulm, Ulm, ALLEMAGNE
2. Department of Internal Medicine I, University of Ulm, Ulm, ALLEMAGNE

Evidence for early childhood as the critical period of Helicobacter pylori infection and for clustering of the infection within families suggests a major role of intrafamilial transmission. In a previous study, we found a strong inverse relation between maternal smoking and H. pylori infection among preschool children, suggesting the possibility that mother-child transmission of the infection may be less efficient if the mother smokes. To evaluate this hypothesis further, we carried out a subsequent population-based study in which H. pylori infection was measured by [3]C-urea breath test in 947 preschool children and their mothers. We obtained detailed information on potential risk factors for infection, including maternal smoking, by standardized questionnaires. Overall, 9.8% (93 of 947) of the children and 34.7% (329 of 947) of the mothers were infected. Prevalence of infection was much lower among children of uninfected mothers (1.9%) than among children of infected mothers (24.7%). There was a strong inverse relation of children's infection with maternal smoking (adjusted odds ratio = 0.24; 95% confidence interval = 0.12-0.49) among children of infected mothers, but not among children of uninfected mothers. These results support the hypothesis of a predominant role for mother-child transmission of H. pylori infection, which may be less efficient if the mother smokes.


I don't know whether your mother smoked when you were born, but had she smoked the odds of you getting the infection would have been 2-8 times (avg 4 times) lower. See also FORCES page on H. Pylori. If you examine further the rest of the antismoking voodoo "science" you will find that it is a complete inversion of reality, including lung cancers, heart attacks,... The whole antismoking "science" is a money making con job.

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