Thursday 5 April 2018

Tameside Tories see RED over Communist party funeral flag!


Tameside Health Campaigner - Rod McCord

A major row has erupted over a family’s right to display in public, the Communist Party flag, in memory of their father, who was a lifelong communist.

Last Thursday, over 300 people attended the memorial service to Rodney (Rod) McCord at the Stalybridge Civic Hall.  A local health campaigner and member of Stalybridge Labour Party, Rod died in Willow Wood Hospice, on Wednesday 15th February 2018, aged 67. Later in the afternoon, a service took place at the Dukinfield Crematorium.

Originally from Openshaw, Manchester, Rod was one of three children of Phyllis and Charles McCord. Along with their father, Rod and his two sisters, Christine and Marilyn, were all members of the Communist Party (CPGB). Rod left instructions that the Communist Party flag was to be draped over his coffin and a communist   banner with the hammer and sickle and "RIP COMRADE", was displayed in the civic hall. The Red Flag and The Internationale were also played at the service and relayed out into the street.

Afterwards, family and friends retired to the Stalybridge Labour Club, where £1,348.94 was collected for Willow Wood Hospice. To show honour and respect to their father, the McCord family, decided to display the CP flag on the flagpole at Stalybridge Labour Club to "mark our Dad's passing."

A local busybody Stalybridge councillor, called Doreen Dickenson, a kind of priggish, parochial, Mrs Grundy type of character, got wind that something rather communist and lefty was going on in her own backyard of Stalybridge.  Even before, Mr McCord had been laid to rest, she was scurrilously tweeting about how un-English and alien it was to display communist flags and play communist songs, in this little northern cotton town. Although Dickenson, later removed the offending tweet, after being contacted by the McCord family, she said she'd received complaints from constituents about the 'Communist Party Flag' and communist music being relayed outside by loudspeakers that she found disgusting. She also seemed to think that because the event took place in a public building (which the family had hired for the occasion), they had no right to fly the flag or play music. 



Many Tameside Labour members appear to have been either unaware of the incident, indifferent, or in support of the kind gesture to honour Mr. McCord, who was held in high regard.  Jonathan Reynolds MP, who represents Stalybridge & Hyde, said:

"Rod was a truly lovely person, generous, intelligent and warm. Many people will know him in particular for his work with Tameside Hospital Action Group... I always thought he was one of the most well-read and informed people I ever met. There was a great turnout today, and Rod's sons and grandchildren all gave magnificent tributes to him. Dave Ormsby gave a brilliant eulogy, which was funny as well as poignant. Rest in Peace Rod."

Councillor Jan Jackson, who chairs the Stalybridge Town Council, said the flag was a family matter and was "not aligned or associated in any way with the New Stalybridge Labour Club." she said:

"It has gone viral and caused a furore on social media, something that should not have happened. It was the funeral of a very stalwart person who sat on the Tameside Hospital Action Board (sic) and did a lot of good work in the community. People are dying all over the world and struggling to put a loaf of bread on the table, yet flying the flag has caused all this fuss.  There are more important issues."

The McCord family later issued a statement saying that it was not their intention to cause offence, upset, or to associate the flag with the Labour Party.

I don't suppose that any of us should be surprised at the foul antics that the Tories and the far right are prepared to stoop to in order to make political capital over their opponents. Even the death of a truly decent man, and the respect his family paid to him, is something that cannot take place without controversy or be exploited for political gain.  Some have even tried to connect this flag incident with the recent poisonings of Yulia and Sergei Skripal.  But what should one expect from a party that snatched milk off the school kids and now threatens to take their free school meals off them, if their family earns more than £7,400 a year.

We understand that the manager of Stalybridge Labour Club received death threats following this incident.  We also understand that someone in the office of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, contacted one of Mr McCord's son's, demanding that the communist flag be taken down and that when he asked to speak to 'Jeremy', he was told he was out at a meeting.  This seems rather cowardly and gutless action from a party that proclaims itself to be socialist.  Needless to say, the party must have found it a political embarrassment.

Despite being embarrassed by a red flag, the Labour Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, says in his  'Who's Who' entry, that his hobbies include "fermenting (sic) the downfall of capitalism."  In 2011, he called on unhappy workers to spit in their boss’s tea.  Clearly, the pragmatic politician lies behind many of these hard men on the left.

And what would my dear friend Rod McCord, be making of this right now?  I bet he'd be laughing his little red socks off. He certainly went out with a bang! RIP mate.

Derek Pattison,
Joint Editor Northern Voices.

Tuesday 13 March 2018

Rod McCord - Obituary.



OBITUARY – RODNEY (ROD) McCORD
5th March 1950 - 15th February 2018
Rod McCord with sons Patrick, Danny, and late wife Liz

It is with deep sadness and regret that we have to announce the death of our good friend and highly esteemed colleague, Rodney (Rod) McCord, who died in Willow Wood Hospice on 15th February 2018, aged 67.

Originally from Openshaw, Manchester, Rod spent most of his married life living in Stalybridge, where he was active in the local Stalybridge Labour Party.  He was one of three children, of Phyllis and Charles McCord, who along with their father were all active members of the Communist Party (CPGB). After the death of his wife Liz, in 1996, he then had responsibility for continuing to bring up his two sons, Patrick and Danny, who attended Copley High School.

Rod was educated at the Central Manchester Grammar School and the University of Sheffield where he studied political Science. After leaving university, he worked for the Inland Revenue and the Manchester Direct Works Department.

A keen local health campaigner, Rod worked with us for many years, in the Tameside Hospital Action Group (THAG) which was set up with the help of Ashton MP David Heyes in November 2006, as well as the ‘Campaign for Change at Tameside Hospital.’ He was also involved with the local health watchdog LINk, (now called Tameside Health Watch). He worked tirelessly to improve standards for patients at Tameside Hospital and often did ward visits to speak to patients about their experiences. This was at a time when Tameside Hospital was being accused of providing sub-standard patient care and the hospital, was denounced by the local Coroner, as “despicable” and “Chaotic”. Failure to address these issues would result in the hospital being placed in “Special measures” following the Keogh review, and the resignation of the hospital CEO, Christine Green, in July 2013.

He was a familiar face at any meeting where Tameside Hospital were being held to account and would grill Tameside Hospital management relentlessly, if he felt standards for patients were remiss or inadequate. As a member of THAG, he wrote the document “A Charter for Change” that was submitted to the hospital.

Though he could be blunt and vituperative with those in authority, no one who knew him ever doubted his sincerity, inherent decency, compassion, and his commitment to any cause that he took up. A stickler for accuracy, he was once told by a High Court Judge during a legal case that he brought himself, against a building contractor represented by a barrister - which he won with costs - that he found Rod too pedantic. He then praised him for being one of best lay persons (litigant in person) that had ever brought a case before him in his court. This legal case, he prepared himself, with no legal experience other than the text books he’d found in a law library in central Manchester. Such was his ability and thoroughness, when it came to mastering any brief.

A devoted grandfather, to Amber, Sammy, Josh and Lily, Rod was an avid reader, a keen walker and liked swimming. He was also a Manchester United supporter and a big fan of Dennis Law.  A man of great principle and integrity, he will be greatly missed by his family, his many friends, and colleagues, who will remember him for his wit and lively and enlightening conversation.

A memoriam service is to take place on Thursday 8th March, at
Stalybridge Civic Hall, commencing at 12 pm followed by a funeral service at Dukinfield Crematorium at 1.30pm.


Derek Pattison (THAG).
Milton Pena – Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon (retired) Tameside Hospital.
Liz Degnan – Campaign for Change at Tameside Hospital.
Paul Broadhurst – Community Health Campaigner.

Tuesday 27 February 2018

Hidden Heroes of Easter Week – Memoirs of Volunteers from England who joined the Easter Rising
By Robin Stocks


Review: by Derek Pattison

To this day, the armed rebellion that took place during Easter Week of 1916 in Dublin, known as the ‘Easter Rising’, remains controversial. Some see it as a courageous and brave act that led to the birth of the Irish Republic, whereas, others, see it as a reckless act of folly, an attempted revolt against Britain while we were at war with Germany. British intelligence was certainly aware of the planned rising and the armed shipments from Germany, which also went to the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), formed in 1913. Most of the people, who died during the six days of the rebellion, which was supported by Germany, were Irish, mostly civilians, and the poor of Dublin. And they died for a cause that they hardly understood or supported. Moreover, many Irish people were aware in 1916 that Irish Home Rule was on the cards and that partition was inevitable. In January 1913, the Third Reading of the Home Rule Bill had been carried in Parliament and the Government of Ireland Act 1914, provide home rule for Ireland.

According to the author of this book, nearly a hundred Irish rebels travelled to Ireland from cities in England and Scotland during the early months of 1916 to participate in an armed uprising which they had heard about. Those from England were frequently described as ‘London Irish’ despite being from other parts of England, such as the city of Liverpool. Some of those who participated during Easter Week also came from the Manchester area and Stockport and this book, is largely about four of those Manchester volunteers. Only two of the volunteers were born in Ireland. These are Liam Parr and Redmond Cox. Gilbert Lynch, was from Reddish in Stockport and Larry Ryan, was born in Salford.

Liam Parr had left Dublin about 1910 when he was 19-years-old and had settled in West Didsbury, in South Manchester. He left Manchester in February 1916 to travel to Dublin and undertook military and munitions training at Kimmage Mill, Larkfield, Dublin. On Easter Monday 1916, Parr was in the Liberty Hall office, the headquarters of the Irish Transport & General Workers Union (ITGWU) and was one of the first to take over the GPO office on Sackville Street, on Monday afternoon. After the surrender on Saturday afternoon, he was arrested and returned to England where he was interned in a camp in Frongoch, Wales.

Redmond Cox was born in Boyle County, Roscommon, in 1893. As a 22-year-old, he’d been living in Cheetham, Manchester, with his sister. He travelled to Dublin in February 1916. Before surrendering, Cox had been in ‘Four Courts’ and he was later arrested and returned to England. He was released from imprisonment after a fortnight.

Gilbert Lynch had been born in Reddish, Stockport, in 1892. A devout Catholic, he joined the National League of Young Liberals in 1908 and was involved with the Clarion in 1916. He claimed to have been a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians) in 1913 and to have joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1917. A member of Stockport Trades Council, he said that his political outlook had been influenced by reading “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist.” A gun-runner, Lynch arrived in Dublin the week before Easter with 500 rounds of .303 ammunition and had been carrying small-arms. During Easter week he had been based in Father Matthew Hall, which was being used as a first-aid station and to detain prisoners and spies. Lynch escaped arrest because he had been in hospital having “twisted his ankle getting over a barricade.” He later made his way back to Stockport.

Laurence (Larry) Ryan was born in Salford in 1894. His mother lived in Seedley in Salford. Unlike the others, it is not known when Ryan travelled to Dublin, but he did train at Kimmage Mill and was one of the first, to take up a position in the GPO building. After the surrender, Ryan was arrested and returned to England. He was interned until Christmas in Frongoch camp in Wales.

On Easter Monday 1916, the rebel’s had planned to occupy the General Post Office building on Sackville Street, Dublin, and to use this building as their headquarters. Many of the leaders including James Connolly, a socialist who had been born in Cowgate, Edinburgh, mistakenly believed that the English imperialists would not use artillery because they would not bomb their own property. Therefore, they expected an infantry attack on the GPO building and posted battalions in four main positions outside the city centre to command the routes that British soldiers would take to attack the GPO. The rebel plan also involved armed risings in the rest of the country. Bolands Bakery, the Marrowbone Lane Distillery, the South Dublin Union Workhouse and the Jacobs factory, were all sites of revolt. Some of the rebels did use Mauser rifles that had been provided by the Germans and brought to Ireland by Erskine and Molly Childers in their yacht ‘Asgard’ in July 1914. The Easter Rising lasted six days before the rebels on the instructions of their leaders, surrendered on the Saturday.

On the third day of the rebellion, Patrick Pearse, a barrister, writer, schoolteacher and nationalist mystic with a martyr complex, had told the rebels in the GPO building that the country was steadily rising and that volunteers were marching from Dundalk on Dublin and that reinforcements would arrive and release them. “They were later told by a visitor of the despondency in the city as well as the news that the country had not risen.” Connolly was certainly aware, that after the surrender, all those who had signed the proclamation of the Irish Republic, would be shot by the British and that this was a cause he was happy to die for. He told others that they were likely to be imprisoned and should keep quiet about what they had done.

After the surrender, many volunteers recalled the hostility and abuse they had encountered from many Dubliners. Con Colbert, who was later shot in Kilmainham Gaol, said after the surrender: “the people who we have tried to emancipate have demonstrated nothing but hate and contempt for us.”

Hidden Heroes of Easter Week is a book that is well worth reading.  Robin Stocks has done a great deal research on this book and many of the accounts given by the volunteers who took part during Easter Week in Dublin are based on witness statements, interviews with family members and research done in archives and libraries in England and Ireland. Where I think this book is at its weakest, is in its lack of analysis of the rising itself and what effect it had on Irish society.

This book does not mention that 450 people were killed and 2,500 injured during the rising and nine reported missing. Among the dead, were 117 soldiers, 41 of them Irish, plus 16 armed and unarmed policeman, all Irish. Some 64 volunteers out of a total of 1,500, who played some part in the rising, were also killed. However, alongside 205 combatants who died, 245 wholly innocent civilians also died. The dead were mostly Irish civilians and Dublin’s poor, who died for a cause they barely understood or supported or were even hostile to. Some saw it as an opportunity for looting. Many of the civilians were killed by British forces using machine-gun fire, incendiary shells and artillery.

As Robin Stocks makes clear, not all leading Republicans were in favour of the insurrection. Bulmer Hobson, a leading Fenian, considered it a reckless adventure. Speaking after the rising, Hobson said that towards the end of 1915, Connolly (who had served in the British army in Ireland), had decided to have a “little insurrection” with the citizen army.

“His conversation was full of clichés derived from the earlier days of the socialist movement in Europe. He told me that the working-class was always revolutionary, that Ireland was powder magazine and that what was necessary was for someone to apply the match. I replied that if he must talk in metaphors, Ireland was a wet bog and the match would fall in the puddle.”

He described Patrick Pearse as a “sentimental egoist, full of curious Old Testament theories about being the scapegoat of the people who had become convinced of the necessity for a periodic blood sacrifice to keep the national spirit alive. There was a certain strain of abnormality in all this.”

Before leading his men out of Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), on Easter Monday, to start a rebellion, we are told that Connolly had said ‘smilingly’: “Well girls, we start operations at noon today. This is the proclamation of the republic.” What we are not told in this book, is that on the way out of the building, Connolly halted at the bottom of the stairs to speak with his friend and colleague William O’Brien. Connolly told him: “Bill, we are going out to be slaughtered.” Is there any chance?” asked O’Brien. “None whatsoever” said Connolly. He then marched his men out of the building along with his fifteen year old son, Roderick (Roddy ) Connolly, who would survive the rising.

Although fifteen of the rebel leaders were executed, many of those who took part in the rising were treated with surprising leniency by the British authorities, including the four Manchester volunteers. Some 3,430 men and 79 women were arrested after the rising and 1,424 men and 73 women were subsequently released. Of almost 2,000 men who were interned in England, over 1,200 were quickly released and most of the others were home by Christmas 1916. All were freed under a general amnesty in July 1917. Those who faced a court martial, included 170 men and one woman, Constance Markievicz. Ninety death sentences were passed and fifteen carried out. Those sentenced to life imprisonment, were released within 18-months.

Today, many Republican groups and trade unions in Ireland, have adopted James Connolly as their patron saint or founding father. While it is true to say that the execution of the rebel leaders produced sympathy for the cause and turned the men into martyrs, Connolly’s influence was marginalised after the rising – all of Connolly’s children took the anti-Treaty side. Ireland did not become the workers socialist republic that Connolly had wished for. What emerged triumphant from the Easter Rising was Irish Catholic Nationalism and it was Pearse’s vision of Ireland, which was elevated. There was little support for Marxism in Ireland before the rising and afterwards and many Sinn Fein and IRA members were fiercely anti-Communist. Indeed, in the 1960s, communists were banned from the Republican movement. Ireland under Eamonn de Valera’s, Fianna Fail, was protectionist, isolationist, and obedient to the Catholic hierarchy. Divorce, contraception and abortion, were all illegal. It was a world of secrecy and obedience with its Magdalene laundries and the subordination of women. It survived by exporting its young, mainly to Britain, where they could earn a living. The Irish Catholic Church supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War and some Irish Catholic’s, fought with the ‘Blueshirt’s on the nationalist side under Eoin O’Duffy. Others supported the Republican side.

None of the Manchester volunteers fought in the civil war which broke out in Ireland in 1922 following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, which was supported by a majority of Irish people. It had been estimated that six times more nationalists were killed in the war than had been killed by the British forces between  1916-1922.

Tragically, we now know that Admiralty SIGINT Unit, Room 40, had been intercepting decrypted messages dealing with German support for the Irish nationalists between the outbreak of WW1 and the eve of the Easter Rising in 1916. Under interrogation at Scotland Yard, Sir Roger Casement, asked to be allowed to call for the rising to be called off to avoid a blood bath, but this was refused. Sir Reginald (Blinker) Hall is reputed to have told Casement – “It is better that a cankering sore like this should be cut out.”


January 2018.

Wednesday 25 January 2017

Trades Council secretary slams MP's for showing ignorance over Benefit Sanctions!

TAMESIDE TRADES UNION COUNCIL 
A Representative Body of the Trades Union Congress 
Secretary: Mr. B. Bamford, 46 Kingsland Rd, Rochdale, Lancs, OL11 3HQ. Tel: 01706 861793


19th December 2016

Anne McLaughlin MP,

House of Commons, London, SW1A OAA.

Dear Anne,

I have been instructed to write to you to thank you for the excellent contribution you made during the debate on the 'Benefit Claimants Sanctions Bill' in the House of Commons on Friday 2nd December 2016.

The level of ignorance or indifference that was displayed by some MP's during this debate on 'sanctions' was quite astonishing. While it’s apparent that some Tory MP's swallow the official government drivel about sanctions, others have clearly put their consciences in cold storage. This Government and many of their MP's display a brutish insensibility to all that does not concern money and wealth - it truly is the worship of Mammon. It is therefore reassuring to many of us who are engaged in protest actions against unfair benefit sanctions that at least some MP's, like yourself, know what they're talking about.

While Victoria Atkins, the daughter of The Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Atkins, and the MP for Louth and Horncastle, didn’t know what a ‘point of order’ was, she was nevertheless, adamant that what you were saying about benefit sanctions was untrue. I was reminded of a remark made by the Greek philosopher, Thucydides, who said:

"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, satisfied with their preconceived opinions." 

I don’t suppose that any of us should be surprised to hear this sort of thing. Even in the mid-1860’s, when according to reports, people were dying of starvation in the streets of London at a rate of about two a week, there were plenty in the House of Commons, who denied it, or dismissed it, as the work of providence - "the poor will always be with us." But how, Ms. Atkins, in a media savvy age, could be so unaware of the real and dire consequences of benefit sanctions on the lives of people, is something that beggars belief. Not only have people been driven to hunger and food-banks because of sanctions, they have also been made homeless and driven to suicide.

Only recently, we heard of the tragic and sad case of 18-year-old David Brown, from Middlesbrough, who took his own life after he claimed he'd been belittled by Jobcentre staff to find work. Although David had not been sanctioned or threatened with a sanction, shortly before his death he told his mother - "The way the Jobcentre treat people, it is no surprise people commit suicide." As you are aware the death of David Brown was raised by Anna Turley MP during Prime Minister's Question Time on Wednesday 7th December 2016.

For over two years, we've held a weekly protest against unfair benefit sanctions outside Ashton-under-Lyne Jobcentre, in Greater Manchester, where we give advice and support to Jobseeker's. Although a sanctions system was always an integral part of the unemployment benefit system, it was not so arbitrary or so unfair, as it is today. Many of the cases that we hear about are quite shocking.

For example, one 19-year-old girl had her benefit stopped when she told a prospective employer - who was offering her an unpaid work placement - that she was 23-weeks pregnant. Another was sanctioned for three-months, when he arrived two-minutes late for an interview at the Jobcentre. A 19-year-old lad from Ashton was sanctioned for one month after Jobcentre staff claimed he'd applied for too many jobs but hadn't received enough interviews. This young man told us that he'd lost his home and had finished up living on the streets. Another Jobseeker told us that he’d received a 3-month benefit sanction for making a spelling mistake. In October, a 44-year-old lady from Ashton told us that she’d had her DLA stopped because she'd been too ill to attend an interview, after her home visit had been cancelled by the Jobcentre. Earlier this year, this lady had spent over 3-months in hospital with double pneumonia, kidney failure and sepsis. She also spent 3 weeks in an induced coma. A disabled young man told us that he’d been threatened with a benefit sanction by staff at Ashton Jobcentre, for supporting our protest, and we now understand, that Jobcentre ‘customers’ are being warned not to speak to us. If you want to speak to this lady or some of the others, we can put you in touch.

While the government deny that Jobcentre staff set people up for sanctioning or have national targets, this is refuted by the Public & Commercial Services Union (PCS) that represents Jobcentre workers. They say that staff, come under intense pressure to sanction jobseekers, or face disciplinary action. Alan Davis, a former Jobcentre worker from Leicester, told a Channel 4 ‘Dispatches Programme’, broadcast in March 2015:

“The pressure was enormous. I just felt what they were asking me to do, was totally wrong – they were asking me to ‘hammer people’ who in their own way were doing their best to get a job.” 

It is clear that some civil servants see themselves as lion tamer's, when dealing with the unemployed. Several years ago, a Whitehall official, speaking about benefit claimants, told the Sunday Times: "If we want them to tap dance, they will tap dance." (Owen Jones, 'The Guardian', 13 January 2012).

While the DWP claim that they are “Making work pay”, around 40% of Jobcentre workers qualify for Universal Credit, because they are so low paid. Some Jobcentre staff that are in receipt of Universal Credit, are now signing-on and facing possible benefit sanctions, because of the requirement to satisfy “in-work conditionality”, which is being piloted at Ashton Jobcentre as part of the roll-out of Universal Credit. In effect, under this scheme, workers are being turned into benefit claimants.

The protests at Ashton Jobcentre have drawn the attention of the national media. In November, a German film crew called to do an interview with some of the protesters. I understand that they had difficulty in comprehending why so many people were so desperately poor and relying on food-banks, in the sixth richest country in the world. They also found it difficult to understand why the British put up with such glaring inequality.

In the 'Northern Poorhouse', many people are becoming increasingly reliant on free food parcels. In 2011, Manchester was dubbed the child poverty capital of Britain, with some 23,000 children growing up in severe poverty. In April 2016, more than 50,000 emergency food supplies were handed out to families across Greater Manchester. Locally, Tameside Hospital, have set up a food-bank because patients were showing signs of malnutrition.

The Trades Union Congress recognise that there is a need to rebuild a modern social security system. The current system has been made increasingly punitive and has effectively been used to stigmatise benefit claimants. The Government's draconian sanctions regime is being used to push people into destitution for the most trivial reasons. The TUC therefore supports a citizens Universal Basic Income Scheme that would be paid to all unconditionally. As trade's unionists, we support such a scheme and would ask for your support as a Member of Parliament.

Yours sincerely,

Brian Bamford.

Thursday 27 October 2016

Is Freedland's claim of anti-semitism on the left, just a smear against Corbyn's leadership?

"My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way you’d treat any other minority."

Jonathan Freedland

"The row over Labour anti-semitism has exposed people who claim to be anti-racist – yet chip away at an essential part of Jewish identity."



A RESPONSE: by Rod McCord - Stalybridge Labour Party (in a personal capacity):

"Let us now be clear. The murder of millions of Jews by Christians in Europe has been paid for by the blood of the Palestinian people whose sole crime was to be indigenous to the land that the Jews coveted.  And those on the left who dare question this now find themselves in the dock answering to the charge of  ‘anti-Semitism’ laid against them by JF and others filled with righteous indignation and grown ‘weary . . . of these attitudes, indeed warned that they had found a warm space to incubate on the left for many, many years." 


In his article in The Guardian of 30 April 2016, Jonathan Freedland implies that the political left in Britain is guilty of anti-semitism and that such attitudes have ‘found a warm space to incubate on the left for many years.’ 

In order to illustrate his contention, he draws an analogy with a single black country which hypothetically emerges as a safe haven for oppressed black people – invoking a very different reaction from the left to the one it allegedly exhibits vis à vis  the State of Israel.

The analogy, however, is disingenuous by virtue of what JF elects, unwittingly or otherwise, to omit. We can, perhaps, be of some assistance here, however, by logical extension of the analogy for the purpose of bringing greater clarity to the  issue he raises.  We can only speculate why he, himself, fails to do this.

Accepting the basic premise of JF’s analogy, let us give context to the emergence of this black country where, following centuries of oppression and exploitation as slave labour by the imperialist and colonialist nations of western Europe, including their ‘transportation’ in coffin ships across the Atlantic to be worked to death in the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of the Americas, black people sought refuge in a land that they could call their own and where they could be free from the tyranny and predations of the white man.

Let us assume, however, that, on account of the Christian religion that their white masters had forced them to adopt, the homeland to which black people naturally aspired was the land of their Saviour, the Holy Land.  And let us further assume, that in order to establish their homeland, they waged a merciless war of terror against its existing inhabitants – the Jews of Israel – the majority of whom they drove out in a planned programme of ethnic cleansing, compelling them to live in wretchedness and degradation in Gaza, the West Bank area of the river Jordan and refugee camps in surrounding countries, with no hope of ever returning to their ancestral home in Israel.

Having, thus, supplanted all but a small remnant of the Jews in Israel, the black country, now rid of any effective Jewish opposition, began to call itself a democracy and could prove it by affording the emasculated, residual Jewish population equal voting rights, though socio-economic discrimination remained ubiquitous.

Even worse was in store, however, for the dispossessed Jews in exile, for many of their black persecutors nursed deeply-held religious aspirations that their Christian homeland should have Jerusalem as its capital and should extend from the Nile to the Euphrates as the Holy Land did of old.

And, so it came to pass, that the army of the black country –  one of the mightiest in all the world with a dazzling array of modern weaponry supplied by its US, British and French backers – invaded and occupied the West Bank and, thereafter, colonised it with successive waves of black settlers, confining its Jewish inhabitants to ‘reservations’ in much the same way as their US ally had done to the indigenous peoples of North America.  In order to placate the modern-day sensibilities of the Americans, however, the black country agreed to allow – within limits –  a Jewish Authority to administer and police the ‘reservations’ and, thereby, keep their inhabitants under control.

Many of the displaced Jews kept in their treasured possession the title deeds – so dear to them – to the land in Israel that they, and their fathers and their fathers before them, had owned and from which they had been expelled by the black country – an event which they and their children and their children’s children now refer to as ‘the catastrophe’. 

Faced with the black country’s intransigence and the world’s indifference to their plight, however, some Jews – both inside the black country and in the occupied West Bank – had refused to accept the status quo  and had embarked on the road of armed resistance adopting the very same methods as the black people had employed against them during the black country’s ‘independence struggle’, such as the use of car bombs, bus bombings, and other indiscriminate attacks on innocent civilians – men, women and children.  The black perpetrators of these attacks, of course, now wore suits and were prominent figures in the leadership of the black country and they condemned these Jewish militants as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists’, their denunciations echoed by the United States, Britain and the rest of the ‘international community’.

In Britain, only a small segment of the left was prepared to stand up in solidarity with the Jews, defending their right to resist occupation and keeping alive the memory of their patrimony and the reality of ‘the catastrophe’ that had befallen them.  For this they were roundly condemned and accused of racism in the form of anti-blackism. One of their number had posted on Facebook that the black country should perhaps be ‘re-located’ to the US (‘problem solved’), for which she was subsequently forced to apologise, no-one at the time bothering to mention the reality on the ground in the occupied territories and in east Jerusalem where the forces of the black country were re-locating Jews on an almost daily basis, raising their homes to the ground and moving them on.  On the contrary, a powerful article in The Guardian  by its liberal, progressive black political correspondent,– who, it must be said, has, on many occasions, raised the question of the treatment of Jews in the black country and occupied territories – joined in the chorus of condemnation of the left asserting that the black country was such an essential component of black people’s identity that to ‘chip away’ at it exposed the left’s claim to be anti-racist. 

Jews in Britain, however, were prepared to make common cause with the left in the struggle to right the wrongs to which their brethren in the black country (which they still referred to as ‘Israel’) and the occupied territories had been, and were still being, subjected.  They demanded an end to the occupation, the right of return of the refugees, as required by international law, and full compliance with UN resolutions, of which the black country remained in flagrant violation, with the complicity of the US and Britain. 

Some on the left,  with the support of large numbers of British Jews, questioned the black country’s right to exist at the expense of the Jews, but they were traduced by all in mainstream politics and the media as covert racists who paid lip service to anti-racism but whose mouthings against the black country exposed their de facto anti-blackism.

It remains unclear whether the white, liberal, progressive Jewish political correspondent of The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, concurs with the demands of his fellow Jews or, as a life-long anti-racist and anti-blackist, supports the right of black people to ‘live as a majority in charge of their own destiny’ in their black country homeland.  Even though some ‘self-hating’ black critics of the black country have raised their voices against the Jewish ‘catastrophe’, it is thought that JF ‘would want to listen to the mainstream black community and be guided by them.’  Or, perhaps not!

* * *

The black country analogy developed by JF is vitiated at virtually every turn. Anticipating the ‘counter-arguments’ of ‘hardcore anti-Zionists’ that the analogy only works if the imaginary black country ‘was guilty of in-built discrimination against a non-black minority and was founded on the forced dispossession of the indigenous people who already lived there,’ he maintains that ‘neither of these problems are rendered logically inevitable by Israel’s existence.’ 

Such a claim is quite simply absurd.  Israel’s existence is predicated on the forced dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians which was, and remains, the means by which the country established and maintains its Jewish majority domination.  Discrimination is the essential guarantor of that majority, the preservation of which is an existential imperative for which reason there can be no right of return for the Palestinian refugees.  This is the Jewish State of Israel – racist both by definition and design.  Immigration and subsequent citizenship is confined to Jews.  To maintain racial purity, there can be no marriage between Jew and Gentile.  Civil marriage does not exist in Israel;  Jew and non-Jew must travel to Cyprus to be wed.

To suggest, therefore, that Israel could develop along the lines of Britain – a Christian country that is ‘an equal home for non-Christians’ –  is non sequitur.  Britain, as JF states, is ‘shaped’  as a Christian country by its history, which is still reflected in its institutions and customs, but it does not ‘define’ itself as the Christian State of Great Britain or strive, at all costs, to maintain a Christian majority population.  Indeed, recent surveys indicate that Christians, if not already, are rapidly becoming a minority in Britain.  Israel’s raison d’être, by contrast, is to exist as a refuge and national homeland for Jews, fundamental to which, therefore, is the re-inforcement and perpetuation of its Jewish character and Jewish majority. To propose that re-possession of their lands by the Palestinians is nonetheless compatible with Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish State borders on the insane.

Institutionalised racism goes to the very core of the Jewish State; it is inherent in every aspect of its construction and modus operandi  and finds its most sickening expression in the occupied territories where graffiti scrawled by Jewish settlers proclaiming, Gas the Arabs, is commonplace. Nor should it be forgotten that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Jews in 1948 was not without precedent:  their original occupation of the so-called Promised Land was the earliest example of genocide in recorded history involving the systematic extermination of the Canaanites – men, women and children put to the sword without mercy in an unrelenting campaign of butchery and conquest.  JF’s call for understanding and empathy for the Jews as victims of genocide conceals an older truth that forms no part of his narrative: the Jews as perpetrators of genocide, a genocide which forms an essential part of Jewish identity since it is upon this genocide that the Zionist claim to a Jewish homeland in Palestine rests.  The irony of it is excruciating:  victims of the Nazi genocide waging a war of terror and ethnic cleansing to establish a safe haven in an ancestral homeland, itself founded upon genocide. 

* * *

JF complains that, although a whole host of other nations were forged in bloodshed, Israel alone is deemed to have its right to exist nullified by the circumstances of its birth.’   The explanation for this, of course, is that Israel is a modern state that has emerged within living memory whose borders to this day remain unsettled and which continues to expand at the expense of the Palestinians.  Unlike in the other countries JF mentions, Israel/Palestine remains in a bellicose state  that is consequential for the peace and stability of the entire Middle East and whilst the Palestinians are expected to recognise Israel’s right to exist, the Israelis feel no equivalent onus to recognise a Palestinian State.  At the UN General Assembly, Israel, with US support and Britain’s abstention, vehemently opposed even observer status for a state of Palestine.  ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ would seem to be the Israeli position.

Justifying Jewish terrorism, carnage and forced expulsions that were midwife to the birth of Israel by reference to the bloodshed in which the US, Australia, Canada and so forth were born, JF nonetheless has consistently condemned the IRA for employing the same methods to achieve the same ends – nationhood – and, more to the point, condemns the Palestinians for adopting the same Israeli terror tactics in their own quest for nationhood.  By any measure, this is hypocrisy of the highest order.

Interestingly, although he refers to ‘the circumstances of [Israel’s] birth,’,  JF gives no detail or clue to these other than by general allusion to the accompanying ‘bloodshed’ and ‘dispossession of the Palestinians . . . the Nakba.’  As a result, many of his readers would remain ignorant of the true reality of the terrorist campaign waged by the Jews against the Palestinians and against the British army and administration in Palestine to put into effect Israel’s ‘right to exist’. 

Guardian readers will not learn from JF of the killing sprees perpetrated by Jewish terrorists against Palestinian civilians: the indiscriminate spraying with bullets of Arab squares and marketplaces, the bombing of Arab buses or the fact that it was the Jews that pioneered the use of the car bomb as a political weapon; they would not learn from JF that the reality behind the ‘dispossession of the Palestinians . . . the Naqba’  was a campaign of ethnic cleansing, striking fear into the Palestinian population and, thereby, provoking a mass exodus by the systematic use of terror and intimidation, including such atrocities as the wholesale massacre of over 100 unarmed men, women and children, ruthlessly gunned down in a clinically planned, premeditated attack by Irgun and Stern Gang (Lehi) fighters under the command of Menachem Begin on the peaceful village of Deir Yassin, the proven efficacy of the operation subsequently confirmed by the consequential mass flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees into neighbouring countries, never to be allowed to return.

Neither would Guardian’ readers learn from JF of the cold-blooded murder by Lehi of former Colonial Secretary, Lord Moyne and his British army chauffeur in Egypt, the letter-bomb campaign against members of the British Cabinet, the bombings of the Jerusalem railway station, the Semiramis hotel, the British Officers’ Club and King David Hotel, headquarters of the British administration in Palestine, or the execution by Irgun of two abducted British army Intelligence Corps sergeants, their booby-trapped bodies left hanging from trees in an orange grove. 

The terrorists that committed these and other atrocities are honoured annually by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in a memorial service and by an official commemoration ceremony, but no reports of this ever manage to find their way into The Guardian  or any other newspaper in this country. The terror campaign of mayhem and murder waged by the Jews has now largely been air-brushed from history by the British press and media, which, like the political ‘mainstream’, now faithfully presents to the world the Jewish narrative of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East whose ‘David and Goliath’ struggle for survival in 1948 pitted it against the combined forces of the surrounding Arab nations, its terrorist origins conveniently and silently interred.

***

In respect of what JF refers to as Ken Livingstone’s ‘version of history’, which he describes as ‘garbled and insulting’,  I am inclined to agree.  This is not, however, evidence, per se, of anti-semitism.  Livingstone has, however, made a previous comment in poor taste which was said to have cost him Jewish votes in the 2012 London mayoral election;  on the other hand, he has for many years been a prominent figure and committed activist in the anti-fascist and anti-racist movements in this country.

 Playing ‘the Holocaust card’  in the way that he does, however, really is ‘bad form’ on the part of JF.  His assertion that Livingstone’s contention ‘that Israel’s creation in 1948 was a mistake . . . a “travesty” ‘, and the corollary that he draws from it that its creation would, presumably, equally have been a mistake in the 1930s, thus denying ‘6 million [Jews] the one lifeline that might have saved them [from the Nazis]’  is the very worst kind of sophistry.  The reality is that the State of Israel was not established in the 1930s and those that prevented its establishment – ‘the one lifeline that might have saved [the Jews]’ – were Tory Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax supported by the entire Conservative Cabinet as well as Winston Churchill from the backbenches.  These are the guilty men, if we are to follow JF’s logic, so it is fair to ask why he reserves his spleen for Livingstone and not those who not only shut the door on Jewish emigration to Britain but also to Palestine.

A similar charge might also be levelled against Clem Atlee,  Foreign Secretary Ernie Bevin and the Labour Cabinet collectively, who from 1945 -1947, prevented by force of arms the creation of a Jewish state.  Does JF hold the entire pre- and post-war British governments to be anti-semitic?  If he does, he should say so.

* * *

Sardonic reference by JF to his playing ‘the Holocaust card’  is also revealing in other ways.  It exemplifies the way in which the Holocaust has been appropriated by the Jews and equated with the Nazi extermination of six-and-a half million of their number.  The word ‘holocaust’, however, signifies wholesale slaughter, death and destruction and the Holocaust of World War II was infinitely more extensive than the exclusive claim laid upon it by the Jews, involving horrendous loss of life from Europe to the Far East on a scale far in excess of Jewish victims, including, not least, 28 million Soviet dead. 

The Jewish monopoly on the Holocaust is implicit in the accusation of ‘holocaust-denier’, a term employed specifically to describe those who seek to deny that Jewish deaths numbered six-and-a half million or were anywhere near that figure.  In reality, the Holocaust consumed many times that figure, Jew and non-Jew;  Jews, specifically, were the victims of genocide – extermination on an industrial scale that constituted the Nazi ‘Final Solution to the Jewish problem’.  It comprised a terrible component of the Holocaust but was not synonymous in the way that Jews, including JF, employ the terminology,  a way that is now woven deep into the fabric of the modern-day narrative in the West.

Jewish ‘ownership’ of the Holocaust is insulting to the memory of the millions of other victims.  28 million Soviet war dead notwithstanding, who today would know that more Gentiles than Jews perished in the Nazi death camps?  Who today remembers the million-and-a half gypsies that were rounded up and herded to their deaths?  Their persecution across Europe continues to the present but where are the calls for a national gypsy homeland; where is the demand that they be afforded the right to return to the land of their forefathers in Bengal?  And who today outside the LGBT community remembers the countless numbers of homosexuals put to their deaths in the camps or the disabled or the 4.5 million Soviet prisoners-or-war.  Neither the holocaust nor the genocide is the exclusive property of the Jews and to conflate either with Jewish deaths alone as is now the norm is to demean and diminish the suffering and sacrifice of millions of non-Jews who shared the same fate.

From what JF calls ‘the Holocaust’ – the extermination of the Jews -  springs, he insists, the rationale for Israel’s existence which he implores the left to understand and empathise with.  He concedes that ‘Israel’s creation came at a desperately high price for Palestinians – one that Israel will one day, I hope, acknowledge, respect and atone for through word and deed;’  though he cannot be ignorant of the futility of his sentiments.  How can it be possible for Israel to atone for the dispossession of the Palestinians – which continues to this day – without providing for the return of the dispossessed, which would signal the end of the Jewish majority in Israel and ultimately, therefore, the Jewish State.  JF is fully aware of this and, after shedding his crocodile tears for the hapless Palestinians, adds emphatically that ‘it is impossible for most Jews to see it [the dispossession of the Palestinians] as a mistake that should be undone.’  [my emphasis]

He is demanding of the left, therefore, that it must lend its imprimatur to the Nakba, deny the right of return of the refugees and become complicit in the continued persecution and dispossession of the Palestinians.  Only then can it shake off the opprobrium of anti-semitism that its solidarity with the oppressed victims of the Jewish usurpation of Palestinian lands allegedly constitutes.  For according to JF, Jews and Jews alone, are the arbiters of anti-semitism, a courtesy that the left, he declares, customarily extends to other minorities, affording black people the right to define what is racism, women to define sexism and Muslims to define Islamophobia.

This is arrant nonsense: none of these groups can even agree amongst themselves what constitutes these phenomena.  Are we to believe that the left should defer to the likes of Gangsta Rappers on racism, the Women’s Institute on sexism or radical Islamists on Islamophobia?  Proceeding along this line of argument, might we expect JF’s next step to be a call for the ‘no-platforming’ of the left and safe spaces and trigger-alerts for Jews?  And why on earth, it might be asked, should black people be afforded the exclusive right to define something as generic as racism?  Indeed, when, for that matter, did women acquire minority status?

The left, of course, is attentive to what its black, female and Muslim comrades have to say on these issues and, likewise, its Jewish comrades in respect of anti-semitism – some of whom will, presumably, be amongst the 7% of ‘mainstream British Jews’ for whom, in the 2015 survey to which JF alludes, Israel forms no part of their identity as Jews and for whom the plight of the Palestinians represents something more than ‘a mistake that should be [left] undone.’  It might be added that there are, no doubt, Jews amongst the 93% in the survey for whom Israel ‘forms some part of their identity as Jews’  that are also on the left and also question Israel’s right to exist as presently constituted.

At this juncture, we are perfectly placed to address the issue central to JF’s critique and which forms the sub-heading to his article: namely, that alleged anti-semitism in the Labour party has exposed people on the left who claim to be anti-racist but ‘chip away at an essential part of Jewish identity,’ by which he means the State of Israel. The clear implication is that anti-semitism is rife on the left, evidenced by its constant and unparalleled attacks upon Israel – for which it is ‘consumed with hatred’ – and upon its right to exist, and, therefore, upon Jewish identity.

The first point that should be made is that, contrary to what JF implies, similar, or more intense passions have, indeed, been released on the left, mainly, it should be said involving, Israel’s staunchest allies: the United States, apartheid South Africa and fascist Chile – a telling commentary in itself.  The American invasion and round-the-clock carpet bombing of Vietnam, institutionalised white supremacy in South Africa and the CIA-engineered coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile and the summary execution of thousands of workers, students and peasants, were all met with a degree of enragement on the left of a kind that JF complains is now reserved exclusively for Israel.

The distinctive point he makes that the attacks on Israel ‘uniquely’ call into question its very existence, I have already addressed.  The implication that to thus ‘chip away at an essential part of Jewish identity’ is anti-semitic, however,  needs to be challenged.  Like much else in his piece, it is a distortion.  The 2015 survey he relies upon found only, according to his report, that for 93% of ‘mainstream’  British Jews (whatsoever that may mean) – not 93% of all British Jews –  ‘Israel forms some [my emphasis] part of their identity as Jews,’  which is quite different from averring, as JF does, that it is ‘an essential [my emphasis] part of Jewish identity’;  it may form a large or a miniscule part of the identity of some, many or only a few of the 93% of the mainstream; it may, or may not, be ‘essential’;  it may be quite abstract and unimportant; we have no way of knowing from the reported information.

Even if we could conclude that it were ‘essential’  to Jewish identity, would it be safe to imply, as JF does, that to challenge an aspect of a people’s identity is racist and, in this case, anti-semitic?  Female genital mutilation is, arguably, ‘essential’, or may form ‘some’ part of the identity of certain communities in Britain.  Is it, therefore, racist to ‘chip away’ at the practice?  White supremacy formed an essential part of the identity of the Boers and of the segregationists of the American South; was it racist to chip away at it? The British Empire erstwhile formed an essential part of British identity; is it, therefore, to be inferred from JF’s logic, that left-wing opponents of imperialism and colonialism were unpatriotic, traitorous and anti-British, as the right invariably portrayed them?  Today, immigration into this country chips away at an  essential part of the identity of all ‘true-born Englishmen’; are the proponents of immigration, therefore, guilty of racism towards this John Bull breed? 

And, what of the displaced Palestinians?  Palestine forms an ‘essential’ and fundamental part of their identity at which Israel has not simply ‘chipped away’, but has smashed to smithereens, an ethnically-directed terrorist atrocity that JF sanctions as ‘impossible for most Jews to see . . . as a mistake that should be undone.’  Applying, therefore, the same logic and same criteria by which JF adjudges the left to be anti-semitic, the Israelis and their Jewish and non-Jewish supporters are guilty of the most vile racism that seems, however, not to disturb JF’s semitic sensibilities in the least or, indeed, at all.

It is worth recalling, that it is not so long ago that JF’s liberal newspaper, The Guardian, along with the rest of the British, European and American media proclaimed with one voice: Je suis Charlie Hebdo, echoing the message of solidarity for the victims of the Paris shootings and for the French people at large that rang around the western world.  The call to defend and uphold the enlightenment values of the French Republic was near universal:  freedom of speech and of the press were deemed inviolable;  freedom of religion was likewise sacrosanct –  but so too was the right to offend, including the right to publish  caricatures in the press of the Prophet Muhammad, notwithstanding the fact that this chipped – nay, hacked –  away at ‘an essential part’ of Muslim identity, and would, by definition, therefore, according to the criteria laid down by JF, be tantamount to institutionalised racism.  There is no evidence in this instance, however, that JF applied the same criteria that he applies to condemn the left.  The right to offend Muslims does not, apparently, extend to the right to offend Jews.

* * *

Let us now be clear. The murder of millions of Jews by Christians in Europe has been paid for by the blood of the Palestinian people whose sole crime was to be indigenous to the land that the Jews coveted.  And those on the left who dare question this now find themselves in the dock answering to the charge of  ‘anti-semitism’ laid against them by JF and others filled with righteous indignation and grown ‘weary . . . of these attitudes, indeed warned that they had found a warm space to incubate on the left for many, many years. 

Such short memories do these people have!  They would do well to remind themselves that this is the self-same left that has always been at the very forefront of the fight against anti-semitism: organising the defence of the Jews against Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s in the East End of London, culminating in the battle of Cable Street; leading the Anti-Nazi League in the struggle against the recrudescence of fascism with the rise of the National Front in the 1970s and 80s; and, in recent times, taking to the streets to stem the threat posed by fascism in its latter-day incarnation, the BNP.  The left has a proud record that is second to none in the fight against anti-semitism and against all forms of oppression – and that necessarily extends to and includes the oppression of the Palestinians;  it is not the left that is guilty of double standards in this respect but JF and his ilk who demand special dispensation for Israel and claim exceptionalism for the Jews on account of their recent (and past) history. There is no right of the oppressed to become the oppressor on account of their own oppression, particularly so when those they oppress played no part in their oppression.  The elephant in the room to which JF turns a blind eye is, in fact, Jewish racism towards the Palestinians for which he himself appears from the content of his piece to be no more than an abject apologist. 

This leads us to examine another of the crude distortions that devalue his so-called ‘plea to the left’.  Taking isolated examples of alleged anti-semitic remarks from individuals allied to the left wing of the Labour Party, JF begins his diatribe by indicting ‘a small but vocal section of the left’.   However, what he goes on to refer to as ‘this noisy segment of the left’  very soon in the course of the article metamorphoses into simply ‘the left’, which remains the butt of his critique thereafter, so that the piece appears under the rubric: My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way you’d treat any other minority. 

Thus, from making unsubstantiated and unconvincing claims of implicit anti-semitism against less than a handful of leftist individuals, JF proceeds to generalise and tar the entire left with the same brush, a well-worn tactic on which his fellow journos at the Daily Mail and Sun could give him a few lessons, were he to ask nicely.

At no point in his piece does JF reveal or define whom or what he means by ‘the left’, with the result that his discourse appears as nothing more than a gratuitous smear against the Labour party as currently configured under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (against whom he casts aspersions for failing to repudiate a caller to a Press TV  programme he was hosting in 2010 who referred to Israel as ‘a disease’).

Can this have been his primary motive?"

Sunday 10 July 2016

Confessions of an NHS whistle-blower!



The Flight of the Black Necked Swans: 
The story of a Chilean surgeon who escaped fascism
Milton Pena Vásquez – ukbook publishing.com
Review: By Derek Pattison

In February 2013, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced in Parliament that Tameside Hospital Foundation Trust was to be one of five failing hospital Trusts that was to be investigated by a review team led by Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS Medical Director for England. The other four Trusts, were – Blackpool, Basildon, Colchester and Burnley. What all these Trusts had in common, was a higher than expected average mortality ratio – death rate. The number of NHS Trusts that were investigated for the quality of care and treatment they were providing, was later increased to fourteen.

The findings of the Keogh review team which were published in a report in July 2013, led to the resignation of Christine Green, the Chief Executive of Tameside Hospital and Tariq Mahmood, the hospital Medical Director. Among its findings, the report stated that Tameside Hospital had the 7th highest rate of infection for MRSA of 141 Trusts nationally over the three years from 2010-2012 and had the second highest infection rate in the country for Clostridium difficile, over the same period. It also found that:

“The Trust’s clinical negligence payments have significantly exceeded contributions to the ‘risk sharing scheme’ over the last three-years, by a total of £21m over this period.” 

Yet, in spite of its appalling record for mortality, cleanliness and safety, Tameside Hospital managed to obtain foundation trust status in February 2008 (“supposedly the benchmark of excellence”) when death rates were 19% above the average and safety was the “sixth-worst in England” (Daily Mail 30/11/2009). Mrs Green also managed to secure a 17% pay rise which took her salary from £120,000 to £140,000 a year.

The Keogh report may well have delivered the coup de grâce that led to the fall of Tameside Hospital CEO, Christine Green and much of her hospital regime, but it also vindicated the painstaking efforts, of one man in particular, who for over a decade, strove to improve care for his patients at Tameside Hospital against considerable threats and opposition from hospital management. That man, was Milton Pena, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon who spent seventeen years working at Tameside Hospital before retiring in October 2014.

Milton Pena became an NHS whistle-blower in 2005, after speaking out publicly to Rebecca Camber of the Manchester Evening News about the lack of patient safety at Tameside Hospital. In his recently published account of his life as a refugee who fled Chile with his wife and children, following the CIA-backed military coup of the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, on 9/11/1973, he says that what led him to become a whistle-blower and to risk his career as an NHS consultant, was “dangerous nursing staffing levels” at the hospital that had put one of his patients at great risk.

Part autobiography, travelogue and detailed diary of his life, working as a doctor at Tameside Hospital, “The Flight of the Black Necked Swans” is a fascinating account of how one young man, more than forty years ago, arrived in England as an asylum seeker and speaking very little English, managed with much difficulty, to obtain a position as a hospital doctor to do a ‘Clinical Attachment’ and eventually to work his way up to becoming a consultant orthopaedic surgeon in the NHS, where he worked for 40 years.

In 1966, aged 18-years old, Milton Pena joined a left-wing university student group called the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), while studying to become a doctor in the City of Concepcíón, Chile.  A supporter of Dr Salvador Allende, a founder of the Chilean Socialist Party, he participated in protest marches and wrote articles in support of Allende and the Socialist Party and worked as an activist in the coal mining and fishing town of Coronel. His political activities didn’t go unnoticed by the military junta and following the coup, he was detained in the Regional Football Stadium which was serving as a jail and then transported to the infamous Quiriquina Island in the bay of Concepcion, where like many others, he was beaten and tortured and accused of being part of a plan to run clandestine field hospitals, but was eventually released so he could continue working as a doctor. It was while working as a doctor in the town of Mulchén that he was tipped-off that he was about to be arrested and was wanted by the DINA, the National Intelligence Agency. Fearing for his life, he left Chile with his family and fled over the Andes into Argentina. After being interviewed at the UK Embassy in Buenos Aires, the family were granted asylum and entered England at Heathrow airport on 11 July 1974.

Official reports suggest that over 3,000 Chilean citizens were murdered during the Pinochet regime and over one thousand are classified as having disappeared. Some 36,948 were tortured for political reasons during the seventeen-years long   dictatorship and over 200,000 fled into exile.

During his forty- year career in the NHS, Milton Pena worked at various hospital’s - Ascot, Kent, Bedford, Epsom, London, Rochdale and Tameside. But the bulk of this book, deals with his experiences of working at Tameside Hospital in Greater Manchester, which he joined in 1997, after leaving Rochdale Hospital in March 1997.

He started to write to hospital management about understaffing in January 2002. At the time, some nurses were looking after 14 patients or more, which he believed, put patients at risk. He also highlighted the problem of understaffing at a coroner’s inquest in 2002. In September 2003, he wrote to the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI), about low medical and nurse staffing levels at the hospital and the high mortality rates that were one of the worst in the country. In May 2004, the CHI informed him that they had received the Trusts ‘Action Plan’ and would not be launching an investigation.

Although nurses were complaining at the time that observations were not being done on time or being done late, or medication, was not being given to patients on time or pressure wounds and catheters, were not being monitored properly, hospital management denied that there was any link between quality of care and patients dying at Tameside Hospital. Hospital mortality rates were dismissed as misleading - a consequence of how data was recorded, or it was put down to the high level of social and economic deprivation in the area, which ignored the fact that standardization of the figures, factored this in. It was even suggested that something called the “Shipman Factor”, might be the reason for the high death rate at Tameside Hospital as more people were being sent to die in hospital from care homes, following the conviction of the serial killer, Dr Harold Shipman, who practised in Hyde, Cheshire. Indeed, in February 2013, Mr Pena met with the Chairman of the Trust, Paul Connellan, to discuss high mortality rates at Tameside Hospital. The Chairman referred him to an investigation by an external professor in 2012 who he said, had found no links, between the quality of care and patients dying at Tameside Hospital. Mr Pena noted in his diary:

“I mentioned the case of a 70-year-old patient, critically ill with a life threatening condition, who was inappropriately sent from A&E to the Trauma Ward, where he died within six hours. He asked for more information which I will send tomorrow.”

In March 2010, Milton Pena appeared on the BBC Panorama programme to discuss failing hospital Trusts. He stated on the programme that Tameside Hospital did not have enough staff or beds to provide the necessary level of care for vulnerable patients and that one or two per cent of deaths at the hospital, were avoidable. He believed the hospital was in danger of becoming another Mid Staffs. Brian Jarman, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at Imperial College, London, told the programme that hospitals had been self-assessing for years and many of them had done so inaccurately. He also added, “Mortality rates should be considered a potential indicator of poor care, with the caveat that statistical errors can occur…”

The CEO of Tameside Hospital, Christine Green, was an ardent believer in “managing people’s perceptions”. Under her leadership which lasted fifteen years, she held to the view that propaganda techniques, vacuous platitudes, and crude publicity stunts such as the “Everyone Matters” campaign and “energising for excellence”, and “I’m writing to thank you”, could persuade people that all was well at ‘her’ hospital. But no matter how many photos appeared on the walls of Tameside Hospital, of happy smiling employees, she couldn’t bluff her way out of everything. One postgraduate medical student, described the hospital in a ‘Deanery Report’, as a “dangerous place” in terms of patient safety, because some locums were perceived as having “significant and clinical language barriers.”  When the hospital Medical Director, Tariq Mahmood, claimed that a recent improvement in the mortality rate at the hospital was due to improvements in care, a hospital ‘Team Brief’ report, claimed that documentation and coding, had played the largest part in the reduction seen. But if propaganda techniques and slick PR stunts, didn’t do the trick, management could always resort to threats and intimidation.

When the local coroner described care at Tameside Hospital as “despicable and chaotic”, the top brass complained to the Office of Judicial Standards, who dismissed the complaint. When the local health watchdog the ‘LINk’, wrote a critical report, the hospital threatened to take legal action against them.

It is clear from reading this book that many nurses and doctors at Tameside Hospital, were afraid to speak out because they feared they could lose their jobs or damage their medical careers, if they went off message or stepped out of line. And this fear of raising concerns and reprisals, wasn’t something confined to just Tameside Hospital.

Dr Stephen Bolsin, (who is referred to in the book), a consultant anaesthetist and whistle-blower, who raised concerns about the high mortality rate of children undergoing cardiac surgery at Bristol Royal Infirmary in the 1990s, maintains that he, “was virtually driven out of the UK by the reaction of some of his colleagues.” Although he knew that he risked being struck off for criticizing medical colleagues, he said:

“In the end, I just couldn’t go on putting those children to sleep, with their parents present in the anaesthetic room, knowing that it was almost certain to be the last time they would see their sons and daughters alive.”

A subsequent investigation found that 29 infants had died unnecessarily at Bristol and two surgeons were found guilty of serious professional misconduct. The hospital’s chief executive, Dr John Roylance, was struck off the medical register for covering up the surgeon’s inadequacies. After resigning his post at Bristol, Dr. Bolsin, applied for other jobs in Oxford, Nottingham and Southampton. After one interview, he was told by a panel member that he was probably not employable in England because people knew that he had raised concerns about mortality rates for paediatric cardiac surgery. Unable to work in the UK, he sought employment in Australia.

Although Milton Pena did not resign his post or lose his job, he certainly came close to it. After speaking to the Manchester Evening News in 2005, he was disciplined and told not to speak out publicly. Later, an investigation was launched into his personal conduct, which came to a sudden and abrupt end – without explanation - after 22 months, following the resignation of CEO, Christine Green, in June 2013. The external investigator, brought in to carry out the investigation, was paid by the hospital, £800 per day, plus expenses and VAT for his work. During this time, his marriage broke down and to cope with the stress and pressure, he took up mountaineering and trekking which is covered in the book.

Although this book is not without its faults, mainly in the editing, it ought to be compulsory reading for any young person intent on embarking on a career in the medical profession. Not only does it give a revealing and honest insight into the internal workings of an hospital and the interaction that takes place amongst the actors who work within it - from the point of view of a senior medical professional and a participant observer - but it is also rare for any medical professional to speak out as Milton Pena has done in this book. Those people, working in the NHS, who have spoken out in the public interest, at some risk to themselves, deserve our praise. I know that Milton Pena never liked being called a ‘whistle-blower' because he always felt that he was just doing his duty as a doctor to his patients. Moreover, while he was aware that understaffing of doctors and nurses on medical wards, put patients at risk, he also knew that this arose largely, because financial priorities, such as balancing the books, were put before the interest of patients. As he says of the NHS generally:

“Cost improvement programmes had to be implemented – which were invariably accompanied by only very perfunctory quality assessments. The internal market led to an increase of employees at every administrative level: business managers, purchasers and procurers as well as accountancy firms, trouble shooters, turn around directors, management consultants and advisers…”

And all this, and the army of senior managers and bureaucrats brought into the NHS by Margaret Thatcher’s reforms of the health service and the Blair, ‘New Labour’ government, had to be paid for by cutting nurses, doctors, salaries, and beds on the wards. The consequences of this, are that patients don’t get cared for properly. They lie in bed in their own urine and faeces, and post-operative observations are not done on time and they don’t get their medication. Likewise, a wrong patient might be put on an insulin drip or given amitriptyline by mistake, simply because of the pressure that medical staff are put under to cope.

Many hospital trusts are now in financial trouble because of PFI schemes and Tameside Hospital is one of them. After the Keogh review in 2014, the hospital was given a government cash injection if £14.3m to the balance the books. The regulator, MONITOR, also pronounced the hospital, “clinically and financially unsustainable.”