Michael Gove, religious fanatics and British schools

Religious organisations have a long history of providing education in the United Kingdom. Under the current arrangement, many religious schools receive subsidies from the state in return for the provision of education.

In July 2012 it was revealed that Tory education minister Michael Gove had approved applications from creationist groups to open three state funded schools in England under his barmy "free schools" programme and that at least 24 state funded religious schools had denied potentially life saving cervical cancer vaccinations to their female students for "religious reasons".

The first story is shocking because creation theory is the worst kind of anti-scientific mumbo-jumbo. Whilst many of the more progressive Christian organisations have officially accepted the scientific method (you would be hard pressed to find a Quaker that would deny the Theory of Evolution for example), the Creationists are on an anti-scientific, anti-intellectual crusade to confuse people into accepting their abject nonsense as an equal alternative to the scientific explanation of the origins of life.

One of the classic Creationist tricks is to equate the everyday word "theory" (a type of abstract or generalised thinking which requires no evidence or analytical proof) with the scientific use of the word "theory" (a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment). Using this semantic trick they try to claim that Creation Theory should be taught as an equal alternative to Evolution theory because they are both "theories".

The use of this kind of semantic fraud to promote their own warped and irrational views demonstrates that Creationists are dangerous anti-intellectual fanatics that should never be let near innocent developing minds, let alone receive direct state funding in order to indoctrinate kids with this kind of outrageous con-trick. However the Tory education secretary Michael Gove doesn't seem to see the problem, having rubber stamped applications for creationist groups to open three schools in Nottighamshire, Kent and Wearside.

The second story about the activities of pre-existing state funded religious schools is altogether more sinister. To deny children vaccination against cervical cancer in order to pressurise them into not having pre-marital sex is an absolutely abhorrent tactic. Girls are routinely vaccinated against cervical cancer before they become sexually active for a reason. The majority of the 1,000 cervical cancer deaths every year can be traced back to two strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV). If girls are vaccinated against this virus before they become sexually active they are significantly less likely to contract cervical cancer.

One of the most damning aspect of this anti-vaccination agenda is that the schools that have denied HPV vaccination to their students, have in many cases not even bothered to inform local health authorities of their agenda, meaning that no alternative provision has been made.

The "religious reasons" for denying this vaccine is that girls should not be having sex outside marriage, therefore they shouldn't need the vaccine and furthermore, if they do receive the vaccine, this is somehow supposed to be an incentive to have under-age sex. These arguments are so easy to undermine it would be laughable if it wasn't so damn serious. To deny the vaccination to girls because sex outside marriage is a sin is basically saying that the "sin" of casual sex is so great that it should carry a potential death sentence. The idea that vaccination against this disease is some kind of incentive to have underage sex is absurd, I'd wager that very few teenage girls factor the potential of contracting cancer into the equation when they are considering how intimate they might be with their boyfriend. Even if they did want to be intimate, the best advice anyone could give them would not be a load of puritanical mumbo-jumbo about abstinence, it would be to say "if you must do it, at least use a condom to avoid STDs and unwanted pregnancies", advice that puritanical religious nutters would certainly not be offering.

Probably the single strongest argument against this anti-vaccination agenda is the fact that unvaccinated girls that do remain celibate until they are married are still at risk of contracting the cervical cancer causing HPV virus, since there is absolutely no guarantee that their husband hasn't contracted the virus from previous sexual encounters. If the unvaccinated woman does remain celibate but contracts the virus through her husband then develops cancer, the religious puritans at her school would have ensured that the "innocent" woman receives the punishment for her husband's "sin" of sleeping with other people before he married her.

If there was widespread knowledge of these issues I'm pretty sure public opinion would be that Creationist nutters should not get state funding to indoctrinate British kids and that at the very least, schools that refuse to vaccinate against HPV must be compelled to inform the local health authorities so that alternative vaccination arrangements can be made. The problem is that Michael Gove is a Bible bashing fundamentalist that actually approves applications from creationists to open state funded schools and has done nothing to prevent religious puritans at state funded schools from giving their warped moral code priority over the health of their students.

See Also
 

Michael Gove's school privatisation bonanza

 

David Willetts' "reckless & incompetent" university reforms
  

The catastrophic failure of "Osbornomics"

 

No new ideas, just more Tory cuts

Obnoxious atheism

Just look at this obnoxious picture I came across on on Facebook. The shocking thing is not that someone actually created such a piece of shit (virtually anyone can create a photo collage, even idiots) but the fact that thousands of people have "liked" it and several hundred enjoyed it so much they decided to "share" it with all of their friends.

The fact that the atheist woman seems to be undergoing some kind of spiritual rapture is frankly absurd (we've all come across plenty of stressed and depressed atheists) but the really obnoxious thing about it is the crude and unbalanced way that it stereotypes the three selected religious faiths. The portrayal of the Jew as the scholar, the Christian as the peaceful contemplator and the Muslim as the terrorist is grotesquely unbalanced.

If the creator of the image above is determined to use 
divisive negative faith stereotypes, perhaps this kind of  
image would have better illustrated the Jewish faith.

I mean if the creator of the image was determined to find the worst possible negative stereotype to illustrate Islam, why on Earth didn't they find images to demonstrate the worst of the other two religions? Perhaps the Jew could have been illustrated an Israeli Defence Force soldier committing warcrimes, an orthodox Jew spitting on an immodestly dressed woman or a brainwashed Israeli child writing on a missile.The Christian could have been illustrated with a woman celebrating fundamentalist Christian intolerance with a "God Hates Fags" banner, an anti-abortion terrorist or a paedophile priest.

Everyone has a right to call themselves an atheist and to celebrate their chosen belief system if they choose to, but the thing I find offensive is the rank hypocrisy of the fundamentalist atheist who see it as their duty to proselytise and convert people to their "orthodox" way of thinking. Their compulsion to spread the "message" that acceptance of atheist orthodoxy will provide the kind of ecstatic spiritual fulfilment that adorns the image I'm complaining about. This sanctimonious and preachy form of atheism is exactly the same kind of behaviour that anti-theists complain so vehemently about when it is God believers pushing their orthodoxies onto others.

Hmmm, this woman seems to have badly
misunderstood the teachings of Jesus.

Hardline atheism isn't a higher, more rational belief system than theism, it is the other side of the fundamentalist coin. Theists take a leap of faith to believe in their specific version of what God is, whilst the militant anti-theist takes the same kind of leap of faith to believe in the nonexistence of any kind of God, no matter what the definition. Since it is impossible to prove a negative, it stands to reason that the only properly rational position for a non-believer to take would be some kind of sceptical agnosticism.

The problem is though, that these shouty atheist ranter types are too stupid to even understand the nuances of the debate. They don't care about reason or logic, they just like displaying the badge of rationality without the baggage of actually using it. They like to take the intellectual high ground, yet the production and dissemination of images like the one above demonstrates that just like the faiths that atheists criticise, the atheist movement is also riddled with unthinking, dim-witted, obnoxious and divisive cretins pushing a belief system that they are incapable of even properly analysing.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the important distinction is not between those that believe in God and those that don't, it is between decent, thoughtful and tolerant people (of all faiths and none) and horrible, reactionary and bigoted idiots.

Don't vote labour

Every time you are tempted to think of Gordon Brown as a left wing
politician, recall his £160-240bn legacy of disastrous and
‘extremely inefficient’ PFI neoliberal economic alchemy schemes.

Every time I hear a Labour party supporter pushing the party line and repeating their mealy-mouthed and weakest possible criticisms of the coalition government (for fear of upsetting the neoliberal economic orthodoxy their party adheres to), I just wish they'd give their outdated partisan rambling a break.

Apart from the introduction of a few badly designed and inefficient bits of pseudo-socialist window dressing, to appease their core voters and the trade unions, New Labour were as neoliberal as Margaret Thatcher.

Neoliberalism has become the unquestionable economic orthodoxy, enforced by the unelected economic overlords at the IMF, the World Bank and most of the world's central banks. Labour followed neoliberal economic orthodoxy diligently, handing massive chunks of state infrastructure to tax dodging scam artists, hugely increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, commodifying education, eroding the principle of equal justice and recklessly liberalising the regulation that was meant to keep a check on the venal and nefarious uber-rich, that so often use their massive wealth to further their selfish and amoral pursuit of even more wealth, no matter what the cost to society.

After all of that they crowned it with the one of the biggest transferences of wealth in history from the ordinary to the super rich economic elite in the form of £900bn bailout to cover the bad debts of the reckless bankers to be paid off by decades of "austerity" imposed on ordinary working people, justified with the great neoliberal lie, that there is no alternative.

If you are one of those people that chooses to hang onto your illusory 20th Century tribal party distinctions and can't understand that all three of the main parties are now hard line neoliberals clamouring to repeat the lie that "the state is too big" and that state spending on infrastructure, education, healthcare and welfare needs to be slashed, when the legitimate debts of the state are completely dwarfed by the the money borrowed by the Neo-Labour party (with the explicit backing of the Tories) in order to give near unconditional handouts to their uber-rich corporatist pals, then you don't really have much to offer to the debate.

The Labour party left behind their credentials as nation builders, ethical social reformers and the representatives of ordinary working people a generation ago. Nowadays when you vote Labour, you are not voting for socialism, not for the left, not for social reform nor for workers' solidarity, you are simply voting on your preference for the colour red.

It amazes me that the gelded trade unions that provided such a large proportion of Labour party donations let Neo-Labour get away with their cosy and relaxed attitude towards the super rich and the tax evaders. After all, the core purpose of the trade unions was meant to be the protection of the interests of ordinary working taxpayers against the interests of the super rich, the landed rentier class and the corporate elites that tend to exploit them.

It also amazes me that millions of Labour voters apathetically let control of their party be seized by the right wing establishment elite out of a primitive fear that "it would be much worse under the Tories".

The biggest condemnation of Labour is that had they used their 1997 landslide as a mandate to spent just one term of government actively undoing some of the most egregious neoliberal abuses of the state imposed by the first Thatcherite party, the raving neoliberal Tories would still be much further away from achieving their goal of turning the UK into a Friedman's wet dream of a selfish, amoral, greed-is-good, fuck the needy, survival of the fittest society.

Let me get this clear. If you vote Tory, Lib-Dem or Labour you are a de facto supporter of the bankrupt neoliberal economic orthodoxy.

Vote for alternative parties or don't vote at all. Choosing the lesser of three evils is just giving a false mandate to the amoral neoliberals that want to destroy our sense of national solidarity and reinvent our nation as one of purely self interested consumers/debt slaves in which ownership of all state infrastructure has been seized by the tiny economic elite.

In terms of democratic mandate the bar is already set pretty low in the UK. 21.5% of the eligible vote was enough for Tony Blair to retain power for Neo-Labour in 2005 and 23% of the eligible vote was enough to make slimy PR man "Call Me" Dave our prime minister now, so please don't encourage any of the neoliberal parties by giving them your vote.

A letter from George

My policy of more of the same militant neoliberal free
market economics is the only conceivable way forward.

Dear voter,

After 30 years of privatise everything, tax cuts & tax loopholes for the rich, pensions & welfare cuts for the poor, reckless deregulation of the financial sector, globalisation of trade & investment while maintaining vast regional inequalities in wages & working conditions, refusing subsidies to industries that actually produce things yet awarding the biggest state subsidies in economic history to failed industry in the form of bailouts and money printing to save a bunch of gambling charlatans, ideologically driven neoliberal economics has doubled the concentration of wealth in the pockets of the richest 1%, turned a vast percentage of workers into debt slaves, provoked popular uprisings and riots all over Europe and the middle east and turned the world economy to over-leveraged, panic stricken chaos.

The only solutions to the problems of growing inequality and debt, ever increasing dissent and increased market volatility are; more privatisation, more tax cuts and tax loopholes for the rich, more "austerity" for the poor, more deregulation of the financial sector, more globalised trade & finance with greater regional inequalities in labour and less support for productive industry in favour of giving billions more to the "masters of the universe" in the banking sector (that coincidentally provide 60% of Tory party funding).

Yours faithfully

George Osborne BA Modern History

 If you enjoyed this post, maybe you could buy me a beer? £1 would get me a can of cheap lager whilst £3 would get me a lovely pint of real ale.
 

Why I blame the left for the economic crisis

New Labour's embrace of neoliberalism in the 1990s
signified the destruction of the traditional Labour movement.

At the risk of starting off by sounding like a the kind of Tory troll that likes to astroturf all economics based threads with their mindless bullshit, I'm going to say that I firmly believe that Labour are to blame for the woeful state of the British economy. Not because they were too "lefty" as the Tory apologists like to claim but because they were way to far to the right.

When Labour regained power in 1997, what the UK needed was an adjustment back to the left after 18 years of unrestrained neoliberal pseudo-economic policy, but what Labour delivered was more of the same neoliberal corporatist agenda but with a bit of (often poorly conceived) left wing window dressing to appease their core voters and Guardian columnists.

Some of the major causes of the deficit can be traced back to Neo-Labour:

Instead of imposing stronger regulation on the banks as "leftists" should do, they gave us their botched deregulation of the banks and building societies and left gaping tax-loopholes in the British economic system. They cosied up to big business and the financial sector instead of taxing their obscene remuneration packages, clamping down on tax avoidance/evasion and preventing the banks from over-leveraging themselves or pissing borrowed money down the speculative derivatives toilet.

Under no circumstances should a supposedly left-wing government be signing multi billion procurement projects with corporations nominally based in tax havens in order to avoid paying UK tax on their taxpayer funded profits, but that is exactly what Labour did in the Mapeley Steps ripoff.

Housing is another area in which the left should lead the way but instead of taking measures to fix the housing market by building more affordable housing, putting an end to right-to-buy without reinvestment, and dampening house prices with proper regulation of the parasitic bank funded buy-to-let sector, Labour politicians were perfectly happy to ride on the crest of the biggest artificial housing bubble in history and rake in the votes from people who were simply overjoyed to see the asset value of their house(s) multiply.

Labour also presided over a massive contraction in the housebuilding business, a sector that should have been booming. Another thing they should have done was to get rid of the ridiculous VAT charges on redevelopment, while they allowed new builds to go up VAT free because a tax on redevelopment is a tax on sustainability. Labour didn't even recognise these problems, they were too busy with their insane house destruction projects like John Prescott's mad Pathfinder schemes. Instead of bulldozing quality houses all over the Midlands, the North and Scotland they should have invested their efforts in attracting industry into formerly industrialised communities through education, skills training and infrastructure improvements.

The left should be blamed for allowing
control of their party to be usurped by amoral career politicians like
Peter "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich" Mandelson.

Labour's contempt for existing infrastructure went way beyond the housing sector, they also built up an estimated hidden deficit of £250bn by tearing down state infrastructure and replacing it under neoliberal economic alchemy schemes called PFI that do nothing but relinquish state control over community infrastructure at great economic cost and enrich corporatist investors for decades. The Tories still haven't brought these hidden debts onto the balance sheet, but then they are also relying on the accountancy fiddle that the bailout costs are somehow separate from the deficit too (a much bigger economic deceit).

Labour spent more than a decade siding with industry, schmoozing with Murdoch and cosying up to the corporatist bosses, bestowing honours galore on the banking community that went on to drive the economy off a cliff with their unregulated speculative derivative trading a few years later. Throughout all of this, Labour were taking the majority of their party funding from the unions. The unions are to blame for the mess too, they didn't want to rock the Labour boat at all, out of their fear that things would be a lot worse for themselves (and the workers) under the Tories. The unions witnessed Labour politicians like Alan Milburn signing off on massive NHS privatisation-by-stealth deals, then sidling off to begin working for the companies he'd just opened the door to, and they did nothing to resist this kind of nasty Tory style profiteering.

Labour should have clamped down on egregious profiteering from utilities companies and reversed botched privatisation schemes like the railways (which now take double the subsidy that BR did and are more expensive to use than running a car) but they were too busy lining their own pockets with more privatisation deals and badly designed procurement contracts, subsidising economic failure and waving through inflation busting price rises from the corporate utilities spivs year, after year, after year.

Traditional left wing voters even re-elected Tony Blair
 after he supported the American far right neoconservatives
in their illegal & immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Just as the unions did nothing, the old guard Labour backbenchers did nothing either, for fear of letting the Tories back in. They voted through one mad neoliberal policy after another and even backed Blair's (Murdoch's) mad neoconservative imperialist adventures in Iraq. As the genuine left bit their tongues and let the right wing economic madness continue, their numbers were gradually eroded away as the older generation were replaced by a tide of amoral self-serving Blairite careerists.

The pattern is the same all over Europe, left leaning parties have fallen over themselves to embrace the markets to such an extent that they have allowed "greed" rather than "state planning" to direct their economies.

After 30 years it should be clear to everyone that the neoliberal economic model is a failure. However all the politicians seem to offer is more tinkering with the broken system from the former-left and more of the same corporatisation of the state, tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, screw the workers idiocy (that got us into this mess in the first place) from the right. There are more right-wing neoliberal governments in Europe than ever before in history to implement these policies.

Labour have now spent a political generation abandoning their socialist credentials and cosying up to the economic elite and it appears is as if they are no longer capable of even conceiving an alternative to the neoliberal agenda. In a way Neo-Labour were the worst of both worlds, combining nasty Tory "business knows best" economic policy with the kind of illiberal, top down, totalitarian tendencies that give the left a bad name (National Identity Register, private jails, child detention, moralistic drugs prohibition policies, Digital Economy Bill,  CCTV and surveillance). After 13 years of Labour rule, when they handed control of the nation back to the Tories``, Britain was in a more corporatised, more unequal and more totalitarian state than the Tories had left it back in 1997.

The neoliberal economic system is broken and the democratic system is too because the huge majority of our elected representatives (in all the major political parties) have become shills for corporate interests. We're being "served" by a bunch of greedy piss taking pillocks (expenses scandal) and mindless avatars for the Murdoch bias who couldn't give a hoot about the majority of the electorate.

The great moral sellout by the left has put us in the situation where all of the major political parties are stuffed with self serving neoliberals only differentiated by differently coloured ties. Until this changes, nobody will steer the economy off the road to dystopian neoliberal failure.

Tory immigration policy, lies and spin

The far right British National Party claim that
Cameron has nicked their immigration policies.

On 14 April 2011 Prime Minister David Cameron made a speech about immigration where he made a whole load of misleading and inflammatory claims about the issue. He has been criticised from across the political spectrum, from Vince Cable of their political allies the Liberal Democrats who said that the remarks "risked inflaming extremism" to the far right British National Party who accused Cameron of stealing their fascist policies in order to win votes before the upcoming local elections.

Perhaps it is criticism enough just to note that the BNP fascists are claiming ownership of Tory immigration policy and accusing Cameron of cynical opportunism, however I am going to outline a few of the fundamental flaws in this speech which was clearly aimed at gaining votes from people with extremist attitudes to immigration.

The first major issue is the target of reducing immigration to a net increase of only 50,000 per year. Acceptance of this theme goes further than Tory policy, the policy of reducing immigration to the UK "to the low tens of thousands" is a stated aim of the cross-party parliamentary group on balanced migration. Anyone with the vaguest understanding of current issues in immigration will know that the whole idea of capping inward migration is utterly absurd given the fact that hundreds of millions of Europeans have a legal right to migrate here under European freedom of movement legislation. The majority of migrants to the UK have come here from elsewhere in Europe, it is illegal to turn them away even if they have a long criminal record or no work history. As long as British wages remain significantly higher than eastern and southern European states the inward flow of migration will not stop. It does not matter how hard the British government stamps down on the minority of non-EU migrants if the door is left wide open to anyone who wants to relocate from Europe. Any politician speaking about reducing immigration to a set target would be being utterly disingenuous unless their party's immigration policy included removing Britain from the European Union and/or revoking Britain's acceptance of European freedom of movement legislation (which would have a severe impact on many hundreds of thousands of Brits living and working abroad).

In his speech Cameron also used some highly misleading statistics by claiming that 75% of all newly created jobs since 1997 have gone to foreign born individuals. This claim is clearly just a conflation of two different statistics noting that the number of immigrants working in the UK has risen by 75% of the number of new jobs created in the UK in the same period. The claim that three in every four new jobs are filled by immigrants is clearly just an inaccurate and cynical attempt to stir up anti-immigration sentiments. He used more misleading statistics citing net migration figueres of 2.2 million since 1997 and then later in the speech claiming that European migration only accounted for 27,000 immigrants in 2010. He knows as well as anyone that the majority of the 2.2 million immigrants since 1997 have been Europeans and that the flood of European migrants reduced to a trickle because of the severe economic conditions that his party is intent on exacerbating with their ideologically driven cuts agenda. Picking the 2010 figures ahead of say the 2006 figures or an average since 1997 is a classic example of cherry picking statistics to support a pre-determined agenda.

Cameron also took a swipe at another minority group in seeking to blame the unemployed, claiming that the blame for immigration lies with Labour's failure to deal with the long term unemployed. Cameron should know as well as anyone that many of the biggest hotbeds of long term unemployment are communities that had their principle industries closed down by the Tories in the 1980s (manufacturing, mining, ship building, steel factories etc). Had the Tories supported these industries or implemented policies to find alternative jobs for the communities they decimated then welfare dependency (and other factors like mental health issues, drug use, crime and poor health) in these areas would be a much smaller problem. These places are rarely desired destinations for immigrants, given the lack of jobs, poor services and high crime rates.

Aside from stealing far right policies from the BNP, misusing statistics to stir up anti-immigrant sentiments and seeking to blame the poorest members of society for high immigration there are many other problems with these far-right policies. The Tory policy of limiting the number of skilled immigrants coming from outside the EU to 20,700 is clearly nonsensical. Why are they seeking to reduce the number of economically and socially beneficial skilled migrants coming into the country while simultaneously allowing in hundreds of thousands of unskilled Europeans? Why are they seeking to limit the number of student visas to 80,000 when the high fees paid by non-EU students are a valuable source of revenue for British universities, especially at a time when they are suffering from large cuts in state funding?

Another issue is Cameron's faux concern that immigrants are settling in the UK without learning the English language. If this was a real Conservative party concern surely they would not be imposing big cuts on English language classes for immigrants.

Have £millions in the bank?
One of these could be yours within two years.
Have skills? GO AWAY.

The terrible fact is that the Tories are not alone in this, all of the major parties seem to have agreed on these far right policies as evidenced by the statement from the cross-party parliamentary group on balanced migration when they made the bizarre and unfounded assertion that "the whole country will support" the prime minister's "splitting of the right to come here to work from gaining citizenship". I for one am fundamentally opposed to the discrimanatary policy of reducing non-EU doctors or nurses working in the NHS to second class citizens that can be thrown out of the country as soon as their working lives are over. If someone comes to Britain to work, contribute to British industry or to British welfare and make tax contributions they should be able to earn the right to become a citizen. At a time when the government is actively discouraging young people from training as doctors and nurses by increasing fees and attacking NHS bursaries the policy of refusing citizenship to the immigrants that must come in to fill the gaps seems like it is actually designed to damage the NHS.

As is always the way with the Tory party there is one set of rules for the rich and another set of rules for the poor. As they set arbitrary and economically damaging caps on skilled immigrants and students, make inflammatory anti-immigration speeches and remove rights from economically beneficial working immigrants they quietly announce that any immigrant coming to the UK with at least £5 million in the bank will get a fast track passport in only three years and anyone arriving with more than £10 million in the bank will get their passport within two years.

The reason Cameron chooses to make inflammatory and misleading immigration speeches in the run up to local elections is pretty clear. The people that generally approve most strongly of this kind of bombastic anti-immigration rhetoric are the baby boomers and older generations who are also the people that are statistically most likely to cast their votes in local elections.

See Also

  

New Family Visa rules: Tories discriminating against British people and their families

No new ideas, just more Tory cuts

The catastrophic failure of "Osbornomics"

The Tory contempt for ordianry working people

 

British businessmen admit that the Tory cuts they supported are causing economic contraction.

In an article entitled Business chiefs who backed coalition cuts raise fears for UK economy the Guardian has reported that a bunch of British "businessmen" who backed George Osbourne's slash and burn economic measures in a letter to the Telegraph back in 2010 have now started to complain that they are not seeing the economic growth they had expected and began talking down the ability of the private sector to create jobs, which is completely at odds the letter's claim that [The private sector] should be more than capable of generating additional jobs to replace those lost in the public sector".

The most surprising thing is that so many of these people referred to as "prominent business leaders" were so shortsighted that they could not understand that if a country's ruling elite pours hundreds of billions of pounds into the banks then prints loads of extra "artificial" money to help their rich mates stay filthy rich, then extracts the costs of these schemes through sacking "alarm clock proles", slashing public services and driving up inflation, whilst millions are suffering the consequences of wage freezes, then ordinary working people are going to have much less cash to buy crap from the half-witted wankers that were publicly applauding these half-baked economic measures as they came in.

The government could have applied strict lending conditions on the banks or let them fold and absorbed the costs into a national investment bank then used all of the money wasted on the bailout to support British industry directly (with 1% loans instead of giving it to the banks for them to lend on to us and our businesses at 12%). Had they done this we could already be seeing good returns on that investment in terms of economic growth and employment, instead we still have exactly the same parasitic economic minority that caused the economic crash through reckless speculation still soaking billions out of the real economy in their massive bonuses and convoluted tax avoidance schemes and all it costs them is a few million in political donations to the nasty party.

Here is a handy list of the people that wrote their stupid letter to the Telegraph in support of Tory cuts, it is always useful to know which companies would like you to boycott them.

• Will Adderley - CEO, Dunelm Group
• Robert Bensoussan - Chairman, L.K. Bennett
• Andy Bond - Chairman, ASDA
• Ian Cheshire - Chief Executive, Kingfisher
• Gerald Corbett - Chairman, SSL International, moneysupermarket.com, Britvic
• Peter Cullum - Executive Chairman, Towergate
• Tej Dhillon - Chairman and CEO, Dhillon Group
• Philip Dilley - Chairman, Arup
• Charles Dunstone - Chairman, Carphone Warehouse Group, TalkTalk Telecom Group
• Warren East - CEO, ARM Holdings
• Gordon Frazer - Managing Director, Microsoft UK
• Sir Christopher Gent - Non-Executive Chairman, GlaxoSmithKline
• Ben Gordon - Chief Executive, Mothercare
• Anthony Habgood - Chairman, Whitbread, Reed Elsevier 
• Aidan Heavey - Chief Executive, Tullow Oil
• Neil Johnson - Chairman, UMECO
• Nick Leslau - Chairman, Prestbury Group
  Ian Livingston - CEO, BT Group
• Ruby McGregor-Smith - CEO, MITIE Group
• Rick Medlock - CFO, Inmarsat; Non-Executive Director lovefilms.com, The Betting Group
• John Nelson - Chairman, Hammerson
• Stefano Pessina - Executive Chairman, Alliance Boots
• Nick Prest - Chairman, AVEVA
• Nick Robertson - CEO, ASOS
• Sir Stuart Rose - Chairman, Marks & Spencer
• Tim Steiner - CEO, Ocado
• Andrew Sukawaty - Chairman and CEO, Inmarsat
• Michael Turner - Executive Chairman, Fuller, Smith and Turner
• Moni Varma - Chairman, Veetee
• Paul Walker - Chief Executive, Sage
• Paul Walsh - Chief Executive, Diageo
• Robert Walters - CEO, Robert Walters
• Joseph Wan - Chief Executive, Harvey Nichols
• Bob Wigley - Chairman, Expansys, Stonehaven Associates, Yell Group
• Simon Wolfson - Chief Executive, Next

See also 

The case for a National Investment Bank
 

The Tory contempt for the value of labour

More riches for the rich, recession for the rest

Psychoquackery

From the very beginning, the so called psycho-sciences (psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychotherapy) were built on a foundation of deranged nonsense. Sigmund Freud came out with a lot of pseudoscientific gibberish (all little boys are latent motherfuckers and all little girls fantasise about a good fucking from their dad). To use a phrase that is common to the psycho-brigade this looks like a classic case of projection. 

Even today Freud's ideas still have huge influence over the field, his theory that adult problems can be traced to unresolved conflicts from certain phases of childhood and adolescence is still popular, his descendants also heavily influenced the field and the vast majority of people able to name a famous psychoanalyst would probably come up with Sigmund Freud.

One of "Pavlov's children."

In the early 20th century, psyco-sciences progressed from Freud's deranged pseudoscience to barbaric experiments on animals and people. Most people have heard of Pavlov's dogs and the "conditioned reflex" but few are aware that Pavlov carried out the same experiments on children too, including surgically adding taps to their salivary glands and force feeding them.

Others like William Sargent pioneered some horrifying treatments like insulin therapy (regularly inducing comas with huge insulin overdoses), Electroconvulsive therapy (giving huge electric shocks to the patient in order to "burn out" their mental illness) brain surgery like lobotomies and all kinds of experimental drug therapies. It seems that many of the people working in the field in the early 20th century would be described as psychopaths by today’s standards because of their willingness to inflict unproven and traumatic treatments on people, often with little or no scientific justification.

By the 1950s the idea of treating "deviance" was commonplace. People such as young women who had a child out of wedlock or refused to stop seeing a boyfriend that their parents disapproved of would be institutionalised and given treatments like electroshock therapy and in many cases lobotomies. Many victims of this regime can still be found in mental institutions to this day and have suffered whole lifetimes of bogus psychotherapeutic treatments and institutionalisation just for failing some social conformity expectation in their early years.

Thankfully the "profession" has left some of the worst treatments like insulin induced comas and lobotomies in the past, however the concept of medicalisation of "deviance" and "non-conformity" is still fundamental to the profession. As you can see from the video there is an ever growing cloud of so called psychiatric disorders, the most famous being ADHD for which hundreds of thousands of children are treated with a stimulant called Ritalin (which has pharmacological effects similar to a mix of amphetamines and cocaine). Imagine the public outrage if I were to set up a website aimed at selling amphetamines to children in order to help them stay awake and concentrate on their school work, however the psycho-brigade can get away with it by deflecting criticism with their expertise and qualifications and pointing to the evidence base they have built up to support their methodology of drugging children with powerful stimulants.

The experimental data does show that the kids become less disruptive when they take these powerful stimulants but the methodology of medicalising symptoms like hyperactivity, impulsive behaviour and inattentiveness with extremely powerful drugs at such early ages must lead to medical dependence in the same way that mass institutionalisations of the mid 20th century led to a huge number of completely institutionalised patients.

The creation of medical dependence is clearly beneficial to the big pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs like Ritalin and to the professional prescribers, who with the right techniques can create lifelong patients out of children with "disorders" like not being able to "sit still and concentrate on boring stuff" which until recent times was considered fairly normal childhood behaviour and treated with corporal punishment in schools. The profession is not only punishing and stigmatising people that display non conformist behaviour they are making a profitable industry out of their medicalised treatments.

The rise of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has given traditional psychotherapists a lot to worry about. In layman's terms CBT is a methodology that focuses on helping patients to develop the mental skills to overcome their own behavioural problems and has been shown to work in the treatment of anxiety, depression, phobias, insomnia and a range of other "mental disorders". One of the main benefits of CBT is that it can reduce patient reliance on expensive long term drug therapy.

It is no surprise at all that leading establishment psychiatrists such as Andrew Samuels like to use their influence to characterise CBT as "a coup, a power play by a community that has suddenly found itself on the brink of corralling an enormous amount of money". It is frankly disgraceful to see a spokesman for, and proponent of, the traditional and expensive methodology of medicalisation and institutionalisation trying to smear the cheaper and more humanist approach as a bunch of money grabbing usurpers.

I don't see CBT as a magic bullet, but it is much closer to the holistic and humanist approach to mental illness that I favour. To me it is obvious that helping people to work out how to overcome their own problems where possible is a vastly superior approach to trawling their childhood for traumatic experiences and helping them to pin the blame for their situation on things that simply can't be undone, prescribing lifelong regimes of expensive and powerful drugs like stimulants and sedatives and herding patients into institutional care. It is time for the so called experts to get rid of the view of mental health conditions as deviances that can be categorised and medicated and start to see and treat their patients as people.

More info - CCHR