My Dad died last year. It seems some remainers are gleeful about this...

Your politics is very troubled if it takes you to a place where you wish your opponents - "the enemy" - dead. Yet this is precisely where we've got to with the Remain side of Brexit:

Enough old leavers will have died and enough young remainers will have come on to the electoral register to turn the dial on what the country thinks about Brexit.

This doesn't come from some little blog but from the UK's leading progressive news platform, The Guardian written by one of its star - and very well paid - columnists, Polly Toynbee. This position - we'll get what we want once all those unpleasant old people in provincial towns have pegged it - it a deeply unpleasant one. It sits alongside the idea - most recently from singer, Jamelia, that old people should have the franchise removed because, y'know, they'll be dead before the effects of their votes are truly felt.

Elsewhere:



Now the person who did this unthinkingly unpleasant site has taken it down claiming that he didn't mean to be nasty to people who are dying (they aren't, of course, all nasty old brexity people) or to the families of people who lost close relatives since the referendum. As far as I know, my Dad voted to leave and he died last year making him one of Polly and her pals gleeful statistics. I miss his wit and wisdom, things gained from a long life including 35 years as a local councillor - the idea that his views and opinions shouldn't have counted because he was at the end of his life is a truly unpleasant and undemocratic idea.

The people putting forward the idea that people dying is something to be celebrated because it suits their political positions demographics consider themselves to be intelligent, moderate, caring people. What these views show is that, in some respects, they are far more dangerous and damaging for our liberty and democracy than the UK's handful of right wing thugs - we sort of expect violent language from the latter but when establishment figures with columns in national newspapers start on the same line, unchallenged by editors or the wider media, alarm bells should ring. Old people are not an inconvenience but part of our society - wishing them dead because you think they might vote the wrong way is repulsive.

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How doctors strikes save lives...

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It's OK dear reader, I'm not getting all soft in my dotage, I still think that doctors - give the oaths they swear and the moral high ground they inhabit - shouldn't go on strike. But, slightly ironically, the strike may save a few lives:

Curiously enough, it has been shown that patient mortality typically falls during doctors' strikes, a finding replicating on a number of occasions across different nations. Cunningham et al's meta-analysis is the most notable recent review of this peculiar fact. In one of the most entertaining studies in the literature, the researchers interviewed the directors of major Israeli burial societies, who seemed slightly disgruntled at the loss of business associated with a major doctors' strike in 2000.

One, bemused, reported a 39% drop in funerals as compared to the same month in 1999. Another, much more confidently, was sure that his loss of custom was due to the striking doctors, because he had been in business long enough to see the exact same phenomenon occur in 1983, the last time Israeli doctors had walked out.

As they say - most peculiar. And it raises the question of whether it's all that expensive medicine stuff that's driving our longer, healthier and happier lives or something else.

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Want to die? Or you could run...

The path towards mercy killing and euthanasia is opening up - death will become us as our misery provides the justification. Is this what you want:

A private charity operates mobile euthanasia units, which travel from one care home to another – door-to-door – to help anyone to die who has been denied the opportunity by a doctor. They only visit each home once a week to relieve the potential psychological burden – but it must still be quite a shock when a group of smiling nurses turn up at your door and politely ask if you'd like to die today.

What science fiction writers of the past imagined as a fantastical reflection on the lack of humanity of their contemporary society has become concrete reality in ours. If you want, we can now kill you in an afternoon. Belgium and the Netherlands list "death" among their accepted forms of medical therapy, performed with a chilling bureaucratic efficiency that has the effect of making it all appear perfectly normal and entirely routine. What was once forced upon people by authoritarian regimes is now becoming vogue by means of the ballot box. Societies are shuffling towards a culture of death. Willingly.

It is but a short step from ending a miserable life to ending the burden on society. We get ever closer to a world where the inconveniently old or ill are quietly disposed of, guided across the Styx by a little pin prick.

Dreadful.

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The case against euthanasia...

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...is a practical argument not one wrapped up in specious argument about life's purpose or value. To allow euthanasia is to licence the killing of another human. And that person may be in such a pit of despair and mental anguish that the mutter those terrible words: "will someone rid me of this misery and end my life".

For all the agony of seeing someone's pain dragged out before the courts and in the columns of the newspapers as the seek the 'right' for someone else to kill them, there still is that problem. A risk eloquently put here by Chris:

A few months ago, curled up around the toilet bowl, chest sore from dry heaving for days on end and every single fibre in my muscle aching from low potassium levels, those words have left my lips. “I wish someone would put me out of my misery,” I moaned. As my intestines failed, so did my strength to bear the pain and indignity of nausea, constant vomiting, pain and the side effects of heavy medication to control my symptoms (and cause new ones). It is difficult for me to live with those words in retrospect, but they made sense at that very point. I understand, perhaps not the depth, but the kind of emotion that can lead us to wish for death.

Every day people who work with the elderly, with the mentally ill and with those suffering painful disability hear these words. And rather than a tidy little injection and an end to it, they give comfort, provide an ear of understanding. We can write a million words of justification for creating a rule allowing someone to kill another but we can never bring back a life ended on the justification of words cried out in anguish. And that is why the so-called 'right to die' is really just a 'right to kill'.

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Scrap the climate change levy and save a few lives.

I am as you know, dearest reader, notably grumpy. Hardly a day passes without me finding some aspect of what's going on out there to rant, whinge and moan about. Of course, all my grumbles are entirely justified - we do pay too much tax for too little return, the state does try to control and direct us to its preferred style of compliance and West Ham United don't win nearly enough football matches.

However, I refuse to grumble about snow. Every year it's the same. We get a pile of snow (it always 'sweeps across the country') and there's chaos, gridlock and a load of tosh filling up the media about how one or other columnist couldn't make it to the shops meaning her children missed out on organic polenta and had to eat sliced white bread and baked beans from the corner shop instead. And yes I took five hours to travel home - a journey that usually takes about an hour. But this isn't a big deal. It's usually one day - a couple of days at the most - before we can get about our daily lives without a great deal of fuss and bother.

However, cold weather kills people. It's much better at killing people than hot weather (whatever the climate change obsessives want to tell you) which is why the climate change levy is a moral outrage. By driving up the price of heating our homes it is directly contributing to the deaths of the old and the ill. Now I appreciate that many greens are closet eugenicists who see our future as something akin to Logan's Run but I am uncomfortable with supporting a tax that kills people.

We pontificate about fuel poverty while supporting a tax that promotes fuel poverty? Look at the impact of high fuel prices:

Policy in this area has been developed around the concept of ‘fuel poverty’ – a household being considered to be fuel poor if it would have to spend more than 10% of its income on fuel to keep the home at an adequate level of comfort, as well as provide for cooking and lighting. Current estimates are that 4.5 – 5 million homes fall under this definition. In addition, it is recognised that there are around 25,000 excess winter deaths each year. Small scale studies suggest that as many as 400,000 emergency admissions could be the result of living in inadequately heated homes.

Simply by abolishing the climate change levy we could take tens of thousands of elderly people, young families and people with long-term ill-health out of 'fuel poverty'. And maybe keep them alive. We spend millions fussing about smoking and drinking and miss the very clear evidence that the biggest preventable cause of death is cold not smoking or drinking.

So scrap the climate change levy and save a few lives.

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Friday Fungus: Weeping Widow

Weeping widow seems an odd name for a mushroom that isn’t poisonous – even though most sources advise against eating that’s more for lack of flavour. But weeping widow it is and we can but speculate as to why is gets such a name – it doesn’t look spectacular being a rather ordinary brown mushroom.

Possible reasons relate to it association with ash and willow – well known weeping trees – but the most likely reason relate to the black veil on the upper stem and the way in which the ripe head oozes droplets. It is indeed a wonder that the idea of bereavement can be transferred to nature – that a simple and common woodland mushroom like Lacrymaria velutina can form such a natural metaphor in the minds of our ancestors.

Perhaps we have lost some of the symbolism of widowhood – not the tears, they remain – but the wearing of black, the sense that loss should be displayed physically and the idea of personified respect for what has gone. Maybe too this is for the better – perhaps the black veil and weeds are rightly in our past? The idea that life goes on and that, especially for women, it can continue without the prop of a partner is central to modern understanding. We no long need the veiled remembrance of the juggernaut. Women share rather than join and their life does not end – even metaphorically – with the death of a husband.

The idea of the black, veiled widow is an anachronism and, like our weeping widow mushroom, unpalatable!

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