Petition to create a new offence of "Animal Murder"

As my petition has now topped 10,000, signatures as of today, 10^th May 2016, I am, as promised, setting out, in this special one-off blog post, a much more detailed explanation of my reasons for starting the petition, and what I hope to achieve by it.

Perhaps the best place to begin is with the text of the petition itself, as it currently appears on the HM Government petitions web site.

Create a new offence of "animal murder" with a minimum of 5 years on conviction.

Our animal welfare legislation dates from times when deliberate killing of pets & other animals was a rarity, and is too often interpreted leniently by judges. This new offence, plus a lifetime ban on keeping animals, plus entry on a new animal offenders' register, would be a significant deterrent.

The number of high-profile cases of animals being deliberately killed, seemingly just for "fun", highlights the way the current legislation is simply not acting as a deterrent to the sort of people likely to carry out these acts. A new offence of "Animal Murder" with a minimum sentence of 5 years in prison on conviction, no remission or parole, backed up by placement on a new "animal offenders' register" and a lifetime ban on keeping animals, should redress the balance, once available to the CPS

One of the shortcomings of the government petitions web site is that it only allows you a very few words to explain what it is you are petitioning for, and what you are trying to achieve. Those two paragraphs above represent the maximum wordage you are allowed on the site when setting up a petition, and obviously they go nowhere near the amount of detail which is necessary to explain such a complicated concept as animal welfare.

My decision to start the petition is one that has been at the back of my mind for some months, if not years, as I have seen, and been critical of, instance after instance of lenient sentences being handed down by the judiciary and magistracy to people who have deliberately injured and killed animals “for a laugh”. The actual trigger that made me put pen to paper (or, more accurately, finger to keyboard) arose out of the incident of Missy the Bus-Stop cat, which was a cat that used to make a habit on sleeping at a specific bus-shelter in Leigh Park near Havant, where it had become a regular fixture and was greeted, and petted by many travellers and commuters. Sadly, at the beginning of February 2016, it was discovered in a badly-injured state and had to be put to sleep. The presumption was, at the time, that yobboes were responsible, although there is now also a theory that she may have been struck by a passing car.

I was angry when I read about it. Especially if it was the yobboes who did it. I make no apologies for calling them yobboes, in fact, I have called them much worse, but out of respect for the mixed nature of my readership, we’ll stick at yobboes.  I’m talking about the sort of people that – a while ago now – burned down the stables of Barnsley Riding for the Disabled; the people who set fire to Manchester Dogs’ Home; the dog-fighting rings; the people who think it’s funny to chuck hedgehogs out of tower block windows.  I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to label my proposed law “Missy’s Law”, though others have done so, because sadly there are many thousands of “Missys”, and not just cats – dogs, horses, farm animals, small mammals and rodents, all of which suffer mindless and needless cruelty at the hands of idiots.

At the moment, under the Animal Welfare Act, the maximum sentence that can be handed down in cases of extreme cruelty and causing the death of an animal deliberately is a 26 week custodial sentence.  All too often, however, this is lessened to community service and/or a fine.  This is no deterrent.  Part of the problem is that the existing laws are rooted in outdated 19^th century attitudes to animal welfare, in an era when life generally was brutish and nasty and animal life didn’t really matter except insofar as it affected economic factors – the loss of a working dog or a horse, for instance.  In the last 150 years we have made great strides in legislature concerning human welfare, but animal welfare legislation is still stuck in the era of the steam train and the public hanging.

A cat, for instance, is regarded as merely a chattel, from the legal point of view of its ownership in law, and a dog is not much better. The only reason that you have to stop and find out who the owner is, if you run over a dog, is that you have potentially done them some economic harm, if it was a working animal.  This sort of outmoded approach to framing the law needs to be fast-forwarded.  So I started an official government petition (link here) to put a new offence on the statute book, of animal murder, which brings with it, on conviction, a minimum jail term of five years with no remission or parole, automatic entry on a new “animal offenders’ register” along the same lines as the existing sex offenders’ register, and a lifetime ban on keeping animals or partaking in any employment connected with animals.

Because people have been sharing it on Facebook and Twitter, inevitably people have asked me questions and raised points about it, and, rather than try and get round them all individually, especially given the limitations of Twitter for long conversations, I thought if the petition did reach 10,000 signatures, and I posted some of my reasoning here, it might help with the frequently asked questions and to provide some background. Plus, in future, I can just link to this blog when someone asks a question I know is already answered here.

Obviously, in an ideal world, I would like to correspond with, and thank, each and every one of the 10,000 people who has signed thus far, but the detail of who has signed a government petition is not available to the petitioner.  And please accept my thanks if you are reading this and you have already signed the petition.

So, as I said above, firstly, the existing animal welfare legislation is rooted in Victorian times, where attitudes to animals were completely different. True, a horse might expect to be worked to death, or a pit pony would spend its life underground and never see daylight, but the idea of deliberately killing an animal “just for fun” was relegated to a hard core of psychopaths.  So we have a situation where successive laws have come down, and been amended through the years, based, for instance, on the principle that a dog is essentially a working animal, and a cat is nothing more, in law, than a household chattel.

Currently the Animal Welfare Act allows for 26 weeks as the maximum custodial sentence in cases of the severest, intentional cruelty, with malice aforethought. However, all too frequently we see cases of people who have inflicted wilful violent cruelty on animals either walking free from court, or with the most minimal punishments. Magistrates have told me that one of the reasons they don’t go for the severe end of the punishment scale, is that it will just be overturned on appeal, which is to my mind another symptom that the whole attitude towards animal welfare and deliberate animal abuse needs revising and strengthening. It leads me to question “why is the original tough sentence seen as unjust?” and the only answer I can come up with is that our existing laws have led us to accept the insidious assumption that animal life is somehow not worthy of protection. Ultimately, that is what has to change, but at least if the CPS have a tough new deterrent to use in the very worst cases of premeditated cruelty, leading to the death of an animal with malice aforethought, then this is a step down that road.

I am not anticipating that, if this ever did reach the statute book, it would become the de facto legislation for prosecuting all cases of animal abuse. I see it as rather like a nuclear deterrent, something you hope will be rarely, if ever used. Maybe once or twice a year, for high-profile cases. I want it to be sitting there on the statute book in the hope that the next time a gang of yobboes thinks its funny to kick a dog or cat to death, or to set fire to an animal sanctuary for a laugh, they might just think twice, and think again.

As to the length of the sentence, I could have said, a life for a life, or 10 years minimum or an even longer sentence, but that would have limited the chance of large numbers of people signing it. I may well agree with you that more draconian measures would be preferable. I have written before, that one possible just punishment would be to do to the abuser whatever it was that they did to the animal they killed, and that once you had set fire to a few yobboes and thrown them off the car park roof, cases of deliberate animal cruelty would decline appreciably. In that respect, I share the views of the late Alfred Wainwright, as well as a similar physique, and broadly agreeing with his take on the Lake District.  However, such remedies aren’t available to us, so I have tried to go for a term which would still be seen as a deterrent, commensurate with the suffering caused, but reasonable enough that people would sign in large numbers. I imagine anyway that if it ever did get close to becoming law, there would be several attempts to dilute the penalty, by vested interests, before it received Royal assent.

I would like to examine here a few of those vested interests and I will take this opportunity, while I am at it, to nail my colours to the mast regarding my own attitude to them.

FOX HUNTING

Fox hunting is already illegal at the moment, although the law is not enforced with anything like the rigour of the enforcement of the law on, say, secondary picketing.  Because of the laxity of the interpretation of the existing law, acts of cruelty towards foxes often go unpunished and are brushed off as “regrettable mistakes”.  Hunting has powerful backing, a lobby made up of rich landowners and has the tacit support of some members of the Royal Family. I have said before, and I believe this to be true, that if fox-hunting had been a working class sport, it would have been outlawed 150 years ago.  Anyway, I see no conflict between what I propose, and the existing anti-fox-hunting legislation. In fact, the presence of an additional offence which an errant terrierman or “careless” hunter could be charged with, should concentrate the minds of all concerned and help to ensure that hunting stays within the law.

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS

I had imagined that various lobbies would seek exemptions from the legislation, including laboratories that routinely test products on animals.  Without wishing to rehearse the entire debate here about animal experiments, briefly, my own view is that they are largely useless, they only take place because the money and the funding insists on them, by ancient tradition, because nobody wants to rock the boat and ask why that should be so, and that they often cause great suffering and pain to animals, needlessly.  However, although the pain is needlessly caused, it is not recklessly caused, nor are the animals tortured over and above the normal torture they endure as a matter of course in their experimental use. This is a fine distinction which is probably lost on the animal, which still suffers anyway, but I expect the vested interests of the pharmaceutical industry to object that it threatens their cosy little merry-go-round of funding, research, nice, well-paid jobs and houses in the leafy suburbs of Oxford or Cambridge.  Again as with hunting, the very least that this legislation can do is to remind them to stick to the absolute letter of the law and ensure that any animal suffering is minimised. Meanwhile, I hope the separate, but linked fight to end all useless animal experiments will continue on another front.

ABATTOIRS

Clearly, millions of animals every day are killed simply to satisfy the human desire for meat in the diet, and this proposed legislation was never intended to deliberately target each and every instance of this. There are legally-binding rules for animal welfare in abattoirs and the meat processing industry, and indeed in animal husbandry generally, and people can already be punished for ignoring these. If my proposed new law again acts as a deterrent, and makes it less likely that meat industry workers, animal transporters, and the like will be cavalier and reckless about the welfare of the animals in their charge, so much the better. For the avoidance of any doubt, I have been a vegetarian for the last 38 years, and more or less vegan for the last seven or so, so you can take it as read that I am against all animal slaughter for meat, on health grounds, on the grounds of animal cruelty, and on the grounds that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable.

BADGER CULLING

I am on record as saying that the badger cull is a useless, costly, and ineffective way of dealing with the complex issues of bovine TB, a sop thrown to the farming industry by a government anxious to be seen to be doing something, even if that something is the wrong thing.  Following the foot and mouth debacle in 2001, the then Labour environment minister wrote into the revised animal health act the power to order contiguous culls and kill pets and farm animals in defined zones more or less at will in the name of preventing disease, thus neatly legalising (after the event) all the various illegal acts carried out by DEFRA and its  Scots and Welsh counterparts during the contiguous culls.  We now have a similar situation, where my proposed law would conflict with what is perceived as “the national interest”, defined in this case as being needlessly and expensively shooting badgers in selected areas. If my law makes the “lampers” think twice before opening fire, then so much the better. Given the long lead times necessary to bring legislation before parliament anyway, it is probable that the culls, and the government that instituted them, will have been discredited before any law such as my proposed one gets anywhere near the statute book.

In conclusion, I hope the above has clarified my position on several key points. Thank you for reading it, and if you have not already signed my petition, and feel able to do so, I would welcome your support. If you have already signed, please consider asking your friends to do so, as well.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Victor Maurus

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Summer seems to have suddenly burst over us in the last few days, there are flowers on the magnolia tree, and all the herbs are thriving (for now!)  As I type this, the door to the conservatory stands wide open and the dog and cat are wandering in and out onto the decking, bemused at their sudden freedom to come and go as they please.

This is not such good news  for the squirrels and the birds, however, who have to take their chance and nip in for bird food when they can get it.  Still, they don’t seem to be exactly starving, so I guess they are doing alright.  This must be one of those times when it’s good to be a squirrel, high up in the gently swaying trees in the bright sunshine with just enough breeze to stop you from overheating, sighing past your perch every now and again.

For the moment, the badger seems to have become a permanent fixture, as she has now been for something like nine or ten nights in a row, lumbering across the decking to hoover up the stale bread and peanuts at more or less 10.30pm on the dot. Last night she was 5 minutes late, and I was growing quite concerned. Of course there will come a time when food which is both nearer to her sett and easier to access will become so plentiful that she will stop visiting us – that has been the pattern over the last three or four years – however, we hope we’ve got a couple of weeks yet of seeing her.

Matilda has simply transferred her daytime snoozing from indoors to outdoors, and she has found herself a little sunny spot round the corner near the back door to the garage where she sprawls out in the sun in a most ungainly, unladylike fashion, with her legs going out in all directions, looking just like a hastily-discarded set of furry bagpipes.

The longer days have also meant more outings for Misty Muttkins, including, rather startlingly for the dog, Debbie deciding to get up and do a five mile run at 6am on Tuesday morning, prior to a full day’s teaching at college. It startled me, so God alone knows what the poor mutt thought. She ate her breakfast though, and then went back to sleep.  Debbie’s father’s genes are undoubtedly resurrecting themselves from the great beyond.  Misty’s also been learning to ignore the new dog-whistle, which I ordered because I hoped it would improve her recall off lead.  Debbie thinks this is a waste of time, and in the course of a discussion I said that I wondered if they did one for wives as well, to which she replied that even if they did one for husbands she wouldn’t buy one because she didn’t care if I came back or not! So we left it at that.

As for me, I am still teetering along on one good wheel and one dodgy one, at the old crinkle-crankle, expecting every moment to develop a sudden list to port and crash to the floor, raising a huge cloud of dust. However, a phone call on Friday morning brought the welcome news that on Monday, I shall be the proud possessor of not one but two new wheels on my wagon, which I hope will put an end to the problem for months if not years to come. I don’t know what they do with the old wheels, probably take them to bits and use what pieces they can in other wheels, if they’ve got any sense.

The wheels are coming off the country as well, of course, but then we said that last week.  We’ve had more missed targets than a blind archery contest, and more u-turns than a driving instructors’ convention. The latest being that apparently now, all schools will, er, not actually be forced to become academies.  Jeremy Hunt has had to give in and say he will talk to the junior doctors after all, the police force in ten or twenty counties are considering whether to feel the collar of the relevant Tory candidate for election expenses fraud, and best of all, Boorish Johnson is no longer mayor of London. Actually, that is probably a relief for him, as well as us, because it must have been incredibly difficult for the last year keeping his expenses as an MP and his expenses as mayor of London separate. People have been quick to assert that the election of London’s first Muslim mayor is only one step away from an Islamic caliphate being proclaimed in Tooting, but Mr Khan seems to me to look more like a hedge fund manager than a jihadi. I do object to him being mayor, but only because I object to anybody being mayor.  Directly elected mayors are a waste of public money, an unnecessary extra layer of local government that achieves very little. Bring back the LCC.

Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, has had the sort of week when you could crap a golden egg and someone would complain it wasn’t silver. In his case, usually one of his own MPs, the ones who still can’t accept the result of a democratic leadership election, six months on. If they can’t deal with the fact that Corbyn is leader, maybe they should just shut up and go and join the Lib Dems in their phone box in Truro, where they would be welcomed, no doubt, with open arms. Labour actually made a reasonable fist of the local election results, apart from Scotland, where it seems, rather depressingly, that they still haven’t learned the lesson that ignoring the issue of independence is the political kiss of death. All that sitting on the fence achieves is painful splinters in the bum.

My main engagement with the political world this week, however, has been watching as the total of signatures on my petition continues to climb inexplicably towards the magic figure of 10,000 when the government is obliged to respond. In case you hadn’t been following developments (I am attempting to try and get the law strengthened against people who deliberately go out of their way to hurt and injure animals for “fun”) here is a link to the official petition page. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/120545  As I sit here today, typing this, it needs 209 more signatures to get to 10,000. It automatically lapses on August 6^th, so I think there is very little chance of it going on to reach 100,000 and thus becoming eligible for consideration for a parliamentary debate, but even so, I am amazed at the way the movement behind it has grown.

When I started the petition, there were just 14 supporters. Then, one day, after we had tramped along the road awhile, there were 198. Then one day I looked behind me, and, amazingly, there were 6,000 following our banner. I felt like Byron, the day hee woke up and found himself famous. No doubt some have their own agenda, and I am the first to admit that what I have proposed is not perfect. Plus, I can imagine that the government response will be largely along the lines of “go away and stop bothering us, the existing legislation is sufficient”.  Without wishing to sound too like Trelawney at this point, if they do say that, here’s 10,000 of us that will want to know the reason why.

What I intend to do, I think, rather than pre-empt it here, is to see if I can gather the remaining 209 signatures and if I do, to post a one-off blog page in the middle of next week, purely on my reasons for starting the petition and how I would see it working in practice, then I can direct any questioners to that page, and I can also (this is the crucial bit) get my response to the government’s response in to the government before they respond to me, and thus, I hope, head off some of the flim-flam and guff they will be looking to utilise to blur the issue and blunt the threat. If I can second guess what they are going to say, and scotch it before they say it, maybe it might make for a better response.  You may think that, in a world where America seems hell-bent on electing Donald Trump as its last, apocalyptic president, all this is irrelevant. Sadly, you may be right, but one does what one can.

In fact, things like that, and the fleeting good weather and the general sweetness of summer and being warm, and being able to nod off in my wheelchair sitting at the conservatory door, and trying to unpick the general tapestry of birdsong back into individual threads of particular birds calling and answering each other, has all conspired to put me in a rather carpe diem mood. Seize the day.  So I may actually do the almost unheard of and cut this blog short, and go and do something (I know not what) in the remaining sunshine, until Muttkins and wifekins get back from Blackmoorfoot, at which point I will be required to confect a salamagundi for the latter and some Butcher’s Dog “rustic feast” mixed with muttnuts for the former. I might serve them up each other’s for a laugh.

Today has been the feast of (amongst others) St Victor Maurus.  Born in the third century AD, in what is now Mauretania, he is supposed to have been a Roman soldier, indeed, perhaps even a member of the Praetorian Guard.  Despite being a Christian since his teens, this belief does not seem to have hindered his military career under the Roman empire, until it finally caught up with him in his old age, and he was arrested during the rule of the Emperor Maximian.  Maximian had St Victor tortured, including having someone pouring boiling lead over him, before the saint was finally martyred, being decapitated in Milan around the year 303AD.

According to St Gregory of Tours, from whom much of the story originates, a church was then built over the site of St Victor’s grave, and many miracles were reported there. In 1576, St Charles Borromeo had the saint’s relics removed to the (then) modern church of the Olivetan monks in Milan, where they remain to this day. 

Obviously, we have no way of knowing at this great distance in time either what the miracles attributed to St Victor Maurus were, or whether they would have occurred anyway without the added factor of having taken place at the shrine of a saint. There is a whole case to be made for the effect of what you might call “collective positive belief” – if enough people think something will happen, and then it does, that also takes us on into a decision of what reality actually is anyway, in a universe where, unless you can measure its location, you have no way of knowing where anything is. Until I see the badger, don’t forget, it is like Schrodinger’s badger – it neither exists or does not exist. Simultaneously. So even if all that happens at a “miraculous” event is that enough people convince each other that they have all seen the same collective hallucination, that in itself is scientifically interesting. Or is it one of those events which I have written about before, when the “normal” rules of “reality” are paused or set aside for some reason.  It is easy, on a day when the afternoon sunshine seems timeless, to conceive of such a moment – although T S Eliot also had one in the middle of winter, at Little Gidding church – the “moment in the draughty church at smokefall”. There’s also the question of who chooses these moments. Or what. Are we chosen to see behind the veil momentarily, and if so, why.

Of course we could all be deluding ourselves, and each other. The only difference is the faith – or lack of it – behind your emotions. There will never be a satisfactory scientific proof, it’s like trying to measure the humidity in the atmosphere with a golf club.  It doesn’t stop me coming back to it again and again, of course, especially as I feel that my own sands of time are diminishing.  The thing is though, it seems to be the case that the more you look for it, the less likely you are to find it, whatever it is.

Still, it’s time to give up these fruitless musings and get on with the doing the thing in the sunshine. I’m working on a painting project at the moment, but it’s a surprise, so I can’t be more specific, but I might go and work on that for a while. It’s a shame to waste this precious time, because the next time you look, it’s usually gone.  So. It’s time to get a wriggle on. A mad wriggle, in fact. Fa la la la la…

Epiblog for May Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather is, of course, now officially bonkers.  Last week, I was sitting here writing that it looked like the worst of winter was finally behind us, only to then experience several days in a row of hail, sleet and snow.  If there was ever any doubt that we have trashed the climate, it’s completely vanished from my mind: you’d have to be a deaf, mad, blind, climate-change denier to ignore the portent of this crazy four-seasons-in-one-day mish-mash.

Poor little Matilda has been caught out a few times by the capricious nature of the weather, especially the hailstorms, which literally start without warning. I have never seen her move so fast. She’s back at the conservatory door before you can say Jack Frost, who is another person she’s not too fond of. One particular night last week, the coldest one (was it Wednesday?) she went to the door and asked to be let out, so I just keeked it open a little bit and she squeezed through. Twenty seconds later, she was back, asking to come in.  Poor little cat. Well, large cat, actually, but I made it up to her by giving her a tin of sardines for her tea one night, and apart from that she’s spent most of the week in her “stable 1” position, on the settee in Colin’s front room, curled round with her nose in her tail.

Oh, apart from Thursday night. Because we are getting low on coal for the stove, the old cat flap which Stuart the builder put through the outside wall of the lobby in 1996 has been exposed again. The coal bags are normally stacked in front of it. Matilda was in the kitchen, gazing into space at nothing in particular, no doubt thinking catty thoughts, when suddenly her head whipped round and she hurtled over to the glass kitchen door, jumping up at it and batting at it with her paws. What the hell? Then I saw that on the other side of the door was next door’s cat, doing the same. I have never seen two cats having a full-on, handbags at dawn, standing on your hind legs, fight with a plate glass safety door between them, but it was quite amusing.  And how enterprising of next door’s cat to find a new way of annoying Matilda by exploiting the (literal) loophole of the uncovered cat flap to invade her territory, if the lobby can be described as such. Matilda seems to think it is, anyway.

Misty, by comparison, has had a quiet week, for her at any rate, with only the prospect of 14-mile route marches across featureless moorland encased in a perma-frost tundra of ice and snow to break up the unrelieved tedium of eating, sleeping, and barking at anyone who has the temerity to come to the door, whether they live here or not.  Deb has also been using the landscape as therapy, mired as she is in the boggage of the exam season at the moment, and counting down the hours until the end of term.

The squirrels and birds have been constant visitors as usual. The birds included more sparrows, a rare enough sight these days to be worth remarking, and a pair of loved-up wood pigeons that seem, perhaps, to be nesting ion one of the trees in the back garden, judging from the coo-cooing that goes on more or less constantly in the background. The surprise visitor, though, has been Brenda the badger, assuming it is Brenda and not just a random passing badger that happens to have battened on to us this year. Anyway, for the last six or seven nights, she’s been visiting the decking and hoovering up what’s left in the bird/squirrel dishes. Plus some stale bread that we put out for her, and some pumpkin seeds that Debbie bought a few years ago in the mistaken belief that they were tasty and nutritious, only to find out that she had been half right. It remains to be seen how long this phenomenon will last, but I was glad that my little nephew Adam saw it, last night, just before he went home.

As for me, I’ve had a quiet week as well. Sometimes I have been quiet because I’ve had my head down working on the three books at once that are going through the press, and sometimes I have been quiet because I’ve been feeling sick as a dog and dozing off in my wheelchair once the pain killers kick in. Whatever it was seems to have passed over me anyway, hastened by several piping hot draughts of hot orange, honey, cider vinegar and lemon, which has killed it off for now.  On the plus side, my second order of herbs arrived and I have been busy putting them in here and there during the week when the opportunity presented itself. I have also been plagued with a fault on my wheelchair, which, for those of you readers who can still walk, is the same as having a fault with your legs. One of the wheels is on its way out, and is no longer round. Roundness is sort of a sine qua none, as far as wheels go, so at the moment I am progressing through life in lurches, jinking and jiving like Ian Butler on the wing, and wondering if the wheel is going to finally go “crunch” one day and deposit me on the floor like a sack of spuds, waving my arms and legs around like an overturned stag beetle.

To be fair to the NHS, wheelchair services, or whatever they are called now they have been privatised, did send the guy out on Monday, promptly enough, to look at it, but sadly, look at it is all he did, pronouncing it to be beyond repair, and saying they will order me a new wheel.  When will it come, I asked. Maybe it will come this week, he said. (It didn’t).

So, as in the song, with one wheel on my wagon, I’m still rolling along. Pretty much like the government, in fact, which lurches on from crisis to crisis. Jeremy Hunt, in his bid to become “most despised politician of the decade” is still putting his hands over his ears and chanting la la la la I can’t hear you, whenever anyone tries to talk him into resuming talks. Frankie Boyle, not normally a person I have a lot of time for, writing in The Guardian, not normally a paper I have a lot of time for, summed up the agenda succinctly. It’s all about privatisation.

Naturally, things won’t actually be improved; they’ll be sold to something like Virgin Health. Virgin can’t get the toilets to work on a train from Glasgow to London, so it’s time we encouraged it to branch out into something less challenging like transplant surgery. With the rate the NHS is being privatised, it won’t be long before consultations will be done via Skype with a doctor in Bangalore. Thank God we’re raising a generation who are so comfortable getting naked online. “I’m afraid it looks like you’ve had a stroke. No, my mistake – you’re just buffering.

It would be even funnier if it weren’t true, but the fact that it will probably happen tends to make the humour rather bitter-sweet.  Hunt keeps banging on about “fulfilling manifesto pledges” – point me to any page in the 2010 or 2015 Tory manifestoes where it says they are going to do a top down re-organisation of the NHS and then sell it off to the highest bidder amongst their corporate cronies!

The Tories must have been incredibly grateful for the bungling boobies of Labour giving them a ready-made distraction just when they needed it most. I can just imagine Cameron heaving a huge sigh of relief when the “anti-semitism” row broke out. It was just like Peter Griffin cutting away to a Conway Twitty gag. Labour are entirely to blame, for falling back into the twin traps of a) accepting the Tory agenda and b) apologising for things which weren’t really their fault. All that Naz Shah, the MP who started it all had to say was that she might well have forwarded a couple of tweets accusing Zionists of Nazi policies or whatever they were, but it was over two years ago and before she even became an MP. To be honest, I can’t even remember what I tweeted last week, let alone two years ago.

But then, of course, any criticism of the Israeli government’s massively disproportionate attempts to deal with the ham-fisted, pig-headed Hamas leadership’s encouragement of their own people to commit acts of ineffectual “terrorism” is always met with cries of “Anti-Semitic!”. Some blind fool enthused by Hamas fires a dustbin rocket that lands six yards inside Israel and mildly injures a passing donkey. Israel retaliates with a six-hour airstrike that takes out a couple of suburbs, a school and a hospital. People rush to condemn Israel, Israel accuses them of anti-semitism. It’s a depressing cycle, oft repeated.

What makes this different is of course, the Tories, the media, and half his own party (the ones who have trouble with the concept of a democratically elected leader with massive popular support) are all queuing up to use this as a stick with which to beat Jeremy Corbyn. Enter Ken Livingstone, a man who never knows when to keep his trap shut, and proceeds to make it worse.  Well done, Labour, well done. With an open goal before you, you hit the corner flag. It’s like back to the bad old days of Mr Ed the talking horse. Idiots.

The reason the Tories are so happy to grasp the opportunity of talking about non-existent anti-semitism scandals is that anything’s better than Brexit. The great confusion continues to rage and once more it’s immigration that’s being used to stir the pot.  Like a particle of anti-matter in a Dan Brown novel, the idea that there are “too many brahn people over ‘ere” getting all our jobs, all our schools, all our hospitals, being given free flat screen TVs and council houses, and demanding that we alter our culture to theirs and sing Allah Things Bright And Beautiful and Halal Black Sheep, Have You Any Wool, has expanded to fill the known universe, and proves impossible to kill off.  Even the Tories are desperately trying to kill it, at least those who want to stay in the EU are, even though they started saying it in 2010, because they know it will (completely and mistakenly) be their undoing in the EU exit referendum.

To give you an idea of how pervasive the feeling is, this week a pub, the Royal Oak at Attleborough (the one near Nuneaton, not the one in Norfolk) published an on-line petition because they claimed to have been told to paint out the red cross of St George that adorns the front wall of the pub, because it might cause offence, by the local council. The pub is painted outside in white, and the red cross is actually quite striking, and has been professionally done, and to be honest, if attention hadn’t been drawn to it, would have passed unnoticed, especially as it’s apparently been painted like that for the last 15 months. But the landlady was adamant she’d been told to paint it out.  I did vaguely wonder whether wires had been crossed and actually it was something to do with planning and conservation, because Attleborough is a conservation area. I do know that councils can get very sniffy about that sort of thing. We had some official correspondence a while ago demanding we trim back the trees along the frontage of the house because they were overhanging the road, so I wrote back to the council by return of post applying for a tree preservation order on the trees in question.

However, I digress. It turned out the solution was even simpler. The phone call from the council had been a hoax. When the local paper asked the council, they basically said they had never been in contact with the woman and didn’t give a stuff what colour she painted her pub. Warwickshire police, who were also asked, just in case, said they would only get involved if it was a traffic matter.  Which it wasn’t.  But, as a measure of how firmly the great confusion has taken hold, a) nobody bothered to check on the phone call and b) the online petition shot to 10,000+ signatures in the first hour or so.  All with comments from the usual suspects saying we want our culture back and St George was our saint (the fact that he was Turkish is lost on these people, as Oscar Wilde said, ignorance is a precious flower; touch it, and the bloom is gone.) This is the speed with which people will be queuing up to give the EU the boot, fuelled by a heady cocktail of xenophobia, fear, and ignorance, on June 23^rd. Time to start stocking up on canned food, bottled water, and candles.

I was mildly surprised to hear that the pub in question hadn’t bothered to check back with the council, until I realised of course that in effect they have just benefited from the sort of publicity which you would have to pay lots of money to acquire by commercial means. Even I have now heard of the place, and I live 200 miles away! I do think though, that people who post comments on social media about “our culture”, should probably be required to learn and recite a Shakespeare sonnet from memory before being allowed anywhere near a keyboard. Being able to know the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re” would also help.

I can only assume that similar rabid xenophobia was behind the decision of the MPs who voted against accepting 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from the camps in France. I hope their dreams are haunted by the screams of drowning children until the end of their worthless, miserable lives, which I hope will be soon.  It has been a good week for the government to bury bad news, of course, with the media dominated by the verdict in the Hillsborough enquiry.  I was an unwitting bystander to the disaster – well, not so much a bystander as a bydriver… I was living in Chichester at the time and we had just bought the house at Carlton, near Barnsley. Simon, my Chichester friend, had very kindly agreed to come up for a weekend and help do some joinery work, and we were all driving up there in his car. There used to be two massive cooling towers on the right hand side of the M1 (they were blown up a while ago) just about opposite where the road from Hillsborough came in to join the motorway on the left, and as we approached, we saw police in high viz jackets actually walking about on the motorway, frantically waving the traffic over into the outside lane.  How they avoided being run over themselves, or even winged, I’ll never know.  They were putting out bollards to close off the inside and middle lane.  Needless to say, everybody was slamming on the anchors “toot de sweet” and a bit of a melee ensued. Meanwhile, a convoy of ambulances, blue lights and all, swept up the slip road, on to the near-empty motorway, and disappeared at speed in the direction of Leeds. We looked at one another. Bloody hell!

We later found out that is was part of the sadly all-too-belated medical evacuation.  It all seems so long ago now, which puts into perspective the purgatorial wait for something approaching due process and justice for those who lost family members that day.  It has also prompted, as did the death of Thatcher, a further outbreak of hostilities, with both sides choosing to re-fight the salient points of what actually happened, fuelled by mutual hatred – the Tories’ hatred of the working class, especially as manifested by football fans, and the Liverpudlian hatred, with good reason, of a party which has brought such devastation and economic depression to the North and to Liverpool in particular, and of the Tory media which is its mouthpiece. Those on both sides have reprised the role of the fans who turned up late outside the Leppings Lane entrance.  Those with an axe to grind against Boris Johnson reprinted his infamous Spectator article, which spoke of the dependency culture and victim mentality and other slurs. In fact, that article was ghost-written by a staffer and appeared under Johnson’s name, because Johnson at the time was too busy horizontal jogging to know or care.

Almost all disasters have multiple causes, and there is no doubt that the excess fans milling about were a factor. But so was the failure of the police to contain and deal with the situation, the decision once they were admitted to the ground to direct them to compounds already full, the failure to recognise what was unfolding, and act promptly to summon appropriate medical resources, the general lack of communication between the emergency services themselves and between the emergency services and the public, especially those searching frantically for lost family members, and last but not least, the decision by the police to cover it all up and to resist, stubbornly, every subsequent attempt to uncover the truth since.

Apart from the last one in that list above, it’s possible that if only one of that list had been missed out, the outcome may have been so much better. The police have a difficult job, and often lives, their own and other peoples’ depend on their decisions, which sometimes have to be made on the spot. But at the same time, they have power vested in them to police us by public consent, and in order to maintain our trust they need to ensure that if mistakes are made, they are owned up to immediately, and remedial action is taken.

One disaster which was, fortunately averted before it ever happened, this week, was the shutdown of CERN, the multi-billion pound atomic particle accelerator buried under miles and miles of the Swiss countryside, by a weasel. The unfortunate mustelid trod on something electrical that had about a bazillion watts going through it at the time, and blew the lot. It’s a good job they weren’t in the middle of one of their atom-smashing, particle splitting experiments at the time or even now we would be watching rolling news reports of a giant mutant glow-in-the-dark nuclear weasel, or even worse, an anti-weasel, trampling through the smoking ruins of Zurich, like Godzilla.

This has been a grim week, though, in the world, errant weasels notwithstanding.  Proof, if proof were needed, that it’s a mean, nasty, compassionless society came in the form of a follow-up to the case of a homeless man who was hailed as a "legend" after saving a young girl from spending a night on the streets of London when she missed her last train home. Nicole Sedgebeer, 21,  had missed her last train from Euston to Milton Keynes and was on the verge of bursting into "drunken tears" she was offered help from a homeless man called Mark Collins.

Mark walked her to a 24 hour cafe where she would be safe to wait overnight and, leaving her with a cup of coffee, he went off to collect his sleeping bag before returning in the morning to walk her back to the station for the first train. Nicole posted her story on Facebook in the hope that "this story makes people look twice when they see a homeless person", prompting comments from her friends that Mark was a "legend". This all happened a couple of months ago, and since then, moved by such a heart-warming story, people have been showing their appreciation by the means of donating online. £13,143 has been raised, and it would be a nice finish to the story to find that with some of that money, Mark had been able to find a flat somewhere that he could then use as a base while seeking employment.

It would have been nice, but sadly he has yet to see a penny of it, because a charity working in the area, Safer Streets, has recommended that it might be more appropriate to give the money to, er, them, instead, than as a handout to a single individual.  Here we go again, back to the  patrician “well, I would give you a sovereign, my man, but you’ll only go and spend it on drink!” attitude. Safer Streets is a project run by a larger charity called Change, Grow, Live, whose chief executive pays himself £180,000 per annum. Go figure.

So, anyway, without really noticing, we have reached May Day, my favourite month of the year is here, and it’s crept up on my while my back was turned. The merry month of may, in the spring time of the year.  No doubt Jack in the Green will have been up at dawn at Hastings, the Cornish in Helston and Padstow will have been singing Hal-an-Tow, and the Green Man will have been seen in the meadows around Oxford. I was in Oxford for one of those mornings, either May 1^st 1974, 1975 or 1976, and it is indeed a spectacle. Worth getting an early bus, to see all those people in fancy dress, some of whom have clearly been up all night, wandering around at 5AM. Morris Dancing for breakfast tests the strongest constitution, even if you are only a spectator.  These are but a few of the things that make England great, of course, but they are interesting remnants of a past now largely obscured, largely forgotten, when the horned god Cernunnos was being ousted by the Romans, and Herne the Hunter and his wild hunt were heard, and occasionally seen, hurtling through the skies pursued by a pack of spectral hounds at midnight. Before the Roman came to Rye, or out to Severn strode, and all that. Last night was Beltane, one of the four great “sabbats” of the Wiccan year. I did know what the three others were, but I can only think of two of them right now. Mind you I forgot Uri Geller’s name this morning when I was trying to describe him to Deb and had to resort to “that bloke who bends spoons”.

For some reason, Beltane always makes me think of that passage in East Coker by T S  Eliot

In that open field

If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,

On a summer midnight, you can hear the music

Of the weak pipe and the little drum

And see them dancing around the bonfire

The association of man and woman

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—

A dignified and commodiois sacrament.

Two and two, necessarye coniunction,

Holding eche other by the hand or the arm

Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire

Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,

Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,

Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth

Mirth of those long since under earth

Nourishing the corn.

When I was at university I knew a bloke who was “into” that sort of thing. I don’t know if he ever did the naked dancing round the bonfires, but he was known for performing Hebrew banishing rituals in the early hours. I remember having a discussion with him one day about religion, during which I said “Do you think there is a God, then?” to which he blithely replied, with a smile, “My dear boy, there are Gods, in the plural!” Of course, there are religions which do have “gods” which are different “manifestations”, or aspects, of the same entity. Hindu Gods that can be either destroyers or preservers, for instance. In Hebrew mysticism, the Quabalah, the sacred diagram or “Tree of Life” contains points called Sephiroth, which are again symbolic of aspects of divinity, such as Chesed, God of Mercy, or Geburah, Lord of Hosts, and so on.  In a sense, I suppose, though I am no theologian, that when we pray to a particular saint to intercede for a particular purpose, assuming we do, all we are really doing is “channelling” that particular aspect of God that concerns, or is concerned with, our particular “intention”, be it the welfare of cats, or the most hopeless of lost causes.

May is dedicated in the calendar of the Catholic religious year as Mary’s month. Hopkins famously wrote of it that

May is Mary’s month, and I  

Muse at that and wonder why:          

Her feasts follow reason,         

Dated due to season

Some churches have specific Mary altars, or processions where the statue of the Virgin Mary is taken out of the church and processed, occasionally being crowned with flowers. Specific “Mary Altars” can be set up, and rites amended to include the Hail Mary. You might expect the church authorities to frown on this sort of thing, or at least to regard it as an ecumenical matter, but in fact Pope Pius XII was all for it, and issued an encyclical to that effect.

It is the obvious association of fertility and bounty with the concept of motherhood and birth/rebirth which are all knitted together in this concept. Once more we are4 back to the aspects of divinity – spring redeems, winter punishes: something which medieval people perhaps understood more readily than we do in our modern houses.

Having said all that, for all our modern double-glazing and central heating, and supermarket deliveries and broadband and surroundsound, I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking how fragile the membrane of happiness is, and how, in a way the reverse of disasters, how happiness only happens if all of a long list of factors are present. The house is warm, it’s late at night, all the doors are locked, the dog and cat have been fed, the stove is ticking away, the badger’s been, we’ve had our meal, Deb is snoozing in her recliner, Matilda on Colin’s settee, and Misty on her bed, and I’m just going to watch the end of this, or listen to the end of that, then I am going to go and get into bed and get warm.  How easily all of this could be snatched away.  How easily, if you removed one or two critical bits, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Life is lent, not given. One day, your loved ones might go out to a football match, and never come back. It was twenty four years ago this week that my father died. Cherish what you have folks, cherish what you have.

For me, I guess next week is going to be pretty much more of the same, Bank Holiday notwithstanding, and my favourite time of year vanishing before I can do anything to stop it. Not that I can do anything to stop it. I seem to have increasingly less control over my own life, so stopping time itself in its tracks, or even slowing it down, is certainly going to be beyond me! My other option would, of course, be to try and savour it as much as possible, but right now it’s all hell-for-leather and devil take the hindmost. So I guess I will be left lamenting May’s passing, a month from now, pretty much as I did last year. I may plant out the remaining herbs, and allegedly there are some roses and bedding plants on the way from Jersey, if they ever get there. If the weather permits. As Shelley might have said, if winter comes, spring can be far behind.