Yesterday in Parliament

The Wolfenden Report came out in 1957 when I was almost 13. I remember the embarrassed response from my parents when I asked what some of the words meant. This, plainly, was not a subject to be pursued with them. Sexuality was another word that had no meaning for me - I don't think I'd even heard of it. But I was at a North London Boys Grammar School in a fairly tough area, and I did understand that my interest in my fellow pupils was not something it would be a good idea to share.

It was another 10 years before the Sexual Offences Act became law, and sexual relations between men were no longer criminal. (The law had never applied to women.) By that time I was a regular at a famous gay pub in Hampstead. The next 3 years still count as among the happiest of my life because I was among people who accepted me as I was, and from whom I had to hide nothing. I made friends in 1967 and 1968 who are still my friends now, 46 years later.

Over half a century after Wolfenden, it ought to be the case that a person's sexuality is not any reason for discrimination, and that no-one should feel that any aspect of their character has to be kept secret for fear of disapproval. Sadly that is not the case. Teenagers making the same discovery that I made are still vulnerable to the effects of homophobia and still even kill themselves, so great is their distress. That has to stop. Believe me, no-one chooses to be gay.

My sexuality evolved - after a 4 year relationship with Mike I discovered girls, and in fact I've been married 3 times. Happily I still have friends who remain as exclusively gay as I was in my teens and twenties, whom I value, and whose happiness matters to me. So I am delighted that last night we began to extend to them too the privilege of making a commitment to love another person for ever. Things go wrong. I am a walking testament to that. But making the commitment is a sign of hope, a statement of intent, and something that everyone loves to see. Few people don't smile when they see confetti being thrown.

I hope to see the process continue, and to witness gay friends of mine getting married. I'll remember my friends from the '60s, Peter and John, who were together longer than any of my marriages has lasted to date, until John died. I met Peter the other day, and saw the tears in his eyes as we shared memories of the man he loved. So my first gay wedding will be a happy day, and a long, long journey since, back in 1957, I asked my parents what "homosexual" meant. I had no idea that the report in the news applied to me.

Yesterday's Angiography

Well, in short I've been feeling worse than I expect to for my age for a while now, most worryingly with shortness of breath and increased use of my GTN spray – the one I take when I have chest pain with exercise. Not a lot, maybe 4-6 times in a year, but that compares with none at all since my surgery in 2004 otherwise. And I know better than anyone that while I am pretty strict about saturated fat in my diet most of the time, a lot of the flavours I love are strongly associated with it. My view has been that it takes time for cholesterol to build up in my heart, and as I'm nearly 70 I should balance life-preserving abstinence with life-enhancing moderate use. So I have a little cheese or bacon from time to time, occasionally cook with butter and don't place any restrictions on my host or the chef if I am eating out. But knowing that I am breaking the rules, and have symptoms associated with heart problems, was in itself worrying and stressful. There are other symptoms too, not associated with my heart, and I went to the doctor with a list.

Frankly, he put the majority on the back burner in order to deal with the heart issue first, and the Consultant at Kettering who had seen me before and already had angiography results to look at from 3 years ago, cut out the middle man and sent me for an immediate second go on the table. I was expecting the result to be that I needed a stent to keep one of the cardiac arteries open, maybe more than one. So I wasn't hopeful of a good result.

On top of that one of my friends had a bad experience with the cardiac unit at Kettering, which alarmed me, as my previous time there had been problem free.

So I presented myself and after a waiting period a nurse came to collect me – and Bonnie who was at my side. Let's say straight away that everything was done to put me at my ease. The first nurse I saw, Suzie, was calm, attentive and ready to answer any questions I had, as well as supervising, again very calmly, a student nurse on her first placement. My hands were cold, and my blood vessels none too prominent, and Suzie had a problem getting the cannula into place. So she left me to warm up and get some circulation back into my hands. After a while Eva appeared. Brimming with personality and confidence she dealt with the cannula in one go, supervised the form the student was taking information with, and told me about the other benefits of sedation before the procedure – it opens the arteries a bit and makes the doctor's job easier. An impressive young lady. Now I had to wait my turn.

Eventually Lisa turned up to get me into the lab – someone else who oozed charm and confidence and, ushering me into the lab and onto the table, put me completely at my ease. Everyone was patient and laughed politely when I made my old joke about not minding what I was called so long as it wasn't late for meals. The Registrar, Nancy, checked that I knew what to expect and said she'd tell me what she found, and I asked her to let me know, if she had the opportunity, to clear up the disagreement between Bonnie and me about how many stents had been put in when I had my bypasses. No problem. By the time they got the sedation started I was as relaxed and cheerful as I've been in a long time, totally confident in the expertise of the people around me.

The procedure took about 75 minutes, longer than usual. Lisa said that was because my bypasses made it more difficult. She actually went into more detail than that, but I won't bore you with it. The technician driving the machine – the table and the scanner move like synchronised swimmers to get the angles the doctor wants for the pictures – was tilting the scanner at crazy angles and moving it over my head with only a few millimetres clearance. I thought he was very good. I could hear Nancy talking to him – “Down a bit, can you go back just a fraction, oh yes, that's very good” - then she'd pause for a closer look or move on for another view.

I was aware how incredibly lucky I was. If this technology had been available 30 years ago when my mother died from coronary heart disease she would probably have lived a good while longer. It's amazing that they can inspect the interior state of the arteries supplying oxygen to my heart muscles. My first experience of angiography in 2004 had led directly to the urgent bypass surgery that has so far given me an extra 8 years of life. The two angiographies at Kettering have showed, among other things, that the blockages bypassed then are now closed, which would have killed me had there not been diversions in place.

After the procedure Nancy told me there was something she wanted to discuss with the Consultant, but she could tell me that the bypasses were working fine. Lisa took me back to the ward, and Nancy came along to explain what they'd found. Item one was that the single stent put in by Prof Taggart at Oxford in 2004 was itself blocked. But there is a bypass in place around it which was working perfectly. There seemed to be no change since my angiography 3 years ago, all my bypasses were working as they should, and there is no sign of further damage. But they would be recommending a change in my medication.

Now super-confident, ultra-knowledgeable Dave turned up to deal with the wound in my femoral artery, the access point they'd used to get to my heart, and he had a lot to say about my medication. The new stuff I have been given is supposed to open my arteries and improve the flow of oxygenated blood to my heart. There are two common side-effects I should note – headaches (darn, I get those already) and if I drink alcohol (if? Did he say if?) I may become light-headed. Well, that'll be a change, normally I fall asleep. Okay, seriously, I will have to drink less and be rigid about not driving after drinking. And they're going to do an echo-cardiogram to check for leaky valves, just in case that's what's causing my symptoms. Anyway, it certainly isn't any worsening of my coronary heart disease.

Dave went home leaving me to the gentle and cheerful ministrations of Sadie, at the wrong end of a 12 hour shift, who removed my cannula, organised tea and a sandwich, monitored my blood pressure, kept me comfortable, and was both efficient and friendly before she finally sent me home.

I am very grateful first to the cardiologist at Northampton who, in 2004, passed me over with an urgent tag and to Prof Taggart at the John Radcliffe in Oxford who did an excellent job fixing me up, and second to the staff of the Cardiac Unit and KGH who were superb, both in getting me on the table so quickly after my GP handed me over, and then, on the day, looking after me so well so that what could have been a very unpleasant and stressful experience actually went far better than could have been expected. And, to top it all, good news at the end.

Police Commissioner Elections

The shambles of the Police Commissioner Elections, the low turnout, the spoiled ballot papers, and the sometimes inane, sometimes ill-informed comments on Facebook, combine to reveal how colossally ill-informed most members of our society are. I find myself driven to set out the basic principles involved once and for all, rather than arguing with so many, far too many, of my friends.

The basic principle of democracy is that the people cede to some of their number power to make decisions over them, and to exercise certain controls over the people at large for the benefit of all. But the ultimate authority remains with the people at large, to whom those given power are accountable. One of the ways in which that accountability is exercised is through removing those who hold the offices of the state from their jobs and replacing them with others. This is the essence of democratic accountability. It is shocking that this basic feature of our system of government is so poorly understood.

As it happens, the system actually doesn't work terribly well in this country, but one of the hopeful signs is that there are moves afoot to extend the ability the people have to call those in authority over them to account. One of the most important of these is the police. They have considerable powers, and very many of the people are dissatisfied with the way those police powers are exercised.

There are examples in the rest of the world where the changes proposed for us have been in effect for a number of years, notably the USA. I happen to know a bit about the way it works there, which can be summed up in a single word – variably. But I do know examples of where it works very well, where the police take into account public concerns and act accordingly, and where, because the Chief of Police's job depends on it, good relations with the public are a priority. The Chief of Police is elected, that's why his job depends on how satisfied the public are. This is an example of democratic accountability.

Someone suggested that we should invite applications for the job and appoint a suitable person in the usual way.  This raises a simple issue. The police have power over the public. It is therefore appropriate in a democratic system that the public hold the police to account, that they have a say over police priorities, and the ability to remove from office the Chief of Police if these matters are not held to be discharged satisfactorily. If the usual route of appointing people to jobs is followed that democratic control is absent. No-one has any say over who does the appointing of the Chief of Police – it regresses to an oligarchy.

The persons who have been elected Police Commissioners now have a difficult job, made harder by the absence of a proper mandate, vulnerable to dismissal when the next election arises, and vulnerable to criticism and complaint from those who did not bother to cast a vote, who gave up their right to have a say, and who will complain none-the-less anyway. Democracy works worst when the people do not play their parts – voting people into power and then holding the people they have elected accountable.

If we get bad policing the responsibility lies with those who did not exercise their democratic rights and responsibilities. If we get good policing the credit belongs in part to good police officers and in part to good Commissioners who will have done a difficult job without the public support they deserved.

I wonder...

I know that, apart from dealing with hunger and thirst, which I don't really get a lot of, eating and drinking are ways to recapture the long lost pleasures of childhood. There is an image in my head from over 60 years ago, dining at my grandparents' table surrounded by family – it was the highlight of my infant week. A table full of food with my family and friends recaptures that happiness. Some, if not all, of the unnecessary grazing that I do seems to me to be an attempt to recapture that happiness and the safety that went with it. It helps to repel the anxiety that is always lurking just out of sight.

Then there are the things I habitually do, or do for no clear reason. It seems to me that a lot of them are to fill my mind and stop thoughts coming that would otherwise be unwelcome. Reminders of the many bad decisions, the host of terrible mistakes, that I've made in my life. The constant nudging into awareness of how much better I could have done, should have done, if I'd got some of those choices right. And thoughts about the distress in other people's lives that I have been responsible for. I cannot say with Edith Piaf that I have no regrets. Sometimes I find myself keeping busy for no apparent reason, and I'm pretty sure that I'm keeping that stuff away from consciousness.

The other side of that coin is the set of things that I avoid doing, things (and just occasionally, people) that I regard as thieves of my time – the few years (who knows how many, but far less than those that have already rushed, ill-used, away) that remain that I really want to cram so much into. I have more books than I can do justice to, more ideas to assimilate and understand, more pushing to do against the boundary of my ignorance. Right now shopping calls, but there is a new book I've hardly started and several I have not yet finished, all dealing with things I think are important and that I want to get a better handle on. And as well as those ideas, there are places to go, old friends to visit, views to enjoy, times to share and new people to meet.

So let's get on with it...

Statistics, Media, and Sentencing Policy.

A short while ago at MK Skeptics in the Pub we had a very interesting talk by Professor Kevin McConway on Statistics in the Media. To show that I was listening and learned something, here is a short reflection on a headline in of today's papers. I think it was the Mail, but it might have been another paper that majors on exploiting ignorance and prejudice.

The headline was "20,000 spared jail reoffend" prompting the knee-jerk response "terrible, far too many, lock more people up and don't give them a chance to reoffend."

The headline, of course, tells you nothing. How many offenders were given non-custodial sentences? What is the proportion reoffending? What if 200,000 offenders got non-custodial sentences and 20,000 reoffended? Well, in that case 90% did not reoffend, which surely would qualify as a success. What if all 200,000 had been locked up at great expense to the community? And what if the 20,000 offences were trivial? Where is the benefit in that? The headline provokes questions. It does not, by itself, give an answer or an indication of whether non-custodial sentences are successful or not. And above all, it does not tell you that the reoffending rate among prisoners is as high as 74% in one UK prison and that the comparative rate for non-custodial sentences compared to short terms of imprisonment (therefore hopefully for similar original offences) is lower, not higher, no matter whether 20,000 seems to be a large number or not. (Figures from a 2010 article in The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/04/jail-less-effective-community-service)

How not to attack religion...

A friend of mine, someone I hold in esteem, recently posted the following quote by Sam Harris which is found in his little book "Letter to a Christian Nation":

"The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive."

This seems disingenuous of Harris to me. He cannot be unaware that all nations of humankind have religious traditions and that all of them recognise some sort of communication with the divine, whether directly in contemplation, through the agency of magic mushrooms or the like, or by casting runes and other kinds of divination. And as far as I know all modern societies also set limits beyond which claims of communication with the divine are held to be at least suspicious and potentially insane at worst. The details vary between societies and religions. He must also be aware that throughout recorded history rulers have sought to legitimate themselves and their policies by associating them in some way with the divine will. And we, skeptics that we are, tend to think that there is less sincerity in these claims and more cynicism than might have been thought by most people at the time. It also seems to me that it is precisely the interposition of a hairdryer that, in any modern society, would tip the balance from an accepted, if disparaged, norm into lunacy. If he cannot see why this is so, then his imagination is sadly lacking and his human empathy is in need of an upgrade.

As an atheist I think it is a sad, and sometimes a dangerous, thing that political leaders still resort to these tactics. It is even more sad that some of them even believe the claims that they make. But my opinions in this matter do not licence me to deride human history and the human emotions that drive religious hunger, nor do they make snide quips that I dream up an acceptable form of rational discussion.

Civil Liberty

I have long been interested in the idea of Liberty and the way it is worked out in different ways and places. And while this country was one of the pioneers of liberty (my own references go back to John Milton's Areopagitica - published in 1644, but I am only an amateur scholar - a real scholar will do much better than that) the present age has seen hard won civil liberty steady eroded. Right now there is a proposal to record all everyone's internet activity which I regard with horror. It's equivalent to opening everyone's post in the hope that some misdemeanor might emerge. But it is far worse than that.

My friend Paul Vella informs me that, under a bill passed into law a few years ago, the police in the UK have the power to remotely install monitoring software on your computer without the need for a search warrant - all they need is the approval of an Inspector and the belief that you are involved in a crime that would attract a 3 year custodial sentence. That's "belief" and we all know how flakey beliefs can be. Worse, if they can't install this software remotely, the same legislation provides for them to secretly enter your home, workplace or hotel room and install it by hand - again, without the need for a search warrant. And you thought your home was your castle. Not any more.

Did you know that under the Lisbon Treaty, passed by our government, they are allowed to intern people who have a communicable disease (see the list here). "Intern" - that's lock them up. The same treaty only recognises our right to life if we don't resist arrest. The death penalty was abolished in 1969 wasn't it? Well it has been stealthily re-introduced for acts of terrorism that could lead to or prolong a war.

There's more. We live in a country where the council dog warden can put you and your family under surveillance and obtain details of your Internet browsing and mobile phone calls! Yes - the Dog Warden. 

Are you interested in the Olympics? If you're lucky enough to be in the stadium and make a video of an event on your mobile phone you are not allowed to upload it to YouTube. Nor may you wear a Pepsi Cola T-shirt to the Olympic stadium. It may be your own favourite T-shirt which you wear often, but Coca-Cola are official sponsors and they wouldn't like it. And you can't even buy chips at the Olympics unless it is from McDonalds, or is served with fish. Curry and chips? Forbidden.

Free country? Not in a way John Stuart Mill, the great 19th Century philosopher of liberty, would recognise. And who cares? People are too distracted with Britain's Got Talent and David Beckham to notice what is really important.