China's smokin' !

https://signal.supchina.com/chinas-cigarette-smoking-epidemic/

Now that 'Bazooka Joe' Biden is reopening the debate about where the Covid virus came from, perhaps we can wave that pointing finger around a bit more.

So far Covid deaths worldwide (as attributed, and that's a moot) total c. 3.5 million; but tobacco-related deaths in China alone are running at a million annually and set to double that by 2030.

https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/over-a-million-people-die-in-china-every-year-due-to-smoking-report-121052601195_1.html

I recall reading years ago that BAT saw great prospects for growth in China, which now has over 300 million smokers. A medical website confirms this:

"Paul Adams, the director responsible for BAT's business in the Asia Pacific region, reported, “China is … by far the largest and most profitable opportunity … " https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598483/

You may remember that at one point the tobacco companies started targeting women, beginning in Germany with a brand called Kim (thanks, BAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_(cigarette)); currently in China the vast majority of smokers are men but I'll bet Ken Clarke's pals are working on breaking their cultural resistance to female smoking and when they do it'll be trebles all round for execs and shareholders - though China is resisting: https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/28/4/409

Who has brought disaster on whom?

Doctor who?

When is the last time you got a house call from your doctor?

If you’re old enough, you’ve seen it on TV – e.g. Peak Practice (Dr Jack: ‘I’ll just pop over the moor and see how Mrs Bassenthwaite’s headache is doing’) or even Dr Finlay’s Casebook (Dr F: ‘And while I’m here I may as well take a look at your cat.’)

Now, not only does the GP not come to you, it’s getting hard to contact the GP for an appointment.

A couple of days ago, a doctor advised my wife (via telephone, of course) to have this and that checked. So she called the group practice, and a recorded message said that there were no appointments left for that day and – well, that was that.

So she went online and found the practice website. There was a long rigmarole (mustn’t scream, mustn’t throw laptop) of registering, plus password and memorable check-word. Finally, she was shepherded through to a page promisingly called Patient Access. This asked what the patient wanted, and the enquiry box wouldn’t recognise the various messages she typed in; but there was also a list below of available services, which if you were incautious you might request – but which were private and mostly fee-charging. How does an NHS GP practice lead to this? How many patients, some elderly, some perhaps not good readers or speaking English as a second language, might walk into this spider’s web?

All we wanted was an appointment with the GP or practice nurse! You can phone/email your dentist (at least, we can – in fact, just got a same-day morning slot today!*) – but not your doctor?

Okay, frustration threshold crossed, time for ‘action directe’; she went next morning in person to the Centre. After standing in line behind someone with a complicated query, she got to the front and was told ‘you can’t come in to book an appointment, you have to do it online.’ (Because Covid? There were only a few people in the waiting room and she was wearing a mask.) Oh, and what if you don’t have a smartphone or a working computer?

There are, of course, no email addresses to reach the practice manager, admin staff or individual doctors.

Back to Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and internet grief. Somehow the practice site led us onto a different link, Engage Consult aka engage.gp, and by dint of not answering most of the questions and ignoring hints to call 999 or 111 we got to the point where we could ask for a call-back; which came by text the following day, with an appointment - for 10 days hence.

Why all this complication and delay? Even now, the average GP has fewer than 2,100 patients https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/workload/number-of-registered-patients-per-gp-rises-to-almost-2100/ , as compared with MPs who have on average 73,000-plus constituents, though admittedly the latter manage by ignoring many of us altogether. Also, where MPs are paid c. £82,000 plus expenses, the average GP in England and Wales earns £98,000 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9356701/NHS-GP-earning-700-000-year-one-hundreds-earning-Prime-Minister.html ; I make that £1.12 per constituent p.a. versus £47 p.a. per patient.

Is it, perhaps, something to do with the way that doctors, like police and politicians, have gone from a bottom-up model of working, to top-down? Modern GP work is a business (it always was, but more consciously so now) and patients are profit centres who can be made more productive by having mass screenings and vaccinations rolled out to them, like the aorta scan (part of a large program) they made me have some years ago. For this kind of thing, you get contacted by letter, email, telephone; you get assigned provisional dates and venues; you get reminders.

‘Contact your personal physician’ – really, that’s so last century. It’s not personal any more; not ‘your doctor.’

_______________

* i.e. last Friday

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Ras Prince Monolulu, by JD

'I gotta horse !'

The death of racehorse trainer and legendary gambler Barney Curley last week reminded me that racing has always been peopled by larger than life characters like him (as well as others of a more dubious provenance.)
https://www.attheraces.com/news/2021/May/23/famed-gambler-and-former-trainer-barney-curley-dies-at-the-age-of-81

Curley's death marks one more sad step towards the uniformity of blandness that is one of the curses of modern life.

British racecourses are one of the few areas where the upper class and the working class meet on more or less equal terms. The middle class could never come to terms with racing and in fact The Guardian would not cover it until quite recently.

It wasn't always like that and one of the most famous and colourful characters was the man shown on the extreme right of this photograph who styled himself Ras Prince Monolulu. His real name was Peter Carl Mackay (1881-1965) and rather than being a chief of the Falasha tribe of Abyssinia as he claimed to be, he came from the Caribbean island of St Croix.

His father and brothers were horse breeders and trainers on St Croix and that is undoubtedly how he knew how to spot a winner in the racing world.

He made a living as a racing tipster and on racecourses up and down the country he would stand with a clutch of small brown envelopes in his hand and talk endlessly to attract punters.

I gotta horse
I gotta horse
God made the bees
The bees make honey
The soldiers do the dirty work
The bookies take all the money.

He became famous after tipping the horse Spion Kop to win the 1920 Derby, which came in at the long odds of 100-6, and from which he personally made some £8,500 (a huge amount of money at the time) and also gifts from grateful punters who had followed his advice.

And always the non stop yarns:

I know an outsider with four legs, one leg at each corner, this one will cross the winning post and the others will be arrested for loitering!

He wrote his memoirs in a book entitled "I Gotta Horse" but whether those memoirs are reliable or not is open to question since he did talk a lot and did contradict himself a lot; all part of his showmanship of course.

His death in 1965 added another myth to the story of his life. Jeffrey Bernard, another colourful character who wrote the Low Life column in the Spectator and also worked as a racing journalist, visited Monolulu in the Middlesex Hospital to interview him. Bernard had brought with him a box of 'Black Magic' chocolates and offered Monolulu a 'strawberry cream'. Monolulu subsequently choked to death on it and Bernard bade him farewell. He later declared that the story was untrue but it does add to the legend.

To add a personal note: this photo was taken by my father on his old Box Brownie and has the date June 1950 on the back. When I was old enough (i.e. still in my pram) I would go with my family to the races. And when I was a bit older I met Prince Monolulu and to a small boy he was a fascinating sight and sound. A very large black man with coloured ostrich feathers in his hair. 

I don't know if my father ever bought one of those mysterious small brown envelopes but I remember on occasions he would say "right, I'm playing with the bookie's money now" as he folded some notes and put them into his pocket. I blame my father and Prince Monolulu for my everlasting devotion to the semi-anarchical world of the turf.

To get some idea of his 'style' here he is with Groucho Marx on the US show 'You Bet Your Life' and for once Groucho is lost for words! (from 15:56 onwards )

He made a second appearance with Groucho Marx the following week and talked more about his life (from 3:55 onwards)

And more, this time from Wiggia -

This has several pages about Prince Monolulu and his life, a lot of his tales are the ones he told Groucho in the second clip above. They may or may not be true but if just half of them are loosely based on the truth then he certainly had a colourful life!

https://flashbak.com/ive-gotta-horse-the-life-of-the-glorious-prince-monolulu-411471/

WEEKENDER: Max Moseley, by Wiggia

MAX MOSLEY 1940-2021

 

It would be disingenuous of me to claim I knew the man; I didn’t, yet I first saw him briefly in East London in 1962 with his father Sir Oswald Mosley at the latter's last appearance at a rally in the East End.

The publicity that naturally surrounded such an event drew the usual anti-fascists of the time and inevitably trouble broke out and the meeting was abandoned. Max was seen fighting to protect his father from being attacked and that was the end of it; well, not quite, he was arrested and charged with threatening behaviour but was released without charge after claiming he was protecting his father. Soon after, Max got out of politics.

For young people like me at the time Mosley's Black Shirts belonged to a pre-war era so this meeting was a ‘novelty’ in many ways, one which drew a few of us to go and see what it was all about. The police knew that trouble was on hand and had cordoned off Mosley’s truck from which he would give a speech from the back of with a megaphone, if my memory serves me correctly.

But not long into his speech, after a delay the trouble started and the meeting was abandoned, after which we went home none the wiser and Oswald Mosley disappeared from the limelight to live in France.

That wasn't quite the end of his political association with his father. A last-ditch rally in the East End in Brick Lane in ‘65 saw Max again in his father's company: 

Photo: Daily Mail (see link below)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5479785/What-Max-Mosley-doing-vile-anti-Semitic-rally-1965.html

This is a picture I took at the time of the meeting in ‘62 taken on my trusty Rollieflex, of the thin blue line separating the factions at the meeting before it went off. Notice: no fat policemen, no midgets and no endless aids to controlling people.  

Max then went into law and studied as a barrister, qualifying in ‘64, specialising in patent and trademark law which was to become useful when he later took the reins at the helm of F1.

His family background is interesting to say the least and it is worth a read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Mosley

My brief and very expensive encounter with motor racing ended in ‘66 and I sold up what was left after a series of disastrous mechanical failures. Among the items advertised for sale was 'selected Ford engine block'; these were not easy to come by and I had a few offers, one was from a Max Mosley who had started racing in clubman's class in a Lotus 7 - these were full race cars not the road versions and nearly all had Ford Cosworth engines.

He later graduated to F2 before deciding he was not going to make it as a driver and going into race car production with MARCH engineering and later into running the constructors' association of F1 and then to the top as President of FISA.

But my little story is of when he came down, from Northampton I believe, to look at the engine block. He didn’t buy it but it sold anyway. What was interesting about him was coming from the background he had and visiting me still living at home on a council estate in east London there was absolutely no side to him; after deciding not to buy the engine block we sat on a wall outside the estate and talked for what must have been about 45 minutes about motor racing: naturally, his thoughts about what he wanted to do which he wasn’t set on at that time, and inevitably his family and his father.

I mentioned the ‘62 meeting in Dalston were he was charged but released over assault and he just smiled. He said he saw little of his father now his parents were living in France, but not once did he malign his father in any way. My impression of him from that meeting was of someone with a lot of charm and a quick mind. We shook hands and he left; that was it, a small moment in life that left a very favourable impression, despite all that went before and later, that I always remembered.

And like so many other things it is difficult to believe all this happened nearly sixty years ago. Where has it all gone ?

FRIDAY MUSIC: Dead Can Dance, by JD

Dead Can Dance is an Australian music duo from Melbourne. Currently composed of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, the group formed in 1981 and relocated to London the following year. 

Australian music historian Ian McFarlane described Dead Can Dance's style as "constructed soundscapes of mesmerising grandeur and solemn beauty; African polyrhythms, Gaelic folk, Gregorian chant, Middle Eastern music, mantras, and art rock."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Can_Dance

They work for us... oh, yeah?

Last Friday, a number of areas in England saw new anti-virus restrictions https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-57232728 . The guidance was published online, without a public announcement; the slide into ‘Simon says’ whimsicality is bound to happen when you only have to report to the House of Commons every six months. Parliament is failing to safeguard our liberty, and this shines a spotlight on MPs’ responsiveness to constituents.

A month has passed since I wrote to my MP asking her to put a question in the Debating Chamber, urging more frequent reviews of pandemic rules. Conscious that newspapers and politicians scorn those who write to them as being generally ill-educated and semi-lunatic, I added a touch of humour, scribbling on the back of the envelope, ‘This communication is also available in green felt tip.’ Even so, no reply; and we know that the law does not insist that there should be one http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8025255.stm .

It’s bad enough when your MP ignores you, but sometimes it’s worse when they don’t. Like Peter Hitchens, who worried about it in this week’s MoS https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2021/05/peter-hitchens-i-remember-inflation-wrecking-lives-and-i-can-see-it-coming-back.html , I have been concerned for a long time about the destruction of our savings by inflation.

The Con-LibDem coalition took over on 11 May 2010; Cameron’s PPS wrote to Cabinet Ministers that ‘The Prime Minister wants to ensure that the Government as a whole is giving the highest priority to addressing the cost of living’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2157018/Cameron-summits-quads-secrets-save-EU.html ;  yet on 19 July 2010 NS&I stopped issuing Index-Linked Savings Certificates (ILSC) for the first time since 1975. The latter were briefly made available again in May 2011 and the window re-closed in September.

So I emailed my then MP, asking him to raise the matter in Parliament. Instead, he promised to write to the Treasury and got a response from its Commercial Secretary Lord Sassoon that was a two-page tissue of irrelevancies. My question was about the duty to protect savers who shouldn’t have to gamble on the stock market to keep pace with price rises (note that today the FTSE is still bumping around the 7,000 mark it reached in 2000, and that it approximately halved twice in the intervening period – 2003 and 2009.) The noble Lord wittered on about inflation coming down, fuel duty increases being deferred, incentives to save via ISAs and pensions, the Money Advice Service etc. Apparently NS&I had to withdraw ILSC because there was so much demand (er, a message from the public there?) and in any case the scheme was to help government finance (not ours, it seems.)

I emailed my MP in March 2013 to register my dissatisfaction with that reply and to ask for an oral question at PMQs or Questions to Ministers, noting:

·         the British Government creditworthiness has been downgraded by Moody's,and

·         the pound has dropped, and

·         inflation looks set to rise further, especially for imports…

 

May I also draw your attention to two passages in Hansard from 1975 (esp. Michael Neubert MP http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1975/jul/10/savings-index-linked-schemes and Lords Lee and Jacques http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1975/nov/04/national-savings-schemes ) that make it perfectly clear that Government recognises the moral obligation to protect the value of savers' money?

The MP replied:

‘I tend not to do Oral questions. They don't have any real effect on government policy and it is a lottery as to whether you have the opportunity to ask one.’

So much for PMQs in general, then. Or is it relevant that the MP’s party (LibDem) was then sharing power with the Tories, and so a pointed question had the potential to embarrass one’s friends?

Still, he invited me to work with his researcher to frame a question. Having given the latter more information and background to explain why the issue mattered, I received a massive waffly draft question of 157 words offering maximal wriggle-room for the Minister. I can’t think an MP’s researcher is stupid, so I suppose he thought I was.

Quixotically, I persisted, and got a written answer from Sajid Javid MP (8 July 2013):

‘National Savings and Investments (NS&I) purpose is to provide cost-effective debt financing to the Government by issuing and selling retail savings and investment products to the public.

‘In meeting this objective NS&I follow a policy balancing the interests of their customers, the taxpayer and the stability of the wider financial services market. In line with this remit NS&I do not anticipate new sales of Index-Linked Savings Certificates this year.’

I submit to readers that the ‘balance’ here is like that between two thieves and their victim.

I asked a second question about the threat of bank bail-ins and the reply from Greg Clark MP made reference to the FSCS £85,00 insurance limit for depositors, without addressing the point that in the Cyprus bank crisis of 2012-13 the latter originally faced partial loss of even their insured deposits.

My MP was kind enough to explain it all to me:

‘What they are basically saying is that they don't want to issue any more index linked debt at the moment. They are also saying the 85K is safe.’

And I was kind enough to respond:

‘I understand that. Please don't think that you're the only grammar-school-educated boy in South Birmingham. I also have a degree in English from Oxford.’

With pushing, a further reply from him, with a request to give him the 1975 Hansard references (again):

‘I accept that there are issues about access from time to time. I will write to the minister about this. The table office are very picky about how questions are put to ministers and normally edit them.’

Poor, sensitive table office! On receipt of the links, he then said:

‘I will ask [my researcher] to put these points to the minister with the suggestion that a small number of index linked bonds should be made available with a limit as to how much any one person can hold.’

Why he took it upon himself to qualify with ‘small’ and ‘limit’, I don’t know. So grudging! Not that even this got an official response; if it was sent at all. So, after more than a year, I got… nowhere. *crickets singing*…

They work for us, do they? 

Vote for war

Outside St Mary’s Church in Totnes stands a rough stone war memorial. At the foot of the cross are named over 100 men killed in the Great War, including three men from one family and two from another, in a town of fewer than 6,000 souls.

Who voted for the slaughter to begin? Nobody. The electorate comprised 5.2 million men (some 60% of all adult males, and no women at all), but they were not consulted. Instead, the order was given by King George V at a Privy Council meeting in Buckingham Palace attended by only two court officials and Lord Beauchamp. As historian AJP Taylor explained  https://global.oup.com/academic/product/english-history-1914-1945-9780192801401?cc=gb&lang=en& , this reflected ‘a general view that war was an act of state, if not of prerogative, with which ordinary citizens had little to do.’

By 1918, after nearly a million British servicemen had died (with another c. two million permanently disabled) https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1914-1945/war/ , it was thought that the people might be entitled to more of a voice. The Home Secretary introduced the Representation of the People Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_of_the_People_Act_1918#Background saying that the war

‘has made it, I think, impossible that ever again, at all events in the lifetime of the present generation, there should be a revival of the old class feeling which was responsible for so much, and, among other things, for the exclusion for a period, of so many of our population from the class of electors.’

Nevertheless, while the Act extended the vote to all men only some women qualified - about 40% of them. The rest had to wait until 1928 to be included. Universal adult suffrage in Britain has yet to celebrate its centenary.

Even modernised democracy didn’t stop the repeat use of the royal war-making prerogative in 1939; and it remains to this day the constitutional position for the United Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_parliamentary_approval_for_military_action . While we complain about minor infringements of our personal freedom, the government reserves the right to kill us (and the people of other nations) wholesale, so long as some pretext can be found that circumvents Nuremberg principles. ‘Gandalf’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9569815/You-looked-like-Gandalf-Tony-Blair-admits-lockdown-mullet-mistake.html bounced us into war with Iraq, and ‘Dodgy Dave’ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/on-this-day-dennis-skinner-thrown-out-of-the-commons-after-calling-cameron-dodgy-dave-263883/ only desisted from bombing Syria because he chose to ‘respect’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23892783 a Commons majority opposing it.

The US Constitution attempted to restrain the Executive with a specification that it should be Congress that declares a war. Despite the country being almost continuously involved in armed foreign conflicts since its foundation, that declaration has been made only eleven times, the last in 1942 https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/War-Powers/ . The use of the notion of ‘authorisation’ has allowed this power, like so many others, to drift towards the Chief Executive, and in any case the next Big One may happen so suddenly that there will be no need for a call-up before a general incineration begins.

The US President’s nuclear football is ever at hand; Britain is now stocking up with more atomic weapons https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/03/18/britain-is-adding-nukes-for-the-first-time-since-the-cold-war ; the winds blow around the old granite cross. And we have the vote.