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My post 'The Old Devils' discussed Professor Brian Abel-Smith, the Labour Party-supporting economist who carried out much of the analyses which underpinned the planning of the NHS in its early years. Abel-Smith was an adviser to successive Labour Secretaries of State for the DHSS, namely Dick Crossman, Barbara Castle and David Ennals. Abel-Smith undoubtedly knew about the institutionalised neglect and abuse that the most vulnerable experienced at the hands of the NHS, but he ignored it while he got on with more important things like sitting on the Board of Governors of St Thomas's Hospital, with its many consultants who also ran Harley Street practices. The other day I found a copy of a 1978 HMSO publication written by Brian Abel-Smith, entitled 'National Health Service, The First Thirty Years'. It's a sort of gullible person's guide to the NHS and its wonderful work. Abel-Smith spent much of his career at the LSE and held a Chair there when he wrote this publication.
It's ironic that Abel-Smith's bit of propaganda was published by HMSO, because when I very first raised a complaint about the NHS – simply that they were unlawfully denying me access to my records – I used an HMSO publication as my guidance. Because I was being told so many lies by people employed by Gwynedd Health Authority, I had sought out an HMSO publication which clarified the legal position regarding access to records. Then I went to see an administrator in Gwynedd Health Authority, Bernard Rhodes, in 1985. Rhodes told me that he was the General Manager of GHA, which I later found out to be untrue. Rhodes was extremely rude and aggressive, was livid that a whippersnapper like me had dared complain and then lied to me again regarding access to my records. When I quoted the guidelines published in the HMSO publication, Bernard yelled at me that he suggested that I went and had a word with HMSO because he wouldn't be taking any notice of them. My meeting with Bernie ended in a substantial confrontation which resulted in me reminding him that the NHS was there for the benefit of the patients. Rhodes yelled 'No No No' and threw me out of his office. Years later I obtained a letter which Rhodes had written to the Top Doctors after I had been to see him in which he stated that he thought that I would be a nuisance for quite some time and 'the less said to this young lady the better'. See previous posts for details.
Rhodes wasn't Welsh, he had a northern accent – not Geordie, either Lancashire, Yorkshire or perhaps Cheshire – but then there was an exchange of paedophiles' friends between different regions, despite the perception of many English migrants to north Wales that 'they're all from Gwynedd'.
Years later when I was working as a sociologist at Bangor University, one of the University secretaries, Linda Jones, told me that one of her first jobs had been with Gwynedd Health Authority as Bernard Rhodes's secretary and that 'Bernie was a good laugh'. Bernie was also colluding with a sex trafficking gang. At Bangor University, Linda was the secretary for the social work tutors, one of whom was Malcolm John, who had been a fostering and adoption adviser for Gwynedd Social Services when kids were being abused by their foster parents (see post 'Local Accessories'). I knew that two other social work tutors at Bangor had also colluded with Dafydd and the gang, but one had not, he had left his job with Gwynedd Social Services because of the abuse and neglect of the clients. There was a co-ordinated attempt by his colleagues to force this tutor out of his job and Linda was part of this. Vulnerable students were also told that this man had 'abused' clients when he was a social worker. Linda Jones knew that was happening and she knew that there was no truth in the allegation.
Had Bernard Rhodes read the HMSO publication written by Abel-Smith, I'm sure that Bernie would not have found it quite so offensive as the HMSO publication that I got my paws on which confirmed that I had been told lie after lie after lie by Top Docs, Angels and administrators employed by Gwynedd Health Authority.
How did I used to know when an employee of the NHS in north Wales was lying? I could see their lips moving. That's how bad it was, none of them could tell the truth about any matter.
Abel-Smith's HMSO publication is a real laugh, because although Abel-Smith obviously wrote this as a PR exercise, there's a few giveaways in there. For example, in the first part of the publication, when Abel-Smith discussed healthcare before the advent of the NHS, he noted that there were 'twice as many doctors per head in London as in south Wales' and that 'four times the number of doctors per head lived in Bournemouth than in the industrial midlands'.
One look at present day statistics is enough to conclude 'My how things haven't changed'.
Abel-Smith confirmed that 'Wales was particularly poorly served with hospitals. In south Wales, about half the hospital beds were in buildings which were judged when they were taken over, to be too small or ill-equipped for their purpose. No general hospital of the requisite size and quality served the thinly-populated areas of north Wales.'
For years now, there has been constant bellyaching and protests mobilised by the paedophiles' friends whenever it has been suggested that any 'hospital' in north Wales should close. We are not talking state of the art centres of excellence. The first Chief Exec of the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, Mary Burrows, did have a good grasp of how shite and dysfunctional the NHS in north Wales was. Mary was never able to sort things out because she was faced with a co-ordinated attempt to undermine her from within which soon evolved into an all-out hate campaign and of course the problems were enormous anyway. Mary and her Board suggested the closure of, among other facilities, a community hospital near Pwllheli and the Blaenau Ffestiniog Memorial Hospital. I am not suggesting that the citizens of Pwllheli and Blaenau should be provided with inferior facilities, but that is actually what they had from those two institutions. Not that the paedophiles' friends told them that, the paedophiles' friends told everyone that their communities were under attack. There were ructions and at one public meeting Mary Burrows was confronted by a mob who threatened her with physical violence. This was witnessed by a group of local politicians, scores of local Councillors and a number of journalists, including some armed with TV cameras. No-one called for calm and no journos reported the threats that had been made to Mary. The inadequate 'hospitals' in north Wales which existed pre-1948 to which Abel-Smith referred included some of those which Mary was proposing to close in 2010.
Chapter 2 of Abel-Smith's book covered 'The Early Years, 1948-60'. It was explained that Boards of Governors directly responsible to the Minister of Health ran the 36 teaching hospitals in England and Wales. Those Governors ran the teaching hospitals in Cardiff and Liverpool, which were colluding with Gwynne the lobotomist and for the very first part of his career, Dafydd. Ministers of Health knew what was happening at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, as well as at places like Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff and at Ely Hospital. Abel-Smith knew what was going on as well. But then Abel-Smith and his gay partner were part of swinging London, they owned a gentlemen's outfitters which supplied the Rolling Stones and Abel-Smith used to travel to Italy himself to buy the latest styles. When you've got cashmere jumpers to purchase for the stars, you can't waste time concerning yourself with people illegally imprisoned in a dungeon in Denbigh and subsequently lobotomised.
Other hospitals were placed under the management of Hospital Management Committees. The planning of hospital services and the employment of the senior medical and dental staff were made the responsibility of Regional Hospital Boards. The Regional Boards appointed the Chairmen and members of the Hospital Management Committees in their region and the members of Boards and Committees 'gave their services without payment'.
I became familiar with the selfless service of those who sat on such Boards and Committees out of the kindness of their hearts at a later date in north Wales. It was noticeable how many of them subsequently bagged very lucrative numbers for themselves in health and social care or associated fields, or how many members of their immediate family bagged such lucrative numbers. A good number of those giving up their time willingly to mismanage the statutory services were also involved with businesses which were commissioned by the health and/or social care services.
Abel-Smith explained that separate Hospital Management Committees were set up to run most of the psychiatric hospitals and the hospitals for the mentally handicapped. In north Wales, that was the North Wales Hospital Denbigh and Bryn-y-Neuadd in Llanfairfechan.
So it will have been one such Board/Committee that appointed Dafydd as a consultant to Denbigh in 1964.
In north Wales, Lloyd Tyrell-Kenyon, the 5th Baron Kenyon, sat on a number of these NHS Boards and Committees. Lord Kenyon continued his selfless service into a more recent era; he was Chairman of Clwyd Health Authority in the mid-1970s. Lord Kenyon was also a County Councillor, President of UCNW (Bangor University) for decades, a Magistrate and a member of the North Wales Police Authority. Lord Kenyon was the most senior Freemason in north Wales. Lord Kenyon's son Thomas was known to be having sex with at least one under-aged boy in the care of the social services. In 1979, Thomas spent the night with this boy and made a complaint to the police that the boy had stolen from him after they had spent the night together. The boy was sent to a detention centre. Thomas faced no charges. In 1993 Thomas died of an AIDS-related illness. See previous posts for further information regarding Lord Kenyon and Thomas.
In 'the early days' of the NHS, all residents of institutions caring for mentally ill and mentally handicapped were hospital patients, unlike the elderly who could be either in institutions managed by the local authority or in hospital. Access to 'specialists' was only by the referral of a GP. Top Doctors still take advantage of this system at present. A number of people in north Wales who have complained about Dafydd and the gang have found it impossible to get a referral elsewhere. There is of course a legal right to a second opinion, but it just doesn't happen. Around and around the system one goes for years and years, even if a lawyer is employed to assist, but no, one does not ever succeed in getting a referral to anyone who is not a close mate of the member of the gang about whom one has complained and who simply snaps that they agree with Dafydd/whichever member of the gang of paedophiles one is trying to escape from.
Abel-Smith tells us that the NHS initially followed the tradition of the Chief Executive of the hospital being the medical superintendent, to whom the matron was responsible. Gwynne the lobotomist was the medical superintendent at Denbigh. As he was also the Chief Executive, if one did wish to make representation after one's lobotomy – presuming that you could still hold a pen and manage to utter a few words – it was Gwynne to whom one made representation. However, things changed in the early 1960s when a new broom arrived in north Wales. In the form of Dafydd, who then took over as medical superintendent at Denbigh. And who presumably doubled up as Chief Exec.
Abel-Smith explained that as the medical superintendents of general hospitals retired, they were not replaced. An elected member of the medical staff became the channel of communication between the Top Docs and the Management Committees and that 'later this arrangement was also applied to hospitals for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped'.
Dafydd's time as medical superintendent did expire, but Dafydd didn't. Neither did he go elsewhere, he continued banging his way around Denbigh and doing exactly what he wanted. Judging from my experience of Dafydd, he was the channel of communication between himself and everyone else on the planet, although I doubt that anyone had elected him to that position.
Abel-Smith notes that matrons were in 'an unfavourable position' compared with the medical staff. Well there it is from the horse's mouth, I've been telling people this for years in the face of all the appeals to Bring Back Matron because she kept everyone in order. Matron didn't. Matron did ensure that the beds had a nice hospital corner and hospitals in those days were usually clean, but Matron tortured the nursing students, bullied the Angels and ensured that only people in her own mould were appointed as Ward Sisters – people who kicked those below them in the chops repeatedly but toadied to Top Docs and colluded 100% with any wrongdoing. Matrons did wield a degree of authority over medical students and junior doctors, but one word from a Top Doc and Matron would back right off.
I have heard stories from Angels who nursed in the 1950s of student nurses in nurses homes being terrified by aggressive advances from lesbian senior nurses and Matron just telling them to go into their room and shut the door and not say any more about it. I was told by two now elderly nurses from two different hospitals of patients dying after medical students and junior doctors carried out 'experimental treatment' on them. Treatment that had been through no ethics committees, was not part of any programme, was done without anyone's consent and that could best be described as idiots out of their depth killing patients. Matron knew what was happening but had no authority at all in the face of lethal Top Docs.
With regard to funding decisions, in 1948 with the creation of the NHS, a circular was sent to hospital authorities which made it clear that the Minister for Health, Nye Bevan, wished Christmas to be celebrated and that there was authorisation for up to 5 shillings per patient and resident number of staff to be spent. In 1949, a circular from Bevan authorised the use of exchequer funds for patients to provide soap, toothpaste, razor blades, sanitary towels, a selection of newspapers but not 'cosmetics, permanent-waving, postage stamps, tobacco and sweets'. Hospitals not providing these things is fair with regard to patients who are in for a few weeks at most and who's relatives are bringing in the grapes every evening anyway. However patients in Denbigh were often there for forty years or more. In later years, those patients did receive a small allowance from social security, but because they weren't allowed out, there was nothing for them to spend it on anyway, except for the limited range of sweets at the hospital shop and of course fags. All of those hospital shops had ample supplies of fags.
People often used to marvel that long term residents of places like Denbigh dressed in such 'odd' clothes, in particular that young women dressed in granny-dresses. The patients did not have access to any other clothes, even in the 1990s. Those hospitals had 'spare clothes' for patients who's clothes wore out or were damaged and those spare clothes were ridiculous. They were not clothes that anyone else in that day and age would have worn. Where places like Denbigh managed to find such clothes from I do not know.
When I was a patient in Springfield Hospital in 1991, my shoes were stolen by another patient. Not in a theft type of way, this lady was brought in by the police late at night, she was an older lady who was completely psychotic and she spent the night in the TV room where I had left my shoes, making some interesting noises and yelling at her voices. In the morning she chucked her breakfast around the room, but not with any malice, it just went flying and then she told the Angels that she was off. Although the police had taken her to Springfield as being in need of care and safety, the Angels let her leave 'because she's been in here loads of times' and she was just a nuisance. This lady took my shoes with her.
I didn't have any other shoes and being really pissed off at the degree of neglect and callousness that was shown to the person who had gone off with my shoes as well as towards the rest of us, I told the Senior Angel that I thought that Springfield needed to take some responsibility for this and that I'd like the price of a pair of shoes to replace my others. They weren't expensive, I just asked for £30. I was refused. I explained that I had NO other footwear. After a couple of hours a message was sent from Oppression Central to tell me that I could go to the hospital clothes shop and choose a pair of shoes free of charge. The one human being who worked as an Angel on the ward, a young mixed race student nurse, warned me that whatever shoes I chose, they would be really bad because that's all that there was in the hospital shop and that I'd need to get some 'normal' shoes as soon as I got out of Springfield. She was right, the shoes and the rest of the clothes in the shop were like those that I had never seen before. Institutional 1950s items, nothing else. I didn't even know that such things were manufactured anymore.
This was a hospital attached to a London medical school, St George's, which boasted of a flagship Academic Psychiatry Unit. No wonder the long-stay patients looked like no-one else in south London. I selected the least grim shoes available – although they were seriously grim – and I did dispense with them as soon as I was out.
I cannot fathom how such a hospital shop existed. Someone manufactured those clothes and someone in south London in 1991 chose to buy them to sell to Springfield patients who needed clothes. No Angel, Top Doc, any other member of staff or indeed any other patient would have chosen to wear such such clothes. Patients entered Springfield wearing mainstream clothes. No-one resembled the characters from 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' in the least and furthermore some patients were quite cool and trendy. So what was going on?
Some years ago a clinical psychologist told me that the standing joke among the clin psych students when they began their training was that many of them would notice that the chronic patients would be wearing 'schizophrenic trousers', trousers which didn't fit and which stopped a few inches above their ankles. I had a laugh at this observation because I'd noticed the syndrome myself, but the clin psych then told me that there was a belief that with chronic illness perhaps there was a problem with judgement and perception which caused people to be unable to choose clothes that fitted. It is an interesting theory, but schizophrenic trousers are far more likely to be the consequence of the utter neglect of the day to day needs of the patients and the presence of a 'hospital shop'. At very best, the only other opportunities to acquire clothing are usually a brief visit to whatever clothes shop is nearest to the hospital which the Angels agree to take the patient to visit when the patient finally gets the written permission in triplicate needed to leave the hospital to visit a shop. The patient will probably be given 'one hour's leave'. They need to get out of the hospital, into the car with the Angels, to the shop, purchase the clothes, back into the Angels' car, back to the hospital and down the corridor into the relevant ward within the space of an hour. I suggest that the clin psych students try looking normal under such constraints, they won't be able to.
Nye Bevan and his wife Jennie Lee were known for their champagne socialism lifestyle, their fondness for Harrods and other Knightsbridge shops. Nye Bevan and Jennie Lee lived in Belgravia, although much is made of Nye's humble origins in Tredegar in south Wales. This is the hovel in which Nye grew up:
I think that's a rather nice hovel myself, I'd be quite chuffed if I was slumming it in there and even more chuffed if I actually owned that hovel. That hovel would have been a good deal grander than the houses in which many of Nye's classmates lived. Nye Bevan obviously did not feel that way about the hovel in Tredegar and he left south Wales to be among like minded souls.
In 1953 a Committee Chaired by the Cambridge economist C.W. Guillebraud examined the present and prospective cost of the NHS to advise on how a rising charge could be avoided while maintaining an adequate service. Iain Macleod, the Minister for Health under Winston Churchill, set up the Committee. Why was Guillebraud's expertise in particular sought? Abel-Smith doesn't explain, but Guillebraud had been Macleod's tutor at Cambridge.
Iain Macleod was born in and spent his youth in Yorkshire, although he attended boarding schools in Scotland. He was the son of a Top Doctor, was close to his father, interested in medicine and accompanied his father on his rounds. Iain Macleod trained as a barrister, but his main income after he qualified was not from his legal work but from gambling, Macleod being an accomplished bridge player. He was Chairman of the Conservative Party at the time of the Profumo Affair. Macleod later became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Ted Heath.
Macleod had many high dramas in his life. At the age of 27, when serving in the British Army as a staff captain, a drunk Macleod nearly killed his boss, a Captain Dawtry. Dawtry had retired to bed rather than play stud poker with Macleod. Macleod shot at Dawtry's door until his revolver ran out of bullets and then passed out after smashing down the door with a heavy piece of furniture. Macleod demanded an apology from Dawtry the next morning for his refusal to play poker, although the two men remained friends thereafter. Dawtry later became Chief Clerk of Westminster City Council.
Macleod was selected as the Conservative candidate for Enfield in 1946, amid allegations of skulduggery. Macleod was strongly supported by the local Young Conservatives, who could vote on constituency association matters despite in some cases being not yet old enough to vote for Parliament. One of the branch officers for the Enfield constituency was 15 year old Norman Tebbit. Macleod was subsequently elected as Tory MP for the more winnable seat of Enfield West in 1950.
Macleod worked for Rab Butler in the Conservative Research Dept just before being elected to Parliament. Along with Enoch Powell, Angus Maude and Reginald Maudling, Macleod was seen as a protégé of Butler at the CRD. Butler was later to become a big mate of Trumpers' when Butler retired from politics and became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (see post '95 Glorious Years'). Macleod and Powell were close friends at this time, although Macleod subsequently dropped Powell after Powell's 1968 'Rivers Of Blood' speech.
It was Macleod who in 1952 announced that Top Doctor Richard Doll had demonstrated the link between smoking and lung cancer. Macleod did so at a press conference throughout which he chain-smoked. Macleod was a Cabinet Minister in Eden's Gov't at the time of the Suez Crisis and Randolph Churchill alleged that Macleod almost resigned on 4 Nov 1956. Robert Carr, junior Minister at the Ministry of Labour, wrote that Macleod had doubts but was not especially morally outraged and that Carr saw no evidence that he planned to resign. William Rees-Mogg claimed that Butler persuaded Macleod not to resign, while a lady friend of Macleod's recorded him turning up at her flat, demanding a drink and declaring that he would have to resign having learned that Eden had deceived the Cabinet.
Suez alienated academics, journalists and other opinion-formers from the Conservative Party. William Rees-Mogg, then a Conservative candidate in the North East, made a speech urging that Macleod be party leader. David Astor of 'The Observer', who on 4 Nov 1956 had attacked Eden for 'crookedness' in an editorial, wrote to Macleod on 14 Nov, urging him to seize the party leadership so that collusion could be pinned on Eden and Selwyn Lloyd. On 20 Nov 1956 the question of collusion was raised in Cabinet, with Eden and Lloyd (who was in New York at a UN meeting) both absent; it has been suggested that it was probably Macleod who raised it. The Cabinet agreed to stick to Selwyn Lloyd's formula that Britain had not incited the Israeli attack on Egypt. Eden stepped down as PM in Jan 1957 and Macleod – despite his closeness to Butler – along with the overwhelming majority of his colleagues, backed Harold Macmillan for leader.
In 1958 Macleod, as Minister of Labour, saw the London bus strike. Macleod initially accepted his own Chief Industrial Commissioner's Investigation into the busmens' case. Macmillan, backed by the Cabinet, insisted on settling a separate railwaymen's strike, despite an arbitration award against them, as it was felt that they had more public sympathy than the busmen. On the bus issue, Macleod was overruled and forced to pick a fight with Frank Cousins, the leader of the TGWU, on the pretext that they accept an independent arbitration award. Macmillan had picked a scrap shrewdly, as the busmen had no allies amongst the other unions. Cousins felt compelled to support the strike and Opposition leader Hugh Gaitskill criticised the Gov't in a speech at Glasgow and moved a motion of censure over Macleod's treatment of the strike. Macleod, in his Commons speech of 8 May, made a blistering attack on Gaitskell. He was congratulated afterwards by the Labour frontbencher Alf Robens. Roy Jenkins described Macleod's attack on Gaitskell as 'high order jugular debating', accused Gaitskell of weak leadership in appeasing the militants of his own party and attacked him for refusing to endorse the findings of the arbitration tribunal. Cousins wanted to call out the petrol tanker drivers, in breach of another agreement, but was blocked from doing so by the TUC. The strike ended after seven weeks and Macmillan dated the Gov'ts recovery in the polls from this point. Macleod had acquired a national reputation as a tough figure.
Macleod was appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies in Oct 1959. He had never set foot in any of Britain's colonies, but the Hola massacre had helped focus his thinking on the inevitable end of Empire. In Nyasaland (later Malawi), Macleod pushed for the release of Hastings Banda, contrary to the advice of the Governor and of other politicians. He had to threaten resignation in the Cabinet to get his own way, but won Macmillan round. Banda was released in April 1960 and almost immediately invited to London for talks aimed at bringing about independence. During a visit to Nyasaland in 1960, Macleod is described as having been 'gratuitously and grossly offensive, extremely rude and downright unpleasant at a meeting with the Governor, the provincial commissioners and senior police officers'. During Hastings Banda's time as President it is estimated that 18,000 people were killed as a result of human rights abuses. Banda also retained links with apartheid South Africa.
Macleod described his own policy over North Rhodesia (modern Zambia) as 'incredibly devious and tortuous' but 'easily the one I am most proud of'.
In 1961 Macleod published a sympathetic biography of former PM Neville Chamberlain, whose reputation then stood at a very low ebb. The book was largely ghostwritten and had been intended as a potboiler to earn money for Macleod's daughter's social season. Macleod used Gov't papers in breach of the 'fifty year rule' then in operation. The PM demanded amendments to conceal the degree of Cabinet involvement in the abdication of King Edward VIII (who was still alive in 1961) and the degree to which two civil servants had demanded that the former King 'reorder his private life' afterwards. Macleod later said 'It was a bad book. I made a great mistake in writing it. It made me no money and it has done me a lot of harm'.
Macleod became Editor of 'The Spectator' and in Jan 1964 published a candid account of the 1963 Tory Party leadership contest, claiming that it was a stitch-up by an Etonian 'magic circle.' In his posthumously published book The Art of Memory (April 1982) Rab Butler wrote that 'every word' of 'The Spectator' article 'is true'. Colleagues 'cut' Macleod in the Commons after the article and the affair permanently damaged his chances of becoming leader.
Macleod also became a non-executive Director of Lombards Bank, which allowed him a chauffeur-driven car.
As Shadow Chancellor in 1967 Iain Macleod helped to found the homeless charity Crisis. Crisis has spent decades not being quite as frank as it could be regarding the numbers of homeless people who were/are kids in care fleeing abuse or the serious neglect shown towards homeless people by the NHS.
Heath appointed Macleod Chancellor in June 1970, but Macleod died the following month. He left behind him an outline budget which included the infamous abolition of free school milk, which became the first significant Ministerial act of the new Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher. Macleod's seat was succeeded by Cecil Parkinson.
Macleod coined the term 'nanny state'.
During his time as Health Minister, Iain Macleod was considered to have consolidated rather than reformed the NHS and defended it against Treasury attacks on its budget.
In addition to Macleod's old tutor Guillebaud, the Committee included J.W. Cook, Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow University; Anne Godwin, Assistant General Secretary of the Clerical and Administrative Workers' Union; Sir John Maude, past Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Sir Geoffrey Vickers of the National Coal Board.
The Clerical and Administrative Worker's Union became the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff (APEX) in 1972. APEX was one of the most right wing unions and was at the centre of the Grunwick dispute in the 1970s. APEX advised some immigrant female workers who were being treated appallingly very badly. In the end APEX walked away from them, leaving those workers to be completely shafted. See post 'A Study In Tyranny'.
Sir Geoffrey Vickers was a soldier, lawyer, administrator and writer. From 1946-48 he was the first Legal Adviser to the NCB. Then Vickers became a member of NCB in charge of manpower, training, education, health and welfare, 1948–55.
Vickers was a member of the Council of the Law Society, 1938-50, a member of the MRC, 1952-60 and Chairman of the Research Committee of the Mental Health Research Fund, 1951-67. During WW II Vickers served as Deputy Director General at the Ministry of Economic Warfare in charge of economic intelligence and as a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
For statistical background, the Guillebraud Committee used a memorandum published by Cambridge University Press: 'The Cost of the National Health Service in England and Wales' written by one Brian Abel-Smith and Richard Titmuss.
Professor Richard Titmuss was Abel-Smith's senior colleague at the LSE who was as committed to demonstrating that the NHS was a Good Thing as Abel-Smith was. It's not that I would have preferred Abel-Smith and Titmuss to have completely opposed the NHS, but they colluded with an enormous degree of deceit by perpetrating the myth that the Poor got a really good deal out of the NHS. They didn't, the very poorest were getting a very raw deal and the organised abuse of vulnerable people was being facilitated by parts of the NHS from its establishment. The necessity of continuing the lie that the NHS was all about equity and caring for those at the bottom of the heap ensured that the Top Docs and the BMA called all the shots and demanded very high salaries entirely on their own terms in tandem with virtually no accountability. Furthermore, the cost of running the NHS was systematically and deliberately underestimated in order to overcome the substantial opposition that there was to it on the part of the BMA.
No Gov't has been able to reign the BMA in or indeed reign in the cost of the NHS. Privately, every PM and Health Minister acknowledges that the BMA are an absolute nightmare. Even Tony Blair didn't satisfy the Top Docs, although he threw money at them and concealed extensive patient harm and death by fiddling statistics and ignoring the gunning down of whistleblowers, even in the case of Mid-Staffs. Only one Health Minister has ever pleased the Top Docs and that was Sir Kenneth Robinson, Health Minister under Harold Wilson. Robinson colluded with the most serious wrongdoing on the part of Top Docs, including the trafficking of vulnerable people and indulged in sleights of hand to give the impression that he was thrashing out fair deals in an uncompromising manner, when in reality he took orders from the Top Docs. See posts 'The White Heat Of This Revolution' and 'Heart of Darkness'. .
The Guillebraud Committee's Report was published in early 1956. As Abel-Smith explains in his HMSO publication, the Report concluded that the early estimates of the cost of the NHS were far too low. The estimates had been 'made before the levels of pay of those working in the NHS had been settled'. That is a reference to the Top Docs who famously had their mouths stuffed with gold by Nye Bevan. Angels at that time were badly paid and the ancillary staff were near-slaves.
There was also an 'unforeseen demand' for spectacles and dentures. Except that it wasn't unforeseen, it was known that a high proportion of the adult population did not have teeth, it was entirely predictable that there'd be a run on dentures. During the first 12 yrs of the NHS, 'new' 'expensive' drugs became available, including psychotropics ie. those which Gwynne and Dafydd used to drug their victims senseless. The drugs were 'expensive' because of the profits that the drug companies knew that they could make from flogging their wares to the NHS. So measures were introduced to limit prescribing, rather than enter meaningful negotiations with drug companies with a view to making drugs available to the NHS at lower cost.
The Minister for Health under Anthony Eden, Robin Turton, told Parliament that the Government 'broadly accepted' the conclusions of Guillebraud's Report. An editorial in 'The Times' said the Report might superficially seem to be 'a bluebook full of hogwash' but that in fact the Committee had 'argued their case with considerable thoroughness.' The Report might have indeed been hogwash but no-one was going to dare say that, it was the nation's pride and joy, the NHS, at stake…
Like Iain Macleod, Robin Turton was a barrister who came from Yorkshire. Turton was the Tory MP for Thirsk and Malton, 1929-74. Turton was given a peerage in 1974.
Abel-Smith tells us that in 1955, the Gov't embarked upon some major hospital building schemes and that Health Minister Iain Macleod 'gave priority' to relieving over-crowding in hospitals for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped. In the year 1956-57, nearly one third of the total capital expenditure of Regional Hospital Boards was devoted to such institutions and by 1960, the capital expenditure was 80% greater in real terms than in 1949. So enormous sums of money were being spent on keeping people locked up in appalling conditions in institutions like the North Wales Hospital Denbigh and Bryn-y-Neuadd. The conditions in these places were no secret, although throughout the 1960s and 70s there were a series of scandals in which it was 'revealed' that people were being neglected and abused. Of course people in Gov't and running the NHS knew what was going on, those institutions consumed nearly a third of the budget, no-one would have waved good-bye to that sort of money with no idea of what was being done with it.
In the 1950s there were fears 'in medical circles' that Britain was training too many Top Docs, so medical schools reduced their intake. In Feb 1955 a Committee was appointed to estimate the long term demand for Top Docs and it concluded that 'reduction of student intake by about one tenth' was needed 'from as early a date as is practicable'. But whoops, the Committee failed to identify the extent of migration of British trained Top Docs to North America, Australasia and elsewhere, which led to problems with the supply and distribution of GPs and a reliance on immigrant Top Docs.
My how things haven't changed. One thing that Top Docs forget to mention when the Shortage Of Top Doctors is discussed in the media and the BMA are fuming about Irresponsible Gov'ts allowing this to happen, is that the numbers entering medical schools are controlled by the Top Docs themselves. The different branches of the medical establishment are entirely in control of how many Top Docs are trained in the UK. One reason why the Top Docs are keen to ensure that not too many Top Docs are coming off the conveyor belt is that the Top Docs want to keep their market value. A modest supply of Top Docs means that salaries remain high. It also means that if the Top Docs want to behave like complete turds and throw hissy fits instead of entering into negotiations with Gov't, it is far easier to do so if there is not a large pool of Top Docs for the Gov't to draw upon to get the work done if some of their colleagues get arsey.
Abel-Smith referred to problems regarding the shortage of accommodation for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped being aggravated by persistent under-staffing. He stated that over 5000 additional beds was provided for these patients between 1954 and 1960, but that it made no difference to waiting lists.
This does not add up. Statistics tells us that the population of the long-stay psychiatric institutions reached a peak in 1954 at a time of near mass incarceration and then gradually started declining. 'New forms' of treatment were cutting lengths of stay. From the early 1950s certain hospitals greatly reduced restrictions and encouraged 'new attitudes' to the care of patients. By 1954, new drugs had made it 'easier to control and relieve symptoms'. And 'new non-physical and social ways of treating patients' were spreading. Increasingly the functions of the hospitals were seen to be treatment and rehabilitation rather than care and control. More patients were treated without admission and it became less common for patients to stay in hospital for long periods. Psychiatric units began to be established to treat the mentally ill in general hospitals near their own homes instead of at large distant specialist hospitals.
I don't think that any of this was true of north Wales. Patients in Denbigh were locked up, lobotomised, electro-shocked and drugged for decades after it was claimed that the 'new attitude' and 'social treatment' were changing attitudes to patients.
As for the rest of the UK, even if they weren't blessed with Gwynne and Dafydd, if 5000 extra beds were made available, if the population of psychiatric institutions was falling, why were waiting lists not decreasing? I am wondering if it was true that the numbers incarcerated in Denbigh and similar places really were falling to the extent that had been claimed.
Between 1954 and 1957 a Royal Commission Chaired by Lord Percy re-examined the laws governing patients with mental illness or handicap. It was on the basis of this Commission's Report that the Mental Health Act 1959 was written. It is always stressed that the 1959 Act led to the vast majority of patients 'being admitted to whatever hospital was appropriate without any legal formality'. Moreover where compulsory powers had to be used, the decisions to use them was taken by Top Docs and social workers, magistrates no longer being involved in such matters.
Dafydd qualified as a Top Doctor shortly before the Mental Health Act 1959 came into being and he did great damage to numerous people under this Act. Psychiatry was by 1959 well-established as a speciality with which no competent doctor would wish to concern themselves and by that time it was most definitely being used to silence bothersome people, including the victims of the crimes of people who's lives and careers would have been destroyed if their offending had been made public. Social workers – or almoners as they were known back then – had no power and simply did what Top Doctors asked them to do.
Welsh speaking Dafydd along with the Welsh speaking social worker who joined him in the 1960s (see post 'The Village') used the Mental Health Act 1959 to wreak havoc in north Wales in the name of helping their fellow countrymen. It wasn't only the North Wales Hospital Denbigh which was used to conceal organised abuse, the Maudsley was as well, as I expect was nearly every psychiatric hospital in the UK.
It was under the Mental Health Act 1959 that Dafydd illegally imprisoned Mary Wynch in 1979. After the scandal surrounding Mary's case, the Mental Health Act was updated and the Mental Health Act 1983 was passed. The 1983 Act was written by Professor Robert Bluglass, Dafydd's mate. The code of practice which accompanied the 1983 Act was written by William Bingley, who for decades both in his capacity as Legal Director of MIND and as Chief Exec of the Mental Health Act Commission, concealed the crimes of Dafydd and the gang, as did William's mother, Lady Juliet Bingley, in her years of service to MIND (see post 'MIND Are Out For Mental Health – Never For Themselves Of Course…').
Bluglass was appointed to 'investigate' my complaint about Dafydd et al illegally imprisoning me by breaching the 1983 Act (see post 'Enter Professor Robert Bluglass CBE'). There was no action taken against anyone. I know of at least one other person who was illegally imprisoned in Ysbyty Gwynedd under a breach of the 1983 Act by Gwynedd social worker Jackie Brandt, who was involved in one of my unlawful detentions. When I was in Bryn Golau Ward, North Wales Hospital Denbigh, as far as I could work out everyone else that I became very friendly with – some five people – were also held illegally. I suspect that had I known the circumstances of the detention of everyone on the ward, I'd have found that they were all there illegally. Every law was flouted and no-one was held to account. 'Improved' Mental Health Acts were irrelevant.
So who was Lord Percy, the genius who took the remit for banging people up for decades away from Magistrates – where it was at least publicly visible – and gave it to a totally corrupt medical profession and a bunch of craven social workers, ensuring that abuses of the law were then conducted under the cloak of medical confidentiality, allowing Dafydd et al to break the law in complete secrecy, making it spectacularly easy for an abusive family to dispose of one of their members?
Eustace Sutherland Campbell Percy, 1st Baron Percy of Newcastle was born in 1887. Lord Percy had died by the time the Act which his Commission recommended had been passed. Percy was a diplomat and Conservative politician. He most notably served as President of the Board of Education under Stanley Baldwin, 1924-29.
It is possible that Lord Percy knew the people who occupied senior positions in the education service in north Wales at that time. One of those was the schools inspector, J.E. Daniel, who's son Huw Daniel is the corrupt judge who was so looking forward to imprisoning me in 2004 on the basis of the perjury of NHS staff (see post 'Interesting Happenings In The Legal System'). Dafydd knows Huw Daniel and knew J.E. Daniel as well. J.E. Daniel was an early member of Plaid, along with Saunders Lewis, with whom Dafydd was mates when Dafydd was young (see post 'A Network Stretching Back Decades…'). J.E. Daniel was a Professor at the Bala Theological College, an institution with which the father of Dafydd Iwan and Alun Ffred Jones was associated. Dafydd Iwan is the former Leader of Gwynedd County Council and folk singer who wrote a 'tribute song' to Dafydd. Alun Ffred was the AM for Caernarfon, 2003-07 and for Arfon, 2007-16. Before he was elected as an AM, Alun Ffred, like his brother, was the Leader of Gwynedd County Council. He worked as a school teacher and subsequently a journo with HTV and a TV Director and Producer with S4C. Alun Ffred is a graduate of UCNW.
Like Huw Daniel, Dafydd Iwan and Alun Ffred, Lord Percy was born into a noble family, as opposed to Dafydd who is of peasant stock. Lord Percy was the seventh son of Henry Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland and Lady Edith, daughter of George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll. Henry Percy, Earl Percy and Alan Percy, 8th Duke of Northumberland, were his elder brothers. His uncle, the 9th Duke of Argyll, was married to HRH Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford.
Abel-Smith noted that the 1959 Mental Health Act imposed a statutory duty on local authorities to provide accommodation, training and day centres to care for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped outside hospital. Not only was this so obviously completely ignored in north Wales – such services were only just being developed in 1989 – but Abel-Smith admits in his publication that many local authorities did indeed simply not bother to develop the services as ordered by the Act.
During the second half of the 1950s, relationships between Gov't and the Top Docs became strained over Top Docs pay. Never mind the scandal of mass incarceration, there's the Top Docs pay to think about. In early 1956, the Top Docs demanded more dosh – despite Nye Bevan having stuffed their mouths with gold less than 10 years earlier. In July the Gov't stated that they were not willing to look at the Top Docs' pay claim. The Gov't finally conceded to an interim payment and set up a Royal Commission in early 1957 to examine Top Docs and dentists pay. The Royal Commission reported in early 1960 and recommended a considerable increase in remuneration, which was paid retrospectively. A review body reporting direct to the PM was established to advise on Top Docs pay in the future, as recommended by the Royal Commission. The Royal Commission was Chaired by Sir Harry Pilkington.
William Henry Pilkington was a glass manufacturer and former President of the Federation of British Industries. He was Chairman of the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting that produced the controversial Pilkington Report of 1962. Sir Harry was Chancellor of Loughborough University, 1966-80.
Pilkington was educated at Rugby, followed by Magdalene College, Cambridge. He joined the board of the family business, Pilkington Brothers Ltd in 1934 and served as Chairman, 1949-73. The Pilkington business – later known as Pilkington Glass – was based in St Helen's and for years was the biggest employer in the town. By the 1970s, Dafydd had built up a substantial empire on Merseyside (see post 'These Sharks Are Crap As Well').
Canon Chris Pilkington, who was involved with the Bristol Cancer Help Centre which was at the middle of a research fraud in 1990 (see post 'Reports Of Death Were Greatly Exaggerated'), was a member of the Pilkington Glass dynasty and for many years was Rector of the City Parish of St Stephen's in Bristol. Dafydd's partner in crime Dr D.G.E. Wood came from a family of Top Doctors in Bristol and had a stronghold in that area.
Sir Alastair Pilkington was Chairman of Pilkington, 1973-80 and Sir Antony Pilkington – a distant cousin of Sir Alastair – was Chairman, 1980-95. Sir Antony's uncle, Sir Richard Pilkington, was Tory MP for Widnes, 1935-45 and then Poole, 1951-64. Sir Richard was born on Merseyside and his father Arthur Pilkington was Chairman of Pilkington.
In response to the industrial recession of the early 1980s, Pilkington's had reduced its workforce from 11,500 to 6,700. But they did so on generous terms and much effort – through the pioneering community of St Helen's Trust, of which Antony Pilkington was founder Chairman in 1978 – to create small-business opportunities for those made redundant. Antony Pilkington was also a Director of GKN, National Westminster Bank and ICI. He was a Governor of Liverpool John Moores University, a member of the Court of Manchester University, a Deputy Lieutenant for Merseyside and High Sheriff of Cheshire in 1996-97.
So Sir Antony was in the midst of many of those previously named on this blog as being involved with or concealing the paedophile ring in north Wales and the north west of England. He was Chairing a company facing serious difficulties on Merseyside in the 1980s. Sir Antony had the disastrous effects of Thatcher's policies on Merseyside – and then the aftermath – to contend with and he was at the centre of the Liverpool branch of the empire of Dr Dafydd Alun Jones and the paedophiles' friends. He was a Governor of Liverpool John Moores – another Governor was John Hamilton, a very close friend of the paedophiles indeed. Cherie Booth was Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores. Then there was Eric Heffer, Derek Hatton and others on Sir Antony's doorstep. The whole lot of them were at each others throats and concealing the serious criminality of Dafydd and co (see post 'These Sharks Are Crap As Well').
Sir Antony would have been in a very difficult position indeed.
A senior manager who spent many years with Pilkington's optronics subsidiary in north Wales, Pilkington PE – which later became Thales Optics Ltd and was then divested from Thales in 2005 as Qioptiq Ltd – knew a great deal about serious organised crime and the abuse of children in north Wales. That is Trevor Jones, the Chancellor of Glyndwr University. Trevor Jones has alighted at every notorious stop during his journey as a paedophiles' friend – including membership of Clwyd Health Authority whilst Dafydd illegally imprisoned the victims of the paedophile gang in the dungeon there. For full details of Trevor and his criminal associates, see post 'A Vampire At Glyndwr University!'
Chapter 3 of Brian Abel-Smith's book, is entitled 'Growth and Development – 1960-74'. There is a reference to Enoch Powell's 'The Hospital Plan' of 1962, which Powell produced when he was Health Minister. Abel-Smith does not mention Powell's VIP visit to the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, which resulted in Powell being so horrified by what he saw that he told the reception committee 'I will not allow you to do this to people', returned to London, made his famous 'Water Towers' speech and announced the asylum closure programme. Yet Powell never returned to this subject again and I was told by the archivist responsible for the Powell papers that there are no other references to asylums in his papers apart from the Water Towers speech.
Someone ensured that Powell left well alone, but I have no idea who. I'm sure that it will have been because of the role of Dafydd et al in the Westminster Paedophile Ring. Powell's own name is in circulation as someone who may have been involved in the abuse of youngsters. Powell was known to have difficulties in his relationships with women and as a young man he fell in love with other men, but I have been given no evidence that he was an abuser. But someone definitely told him to leave Dafydd and Gwynne alone.
In 1966 the paedophiles' friend Health Minister Sir Kenneth Robinson published a revised version of Powell's Hospital Plan. It was a more modest plan, but more costly. No wonder the Top Docs loved Sir Kenneth.
It was while Sir Kenneth was Health Minister that Dafydd was given a job as a consultant at Denbigh.
Abel-Smith explained that by 1974, there was a plan for a network of District General hospitals across Wales, which Abel-Smith stated – he was writing in 1978 – 'should be largely completed in the 1980s'.
A Royal Commission on Medical Education was appointed in 1965. It issued an internal memo in 1966 stating the urgent need to increase the number of medical students. The final Report of the Commission appeared in 1968 and following this, Harold Wilson's Gov't announced plans to nearly double the number of medical students by 1980. The Royal Commission was set up under Kenneth Robinson and was Chaired by Lord Alexander Todd.
Alexander Robertus Todd was a Nobel winning biochemist. Todd graduated from Glasgow University in 1928 and received his PhD from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Mein in 1931. Todd gained another doctorate in 1933 after studying at Oriel College, Oxford. After that, Todd held posts with the Lister Institute, Edinburgh University and the University of London. He spent six months as a visiting Professor at California Institute of Technology and became the Sir Samuel Hall Chair of Chemistry and Director of the Chemical Laboratories of Manchester University in 1938. In 1944, Todd was appointed to the Chair of Chemistry at Cambridge University, which he held until his retirement in 1971. Todd served as a visiting Professor at the University of Chicago in 1948 and University of Sydney in 1950.
Among much other work, Todd studied alkaloids found in hashish and as Dafydd would say, mari-jew-ana. He served as Chairman of the Gov'ts advisory committee on scientific policy, 1952-64.
Todd was appointed Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde in 1975 and a visiting Professor at Hatfield Poly, 1978–86. Neil Hamilton, the former Tory MP for Tatton who left his seat after public disgrace as a result of allegations of cash for questions and attended social functions with Sir Peter Morrison – Thatcher's personal friend who was abusing children in care in north Wales, Cheshire and elsewhere – worked as a lecturer at Hatfield Poly while Todd was a visiting Professor there.
Todd was President of the Royal Society, 1975-80. In 1981, Todd became a founding member of the World Cultural Council. Todd was honoured as a Nieuwland Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame in 1948, an Arthur D. Little Visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954 and a Hitchcock Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957.
In 1937 Lord Todd married Alison Sarah, daughter of Nobel Prize winner Sir Henry Dale, who like Todd served as President of the Royal Society. They had a son, Alexander Henry, and two daughters, Helen Jean and Hilary Alison. Alison predeceased Lord Todd in 1987.
Sir Henry Dale was a pharmacologist and physiologist who, when he was a medical student, was at the centre of an early 20th century vivisection scandal, the Brown Dog Affair. Dale was educated at the Leys School – Trumpers's husband was Headmaster there years later (see post '95 Glorious Years!') and the Leys is so proud of Henry Dale that one of the school's houses is named after him – and Trinity College, Cambridge. During WWII he served on the Scientific Advisory Panel to the Cabinet. Dale was Chairman of the Wellcome Trust, 1938-60.
In Feb 1903, William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at UCL performed an illegal vivisection, before an audience of 60 medical students, on a brown terrier dog. Bayliss was an enthusiastic vivisectionist, even by the standards of the time.
The Brown Dog was first used in a vivisection in Dec 1902 by Bayliss's brother-in-law Ernest Starling, who was Professor of Physiology at UCL. Starling cut open the Brown Dog's abdomen and ligated the pancreatic duct. For the next two months the Brown Dog lived in a cage, until Starling and Bayliss used him again for two procedures on 2 Feb 1903. Outside the lecture room before the students arrived, Starling cut the Brown Dog open again to inspect the results of the previous surgery, after which he clamped the wound with forceps and handed the dog over to Bayliss. Bayliss cut a new opening in the dog's neck to expose the lingual nerves of the salivary glands, to which he attached electrodes. The aim was to stimulate the nerves with electricity to demonstrate that salivary pressure was independent of blood pressure. The Brown Dog was then carried to the lecture theatre, stretched on his back on an operating board, with his legs tied to the board, his head clamped and his mouth muzzled.
According to Bayliss, the dog had received morphine, then was anaesthetised during the procedure. Some Swedish feminist students who were anti-vivisectionists had infiltrated the lecture and they disputed that the Brown Dog had been adequately anaesthetised. They said that the dog had appeared conscious during the procedure, had tried to lift himself off the board and that there was no smell of anaesthesia or the usual hissing sound of the apparatus. Other students said the Brown Dog had not struggled, but had merely twitched.
In front of around 60 students, Bayliss stimulated the nerves with electricity for half an hour, but was unable to demonstrate his point. The dog was then handed to Henry Dale, then a research student, who removed the dog's pancreas, then killed him with a knife through the heart. Dale did not have an animal license and throughout the experimentation upon and the subsequent killing of the Brown Dog, the audience of students had laughed and joked.
Barrister and Secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society Stephen Coleridge was given extensive notes which the Swedish students had taken while watching the vivisection of the Brown Dog. Stephen Coleridge was the son of John Duke Coleridge, former Lord Chief Justice of England and great-grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Stephen Coleridge gave an angry speech about the Brown Dog on 1 May 1903 to the annual meeting of the National Anti-Vivisection Society in Piccadilly, attended by 2,000-3,000 people and accused the scientists of torture. Details of the speech were published the next day by the radical 'Daily News'. Questions were subsequently raised in the House. Bayliss demanded a public apology and when by 12 May it had failed to materialise he issued a writ for libel. Ernest Starling decided not to sue. 'The Lancet' wrote that 'it may be contended that Professor Starling … committed a technical infringement of the Act.' (The law had actually been flouted in a number of ways.)
The libel trial opened at the Old Bailey on 11 Nov 1903 before Lord Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice and lasted four days. There were queues 30 yards long outside the courthouse. The British Medical Journal called it 'a test case of the utmost gravity'. Lord Alverstone advised the jury not to be swayed by arguments about the validity of vivisection. The jury unanimously found that Bayliss had been defamed, to the applause of Top Doctors in the public gallery. Bayliss was awarded £2,000 with £3,000 costs; Coleridge gave him a cheque the next day.
The Daily News asked for donations and raised £5,700 within four months to cover Coleridge's costs. Bayliss donated his damages to UCL for use in research; Bayliss ignored the Daily Mail's suggestion that he call it the 'Stephen Coleridge Vivisection Fund'. It was suggested in 2004 that the fund may still have been in use then to buy animals. The Times declared itself satisfied with the verdict, although it criticised the rowdy behaviour of medical students during the trial, accusing them of 'medical hooliganism'. The Sun, Star and Daily News backed Coleridge, calling the decision a miscarriage of justice. The Brown Dog Affair led to a Gov't appointed Second Royal Commission on Vivisection in 1906.
After the trial, Anna Louisa Woodward, founder of the World League Against Vivisection, raised money for a public memorial and a bronze statue of the Brown Dog was commissioned. Battersea Council agreed to locate the statue in its Latchmere Recreation Ground. Battersea was considered to be a hotbed of radicalism and was closely associated with anti-vivisection. The statue was unveiled in Sept 1906 in front of a large crowd with speakers which included George Bernard Shaw.
The statue was accompanied by a plaque which was inscribed with the words:
In Memory of the Brown Terrier Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903 after having endured Vivisection extending over more than Two Months and having been handed over from one Vivisector to Another Till Death came to his Release. Also in Memory of the 232 dogs Vivisected at the same place during the year 1902. Men and Women of England how long shall these Things be?
Medical students in London's teaching hospitals were enraged by the inscription and UCL sought advice as to whether they could take legal action over it. Meanwhile, London medical students rioted. On 20 Nov 1907 a group of students attacked the statue with a crowbar and sledgehammer. Ten of them were arrested by just two police officers. A local Top Doctor told the South Western Star that this signalled the 'utter degeneration' of junior doctors: 'I can remember the time when it was more than 10 policemen could do to take one student. The Anglo-Saxon race is played out.' They just weren't making junior medics like they used to.
Several students were fined ₤5 by the magistrate, Paul Taylor. This triggered another protest two days later, when 1,000 medical students from UCL, King's, Guy's and the West Middlesex hospitals marched along the Strand, waving miniature brown dogs on sticks and a life-sized effigy of the magistrate, and singing, 'Let's hang Paul Taylor on a sour apple tree / As we go marching on'. The Times reported that they tried to burn the effigy but, unable to light it, threw it in the Thames instead. Women's suffrage meetings were invaded, although the students knew that not all suffragettes were anti-vivisectionists. A meeting organised by Millicent Fawcett on 5 Dec 1907 was left with chairs and tables smashed and one steward with a torn ear. The Daily Express reported it as 'Medical Students Gallant Fight with Women.'
Here's a feminist with a sense of history who gives the Top Doctors her unstinting support under all circumstances:
The rioting reached its height five days later, on 10 Dec, when 100 medical students tried to pull the memorial down. The protest had been organised to coincide with the annual Oxford-Cambridge rugby match at Queen's Club, West Kensington. The protesters hoped (in vain, as it turned out) that some of the thousands of Oxbridge students would swell their numbers. The intention was that, after toppling the statue and throwing it in the Thames, 2,000–3,000 students would meet at 11:30 pm in Trafalgar Square. Street vendors sold handkerchiefs stamped with the date of the protest and the words, 'Brown Dog's inscription is a lie, and the statuette an insult to the London University.'
In the afternoon protesters headed for the statue, but were driven off by locals. The students proceeded down Battersea Park Road instead, intending to attack the Anti-Vivisection Hospital, but were again forced back. When one student fell from the top of a tram the workers shouted that it was 'the brown dog's revenge' and refused to take him to hospital. A second group of students headed for central London, waving effigies of the brown dog, joined by a police escort and, briefly, a busker with bagpipes. As the marchers reached Trafalgar Square, they were 1,000 strong, facing 400 police officers, 15 of them on horseback. The students gathered around Nelson's Column, where the ringleaders climbed onto its base to make speeches.
While students fought with police on the ground, mounted police charged the crowd, scattering them into smaller groups and arresting the stragglers, including one Cambridge undergraduate, who was arrested for 'barking like a dog'. The fighting continued for hours before the police gained control. At Bow Street Magistrate's Court the next day, ten students were bound over to keep the peace; several were fined 40 shillings, or £3 if they had fought with police.
'As we go walking after dark,
We turn our steps to Latchmere Park,
And there we see, to our surprise,
A little brown dog that stands and lies.
Ha, ha, ha! Hee, hee, hee!
Little brown dog how we hate thee.'
Sung by rioters to the tune of 'Little Brown Jug'
Rioting broke out elsewhere over the following days and months, as medical and veterinary students united. When Lizzy Lind-af-Hageby arranged a meeting of the Ealing and Acton Anti-Vivisection Society at Acton Central Hall on 11 Dec 1906, over 100 students disrupted it, throwing chairs and stink bombs when she tried to speak. The Daily Chronicle reported: 'The rest of Miss Lind-af-Hageby's indignation was lost in a beautiful 'eggy' atmosphere that was now rolling heavily across the hall'. Furniture was smashed and clothing torn. The riots saw trade unionists, socialists, Marxists, liberals and suffragettes descend upon Battersea to fight the medical students, even though the suffragettes were not a group toward whom male workers felt any warmth. The 'Brown Terrier Dog Done to Death' by the male scientific establishment united them all.
According to Coral Lansbury, the fight for women's suffrage became closely linked with the anti-vivisection movement. Lansbury argues that the Brown Dog Affair became a matter of opposing symbols, the iconography of vivisection striking a chord with women. The vivisected dog on the operating board blurred into images of suffragettes force-fed in Brixton Prison, or women strapped down for childbirth or forced to have their ovaries and uteri removed as a cure for 'mania'.
However, life is not simply a matter of Two Ovaries Good, Two Testicles Bad. Here's Dafydd's accomplice sporting what Brown described as 'an ill-advised wig':
Miss Hughes joined Caernarfonshire County Council as a Social Worker in the Children's Department in September 1958. She was Children's Officer in Anglesey from 1966-1969, returning to Caernarfonshire as Children's Officer until 1974 when she was appointed Principal Assistant Director in the new Social Services Department following Local Government Reorganisation. Miss Hughes subsequently held the posts of Deputy Director and Director of Social Services. Miss Hughes was a member of the Citizens Advice Bureau for 20 years, and nowadays she is a National Trust steward at Penrhyn Castle and also works for her church. She enjoys attending music concerts, and is also an art lover. She has been a member of Bangor & District Soroptimists for over 40 years. Within CAIS, Miss Hughes is particularly committed to supporting training and high standards of professional service. She is also especially interested in CAIS's approach to its service users, and proud that respect, collaboration and partnership have become CAIS values and that the Board, management, staff and service users are working on these together. Miss Hughes facilitated a vicious paedophile gang for decades.
Coral Lansbury wrote that the medical students saw themselves and their teachers as the 'New Priesthood' and the women and trade unionists as representatives of superstition and sentimentality.
Sir Henry Dale:
Anyone up for a vaginal mesh?
Questions were asked in the Commons about the cost of policing the statue, which required six constables a day. London's Police Commissioner wrote to Battersea Council to ask that they contribute to it. Councillor John Archer later Mayor of Battersea and the first black mayor in London, told the Daily Mail that Battersea was already paying £22,000 a year in police rates. The Canine Defence League wondered whether, if Battersea were to organizs raids on laboratories, the laboratories would be asked to pay the policing costs themselves. Suggestions were made through the letters pages of the Times and elsewhere that the statue be moved, perhaps to the grounds of the Anti-Vivisection Hospital. The British Medical Journal wrote in March 1910: 'May we suggest that the most appropriate resting place for the rejected work of art is the Home for Lost Dogs at Battersea, where it could be "done to death", as the inscription says, with a hammer in the presence of Miss Woodword, the Rev. Lionel S. Lewis, and other friends; if their feelings were too much for them, doubtless an anaesthetic could be administered'.
Here's Hippocrates, the Father Of Medicine:
We turn our steps to Latchmere Park,
And there we see, to our surprise,
A little brown dog that stands and lies.
Ha, ha, ha! Hee, hee, hee!
Little brown dog how we hate thee.'
The protests were to no avail. The statue was quietly removed before dawn on 10 March 1910 by four council workmen, accompanied by 120 police officers. Nine days later, 3,000 anti-vivisectionists gathered in Trafalgar Square to demand its return, but it was clear by then that Battersea Council had turned its back on the affair. The statue was at first hidden in the borough surveyor's bicycle shed, according to a letter his daughter wrote in 1956 to the British Medical Journal, then reportedly destroyed by a council blacksmith, who melted it down. Anti-vivisectionists filed a High Court petition demanding its return, but the case was dismissed in Jan 1911.
Echoing the fate of the previous memorial, the new dog was moved into storage in 1992 by Battersea Park's owners, the Conservative Borough of Wandsworth, they said as part of a park renovation scheme. Anti-vivisectionists campaigned for its return, suspicious of the explanation. It was reinstated in the park's Woodland Walk in 1994, near the Old English Garden, a more secluded spot than before.
In 1992 social workers employed by Wandsworth Borough Council were facilitating a paedophile gang in south London with links to Dafydd and Lucille's gang in north Wales (see post 'The Most Dangerous Man In The World – Part III'). The south London gang, as well as Dafydd's gang, was also being concealed by Top Docs at St George's Hospital Medical School, just down the road from Wandsworth and some of those concealing organised abuse lived in Wandsworth. As did Michael Mansfield QC, who was studiously ignoring the activities of those gangs. One member of staff at St George's who was colluding with the gangs in 1992 was Prof Geoffrey Chamberlain, some of who's colleagues were conducting animal experiments but denying what they were doing. Chamberlain himself, in the mid-1960s, experimented upon a living foetus of 7 months gestation which he had aborted. When Chamberlain finished the experiment, he killed the foetus. For further details, see post 'Now Then…'. When I worked for Chamberlain in 1991, there was a preserved, fully formed but very small foetus sitting in a jar in a shelf in one of the labs. Minding its own business but very casual like. I suspect that it shouldn't have been there because when I asked a benign question about that foetus I got my head bitten off.
Here's one of Chamberlain's personal friends who when she was on Desert Island Discs spoke of her heartbreak at losing a premature baby:
Abel-Smith explained that teaching hospitals were prioritised in the hospital building programme and he mentions that in 1971 the flagship first purpose built completely integrated teaching hospital and medical school in Britain was built at Cardiff. That is of course the University Hospital at Cardiff, known to locals as the Heath. The child molester George Thomas aka Lord Tonypandy seems to have had a very chummy relationship with the Heath and the bungalow in which he lived was on its doorstep. The Heath was choc full of all those Top Doctors who were concealing the crimes of Dafydd and the gang, as well as the crimes of one George Thomas and others in south Wales. George Thomas really loved medical charities and one big medical charity in Cardiff bore his name until the stream of revelations regarding his sex offending became so embarrassing that the charity changed its name.
Previous blog posts have discussed the experiences of a school friend of mine who was a medical student in Cardiff during the 1980s and found out that there were big problems at the Heath then. Cardiff medical students knew about malpractice and the dreadful conduct of certain people but felt unable to challenge it. The students also knew about even bigger problems in the NHS in north Wales, Cardiff students all dreaded being sent on placement to north Wales. The problems didn't go away and over the last few years the medical school in Cardiff has seen its reputation plummet, which is what happens when serious misconduct is ignored.
Abel-Smith explained that the hospital building programme was implemented by Regional Hospital Boards and by the Boards of Governors of teaching hospitals. Regional architects and engineers planned some hospitals but usually private architects were commissioned to work with them. According to Abel-Smith, so little hospital building had been done over previous 20 yrs that British architects and engineers lacked experience, so a visit was arranged to the US to study recent developments. The Dept of Health produced guidelines on design and also launched a major research and development programme in hospital planning.
I'm a bit surprised by this. Surely it would have not been beyond the wit of architects and engineers to sit down and have a good think about what would be needed to build a hospital? However the fuckwittery to which Abel-Smith referred might explain the constant problems that were discovered after Ysbyty Glan Clwyd and Ysbyty Gwynedd were built in the 1980s. I remember being told that the same person designed both hospitals and there were serious design faults. Some of the faults were only discovered after the hospitals were in operation when bits of them started falling apart, but there were some real howlers as well, such as the mortuary being sited in a totally inappropriate part of the building, I think it was next to the kitchens or something equally crazy. In the 1980s Welsh TV news regularly featured items regarding yet another bit of one of those two hospitals which was having to be rebuilt or redesigned. Knowing the way in which the NHS in north Wales conducts business I presume that the contracts for building those hospitals would have gone to the mate of a Top Doc or senior manager who will have been clueless and out of their depth.
Abel-Smith explains that 'Wales was advantaged' in the distribution of the dosh for the hospital building programme and that larger shares of dosh were given to the authorities whose needs seemed to be greatest need. It is obvious that in Wales this could not have happened. Facilities in rural Wales were still lacking even after the new hospitals were built. There was however the one massive, flagship envy-of-the-UK institution in Wales – the University Hospital in Cardiff, which must have taken up the greater part of the hospital building programme budget allocated to Wales. The University Hospital which employed all the big wigs who were concealing all the crap, who also had a very cosy relationship with George Thomas.
George Thomas was Secretary of State for Wales, 1968-70. Responsibility for Health in Wales was assumed by the Welsh Office in 1969. Before George Thomas was Secretary of State for Wales, he was a Minister in the Welsh Office, under Cledwyn Hughes aka Lord Cledwyn. Lord Cledwyn was the Labour MP for Anglesey and was considered so influential in the Labour Party in Wales that when the Windbag was a whippersnapper, Glenys's parents, who were mates of Lord Cledwyn, made a point of ensuring that the Windbag got to know him because that would be the route to success for the Windbag. So Cledwyn Hughes and George Thomas were in the Welsh Office when decisions were being made regarding which hospitals would be built in Wales and where.
Does the Windbag know if that ridiculous bungalow in which George Thomas and his mother lived which was on the doorstep of the Health was funded by the NHS as well? After all, it was George Thomas who did that dodgy deal with a firm of builders which resulted in them bagging the lucrative contract to build an estate of houses in Cardiff…
Brian Abel-Smith noted that although more psychiatric units were developed in the general hospitals, 'the adequacy and suitability' 'varied considerably'. Indeed the ones in north Wales were completely inadequate, so more were built, which were also inadequate. Although the biggest problem, as I always stress, was not the buildings, it was the staff.
Abel-Smith fessed up that it was difficult to attract staff to work in the mental handicap hospitals because they were old and isolated. The staff were often also abusing the patients, which is never a magnet for people who want to do a good job. Of course in Bryn-y-Neuadd in Llanfairfechan, although that too was an old isolated hospital, those two forward thinkers Ann and Michael Craft rocked up there to carry out 'research' into the sexual histories of the patients, 'research' with which Dafydd was involved. Being a pioneer of Empowerment, Ann also supported patients to explore their sexuality and supported them in their choice to conduct sexual relationships (see post 'The Old Devils'). Those patients were given absolutely no choice over any other area of their lives, but they were given choice regarding with whom they had sex. Although as many of the Bryn-y-Neuadd patients had difficulties communicating, it would have been not been easy for a layperson to know if the patient was desperate to have sex with them, but with Ann Craft there to support them, I'm sure that communication difficulties would have presented no problems.
Dafyd and Lucille's friend, Trustee and Vice-Chair of CAIS, Cledwyn Williams, spent many happy years running the mental handicap service in north Wales:
From 1983 to 1996 Cledwyn was Assistant Director of Social Services, responsible for mentally handicapped services and for the all-Wales strategy for people with learning disabilities. He was responsible for developing services for people with learning disabilities for the education, health & social services group. After this, he became Director of Social Services for Conwy.
In the late 1960s, there were so many scandals involving neglect and abuse in long stay hospitals that Secretary of State for the DHSS Richard Crossman initiated a re-examination of the standards of care in hospitals for the mentally ill and mentally handicapped. Among the many scandals and Committees of Inquiry, there were none involving Denbigh, although it was admitted after the Ely Hospital Scandal that conditions at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh were worse. The Ely Scandal remains one of the most shocking scandals that there has been in the UK. George Thomas described the 'nursing' at Ely as 'old-fashioned'. Patients were kicked, beaten and doused with cold water.
Dick Crossman was Secretary of State for Health and Social Services, 1968 to 1970, after which he became Editor of the 'New Statesman'. Crossman was an Oxford graduate who during WWII served in the Special Operations Executive making anti-Nazi propaganda material. Such experience would have been put to good use at the DHSS, dealing with those old fashioned Angels.
In 1969 Crossman established the Hospital Advisory Service, which employed teams to visit long stay hospitals and give advice locally regarding improving patient care. The Director of the HAS also reported to the Secretary of State regarding conditions in particular hospitals. Crossman knew what was happening in north Wales.
In 1957 Crossman joined Nye Bevan and Morgan Phillips in a controversial lawsuit for libel against 'The Spectator'. Crossman and co won the case and bagged damages. Years later, Crossman's posthumously published diaries revealed that the allegations made by 'The Spectator' had indeed been true and that Crossman, Bevan and Phillips had perjured themselves. Strong Woman Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour MP for Exeter, 1966-70 and Crewe and Nantwich, 1974-2008, attempted to pass legislation that would have concealed the truth regarding the perjury of Crossman et al. Gwyneth Dunwoody was the daughter of Morgan Phillips. Gwyneth's husband John Dunwoody was a Top Doctor and Labour MP for Falmouth and Cambourne. John Dunwoody was a junior Minister in the DHSS under Dick Crossman. The Labour Party had their eye on John Dunwoody as a future Secretary of State for the DHSS and he was talked up in much the same way that Dr Death always was, but it all went pear shaped and Dunwoody left politics and returned to being a Top Doctor running huge swathes of London's NHS. The Dunwoodys had a truly dreadful daughter, Tamsin, who rocked up as an AM in Wales until things finally fell apart for her as well. The Dunwoody clan were all involved in concealing the crimes of Dafydd and the gang. See previous posts for further details regarding the sordid activities of the Dunwoodys.
In 1971 a White Paper was published regarding better services for the mentally handicapped. A 20 yr plan was envisaged, with greatly increased local authority residential places and day centre places. This led to the nearly halving of the numbers of long stay patients in mental handicap hospitals and a major extension in community care facilities. Although not in Wales. Those who were exploring their sexuality in Bryn-y-Neuadd did not even begin to be resettled in community care facilities until the late 1980/early 1990s.
When the resettlement began, many found themselves living in homes provided by a company called Cartrefi Cymru. I knew someone who worked as a support worker for Cartrefi Cymru and she maintained that it was complete chaos. Turnover of staff was incredibly high because of the terrible pay and inadequate facilities and there was completely inadequate support for 'clients'. One male resident developed mental health problems as a result of spending months living in a house with a female client who was highly sexually aggressive of whom he was terrified. I expect that she'd been taught to explore her sexual needs by Ann and Michael Craft. My friend made repeated representation to the managers of Cartrefi Cymru about the problems but was simply told 'it has to work, they're in the community now'. The male resident eventually had a breakdown. Dafydd's colleague Tony Francis refused to treat him on the grounds that he was mentally handicapped and Francis Didn't Do Them.
My friend's observations to her senior colleagues that no-one else would be expected to share a house with a sexually aggressive person of whom they were petrified and that people with learning disabilities should not be refused NHS care for mental health problems were ignored.
One of the Directors of Cartrefi Cymru is Dr Peter Higson, a former clinical psychologist in, and the former manager of, the North Wales Hospital Denbigh. Higson's sister Dr Ruth Hussey is a Role Model For Wimmin, being a Top Doctor who is the former Chief Medical Officer for Wales. Here's Ruth, picking up her honorary fellowship from Bangor University:
Here's her brother, who when Ruth was honoured by Bangor University, was sitting on the governing body of Bangor University:
Abel-Smith observed that although local authorities had been given community care duties from 1959, by 1974, only half the places needed for training and occupation for mentally handicapped adults were provided and only about one third of the places needed for residential facilities. Some local authorities had made no provision at all. I wonder which LAs that might have been?
Abel-Smith explained that 'provision for the mentally ill was still more deficient'. In 1974, only approximately one sixth of the day centre places and one third of the residential care facilities estimated to be needed were available and 'community social work and other community services were seriously under-developed'.
How did it all happen, what with the plans being announced in 1959?
I'm glad to say that those at the heart of Gov't may have been a little slow in providing accommodation and other basics for vulnerable people but there was one need which was prioritised. In 1966, the paedophiles' friend Kenneth Robinson asked LAs to provide family planning services on medical grounds free of charge and from 1967, LAs were given the power to provide family planning services free of charge 'for those who needed them' for non-medical as well as medical reasons. The only people I know who ever availed themselves of the infamous NHS free condoms (which I was told were grossly inferior to the ones which are purchased over the counter from Boots) were various people having a massively hard time, who were in the clutches of the Top Docs and social workers after having grown up in care, become pregnant when they were still at school etc. Advice, or rather direct orders regarding 'family planning', rains down upon the head of these folk like there is no tomorrow, as do instructions to get themselves sterilised. It is all accompanied by 'it's for their own good or they'll get pregnant'.
Unplanned pregnancies, particularly among people who would have trouble looking after the resultant babies, do of course lead to difficulties. However I have watched what has been going on for nearly 40 years now and the story in Somerset and north Wales was the same. Vulnerable people who were being sexually used, often by those caring for them, were in some cases being actively prepared for sex and in other cases were being kitted out to ensure that those sexually exploiting them did not have to face the consequences of making them pregnant. One group of NHS workers who know damn well when people are being sexually abused are those dishing out the contraceptives, performing the abortions and treating the STIs. It was one such Angel who blew the whistle on one of the big trafficking rings in the north of England. No-one else has. Everyone involved in 'family planning' in north Wales knew that kids in care and residents of the North Wales Hospital Denbigh and Bryn-y-Neuadd were becoming pregnant. Yes those people do have consenting relationships with each other, but the rate at which they were becoming pregnant (or infected) was such that it was not the result of mutually consenting relationships. Furthermore Top Doctors and Angels were being told by the children/patients what had happened. No-one said a word.
People like Kenneth Robinson knew exactly who were in receipt of 'family planning for non-medical reasons' and it wasn't usually women in happy relationships who were just waiting for a while before they started a family.
As a result of the 1966 Salmon Report, Chief Nursing Officers were appointed who were responsible for nursing services in each group of hospitals. Parallel to this were the Directors of Nursing Services who were responsible to the local authority. People who occupied these positions knew precisely how patients in north Wales were being abused and mistreated. Some people with these job titles were still in place in the 1980s and their names appear on my documents. They were the Angels at the top of the tree who were attending meetings about the problem that was me while failing to respond to my letters which detailed serious criminal activity on the part of their colleagues.
Here's some pigs in blankets, there's a lot of them:
Brian Abel-Smith notes that although Angels were still badly paid, between 1948 and 1974 the pay for a consultant Top Doc at the top of the pay scale had multiplied by more than four times.
Professor Abel-Smith noted that the League of Hospital Friends had rapidly expanded by 1974 and were involved with 'supporting' long stay patients. The League of Friends in north Wales were always busy and because they had direct contact with the patients they could hardly have not noticed the state that some of them were in or the conditions in Denbigh. The League of Friends were usually elderly insiders, often retired Angels or the wives of the Top Doctors and administrators.
Chapter 4 of Abel-Smith's book is concerned with the reorganisation of NHS. In 1962 a 'non-Governmental Committee' established by Top Doctors and Chaired by Top Doctor Sir Arthur Porritt produced recommendations with regard to the reorganisation of the NHS.
Col Arthur Porritt was born in New Zealand, the son of a Top Doctor. Porritt himself studied medicine at Magdalen College, Oxford. Porritt represented New Zealand at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris. It was this race against Harold Abrahams that was later immortalised in the film 'Chariots Of Fire'. Porritt was New Zealand's team manager at the 1934 British Empire Games in London and 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Porritt was the New Zealand member of the International Olympic Committee, 1934-67 and he was the first President of the IOC Medical Commission, serving from 1961-67. So Arthur Porritt had something to do with the laughable and discredited 'sex tests' which were supposedly designed to ensure that female athletes were actually female, on the grounds that the gender of some of those Russian shot putters was open to question. Women athletes themselves maintained that the 'sex tests' were no more than a grope fest.
Porritt served as Chairman of the British Empire and Commonwealth Games Federation from the 1950 Auckland games to the 1966 Kingston games.
Porritt became a house surgeon at St Mary's Hospital Paddington and later that year was appointed surgeon to the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII.
I think I understand why the Top Docs ensured that Porritt Chaired their 'non-Governmental Committee' to advise on the reorganisation of the NHS.
During WWII Porritt served with the Royal Army Medical Corps and was involved in the D Day landings. He ended his military career in September 1956, with the honorary rank of Colonel in the TA. Porritt was King's Surgeon to George VI, 1946-52, and was Serjeant Surgeon to Lilibet until 1967.
In 1955 Porritt was asked by the suspected serial killer Top Doc John Bodkin Adams to operate on his patient Jack Hullett for colon cancer. The death of Hullett under Adams' supervision a few months later followed soon after by the death of his wife, led to Adams being put on trial for Bobby's murder in 1957. He was acquitted but is suspected in up to 163 deaths. Harriet Harman's dad Dr John Harman gave evidence for the defence at Adams's trial. See previous posts for details of the Bodkin Adams case.
Porritt became President in 1960 of both the BMA and the Royal College of Surgeons of England and retained the presidency of the RCS until 1963. In 1966 he was elected President for two years of the Royal Society of Medicine, but served only one year before leaving for New Zealand.
In 1967 Porritt returned to New Zealand to be appointed by the Queen on the advice of PM Keith Holyoake as the 11th Governor-General of New Zealand.
These feminists are only Women's Libbers because they're too fat and ugly to get a man.
|The Baroness Thatcher
At his last Waitangi Day speech in 1972, Arthur Porritt caused yet more offence by stating that: 'Maori-Pakeha relationships are being dealt with adequately through the biological process of intermarriage'.
I'm not going to comment.
At the end of his term as Governor-General of New Zealand in Sept 1972 England got Porritt back again.
Sir Arthur was an enthusiastic Freemason. He was initiated in Oxford University's Apollo University Lodge No 357 on 13 June 1925 and later joined other English Constitution lodges, including Sancta Maria Lodge No. 2682 (a Top Doctors' lodge), Prince of Wales's Lodge No. 259 (a so-called 'red apron' lodge as it nominates one of the 19 Grand Stewards each year, who wear red aprons), and Royal Alpha Lodge No. 16 (membership of which is at the personal invitation of the Grand Master).
During his term as Governor-General (1968–1971), Porritt served as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New Zealand.
Sir Ronnie Waterhouse emphasised that he found not a scrap of evidence to suggest that Freemasonry had played any part at all in the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal. But then Ronnie missed the biggest parts of the whole scandal, so it was hardly surprising that he didn't notice the involvement of a great many Masons, even the Masons with whom he was personally friendly.
Lord Porritt – as Sir Arthur became – was the father of Jonathan Porritt, the environmental activist who caused confusion among some other activists because he was rather posher than the rest of them.
Jonathan Porritt was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He trained as a barrister but instead worked as a teacher at St Clement Davies Grammar School in Shepherd's Bush, 1974-84. In the late 1970s/early 80s, Porritt was involved with the Ecology Party (now known as the Green Party). Porritt Chaired the Ecology Party, 1979-80 and 1982-84. Porritt was Director of Friends of the Earth, 1984-90. Friends of the Earth in those days was based at 9 Poland Street, London, along with a number of organisations with varying reputations, including one with links to organisations campaigning for paedophiles' rights. The charity Release was also based at 9 Poland Street.
Release offered help to people arrested and/or imprisoned for/on drugs offences. I know someone who was unlawfully arrested and imprisoned by Dafydd et al for more than a year in the mid-1980s after the police planted class A drugs on him and his wife. This man had been violently assaulted by the North Wales Police when he objected to a Sergeant joining him in the loo. Before being transferred to Denbigh, he'd spent weeks in the 'hospital wing' of Risley Remand Centre, where he heard the screams of other inmates as they were beaten up by the screws. When in Denbigh, he rang Release and was most impressed when a man from Release came to visit him in Denbigh, all the way from London. The man explained that there was nothing that Release could do to help.
The man from Release knew of the circumstances of the Denbigh patient's arrest and imprisonment and he will have known how illegal it all was. He also will have noticed the conditions at Denbigh and probably realised that he was visiting someone who had been a witness to very serious crime. The man from Release returned to London and was never heard of again.
In the 1992 General Election, Jonathan Porritt backed Cynog Dafis, who stood in Ceredigion as the joint Plaid/Green Party candidate. Many people alleged that Dafis was involved with a very dirty deal but no-one would actually clarify what the deal was. The deal did however lead to an overwhelming victory for Cynog Dafis, who defeated Geraint Howells, the Lib Dem who had held the seat since 1974. Lord Geraint had been one of those who had supported Mary Wynch, before everyone was terrorised into pretending that they'd never heard of her.
In 1992 the North Wales Police investigation into the possibility of a VIP paedophile ring operating in north Wales/Cheshire was underway.
In 1994, the Green Party Regional Council suspended Porritt for supporting Dafis and demanded that Dafis should stop identifying himself as a Green.
Porritt Chaired the New Labour Gov'ts Sustainable Development Committee (SDC) which was set up by Blair, between 2000 and 2009. Porritt was also involved with the UN with regard to environmental matters.
Between 1996 and 2009 Porritt withdrew from active involvement in party politics. In 2009 he entered the arena again, reaffirming his support for the Green Party and explaining that he had never stopped supporting them.
Porritt was a Trustee of the World Wildlife Fund, 1991-05 and was on the Advisory Board of BBC Wildlife Magazine. In 2005 he was appointed a non-executive Director of Wessex Water and in 2008 he became a non-executive Director of the Willmott Dixon Group. Porritt is also on the Sustainable Retail Advisory Board for Marks & Spencer. M&S have links with the Royal College of Psychiatrists and for some unfathomable reason it was M&S who years ago stumped up an enormous loan on favourable conditions for the Royal College to move themselves into a palatial building in Belgravia, when the Royal College was nearly bankrupt.
Porritt is a Patron of Population Matters and has expressed his belief that families should have no more than two children. He has praised the one child per family policy that caused such havoc in China. Porritt is not daft, he must know that the Chinese Gov't enforced that policy so robustly that pregnant women were abducted from their homes, given abortions against their will and foetuses of 8 months gestation were chucked into buckets and left to die. Then there were the numerous dead bodies of babies which turned up in waterways etc in China.
Jonathan, would you happen to know how Chinese baby girls became available for adoption on Anglesey at the turn of the millennium? The adoption officer for Anglesey, a lady called Jean, was most helpful if someone wanted a Chinese baby, it didn't matter what age they were or whether they were married or single. The only criteria was that they had to have a lot of spare cash because those Chinese babies did not come cheap.
In 2012 Porritt became Chancellor of Keele University.
Porritt seems to be based in the West Country, he's certainly very busy down there.
Jonathan Porritt is of course the environmental adviser to Carlo.
Back in the 1980s, Porritt did wonders for the image of Friends of the Earth. They had previously been characterised as a bunch of old hippies, but after Jonathan arrived as Director, FoE began receiving much good PR in right-leaning publications, which stressed that Jonathan had been to Eton and Oxford so couldn't be all bad.
Porritt did ruffle feathers by maintaining that people should be happy with lower incomes and less consumer goodies. I never had a problem with this, but one of my friends who is involved with environmental activism himself explained that what was pissing people off was that Porritt is a very rich man, so he didn't need a high income. I had no idea that Porritt's dad was a Top Doc and umbrella par excellence for Dafydd et al…
With regard to the lack of development for community care, Abel-Smith explained in his publication that Regional Boards and Hospital Management Committees 'could do no more than try to persuade local authorities to give these services greater priority'. Couldn't Jonathan Porritt's dad have put a boot up their butts? He doesn't seem to have minced his words with regard to other matters.
In north Wales, the people running the local authorities who were failing to develop community services will have been either exactly the same people or the family and friends of those people who were sitting on NHS Regional Boards and Hospital Management Committees. Despite all the hot air, even in the 1990s, it was patently obvious that those who called the shots in north Wales did not want to see the North Wales Hospital Denbigh closed. A lot of people articulated this quite openly. Other people held the 'but the patients will never cope, there are no community services' conversations. Which was true, but there had been a deliberate refusal on the part of everyone to develop even the most rudimentary of those services. It was the usual story. 'We're the paedophiles' friends, we say what's going to happen and we run these 'services' for ourselves.'
In north Wales, the senior managers of the mental health services were still referring to the 'new ideas' and 'new attitude' to psychiatric patients in the late 1980s, although the 'new ideas' were actually new in the late 1950s. I had a conversation with Alun Davies in 1989 during which he made derogatory comments about the 'new ideas'. That lot were clueless, totally clueless.
Following Porritt's dad's Report, concerns about standards in the long stay hospitals grew…
In 1965, the Seebohm Commitee was established on the watch of the Health Minister and paedophiles' friend Kenneth Robinson. The Seebohm Committee reported on personal social services. The Committee sat from 1965 to 1968 and was Chaired by Frederic Seebohm. The Committee was appointed on 20 Dec 1965 to review the organisation and responsibilities of the social services functions of local authorities. It reported back in 1968, recommending the amalgamation of a number of functions to form a single Social Services Department. The single department would include services provided by children's departments, the home help service, mental health, social work services and other social care functions provided by other organisations. Harold Wilson's Gov't commissioned and received the Report, welcomed it and committed to carry out a consultation to review the recommendations made by Seebohm.
It was the recommendations of the Seebohm Committee which allowed Dafydd and the gang complete control over their victims' lives. I have mentioned in previous posts how the mental health services/learning disability services worked in tandem with the paedophile/sex trafficking gang. What I have not blogged so much about but which readers will already have grasped was happening was the control that the gang exerted over the whole families of victims/witnesses. If complaints were made about members of the gang, a favourite strategy was to maintain that the witness had been abused, but not by the member of the gang named. The finger was instead pointed at an innocent person known to the witness, usually a family member and it would be explained that the victim had named the wrong person because of 'transference' or 'projection'. People who had named Dafydd et al were subjected to hours of discussion by the Top Doctors of this sort where they were repeatedly told that it wasn't the gang who had abused them, it was someone else. I know of one young woman in Gwynedd who's father went to prison after two of her sisters were subjected to this 'counselling'. She maintained throughout that her father was innocent and that her sisters were bullied and pressurised into naming him. This young woman developed bulimia and a serious alcohol problem. She was told by the Hergest Unit that she had a personality disorder and that she was untreatable. She died a few years ago. Ysbyty Gwynedd's story was that her life support was switched off after a lethal boozing session. One of her friends is in possession of a suicide note that the dead young woman left behind. Not that 'the authorities' have ever seen this note, because the person who found it is a mental health patient themselves who has as little as possible to do with 'the services'.
Should a victim/witness have children themselves, they will find the gestapo right back in their lives even if they have done their best to wave good-bye to them. Their parenting skills will be questioned before they have got anywhere near giving birth. I know of young women who were forced into aborting babies which were very much wanted – one such young woman went into hiding from the mental health services after this experience – others have had children removed from them upon the flimsiest pretexts. The favourite technique however is to leave the child with the victim/witness, maintain to the world that the family are being 'supported' because they are 'chaotic and dysfunctional' and then make the whole family's life hell.
My post 'Cry, The Beloved Country' explained how the south Wales Labour MP Leo Abse, with the help of Jim Callaghan, Harold Wilson and Dr Death, developed and piloted the Children's Act 1975 – following a Report by the Houghton Committee, which was ruthlessly manipulated by Leo Abse – which resulted in so many children being handed over to Dafydd and the gang in north Wales. Abse was a bent lawyer and a close friend of fellow south Wales Labour MP the child molester George Thomas. Abse is suspected of having been a sex offender himself. Abse extracted George Thomas from trouble constantly, sometimes by threatening witnesses or paying them off. On one occasion in 1984, George Thomas summoned Abse to an unidentified hospital in the middle of the night after Thomas panicked and believed that he was about to be exposed. Thomas had been admitted to hospital as a result of the consequences of an STI and thought that the media would discover why he was in hospital. Abse made up a load of guff about Thomas having prostate trouble and fed the lies to the press.
No wonder George Thomas supported so many medical charidees and lived on the doorstep of the Heath Hospital.
The recommendations of the Seebohm Committee seem to have been as of much assistance to Dafydd and the paedophile gang as the Houghton Committee and the Children's Act 1975 was.
Frederic Seebohm was educated at Leighton Park School and Trinity College, Cambridge. After Cambridge he joined Barclays Bank, which had taken over the Hitchin Bank founded by his family. Seebohm served in the Royal Artillary. Seebohm was local director of the bank's branch office in Luton and Birmingham and then became Director of the main Board after WWII. In 1951, he was made a member of the bank's overseas Board and in 1965 Chairman of the renamed Barclays Bank International. Seebohm retired seven years later.
In December 1965 Seebohm was appointed, by Douglas Houghton MP, to Chair the Committee on Local Authority Personal Social Services. Seebohm was also Chairman of the Overseas Development Institute. In 1972, Seebohm was created a life peer.
Frederic Seebohm was President of the National Institute for Social Work. As a result of the infiltration of children's social services by paedophile gangs in the 1960s and 70s, there were many abusers involved with the National Institute for Social Work, the most high profile being Peter Righton.
Seebohm was President of the Royal African Society and of Age Concern; Chairman of the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust (now the Joseph Rowntree Foundation) for 15 years and one of the founders of the York Council of Voluntary Service. Seebohm was a governor of the LSE and of the Haileybury and Imperial Services College.
The names of many people who taught or studied at the LSE were linked with abuse scandals, including in north Wales. Jane Hutt, the former Health and Social Services Minister in the Welsh Gov't, who spent an entire career looking the other way as people screamed at her that a massive trafficking ring was in operation under her nose, is an LSE graduate. David Hurst, a 'social policy specialist' at Bangor University who wrote fiction with regard to the history of the mental health services in north Wales, is an LSE graduate. The Waterhouse Report again and again mentions managers and staff of the Social Services in north Wales who studied at the LSE. Of course there will be plenty of people associated with the LSE who have not been involved in these sort of scandals, but the point is that the ones who are will have used their LSE network to protect themselves. That will be a useful network to have, the LSE has a towering reputation in the social sciences.
Brian Abel-Smith held a Chair at the LSE, as did his mentor, Richard Titmuss.
Frederic Seebohm was Chairman of 3i, a private equity group.
Seebohm died in a road accident in 1990, just before the North Wales Police opened the first investigation into the abuse of children in care in north Wales/Cheshire. His wife, Evangeline, daughter of Sir Gerald Berkeley Hurst, died shortly after.
Sir Gerald Berkeley Hurst was the Conservative MP for Manchester Moss Side, 1918-23 and 1924-35. He was born Gerald Berkeley Hertz in Bradford. His Jewish grandparents on both sides came from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. Hurst was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Lincoln College, Oxford. Hertz changed the spelling of his surname to Hurst in 1916. He served in the British Army during WWI. Hurst married one of the daughters of Sir Alfred Hopkinson, VC of Manchester University and a Conservative MP. In 1938, Hurst was appointed to the County Court for Croydon and West Kent. Hurst stepped down from the county judgeship in 1952. From 1947 -55, he served as Commissioner of Divorce Cases. His younger brother was the Top Doctor Sir Arthur Hurst, a neurologist.
Frederic and Evangeline Seebohm's daughter is the broadcaster and writer Victoria Glendinning. Glendinning is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Glendinning grew up near York and after attending Millfield School in Somerset, went to Oxford University. In the second year of her degree, she married one of her lecturers, Professor Nigel Glendinning. They divorced in 1981. Her second husband Terence de Vere White died in 1994 and in 1996 Victoria married Kevin O'Sullivan (a previous husband of Shirley Conran). She had four sons, including sportswriter Matthew Glendinning and the mathematician Paul Glendinning. Another son, Simon Glendinning, lectures at the LSE and previously taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Another son, Hugo Glendinning, is a photographer and artist.
Glendinning has written about the experience of coming from a Quaker family. A number of Quakers were involved in the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal. Owain Gethin Evans, who was the Assistant Director of Gwynedd Social Services and Lucille Hughes's henchman while the paedophile gang ran riot, was a leading light in the Quakers in Gwynedd. Dr Paul Nickson, a GP from Bethesda, was a Quaker. Nickson ignored the abuse of mental health patients and the abuse of children as well as serious crime related to these matters. Dafydd subsequently appeared on a Quakers website sharing his wisdom. See previous posts for further details of the role of the Quakers in concealing the crimes of Dafydd et al.
Douglas Houghton, the man who appointed Frederic Seebohm to Chair the Committee, was the Labour MP for Sowerby in West Yorkshire.
Houghton was born in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, fought in WWI, survived the Battle of the Somme and subsequently joined the civil service. Houghton was 'a great believer in equality of opportunity' and campaigned for lower grade civil servants to have the chance of taking an examination that could lead to promotion. Houghton founded the Inland Revenue Staff Federation, leading it from 1922 to 1960. He served on the General Council of the TUC, 1952-60 and as Chairman of the Staff Side Civil Service National Whitley Council, 1955-57.
Houghton was a panel member of a BBC radio programme Can I Help You?, 1941-64. He was an Alderman of the London County Council, 1947-49. Jim Callaghan's wife Audrey, who did many favours for the paedophile gangs of Wales, was also a member of London County Council and an Alderman, although some years after Houghton held the role (see previous posts). Houghton knew the Callaghans.
Houghton was Chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, succeeding Harold Wilson in this post after Wilson was elected Leader of the Labour Party in 1963. Houghton became a Cabinet Minister in Wilson's first Gov't, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which gave him special responsibility for Social Services. Houghton was dropped from Gov't in 1967 and became Chairman of the PLP. He retired from the Commons in 1974 and was elevated to the Lords a few months later on 20 June.
Douglas Houghton was the Houghton of the Houghton Committee, to whom Leo Abse gave instructions in order to bring about the Children's Act of 1975.
Lord Houghton was passionate about the subject of animal welfare. The People's History Museum in Manchester holds the collection of Douglas Houghton, whose papers include those of animal charities and pressure groups.
In 1939, Douglas Houghton married Vera, who also worked at Association of Officers for Taxes, before becoming a campaigner for abortion law reform and free birth control. Vera is described as having been a 'women's health campaigner'. Vera was the Chair of the Abortion Law Association, 1963-70, whilst the organisation, lobbied, sponsored and steered the Abortion Act 1967 through Parliament. Following this, Vera continued to campaign for women's reproductive rights by founding the Birth Control Trust, which pushed for universally free contraceptives. She also became active in the Family Planning Association, becoming its Chair in 1973, with birth control becoming free available on the NHS in 1974. Vera also became Executive Secretary of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, 1953-59.
Vera served as Vice-President of the British Eugenics Society, 1964-66 and again in 1969 when it was reformed as the Galton Institute.
Vera died in 2013. 'The Guardian' published an admiring obituary of this Wimmin's Champ whom it claimed 'advanced' the women's movement. Vera maintained that she campaigned for abortion law reform – it was of course David Steel who sponsored the private member's bill which resulted in the 1967 Abortion Act and Steel greatly appreciated Vera's support – because she knew of cases of women 'bleeding to death' on bathroom floors. Vera was quite right about that, but the problem with Vera's brand of feminism was that it involved ignoring a great many other things which were equally as gross as women bleeding to death after botched abortions, because Vera et al needed to forge alliances with the people who were involved in those gross happenings.
David Steel knew about Jeremy Thorpe and he was told that Cyril Smith was molesting children. Steel ignored the lot. Vera ignored a great deal as well. Such as kids in care being abused by Dafydd and the gang, being kept in a dungeon in Denbigh and dying in Risley Remand Centre. Vera lived until she was 99. Many of the victims of Dafydd's gang died before they were 30.
Vera's obituary mentioned that NHS abortions were available before free NHS contraception was, so Vera then campaigned for NHS contraception. I'm curious as to why this situation ever arose. I'll do a bit of digging, because the answer will no doubt involve a sleazy deal between politicians and abusive people.
Vera kept her mouth shut about one thing that really should have concerned Vera which affected the well-being of numerous wimmin, but not wimmin like her. That was the fact that, until well into the late 1980s, a cartel of Top Doctors had made it virtually impossible for women to access NHS abortions in north Wales (see post 'The BMA And It's Ethics'). The Top Doctors were always happy to refer wimmin in north Wales with money to private clinics in Chester, those clinics did a roaring trade and I suspect that the Top Docs in north Wales were receiving backhanders for this service. Perhaps someone could ask Dafydd's mate Dr D.G.E. Wood what their cut was, Wood sent loads of women to Chester for a private abortion. So what happened to wimmin who didn't have the used fivers to hand over? Well, they were told that if they wanted an abortion on the NHS, they had to be 'assessed' by a Top Doctor. One Dr Dafydd Alun Jones to be precise. Who would then admit them as an inpatient to the North Wales Hospital Denbigh to be 'assessed'. Not that they would have been able to get an abortion on the NHS in north Wales after the 'assessment', because no-one could.
So what happened to those women and their babies then Dafydd? I think we should be told, because there were a great many of them.
Jane Hutt, the founder of Welsh Women's Aid and the 'wimmin's equality' charidee Chwarae Teg, was living in Wales by the 1970s. Jane was completely silent regarding the dreadful situation facing women with unplanned pregnancies in north Wales who had no money. As was Jane's mate Val Feld, another Wimmin's Champ. Val knew what was happening because Val was from Caernarfon. Val is remembered by a plaque on the wall of the Senedd because Jane was cross that all those being remembered were in possession of testicles. As for Julie Morgan, another Wimmin's Champ, Julie too kept quiet about the disappearing women and the missing babies.
Ah well, never mind, by keeping their mouths shut, Jane, Julie and Val ended up in the Senedd and Vera bagged herself a grand title.
Here's our Role Model:
|The Lady Houghton of Sewerby
If one didn't think that Vera and her mates were up to much, here was the other Role Model for us ladies:
|The Baroness Thatcher
Of course, this Role Model would have been brought down along with her Gov't if Vera et al had gone public on what Dafydd was doing, because Dafydd was also supplying underaged boys for the above Role Model's close friend Sir Peter Morrison to have sex with. But Vera had her Championing Of Wimmin's Causes to think of…
The social workers' house magazine 'Community Care' published an article in 2005 which discussed the legacy of the Seebohm Report. 'Community Care' told us that Frederic Seebohm published the report 'that brought social services departments into being and decided the fate of social work'.
In 2005 'Community Care' explained that 'the Seebohm-inspired departments face extinction' and that 'By next year the split between children's trusts and adult social care will be nearly complete, the Seebohm committee's vision of unified social services departments as the final link in a comprehensive, generously funded welfare state having faded within 10 years of their creation in 1971. Under the successive blows of an economic downturn, child death scandals – starting with Maria Colwell in 1973 – and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the sparkling new departments were, as one influential commentator put it, quickly "transformed from a first resort to the last ditch"'.
'Community Care' very wisely does not mention that the sparkling new departments were rotten from the moment of their creation and sprang from the ideas of some very rotten apples.
We are told that Richard Crossman, the Labour Secretary of State who oversaw the legislation which resulted from Seebohm (the Local Authority Social Services Act 1970), 'privately despised the report, considering it long on good intentions but short on realism about costs: the report ran to more than 300 pages, the legislation to a terse 22.'
'Community Care' remembered 'the wave of optimism that swept over social work in those early days'. 'Community Care' certainly quoted a few choice people regarding that wave of optimism:
John Rea Price, who became Social Services Director in the London Borough of Islington in 1973, remembers the 'huge idealism' among social workers.'I had no difficulties with recruitment then… ' Rea Price said. 'The unions were powerful and there were strikes but, generally, you couldn't stop them working even when it was for their own good – they were obsessed with the job.'
John Rea Price was Director of Islington Social Services when Islington children's homes were colonised by gangs of paedophiles. The situation was as bad as in north Wales. Some children were murdered and at least one social worker disappeared. Rea Price knew what was happening and ignored it. Rea Price is now seen as having been very guilty indeed. Rea Price had previously worked for the Probation Service.
Bob Hudson, who was in 2005 Professor of Partnership Studies at Durham University, was among the first members of Sunderland's Social Services Committee: 'Everyone on the committee felt they were on the brink of a new era; we were genuinely carried away by the sheer excitement of it all. There was money to spend and the economic optimism added to our sense of exhilaration.'
Sunderland Social Services had also been infiltrated by a gang of paedophiles and that gang had close links with Dafydd's gang in north Wales. Colin Smart was one senior manager in Sunderland who repeatedly raised concerns about the abuse of children in care. Colin's career was ruined, he was forced into expensive litigation in order to defend himself which was then used to force him into a corner and sign a gagging clause.
Durham University employed people who concealed organised sexual abuse, as did Newcastle-upon-Tyne University.
Mo Mowlam was a Labour MP in the North East who knew about the abuse of children in the region and who will also have found out what happened at the Kincora Boys' Home when Blair appointed her Secretary of State for N Ireland. Mo studied anthropology at Durham University. Prof Eric Sunderland, the well-camouflaged paedophiles' friend who in 1984 became Principal of UCNW, had spent most of his career as an anthropologist at Durham University. Mo also worked at Newcastle-upon-Tyne University, taking up an appointment there in 1979. Mo was a Wimmin's Champ as well.
'Community Care' tells us that 'For the first few years social services' spending increased by 10 per cent a year in real terms as Seebohm's ambition to do much more for the "neglected flotsam and jetsam of society" was put to the test'.
So that's why most of the Depts of Social Services in the UK by the mid-1970s had been infiltrated by paedophile gangs, many of which were linked! Dunno if the neglected flotsam and jetsam of society saw much of that dosh which was increased by 10% a year in real terms though.
Seebohm 'emphasised' 'Prevention, partnership, the role of the voluntary sector and the importance of harnessing the strengths of communities'. Which sounds strangely familiar. The Empowerment bit hadn't been invented when Seebohm wrote that Report.
Seebohm's 'new service would be family-centred rather than "symptom-centred". Since the aim of departments was to "meet all the social needs of the family or individual together and as a whole", the committee insisted these needs should be served as far as possible by a single social worker.'
You've got Lucille. She'll service your every need. If symptoms do insist on rearing their ugly head, Dafydd will deal with them. He'll share information with Lucille, it'll be easy enough, they were bedfellows for donkeys years.
'Community Care' reported that 'Adrianne Jones, appointed social services controller in the London Borough of Harrow at the outset of the reforms before becoming director in Hillingdon and in Birmingham, says the changes asked too much of social workers. As a former member of the committee chaired by Peter Barclay, whose landmark report published after three years of the Thatcher government was the last, brave attempt to maintain social work in the Seebohm vein, she believes that local authorities chose an over-rigid interpretation of "single social worker". Generic teams, she thinks, would have been better than generic workers. Jones says: "The idea of generic, family-based departments was excellent; what went wrong was that we threw out the specialisms. We were expecting too much of individuals to be able to work with every age group and every need. It was a reaction against the fragmentation of the 1960s."
Where does this blog know Adrianne Jones from? Er, from her role as an adviser to the Waterhouse Inquiry. When a major child abuse scandal was uncovered in the 1990s at a residential school in Shropshire, an extraordinarily high number of children had been placed in the school by Harrow Social Services. When Adrianne was Director of City of Birmingham Social Services, that Dept was sending kids on placement to children's homes in north Wales. Adrianne's turf at Hillingdon was the site of the disaster which ended in the death of Heidi Koseda. See previous posts for details of Adrianne and her good works.
Adrianne had a few things to say about the restructuring taking place in the wake of the 40 yrs of organised trafficking which Seebohm made so easy though. Adrianne told 'Community Care' that 'She fears that the new services will be managerial in outlook, preoccupied with targets rather than good outcomes for service users and usurped by education and health, a risk that the Seebohm report itself mentioned.'
Don't worry Adrianne, the Top Docs are completely on board and some of the schools are as well.
Adrianne continued: 'Looking back, the nails were hammered into the coffin year by year as successive scandals unfolded and people became demoralised'.
Adrianne did notice the successive scandals. Of course she did, in the wake of every one of them and the dreadful publicity which followed she offered her services as a consultant and earned a packet.
Another member of the Barclay working party – the Barclay Report was concerned with the staffing of Social Services Depts and was pointedly ignored by Thatch's Gov't – along with Adrianne, was Robert Pinker, then Professor of Social Administration at the LSE. Pinker is a renowned 'scourge of political correctness' in social work but obviously not of gangsters. He agreed with Adrianne 'that generic teams would have been better but also blames the "tendency to over-bureaucratise" for the failings of social services departments, a tendency which, he says, today's obsession with targets has only made worse.'
Rea Price, whose own Dept employed more than 3,000 paedophiles/gangsters/abusers/fuckwits, told 'Community Care' that 'Probably the major failure of the Seebohm analysis was not to anticipate the scale of the huge departments that its recommendations were creating, and the scale of the administrative, financial and management issues they would present. There was also the excessive faith in the generic approach to social work, but the stream of child death inquiries, as well as the rapid extension of the understanding of child abuse, soon began to expose the weaknesses of the non-specialised approach.'
OK. We just need more of the experts that allowed all this to happen. Experts in sexual abuse. Dafydd and his mates all claimed expertise in sexual abuse. For female patients only, at least on the NHS there was no 'sex therapy' for male victims of sex crime in north Wales.
'Community Care' observed that 'social services departments had to contend with more than 30 child deaths which were examined by high-profile inquiries. Press coverage quickly grew shrill, social workers were publicly pilloried and the profession's image was so tarnished it has never fully recovered. It marked out child protection as an unwise career path, making social services more reliant on agency staff and probably heightening the risk of further tragedies.'
Yeh, it's because we've all been so rude when yet another child has died, it's our fault that the hopelessness and dishonesty escalated.
John Rea Price further illuminated the situation: 'In the early 1970s there was a great sense of optimism about prevention to the point where some of the specifics of child protection were neglected'. Such as the failure to dismiss and prosecute child abusers perhaps?
'The message from the death of Maria Colwell to that of Jasmine Beckford [in 1984] was that social workers were so focused on the family as a whole that they were forgetting about the child. In Jasmine's case the social worker had a good relationship with the parent but did not see the child – meanwhile, the child was starving in an upstairs room.'
Jasmine wasn't just starving, she had the living daylights battered out of her and was tied up in a bath full of turds. Didn't the social worker who was employed to 'protect' Jasmine – who was on the at risk register – wonder where perhaps she was on those visits to Jasmine's house?
'Community Care' reassures us that there 'were achievements which answered the critics…more attention was paid to adult clients: smaller, state-of-the-art residential homes replaced converted workhouses for older people, long-stay psychiatric hospitals and hospitals for "the mentally handicapped" were closed, and the Disabled Persons Act 1986 put disability rights on the map for the first time, even if much of the act was not implemented.'
So that's why the Empowered Service Users were threatened and assaulted by the 'care staff', trafficked into sex work, arrested and framed if they complained and left destitute.
'Community Care' mentioned that 'the Conservative government's fixation on the mixed economy of care…gave unprecedented opportunities to the private sector which flourished after funding was transferred to councils from the Department of Social Security in 1993.'
I'm happy to remind 'Community Care' that many of those who owned, managed and staffed the private sector facilities which flourished after 1993 were exactly the same caring people who had abused and trafficked their clients when those caring people were paid to provide 'care' via the state sector. As the new mixed economy grew, I watched exactly the same people populate the new sector, many raking the money in by styling themselves as 'consultants'. They weren't consultants, they were usually Angels and social workers and they were being commissioned by their former colleagues.
Welcome to the new mixed economy where choice has been introduced. The Empowered Service Users are free to choose from the pool of paedophiles and their friends who were allocated to them previously. Not that there'll even be any choice among that pool, because there's a cartel in operation and the Empowered Service Users find that the cartel will conspire to ensure that they decide who ends up receiving a 'service' from whom.
'Community Care' told us that Bob Hudson remembers how quickly thinking changed after 'bright new hostels and day centres' were built after Seebohm: 'We thought we were doing the right thing and it's easy to say with hindsight that we should have done it differently. There was no consultation with service users to speak of, there was a 'we know best' mentality about it. Then Thatcher took the view that professionals had disempowered 'consumers' and the remedy was to bring market forces to bear in social care. It was the most astonishing change. In 1970s Sunderland we couldn't have conceived of the local authority not being the service provider.'
Bob Hudson knew about the paedophile ring which operated in Sunderland and he'll have known that it had an arrangement with Dafydd and the gang in north Wales. If in 1970s Sunderland no-one could have conceived of the local authority not being the service provider, then why did so many senior managers of social services in the North East at that time send so many children to children's homes in north Wales, which were being run as private businesses by the trafficking gang? One Director of Social Services from the North East even turned up at Bryn Alyn near Wrexham to celebrate the opening of a new annexe. The kids maintained that he saw the dreadful conditions in which they were living.
According to 'Community Care', the Barclay Report boldly advocated a 'political' element of social work in which their role was to speak out about the impact of social policy on the lives of the poor and disadvantaged. Pinker was the Barclay's Committee's lone dissenter. 'Social workers are not there to change society, that's what politicians are for,' he says. 'I didn't think community social work was a good idea at all; it was so general it stretched social workers beyond their professional capacities.'
I have been exposed to discussions regarding whether social workers should be 'political' or not. I knew a nurse at the Hergest Unit who expressed the view that the Arfon Community Mental Health Team treated their clients appallingly because the training of social workers was 'political', whereas Angels were trained to place patients' needs first. This particular Angel did not abuse the patients in the way that the Arfon CMHT did and she was actually very well-liked by the patients. However, she did know that her immediate colleagues and that Dafydd and the Top Doctors were dangerous and abusive and she rushed to their defence in the wake of every complaint about them. Although she was a senior nurse, she was treated disrespectfully by the Top Docs and the Arfon CMHT alike. This Angel trained at a time when it was indeed stressed to Angels that the patients' needs should be prioritised. However, along with that, the Angels were also trained to be subservient in the face of hierarchies, even if this meant remaining silent when patients were being grossly abused. The Angel in question was very sharp regarding her observations in terms of her patients who were living in abusive relationships or working in jobs in which they were being exploited. She must have known how unhinged some of those with whom she worked were and she was repeatedly told by patients of the serious abuse that they had experienced at the hands of her colleagues.
I suspect that she knew exactly what would be coming her way if she ever raised one word of concern regarding Dafydd et al…
In contrast, I witnessed a social work tutor at Coleg Menai tell her students that they must never be 'political' and furthermore they must always blow the whistle on any client breaking the law, even if it was minor benefit fraud by someone who could not make ends meet. On the day that the Waterhouse Report was published, this tutor told the whole class that she had been one of the social workers who had taken children to the Ty'r Felin children's home and although she always thought that Nefyn Dodd was 'very uncaring' towards the children, she had no idea of the serious abuse to which the children were being subjected. The kids at Ty'r Felin were starved, beaten, kicked, made to work for no pay in the local businesses, forced to lick Nefyn Dodd's boots and were trafficked to local venues as well as to Dolphin Square for sex work. Hundreds of complaints were made about Nefyn Dodd and his wife June by children. That social work tutor missed a great deal.
Nefyn Dodd was a friend of Dafydd's.
I know one man who began social work training in north London in the early 1970s. He was on placement with Haringey Council and with Islington Council. This man remembered Margaret Hodge who was a leading light in Islington Council at the time. He and others on his course raised concerns with their tutors regarding the corruption within the Councils and also regarding the neglect that the clients were experiencing at the hands of the Social Services. His tutors told the students that they were not allowed to document any criticisms of the Councils employing those social workers. When he observed that the only problem that one 'problem family' actually had was their dreadful and unsafe accommodation he was told that he was being political and that was not a social worker's job. He subsequently withdrew from the social work course on the grounds that he would never be able to help clients working under these constraints.
Political or not political, the training of Angels and social workers ensures that everyone is trained to do one thing above everything else – to never, ever blow the whistle, even if a criminal gang is operating in the area and murdering witnesses.
In July 1968, when Kenneth Robinson was Health Minister, a Green Paper was issued, before the Seebohm Report was published. The Green Paper stated that Medical Officers of Health could extend their role as community physicians. Documents in my possession demonstrate that the Community Physicians of Gwynedd and Clwyd Health Authorities were the Top Doctors responsible for holding Dafydd to account. Both of them ignored my complaints about Dafydd. It was only after writing to them several times that they even bothered to reply. What they did when I persisted is to contact their mate Dafydd and have a friendly chat, then write back to me and tell me that my complaints were groundless. See previous posts for details.
In my post 'Feet In Chains' I detail part of Dafydd's early career as a Top Doc. Before being appointed as a consultant at Denbigh, Dafydd had carried out 'community research' on Anglesey with the Medical Officer of Health. Dafydd and those Medical Officers of Health who were later responsible for holding him to account went back decades…
Seebohm's recommendations that new personal Social Services Depts should be established within local gov't and take over children's services, as well as the care of the mentally ill and handicapped, that were despised by Dick Crossman but nonetheless accepted, were put into action from 1971 onward, by which time Ted Heath was PM.
One person who was really impressed by the Seebohm Report was Baroness Brooke of Ystradfellte. I need to double check, but I think that Baroness Brooke was a member of the Seebohm Committee. She stated that 'What the Seebohm Committee wants is a family service geared to meeting as many as possible of the needs of the family'. Yet it wasn't Baroness Brooke's family which would be destroyed by Dafydd et al.
Barbara Brooke was the daughter of a Welsh Minister. She was educated at the Gloucester Training College of Domestic Science. In 1933 she married fellow Conservative Henry Brooke, who was Home Secretary. They had four children: Peter Brooke, a Conservative politician; Sir Henry Brooke, a judge and Lord Justice of Appeal; Honor Brooke, who married Dr Thomas Miller; and Margaret Brooke, who married Dr James Pulfer.
Peter Brooke held a number of Cabinet posts. He was Chairman of the Conservative Party, 1987-89 and Secretary of State for N Ireland, 1989-92. Brooke knew about Dafydd's gang and he knew about Kincora in Belfast.
In 1948 Barbara Brooke became a member of Hampstead Council and held her seat until 1965. She was Joint Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party, 1954-64 and was active in the NHS. Among other things Brooke was a member of the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board, 1954-66; Chair of the Queen's Institute of District Nursing, 1961-71; and the North London Hospital Management Committee, 1963-66.
Barbara Brooke will have known about the abuse of children and vulnerable adults within the NHS and Social Services.
In Wales, with regards to the reorganisation of the NHS, a Green Paper was published in 1970, which proposed the establishment of seven Area Health Boards directly responsible to the Secretary of State. The Green Paper was probably written in the dying days of Wilson's Gov't, when George Thomas was Secretary of State for Wales.
In June 1970, Sir Keith Joseph arrived at the DHSS with Heath's Gov't. In 1972, a White Paper proposed that Chairmen of Area Health Authorities should be selected and appointed by the Secretary of State. The White Paper also proposed that Community Health Councils be established. Such is the dynamism to be found within the NHS, some CHCs did not come into being until the late 1970s.
CHCs are surrounded by much discourse regarding them being the 'patients' voice' and a democratic way of holding the NHS to account. In north Wales, there are very few 'patients' sitting on CHCs and those that do simply take instructions from their masters in the NHS. The vast majority of members of CHCs in north Wales are people who hold, or who have held, senior positions in the NHS, in the Social Services, in the County Councils and other such organisations.
The Chief Executive of Gwynedd CHC was Glanville Owen. Glanville had formerly been the Deputy Director of Gwynedd Social Services with responsibility for children's homes throughout the years when the abuse of kids in care in Gwynedd was at its worst (see post 'I Know Nuzzing…'). Other leading lights in the various CHCs that have served the patients of north Wales include Dr Sadie Francis, who spent years working as a Top Doctor at Denbigh and then the Hergest Unit, Dr Medwyn Williams, a GP from Anglesey and Dr Christine Evans, who spent years as one of the awkward bastards of surgeons at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd who caused so much difficulty for patients. Christine Evans however did provide a good service to Tony Francis when she was his Top Doctor. Eleanor Burnham, a former Lib Dem AM, more recently joined the CHC in north Wales. Eleanor is a former Social Services manager and for years sat on the Mental Health Review Tribunal for the North Wales Hospital Denbigh. See previous posts for details of the shenanigans on the part of CHCs in Wales.
The Patients' Voice the CHCs are not.
In Feb 1971, a consultative document was published with regard to the reform of local gov't in Wales. It proposed seven County Councils and 36 District Councils, with personal Social Services being a function of the County Councils. The number of County Councils was subsequently increased to eight, as was number of Health Authorities. The areas covered by the Health Authorities matched the new Counties.
The Secretary of State for Wales issued a White Paper on the NHS, which stated that the Area Health Authorities would be directly responsible to the Secretary of State for Wales. So the successive Secretaries of State don't really have any excuses for not addressing the waste and embezzlement of NHS funds, the corrupt tendering processes, the sky high mortality rates, the failure to deal with the most serious of complaints, the illegal imprisonment of witnesses and the most appalling abuse and neglect of patients. As well of course as that dungeon at Denbigh.
Chapter 5 of Abel-Smith's HMSO publication is entitled 'The Lean Years Following Reorganisation, 1974-78'. The Top Docs obviously really felt the pinch.
It was on April 1 1974, that the NHS reorganisation was put into effect. In Wales, the Area Health Authorities were responsible directly to John Morris, who was then Secretary of State. Lord John Morris is yet another paedophiles' friend who graduated in law from Aberystwyth University and then joined the crooked barristers on the Chester and Wales Circuit. Morris is a member of Gray's Inn, as was Dafydd's friend and protector Sir William Mars-Jones. John Morris was the Labour MP for Aberavon, the seat now held by the Windbag's son. John Morris was so useful that he served in the Cabinets of Wilson, Callaghan and Blair. Foot, the Windbag, John Smith, Margaret Becket and her caravan as well as Blair all made use of John Morris as Shadow Attorney General, confident that he would be in no danger of pointing at the Tories and saying 'Dafydd is/was supplying young boys for your mate Peter Morrison to have his wicked way with'.
Blair was so wowed by Lord John Morris that in 1997 Blair dusted the old boy off and appointed him as Attorney General for England and Wales, as well as AG for N Ireland, posts in which Morris remained until 1999, when the paedophiles' friend Lord Gareth Williams took over the role of sitting on all the crap, just in time for the publication of the Waterhouse Report.
Lord John Morris was Chancellor of the University of Glamorgan from 2002 and then became Chancellor of the University of South Wales when it was formed by a merger between the University of Glamorgan and the University of Wales, Newport in 2013.
The Universities of Glamorgan, Newport and South Wales have churned out Angels from their nursing degrees, some of whom have been less than impressed with their 'training' and even less impressed with the NHS when they have begun work.
Lord Morris was President of the London Welsh Trust – which runs the London Welsh Centre – 2001-08. He is also a Council member of The Princes Trust, with which all the best paedophiles' friends are associated.
Here is Lord John Morris, in his Sunday Best:
From 1974, all Angels, in the hospital and the community, were responsible to the District Nursing Officer. The names of the District Nursing Officers appear on my documents as well, clearly colluding with the crimes…
By the time that John Morris was concealing the serious organised crime, the NHS staff were bellyaching about their pay again. Fundamental re-adjustments were made in 1974-75. With regard to Angels, an 'independent committee' under Lord Haldane was asked to make recommendations. Lord Haldane's recommendations led to a huge pay rise for Angels, their pay rise averaged a 51% increase in the course of a year. It was at this point that Angels could no longer be considered to be 'low paid' no matter how many times that 'The Guardian' used this phrase about them.
Despite the substantial increase in Angels' pay, Abel-Smith told us that at this time, 'morale in the NHS was lowered'. 'Abel-Smith made reference to the 'more active role of trade unions' and the 'conflicting interests of professional groups'. What actually happened was that although Angels received a big pay rise, other groups of NHS workers did not. This led to a great deal of aggro and bad feeling, including between different unions. The RCN considered themselves to be a cut above the other NHS unions, which the RCN viewed as being somewhat plebeian. Nurses were also very conscious that some of the industrial action in the NHS was being led by groups of people who were not nurses. One Angel told me that she voted Conservative in the 1970s because she was so angry that a strike in the hospital in which she worked was called by the porters, rather than by the Angels. The porters of course had not enjoyed the massive pay rise that the Angels had, but then whenever NHS workers want a pay rise, it is always said to be on behalf of Angels…
In 1976, Lord McCarthy published 'Making Whitley Work' and 'made recommendations'. Whitley is a reference to the Whitley Council, which set the pay scales for professions allied to medicine, apart from, by then, Angels. The Whitley Council was truly hated, it was the most offensive exploitative body that had ever stalked the earth, except of course for the Agricultural Training Board. Angels only received a healthy salary after decisions regarding their pay was removed from the Whitley Council. Lord McCarthy did not Make Whitley Work, by the mid-1980s there was a massive shortage of medical lab staff, medical physicists and other professional groups in the NHS, because the pay as dictated by the Whitley Council was insulting. Fancied working in a cancer screening lab in London in 1989? You'll have needed a degree, preferably an MSc as well and further professional training. In return you got £6,000 pa. The labs were empty which was why the cancer screening programmes were seriously flawed. The general public were not told. All those leaflets and adverts urging people to 'get screened' were a complete scam, there were no staff to carry out the analyses. Hundreds and hundreds of mistakes were being made because of the severe staff shortage…
There was also a serious shortage of hospital pharmacists because their pay was so bad, but I'm not sure if that was determined by the dear old Whitley Council as well.
Lord William McCarthy was an academic who specialised in industrial relations and a Labour Party politician. McCarthy grew up in Islington, went to Holloway School and then worked in a gentlemen's outfitters, where he joined the union USDAW, which sponsored him to study at Ruskin College, Oxford. Ruskin College taught and employed a number of people with links to Dafydd and the gang, including Matt Arnold and Peter Howarth who worked at Bryn Estyn (see post 'A Study Of Tyranny'). After Ruskin, McCarthy went to Merton College, Oxford and then completed a doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford. He remained as a research fellow at Oxford. In 1965 McCarthy was appointed Research Director of the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers Associations, the body set up by Harold Wilson's Gov't, which led to Barbara Castle's failed 'In Place Of Strife' reforms.
Lord McCarthy was considered to be the UK's leading academic in industrial relations. Even he could not sort out the NHS pay claims. Of course, the problem would have been dealt with had anyone arrested Dafydd and his associates and made public their very serious crimes and the massive degree of collusion with those offences on the part of huge swathes of the NHS.
Abel-Smith tells us that 'further acrimony resulted from the Gov'ts decision to phase pay beds out of the NHS'. This policy was supported by the NHS unions but not the Top Docs. Barbara Castle – who during her incumbency as Secretary of State for the DHSS was assisted by one Jack Straw – made much of her complete opposition to pay beds, but despite all the mouthing off, Castle did not end private care within the NHS. What Castle did do, along with Dr Death, was to appoint a Royal Commission, Chaired by Sir Alec Merrison, on the future of the NHS. Babs and Dr Death privately told people that Sir Alec was selected for this role because of his commitment to the NHS and their confidence that he would not recommend any privatisation. However, Babs and Dr Death knew damn well that the Labour Party would not win the next General Election because everyone hated Sunny Jim and the patronising old git Denis Healey. Thatch had already chosen the curtains for No 10 – chintz no doubt. So whatever Merrison said, private care would flourish because Babs would not be having any say in the matter.
Which is just as well, because Battling Barbara the Flame-Haired Passionate Socialist Who Hated Private Medicine made use of it herself. She must have, because when she was younger Battling Barbara had a course of fertility treatment and the treatment that she described receiving was not available on the NHS. See previous posts.
Furthermore, Sir Alec Merrison had the dirt on Dafydd and whatever went on at Windscale in the 1950s which Dafydd found out about and used to his own advantage (see post 'Those Who Are Ready To Serve'), which was far more likely to have been the reason for Merrison's appointment than any putative commitment of his to the NHS.
Towards the end of 1974, discussions regarding the new contract for consultant Top Doctors broke down, so the consultant Top Doctors restricted the 'services' offered' by them – in other words they refused to treat their patients.
Exactly how much gold do you want stuffed into your mouth now Doctor? Surely there cannot be room for much more.
In 1975 the junior Top Doctors went on strike – it was emergencies only.
Someone continued to cart Dafydd's victims off to the dungeon in Denbigh throughout these crises.
The Top Docs know how to kick a Gov't though. Abel-Smith informed us that 'the number of new outpatients seen fell by 900,000 in 1975 compared with the preceding year or by a million compared with 1972. The number of main operations performed in hospitals (other than psychiatric) fell by over 1/4 million between 1974 and 1975. Waiting lists rose by about 70,000 between the end of 1974 and the end of 1975.'
Throughout it all, the dungeon at Denbigh was in operation.
1976 saw the start of a major campaign 'Prevention and Health: Everybody's Business', 'to encourage preventative action'. The message was that the NHS could provide health services, but not health and that the main causes of ill health lay in lifestyles. We're on familiar territory here. In fact yesterday, Suzy Davies, a Tory AM in Wales who hopes to be the next leader of the Welsh Conservatives, made a speech in which she stated that those carted off in an ambulance as a result of alcohol intoxication should be charged. Where that leaves irresponsible teenagers who do not understand that large quantities of spirits can kill you and therefore end up in need of an ambulance and A&E I don't know. Not only do Top Docs have a very high rate of alcoholism, but I remember one Euan Blair being found drunk and incapable in Leicester Square. Perhaps it's different for the Top Docs and the Blairs though, because they'll be able to afford the surcharge when they get bladdered.
Abel-Smith's publication reminded me of something that I'd completely forgotten about ie. the saga over whether to add flouride to the nation's drinking water. Dentists were very keen on the idea, but then there was a great deal of evidence that while flouride protected against tooth decay within certain limits, flouridisation of drinking water was alleged to half deleterious effects on health in other ways. Abel-Smith stated that half a million quid was earmarked to help authorities to set up schemes for the fluoridation of water. Who was the front runner in terms of adding fluoride to water? It was none other than dear old Anglesey. I have no idea why that famously corrupt nest of vipers led the field in this regard, I would have thought that they were far too busy ignoring child abuse, taking bribes in the planning dept and failing to pay people's housing benefit, those were the things that they had built their reputation upon. I'll have to look into this. I expect that someone was paid to take part in the scheme, that's usually the explanation.
The Health Education Council bagged an extra £1 million to launch a 'better health' campaign, which was a regional campaign against alcoholism. That will have been at about the time that Dafydd launched CAIS – 1977. Dafydd must have piggy-backed on that campaign and have been given dosh. The Health Education Council's remit was also to provide more training for health education officers and Abel-Smith stated that 'the number of these working in health authorities was increased substantially'.
The health outcomes for north Wales – and of course for certain other parts of the UK, including parts of south Wales – remained stubbornly terrible, no matter how many health education officers were deployed. Knightsbridge and Surrey never experienced the morbidity that Merthyr Tydfil did, they obviously have more health education officers in Belgravia. That must be why it is such a desirable place to live, those health education officers have really pushed the property prices up.
Abel-Smith mentioned the Act of 1973 which reorganised the NHS and included provision for 'comprehensive family planning service'. From April 1974, the new health authorities became responsible for both the clinics run by the local authorities and those run by the Family Planning Association. Of course, thanks to Vera, Lady Sewerby et al, in 1974, the new Gov't – Harold Wilson's – decided that family planning services should be free. From July 1975, free family planning services were also provided by GPs.
So from 1975, those underaged girls and mental health patients being trafficked by Dafydd et al had plenty of options as to where to acquire their contraceptives. No excuses for not having sex with horrible old men now!
Harold Wilson's Gov't were obviously into holistic medicine though, because in 1975 a 'comprehensive long-term programme to improve the quality of services for the mentally ill was set out in a White Paper'. The Secretary of State for the DHSS at the time was Battling Barbara. The core of the programme was a shift of care and treatment services into local communities. I think that we've been here before. Housing and employment services were also to be closely involved. As these networks developed they were to replace the services provided by the old long stay hospitals. A 20-30 year time scale for implementing the programme was envisaged.
So what happened to the grand plans for facilities in the community which were part of the Mental Health Act 1959?
Brian Abel-Smith explains that because of the economic crisis which hit Britain in the mid-1970s, resources for the NHS 'had to be planned afresh'. As a result, in March 1976 Battling Barbara issued a consultative document, 'Priorities In The Health And Personal Social Services'. Jack Straw will be able to tell us all about that. A comparable document for Wales was issued by Lord John Morris. Priority in the planning of services for both England and Wales was to be given to the development of community services for the mentally ill, the mentally handicapped, the elderly and children. The key social services which could reduce the need for health services and the domiciliary care of the mentally ill and mentally handicapped had been by then transferred to local authority Social Services Depts. Yes, it was now the remit of Lucille et al.
Local authorities and health authorities were required to set up joint consultative committees of members of both authorities, which in north Wales would have been the same people and of course their friends and relatives. In England, money was specially allocated and set aside from the NHS budget to enable health authorities to contribute to local authority schemes helping those being looked after in the community. Presuming that any such schemes actually existed. For England, this allocation was £8 million in the year 1976-77. By 1978-79, the allocation had risen to £32 million. In Wales, Areas Health Authorities were given discretion to use their ordinary funds for these purposes and a central reserve was created on which they could draw. from 1978-79. At the time, the Secretary of State for Wales was Lord John Morris.
Many of the key players from those days are now pushing up the daisies, but John Morris is still with us. Can he tell us where all this money for community mental health facilities went, because the patients were certainly never offered the use of any such facilities. This is not just a bit of loose change that could have disappeared down the back of the sofa, millions of pounds were handed over yet no community facilities appeared. The conditions in Denbigh were dreadful as well, so it certainly wasn't invested in that institution.
What did you do with the money Lord Morris?
Abel-Smith explains that in order to achieve geographical equity, financial allocation would be based on the population served, differences in morbidity, the state of the capital plant and the special needs of teaching and research. A working party was set up in 1975 to recommend on allocations. The system brought special help to deprived regions. It was from 1977-78 that Abel-Smith tells us that a substantial step towards this system of allocation was made, when David Ennals, who was by then Secretary of State for the DHSS, decided that the most deprived regions should be allowed a growth of revenue of 3% and the best endowed region of 1/4%. Year by year progression was planned.
Ennals was a long-standing paedophiles' friend, as were other members of his family as well. Lord Ennals loyally concealed the crimes of Dafydd et al during the many years that Ennals played leading roles in MIND. Furthermore, David Ennals was a mate of Dafydd's old buddy and umbrella who was based at the Maudsley, Dr Jim Birley. See previous posts for details of David Ennals and his close relationships with people who were facilitating trafficking gangs. Ennals's year on year increase in extra dosh to deprived regions clearly made no difference at al. But then sending money to deprived regions, such as the immediate area around the Maudsley and letting Dafydd's mates decide what to do with it is not going to bear fruit.
In Wales, a Working Group on Resource Allocation was set up in 1974 to examine methods of resource allocation to Welsh health authorities. The Group produced its first Report in Dec 1974 and a second in Dec 1975. A Steering Committee on Resource Allocations superseded this Working Group. Allocations made by the Secretary of State for Wales was based on the advice of the Committee. The Secretary of State for Wales at the time was, er, Lord John Morris.
Chapter 6 of Abel-Smith's publication is ominously entitled 'Unfinished Business'. Abel-Smith told us that 'despite 30 years of the NHS, mortality rates are in general a third higher in Wales than in East Anglia…despite 30 years of the 'welfare state', the differences in mortality rates between social classes, are if anything getting wider rather than narrower…'
Yes, Brown and I have been making those points for some time now. Whatever the Top Docs are doing, it is not working. It is working for the Top Docs, they're doing very nicely for themselves, but it's not working for The Poor, whom Nye Bevan and the more recent generations of Top Docs assured us were benefiting from the NHS. Abel-Smith wrote that damning admission in 1978. Pre-Thatch, so it was nothing to do with Tory Cuts.
Abel-Smith continues: 'many mentally ill people now in the old psychiatric hospitals could live in the community if all the local services were there to help them do so…Only about one third of districts provide a comprehensive psychiatric service in their general hospitals, only a fifth of the 30,000 places needed in day centres are provided and only a third of the 12,000 places needed in residential homes. Adequate accommodation for mentally infirm old people is sadly lacking'. Abel-Smith continues in a similar vein with regard to the lack of support for the mentally handicapped, the elderly, the younger disabled…Brian Abel-Smith finished by saying that a Royal Commission on the NHS is 'currently at work', one of its tasks being to re-examine the organisation of the NHS, which may need 'to be adapted in years to come'…
It is now 40 years since Abel-Smith's idiot's guide to the non-achievements of the NHS was published. Yesterday it was announced that transpeople will be allowed fertility treatment funded by the NHS. This might be very nice for transpeople – I'm sounding a bit reserved here, because many forms of fertility treatment still have a very low success rate, so not all transpeople may end up being blessed with children. My friend's dad is in his 80s and is facing the last few days of his life at the moment, he is not expected to be here next week. He has cancer. He lives alone with his wife who is also in her 80s and who has been caring for him herself at home. There are no state funded home helps or carers in Somerset, where they live. My friend's dad is conscious but he's bedridden now and needs everything doing for him. The last time that I spoke to my friend, she was intending to phone a private agency supplying carers with a view to paying for some to help her mum look after her dad. Across the UK, thousands of other elderly or disabled people cannot get the help that they need for washing, dressing, going to the bog etc. Mentally ill people – not the 1 in 4 that MIND have been so concerned about in recent years, but the 1 in 50 with severe, lifelong psychotic illness – are dying destitute on the streets of every major city in the UK and are having a very bad time in most small towns and villages.
Top Docs and NHS senior managers remain some of the highest paid people employed by the state in the UK.
UK news items that have received coverage in the media over the past couple of days include a row over Angels' pay. The Gov't agreed to a pay rise for NHS staff just weeks ago. The Angels are furious because they have now realised that the pay rises only benefit Top Doctors and senior Angels. Everyone else gets sod all. That doesn't surprise me. The Angels are claiming that the RCN has sold them down the river. That doesn't surprise me either. The RCN is no longer about the Angels who are doing the grafting, it is about the Angels who will tick the boxes, keep quiet about patient neglect or even abuse and rapidly move into NHS management.
A story appeared on BBC News Online about a psychiatrist in Norway who has been jailed – but not for very long – after being found in possession of thousands of child porn images. A number of people have come forward explaining that this man performed 'assessments' on them and on the basis of what they maintained were very flawed assessments, removed their children from their care. There are demands that every assessment that the convicted psychiatrist made should be reviewed. The BBC was particularly disgusted that the psychiatrist was first arrested in 2013 but it wasn't until 2015 that he was prevented from practising.
Serious complaints about Dafydd were made by the early 1960s. In 1966, Dafydd was at the centre of a huge patient abuse and neglect scandal published by 'The Times'. The complaints about Dafydd have poured in on a truly impressive basis every year since. It is now 2018. Dafydd is 87 yrs old. He may be 88 by now. Dafydd is still a registered medical practitioner.
In the mid-1990s Dafydd appeared on a number of BBC TV programmes in his capacity as an expert, including on Kilroy and the Kane Debates. In the late 1980s I wrote to Esther when she launched her 'improve mental health care' campaign and provided her with full details of the serious crime with which Dafydd et al were involved. I did not receive a reply.
There is a bun-fight over heart surgery at St George's Hospital Medical School. It has been revealed that higher number of patients are dying than should be. That is not in dispute, but nonetheless, St George's have reassured the public that the heart surgery unit is safe. After their Professor of Paediatrics Oliver Brooke was jailed for child porn offences in 1986, St George's reassured the public that Oliver Brooke had never offended against his patients. Not only was that most unlikely to be true, but some of the members of the pan-European child sex ring of which Brooke was a key figure continued to work at St George's and numerous members of staff at the hospital continued to collude with them.
My documents demonstrate that the BMA not only colluded with Top Doctors who were involved in very serious crime, but advised those Top Doctors on how to bring charges on the basis of their own perjury against people who had complained about those Top Doctors. If Thatcher's Gov't sequestered the NUM's assets on the grounds that the NUM had broken the law, may I suggest that the assets of the BMA are seized? The wrongdoing that the BMA positively encouraged is so serious that I imagine that their funds could be seized under the proceeds of crime legislation.