A young woman decided to take a walk with her father one early evening.  It was just a little over two years ago.  They were walking along the Embarcadero in San Francisco … near Pier 14.  I’ve been there and it is quite lovely.

Suddenly, a shot rang out and the young woman fell to the ground; a bullet had pierced her aorta.  Her father quickly administered the lifesaving steps until paramedics arrived.  Within a short time, the young woman was transported to San Francisco General Hospital.  She died there two hours later.

This isn’t a commentary about guns.  It is a commentary about justice.

Despite the passage of two years, the murderer of Kate Steinle continues to await trial.  It is —justice delayed.  It is —justice denied.

The law protects her murderer, but not Kate.  In fact, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez has all sorts of rights now that he’s been charged with Kate’s murder: the right to remain silent, the right to an appointed attorney, the right to a fair trial, protection from cruel or unusual treatment, and —while we’re at it, the right to disregard immigration laws, evade federal immigration officials, and the right to demand sanctuary from deportation proceedings inside the city of San Francisco, the right to free room and board for the rest of his life —all of this at the taxpayer’s expense, of course.

What does Kate Steinle get?  San Francisco didn’t protect Kate from an illegal alien, that’s for certain.  No, what Kate got was dead.  Neither was Kate the only victim; her father now gets to live out his life in severe emotional torment, sadness, and painful memories of a walk that turned into a tragedy.

I realize that sometimes bad things happen to good people, but I am rather amazed by the number of people in the United States who are able to place political ideology ahead of common sense.  My opinion is based on the following: San Francisco officials steadfastly refuse to hand illegal aliens over to federal authorities.  House and Senate Democrats refuse to enforce compliance with federal laws.  The smug-faced louts among us maintain that anyone standing for the safety of our citizens is in some way “anti-immigration.”  Such claims are so illogical that they defy comprehension.

I’m not sure I understand these attitudes among so many Americans.  I’m not asking for emotional attachment to the issue; I’m asking for common sense.  Should there be a difference in the way the law behaves if Kate were suddenly your daughter?  I think not; our laws must be designed to provide maximum protection to as many of our people as possible.  There is never a guarantee, of course … but offering encouragement to law-breakers, which is what a blind eye to illegal trespass really is, only places all of us in greater danger.

When I was a child, my mother always emphasized to me that if I could not say something nice about someone, I should simply keep my mouth shut.  “God hears everything you say,” she told me.  I don’t think I became profane until after I no longer believed that God hears … or even cares what we say.  Still, I think my mother gave me good advice and one that Confucius might even agree with.  Saying something unkind to (or about) someone can very easily back-fire.

That said, I have never had much respect for the current head of the Clinton Crime Family.  I have never trusted Donna Hillary, and have believed that her primary concern had anything to do with serving the interests of the American people.  So that during her many campaigns for election to high office, I used to choke whenever the Donna spoke of breaking the glass ceiling —one small step for woman-kind.  Hillary must have forgotten (conveniently, or otherwise) about America’s first woman president—and this surprised me because the Donna and Edith Wilson have so much in common.

Edith Wilson was the second wife of President Woodrow Wilson; they were married in December 1915 during Wilson’s first presidential term.  When Wilson suffered a severe stroke in October 1919, Edith Bolling Wilson assumed the mantle of the presidency and governed the United States as chief executive until March 1921.

Like her husband (and Donna Hillary), Edith Wilson harbored racist feelings toward African-Americans; nothing overt, mind you … just the condescending view that blacks were a problem that demanded a white solution.  Enter friend of the Wilson’s and founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.  Sanger never concocted a plan to eradicate blacks from American society in one fell-swoop, but she did have a plan for controlling black populations through birth control and abortion clinics.

“We must have a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”—Margaret Sanger, 1932

It was never a surprise to me that Margaret Sanger’s plan was incorporated into Germany’s final solution for dealing with Jews and Gypsies in 1937, nor even that Hillary Clinton publicly stated that Margaret Sanger was the woman she most admired.

It wasn’t simply that Woodrow and Edith Wilson were racists; after all, they were southern Democrats —but more to the point, they were politically progressive.  What progressives do best is divide Americans into little camps, and then by pitting one group  against another, destroy the fabric of American society.  This is part of the progressive (nee communist) agenda.  Now add to this the incorporation of millions of functionally illiterate people into the Democratic Party; it was clearly a win-win situation for DNC —and still is.

Edith Wilson was also curious in another way.  She proclaimed herself to be a descendent of a famous Indian princess: Pocahontas.  It was a claim she never abandoned for the remainder of her life.  Voila!  Several decades later, another progressive would make a similar claim: Elizabeth Warren.

Very odd.

One need only casually examine the Democratic agenda to detect a disturbing trend —and one that leads us to conclude that people who harbor a progressive mindset, if not clearly psychotic, do hover near the border of its clinical definition.

No matter.  The above only represents an interesting tidbit of American history that is probably unknown to most people today.  The curious reader will no doubt initiate additional inquiries to discover for themselves the veracity of what I have written here.

How dangerous is military service, even if you aren’t assigned to a combat zone? Ask this question of the 318 sailors and Marines once assigned to the USS Ronald Reagan, now suffering from exposure to radiation during the time they provide humanitarian relief to the Japanese victims of the Fukushima nuclear plant melt-down. Today, these men are suffering from leukemia, ulcers, brain cancer, tumors, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, and stomach cancer. No matter what the future holds for these men, it won’t be very bright for them, or their loved ones.

Even if you detest the military, don’t smirk because millions of people around the world are now consuming dangerous amounts of radioactivity in the form of Cesium-134, which has become the fingerprint of the Fukushima disaster. The element has found its way into shell fish, sea bass, and salmon all along the West Coast of the United States and Canada. Scientists have also discovered significant contamination of sea lions, seals, and otters. Increasing numbers of polar bear have been found with skin lesions and tumors.

This is not a nutty rant about nuclear power or becoming better stewards of our planet, although I have a difficult time trusting scientists who, in the development of nuclear energy as a power source, never once considered what should happen to used-fuel rods. Apparently, there are idiots with advanced degrees who, unhappily, now advise Al Gore about global warming. At the same time, we need to understand that there are consequences to unfortunate circumstances. No one thinks that Japan could have prevented a tsunami; mother nature does what mother nature does, but one does wonder why a nuclear power plant was not constructed with secondary or tertiary cooling systems, and why these weren’t routinely tested.  The one thing we know for certain about large bureaucracies is that they are always complacent.

As for the unfortunate 318 sailors and Marines, they remind me that no good turn goes unpunished.  For people who enjoy a good sea bass or salmon, you might consider something from the South Atlantic, instead.

In a deck of playing cards, we use the term face card to describe a card that depicts a person rather than a number.  They have also been referred to as court cards and coat cards (I imagine from “coats of arms”).  There are many stories about the origin of playing cards, and there may be some truth to all of them.  This is not something that matters a great deal, but I do find it interesting.

Playing cards originated in China, but cards used in China did not have face cards.  Over time, as people interacted with one another with greater frequency, as they exchanged ideas and cultural practices, playing cards made a steady westward movement—first to Persia, the first to place face cards into a deck.  Their human form was a mounted vizier and a seated king.  From Persia, playing cards made their way to Egypt; the Mamluk created a third face card.  The best-preserved deck of cards can be found in the Topkapi Palace and we find that these cards avoided idolatry by featuring abstract designs for royalty.  Playing cards used by commoners may have been configured differently, however, which could explain the appearance of seated kings and mounted knights on Indo-Persian and European cards.

A third court-card may have had a special role to play in Spanish, French, and Italian playing cards.  By 1377, the most common playing cards were essentially structured as they are today: each suit containing a seated king and two knights, one of these replaced by a queen in 1400s France, and the other was changed from a knave (servant) (page) to a Jack.  The re-designation allowed card manufacturers to change the card’s abbreviation from Kn to J.

The Jacks, popularly named in France, were Ogier the Dane (a mythical character from early French poetry) for the Jack of Spades, Hector, from Greek mythology for the Jack of Diamonds, Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the lake, baptized as Galahad) was one of the Knights of the Round Table in the Arthurian legends —our Jack of Clubs, and the Jack of Hearts, Étienne de Vignolles called La Hire, a French military commander during the Hundred-years’ War,

History remembers Étienne de Vignolles as the ablest military commander serving under the 17-year old field commander, Joan d’Arc.  He lived from 1390 to 1443 and may have participated in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, where the French were first introduced to England’s longbow.  He was clearly aligned with the cause to restore Charles VII after 1418.  History remembers our Jack as loud, vulgar, and quick-tempered and his nickname La Hire may be a corruption of Ira Dei (wrath of God).  He first fought with Joan during the Battle of Orleans and became her trusted right-hand during all subsequent battles.  He led an audacious charge against the English at Patay in 1429, an action that resulted in the virtual destruction of the English field army and most veteran commanders.  Over the next several weeks, subsequent gains in territory permitted the French to crown their new king on 17 July 1429.

Seeking to tame the beast within his breast, Joan’s influence over La Hire was a positive one, including his attendance at Confession … which, in addition to the filthy beast, soon included most of his lieutenants.  At the end of Joan’s life, La Hire was one of only two French knights making the attempt to rescue her from English captivity.  It was thus that La Hire found himself imprisoned by the English until a ransom was paid for his release.  Afterwards, La Hire continued to fight the English during Charles VII’s re-conquest of Normandy.  La Hire was appointed Captain General of Normandy in 1438.  In a few years, our Jack of Hearts would be dead —the reason for his demise uncertain— as he vanished, wrote one romantic, in the mist of battle.

We all recall the film starring William Holden, Jack Hawkins, and Alec Guinness.  Perhaps less memorable is the novel, which was the basis of the American/British film in 1957.  The novel was written by a French prisoner of war who was forced to participate in the Burma-Siam Railway project.  In his book titled Le Pont de la Riviêre Kwai (1952), Pierre Boulle later claimed that his character, LtCol Nicholson, was an amalgamation of French military officers whom Boulle observed did collaborate with the Japanese.

The fact that French officers collaborated with the enemy should surprise no one; the Vichy French were, after all, part of the Axis Powers.

The real allied commander of the Burma-Siam Railway prisoners was Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey, who passed away in 1975.  He has been recently joined in death by a comrade, Mr. Fred Seiker (shown left), who on 1 June 2017 passed away at the age of 101.  Both gentlemen were preceded in death by around 120,000 victims of Japanese atrocities, including Asian laborers and allied servicemen.

Mr. Seiker tells of his trials as a prisoner/slave laborer in his book entitled Lest We Forget.  He is right, of course: we should not forget the trial and suffering that he and others endured.  If we do forget, then we are doomed to repeat a very sad history—and we will deserve no less.

Rest in peace, Mr. Seiker.

A mother, aged 47, lost her husband seven years ago.  Then she remarried; her new husband wanted to have a child, but nothing was working in the normal course of things.  In Vitro Fertilization wasn’t possible because the mother was “too old.”

What to do?  Oh, what to do?

Well, here’s their idea: the mother’s 30-year old daughter agreed to have a baby with her step-father.

Voila!  Problem resolved.

Now, if you think that is a bit weird, here’s a summary of the official surrogacy laws in England and Wales:

When a child is born, its mother is considered as the woman who carried the infant through pregnancy.

If this woman is married, her husband is considered the legal father, which means that the intended father has no automatic claim to legal parenthood.  If the woman is unmarried, it is possible (but not certain) for the genetic father to be considered a legal parent.

The surrogate (woman) is responsible for registering the birth of the child, so her name and that of the legal father will go on the birth certificate.

A “parental order” made possible by the 2008 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, can then transfer full parental status to the intended parents.

The foregoing cannot happen until the child is six-weeks old, but must do before the child is six-months old, and strict conditions must be met.  One condition is that no money must be paid by the would-be parents to the natural mother or to an agency, except for legitimate expenses.

Applicants for the parental order must be husband and wife, a married same-sex couple, civil partners, or in a long-term relationship.  Note: Presumably, they must also be human species, but this has not been emphatically stated.

Well, here we are again; another Moslem attack upon the innocents of London.  What we know so far is that murdering filth have killed six people during attacks in two closely connected areas of London on Saturday night.  Three suspects have been shot and killed by police.

Once more, Enoch Powell correctly predicted these kinds of events in 1968.

The government’s political correctness is aiding and abetting the murder of innocent citizens.  When will government begin protecting the innocents as much as they protect, make allowances for, and hide the truth about Islamists?

Political correctness: the gift that keeps on giving.

Even though MI5 reveal the presence of 23,000 jihadi living in Britain (those are just the active inquiries, mind you), Manchester police say they’ve arrested “most of the suspects” in the recent attack against the innocents (and those, by the way, who are unable to defend themselves).

Most of the suspects, they said … meaning of course that some suspects remain on the loose.  British society is closing in on Katie Hopkins though, for daring to suggest in a Tweet that it is time for a final solution to the Islamist problem in the United Kingdom.

Well, it isn’t as if the British people weren’t warned, is it?

Rivers of Blood

By Enoch Powell, 20 April 1968

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.

After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: “I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.

I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.

The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: “How can its dimensions be reduced?” Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.

It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week – and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.

Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country – and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay.

I stress the words “for settlement.” This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. They are not, and never have been, immigrants.

I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.

Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party’s policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.

Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.

Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.

The third element of the Conservative Party’s policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no “first-class citizens” and “second-class citizens.” This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it “against discrimination”, whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.

The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.

This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.

Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another’s.

But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.

I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:

“Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

“The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her ‘phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week. “She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, “Racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere in this country.” So she went home.

“The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house – at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. “Racialist,” they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word “integration.” To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.

Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.

But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population – that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.

Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government:

‘The Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.’

All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

~End~

Health care in the United States was never perfect, but in the days before Medicare[1], it was the best the world had to offer.  Whenever we begin to discuss such things as socialized medicine, we are almost immediately drawn to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service system, its baby brother in Canada, or the “single-payer” system in Japan.  I think they call it managed health care —which I think is not only appropriate, but true.  The questions are, who manages it, what is the effect, and at what cost?

I recently came across two analyses of the British NHS and Japan’s[2]; it was not only interesting, but should serve as a warning bell to the American people who somehow feel as though we can trust the government to do the right thing.  The problem is in determining what the right thing is, as we shall see below.  But first, a summary of managed care in the United Kingdom and Japan.

Page One

According to Dr. Thane, the United Kingdom’s problems arise from two post-war measures: the NHS and National Assistance Acts (1948).  The latter measure required county level governments to provide shelter for elder persons, to monitor and supervise elder care, and provide meals, home care, day care centers, and to subsidize private organizations attempting to provide similar services.  Apparently, no one in the central government stopped to consider that monetary resources were limited, and they also failed to imagine that elderly populations would eventually increase.  The latter would result in greater demands for funding that simply wasn’t available.  Labor Government in the post war period could not fund all their ideas so they simply required county government to do this, or as Dr. Thane stated, prioritized the delivery of health and senior care.  Thane argues that the relatively poor care of elderly persons living in the United Kingdom is the result of age-discrimination.  She apparently ignores the fact that younger generations are also receiving relatively poor care, but on the other hand I think she is right about spending priorities: the British government is able fund outlandish foreign aid projects, but is somehow unable to address the health care of its own citizens.

Page Two

Dr. Hayashi’s analysis of the health care system in Japan includes a short comparison to the way things used to be done in Japan (citing Confucian values) to those in practice today—one in which long term care is challenged by the same factors found in all industrialized societies: more people, fewer monetary resources (or that pesky prioritizing measure).  “But post-war social and economic change had major implications.  Japan’s economic miracle made it possible to introduce a universal healthcare system in 1961, and then free healthcare for older people in 1973.  This contributed to an increased life expectancy and unprecedented numbers of older people surviving, but requiring long-term care.”  Confucian ideals could no longer stand up to the expectations rooted in ancient values and this resulted in abuse and neglect in homes where the aged were being cared for by younger generations.

The Japanese government introduced universal long term care insurance for older people in the year 2000, funded by government and everyone over the age of 40; it may work now, but the program is unsustainable.  By 2025, almost one-third of Japan’s population will be aged 65 and over.  Included in this estimate are 7 million people suffering from dementia.

Page Three

Not to worry … our governments are watching out for us.  During the debate over Obama-Care, both Congressional parties raised the argument of death panels with each side accusing the other of horrific programs that would result in detached managers making decisions about whether a patient should receive medical treatment.  The older the person is, the less likely they will be to receive needed medical attention.  Tied to this, the federal government demanded that private doctors and hospital turn over all their patient records to the regulating agency (there are several, including the Treasury Department, if you can believe that).  In this way, panels will take note whether the patient adopted a healthy life style; drinking and smoking could result in the panel deciding not to extend health services.

Now back to the United Kingdom for this case in point: The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), developed in the 1990s at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital in partnership with the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute.  This was not a form of treatment for sick or dying elderly; it was a methodology used to speed them along to their graves —making them as comfortable as possible, of course, but denying them nourishment and water.

In 2013, the LCP was excoriated in the press when it was revealed that the process implemented hastened death by starvation or over-prescription of pain killers.  Families were kept in the dark about what was actually happening to their loved ones; seniors were placed into LCP programs without theirs or their family’s consent.  What did the British government do about this intolerable situation?  Why, Parliament convened a commission, of course.

In 2015, Professor Patrick Pullicino was one of the UK’s first medics to raise concerns over the pathway to death and argued that recent government proposals were worse than the LCP: they could push more patients into an early grave.  Pullicino stated that new government policy encouraged hospital staff to guess at who was dying, in the absence of any clear evidence, and then to take steps that could hasten patients’ death.  This means withdrawing fluids and treatment and the administration of sedation to the dying, based on no more than a reasonable guess by a healthcare manager.

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If the American people were smart, and I am certainly not suggesting any such thing, they would look carefully at what is happening to Medicare and Medicaid under the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and judge for themselves if managed care is moving dangerously close to the Liverpool Care Pathway.  I only mention this because Dr. Victor J. Dzau of the Institute of Medicine once said, “The time is now for our nation to develop a modernized end-of-life care system.”

Really?  What does that mean, exactly?

Do we want government or medical eggheads to have the power of life and death over us, or our parents and grandparents?

Americans might pause to consider the far-reaching implications of managed health care; they may want to remember as well: whatever goes around comes around.

Notes:

[1] Note: the political party that gave us Medicare also gave us Obama-Care.  The people who instituted the NHS were also leftists … what they have given us today in no way resembles what they promised.

[2] Thane, Pat and Hayashi, Mayumi, Why is our elderly care services in crisis?  BBC History Magazine, February 2017