UK: Fresh criminal investigation launched into hundreds of deaths at Gosport War Memorial Hospital

Another case of mass deaths in a single-payer system.  Also a case of how effectively government health care covers up its callous misdeeds.  Only the vast scale of this episode kept it under scrutiny

The retired doctor, at the centre of the Gosport War Memorial Hospital scandal, could face murder charges over the deaths of hundreds of patients who were needlessly given powerful opiate painkillers, the police have said.

A total of 456 people had their lives cut short and another 200 were "probably" given drugs without medical justification between 1987 and 2001.

An official inquiry last year concluded that Dr Jane Barton, 71, who worked at the hospital between 1988 and 2000, had presided over an "institutionalised regime" which had a flagrant "disregard for human life".

A damning report revealed how patients who were viewed as a "nuisance" were given opiates via syringe drivers, often resulting in their deaths within days.

Three previous police investigations have failed to bring anyone to justice, but yesterday senior officers vowed to get to the bottom of the scandal and determine whether the prescribing of the opiates led directly to patient deaths.

Assistant Chief Constable Nick Downing of Kent Police, the force overseeing the independent investigation, said if causation was proved and suspects identified then “all homicide charges including murder” were on the table.

He said a team of up to 90 officers would focus on 456 deaths between 1987 -2001, but said the first phase of the inquiry, which would involve taking statements from relatives could take up to nine months.

It could see Dr Barton and other senior figures at the hospital face a range of charges including murder, manslaughter and corporate manslaughter.

In  2010 the General Medical Council found Dr Barton guilty of serious professional misconduct for failing in her care of 12 patients between 1996 and 1999, but she was not struck off and later retired to enjoy her hobby of wildlife photography.

The families of those who died welcomed the fresh police investigation but expressed concern that it might be too late to get justice.

Gillian Mackenzie, 85, the first person to go to the police about Gosport after the death of her mother Gladys Richards in 1998, said justice would not be served until a criminal trial was held.


Bridget Reeves, whose grandmother, Elsie Devine, 88, died at the hospital in 1998, after being admitted with a urinary tract infection, said the involved should face the full range of criminal charges available to police including “murder, manslaughter and corporate manslaughter.”

She said: “The failings by the CPS were catastrophic. The Gosport families were deceived and their relatives have been betrayed, this immoral disaster was perpetuated by a club culture.

“Even when concerns came to light all those years ago the officials just protected each other even when the fact shocking fact of death was staring each and every one of them in the face”


Ian Sandford, 75, whose mother Hazel died at the hospital in 1990, aged 80, said: "They should have sorted this out a long time ago."

Charles Farthing, 79, whose step-father Arthur “Brian” Cunningham died after being admitted to the Gosport hospital suffering from bed sores, said there had been a cover up for decades.

He said : “The level of corruption in a failure of the authorities to tackle this systematic killing is incredible

“But we’re frustrated that this is going to take a further nine months before we even know whether there is enough evidence to prosecute.”

She said: “The corruption in covering this up has been appalling. It stinks - this isn’t the country I was born in.”

In the wake of the inquiry last year Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the police and CPS would “carefully examine” whether new charges should be brought.

Following the publication of last year's report, Dr Barton, issued a statement insisting she had been attempting to do her best for the patients under her care.

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Why Does Highly Religious America Keep Liberalizing, Drifting in Europe’s Direction?

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once declared that “God is dead … and we have killed him.”

That famous statement rocked Europe nearly 150 years ago. His point was not that God actually died, but that people in the Western world no longer believed in God, and that this loss of faith would only spread.

Nietzsche’s prediction largely has panned out in Western Europe, where only 15 percent say they believe in God with absolute certainty. But America has been an exception to this trend, and remains so today.

A whopping 63 percent of Americans say they believe in God with absolute certainty, according to Pew Research. And although only 11 percent of Western Europeans say religion is very important in their lives, 53 percent of Americans say it is for them.

What’s more, new data shows that Americans actually want religion to play a larger role in society than it currently does. According to a new Pew study released Monday, roughly half of Americans say they favor a greater role for religion in society, compared to only 18 percent who say they oppose that.

That’s a surprising number, particularly when compared with countries in Western Europe, which are not so hot on religion.

But before we start cheering for American exceptionalism, we need to recognize something is deeply awry.

Yes, America is much more religious than Western Europe, but that doesn’t seem to be making much difference on the big-ticket cultural issues of the day. Despite our religiosity, we continue drifting in Europe’s direction on issue after issue.

Consider marriage. Same-sex marriage took hold in 13 European countries before it reached the United States. The U.S. lagged, but not for long. Public opinion in the U.S. has flipped in the last 20 years, from 60 percent opposing same-sex marriage in 1998 to 67% now supporting it, according to Gallup.

Or consider gender. Americans are becoming more accepting of transgenderism as pop culture, media, and schools promote the idea that gender is based on feelings, rather than an objective standard tied to biology. The result: 46 percent of millennials now say gender identity is a matter of choice.

Most Americans also are fine using transgender pronouns. An Ipsos survey from 2017 found that only 1 in 5 Americans would use the pronoun of a transgender person’s biological (real) sex, and even fewer would do so in Canada and the United Kingdom.

This cultural change has come at a dizzying pace, and it raises the obvious question: If America is so religious, why does it keep liberalizing on all the hot-button cultural issues? To put it crassly, what good is our religion?

The answer, it would seem, is not much good at all.

Bad Religion Is Almost Like No Religion

This is the argument that columnist Ross Douthat has made in pointing out the rise of “bad religion” in America. He notes that while we aren’t secularizing like Europe, we also aren’t strictly adhering to traditional forms of religion. Instead, we are “a nation of heretics.”

Americans increasingly view religion as a subjective thing with no bearing on the actual world. A recent study by Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research found that 6 out of 10 Americans say they think religious belief is a matter of personal opinion, not objective truth. Perhaps most shockingly, one-third of those identified as evangelical Christians also take this view.

This is the core problem, and it explains the paradox of America as a country with both vibrant religion and a liberalizing culture.

What we have in America is a radical separation of God from “reality”—the real world that we claim to live in. It’s not that we reject “God” per se, but we reject a God who comes with a certified worldview package—a God who orders the universe, sets moral norms, defines our being, and binds our consciences to a moral code in this world—today.

It’s not that we reject “God” per se, but we reject a God who comes with a certified worldview package.

We’ve kept God, but jettisoned the traditional package.

The problem is, this is almost the same as rejecting God completely. If believing in God has no impact on the way we view realities in this world—whether they be gender, marriage, or who counts as a person worthy of dignity and respect—then what God are we even worshipping?

Could it be that the atheists are right when they accuse us of worshipping a God of our own making?

The Tremors to Come

Nietzsche predicted that the spread of atheism in Europe would shake Western civilization to its core. He understood quite well that his culture had been shaped at every turn by Christian belief, and that pulling the rug from under that belief would send society tumbling like a Jenga set.

Nietzsche illustrated this in his “Parable of the Madman,” in which a prophetic figure—the Madman—hails the death of God. But the Madman goes further. He warns that tumult and chaos will emerge when people finally realize the consequences of their unbelief. Almost in pain, he says:

“What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?”

But then, realizing his listeners have no idea what he’s talking about, the Madman takes a step back.

“I have come too early,” he said them; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”

It took more than a century, but the West is now feeling the tremors of unbelief. The lightning and thunder are raging as realities once known and cherished are lost—dissolved by the acids of secularism.

This secularism is more pronounced in Europe, no doubt. Yet it wields extraordinary power in America because so many of us—even religious believers—have conceded vital ground, saying that divine truth has little or nothing to do with this world. In relegating “belief” to the realm of private opinion, we have made our bed and are now living in it.

There will be many more tremors yet to come. The unborn, gender, and marriage are just the first to come under attack. In so many more ways than we realize, we continue to live off the remnants of a Judeo-Christian worldview that has set sail.

In relegating “belief” to the realm of private opinion, we have made our bed and are now living in it.

We would do well to remember Europe before the coming of Christianity. In Plato’s Greece, pederasty was widely practiced and accepted. Dignity was not recognized to be universal. Slavery was accepted. Might, very often, made right.

Nietzsche knew that the “death of God” meant such things would be back on the table in the West. And so they are.

Consider these questions: Without God-given dignity for each individual, what happens to consent as the basis for modern sexual ethics? The right of the strong over the weak already is granted as the basis for abortion—why not to the stronger party in bed?

What about the human-animal distinction? Without real value differences between the species (we’re all the same stuff, anyway), why not blur the lines between species? Why not create hybrid human species in the lab?

A Way Back?

The questions we face are more serious than we can fathom. America’s high levels of religiosity are cause for great hope, but also caution.

Many of our religious communities have not yet compromised with the cultural left on the major issues of the day. These communities offer a vital connection to the past and the resources for cultural recovery and renewal, should our culture become disillusioned with its current direction.

The surprising fact is that Americans actually want a greater role for religion in society, per the Pew study. Perhaps this may signal the beginnings of cultural regret—or at the very least, a yearning for something that’s been lost.

But if Americans return to traditional religion out of disillusionment, they will have to accept the strings that come attached—the package deal. This will mean allowing the divine to speak directly to our daily, real-world affairs, to matters of gender, marriage, the nature of the person, and more—to live as a nation, really and truly, under God.

Is that a bargain America will soon make? One can hope and pray.

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DC Circuit rightly rules prayer in Congress is constitutional

The D.C. Circuit unanimously upheld religious prayer in Congress last week, following a lawsuit that attempted to halt the tradition of opening House meetings with invocations to God. While the lawsuit is unsurprising, it’s still good to see federal judges maintain the authority of the First Amendment, specifically the much-contested establishment clause.

According to the opinion in Barker v. Conroy, "a member of the House asked the Chaplain, Father Patrick J. Conroy, to invite Daniel Barker, a former Christian minister-turned-atheist, to serve as guest chaplain and deliver a secular invocation. Conroy denied the request, and Barker sued, alleging that Conroy unconstitutionally excluded him from the guest chaplain program because he is an atheist."

Barker also happens to be the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization dedicated to separating church and state. If that little controversy wasn’t contrived, I don’t know what was. But I digress.

In its opinion, the Court said the House doesn’t violate the establishment clause when it limits its opening prayers to religious prayers, as opposed to secular ones, because our country has enjoyed a “longstanding ... tradition” of prayer prior to legislative meetings for more than 200 years. Organizations such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation are known for making this kind of pedestrian argument, which is more anti-religion than it is anti-establishment. It usually fails as it did here.

It’s still worth noting the Court’s opinion actually outlines the beauty of how the Founding Fathers drafted the First Amendment and what they meant when they referred to an “establishment.” I spoke with Eric Baxter, of the Becket Fund, on the phone. He filed an amicus brief in support of the chaplain and explained the decision further.

“When we analyze the establishment clause, we have to look and see what the founders meant by it. There’s a continuous history, back to the founding of legislative bodies, of starting meetings with prayer. It’s understood that this is not an establishment of religion. The founders had a very specific idea of what an establishment was: forcing people to worship, establishing a religion or church for the country,” he said.

Despite this decision, the Freedom From Religion Foundation continues on the warpath in an effort to strip religion from the public square, always claiming that any kind of religious statues, monuments, prayers, or documents endorse religion and violate the establishment clause. On Tuesday the Times-Reporter reported the Wisconsin chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation is now attacking Welty Middle School for having a plaque of the Ten Commandments at the school. Guess what they’re claiming? That a Ten Commandments plaque violates the establishment clause.

Like prayer at the start of a House meeting, the Ten Commandments don’t endorse religion, but they are a marker of this country’s origins and, in fact, the entire reason this country began: to enjoy religious freedoms unavailable elsewhere.

While organizations such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation certainly have the right to exist and can file lawsuits until the end of time, their relentless attempts to strip the country of its religious and historical foundation by forcing every single utterance to God to stop or monument about God to be torn down is a window into their vapid existence. I’m glad to see even the D.C. Circuit rely on Supreme Court precedent to recognize the real meaning of the establishment clause and honor the First Amendment.

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What Immigration Reform Should Look Like
 
Immigration is one of the fundamental building blocks that help make America the unique nation that it is. But the debate over border security and immigration has become toxic because politicians have put politics before principles. And reasonable Americans find themselves trapped between zealots on both sides.

For over two centuries, the United States has welcomed millions of people from every corner of the globe.

And today, we lawfully admit over one million people every year. That is more than any other country in the world.

The debate is not about whether we should allow immigration – it’s about how we do so in a way that protects American sovereignty, respects the rule of law, and is beneficial to all Americans. So what does a thoughtful agenda for American immigration reform look like? Here are four guiding principles:

Number one: We must respect the consent of the governed, that is the will of the people. Individuals who are not citizens do not have a right to American citizenship without the consent of the American people.

That consent is expressed through the laws of the United States. Through those laws, we the people invite individuals from other countries, under certain conditions, to join us as residents and fellow citizens.

Number two: We cannot compromise national security and public safety.

Every nation has the right, recognized by both international and domestic law, to secure its borders and ports of entry and control what and who is coming into its country. A disorganized and chaotic immigration system encourages people to go around the law and is a clear invitation to those who wish to take advantage of our openness to harm the nation. Secure borders, especially in a time of terrorist threat, are crucial to American national security.

Number three: Becoming a citizen means becoming an American. We must preserve patriotic assimilation. The founding principles of this nation imply that an individual of any ethnic heritage or racial background can become an American. That’s why we have always welcomed immigrants seeking the promises and opportunities of the American Dream. Patriotic assimilation is the bond that allows America to be a nation of immigrants. Without it, we cease to be a country with a distinct character, becoming instead a hodgepodge of different groups. If we are to be a united nation, living up to our motto of e pluribus unum, out of many, one…we all must understand and embrace a common language, history, and civic culture. And that not only benefits America, but also those immigrants and their families who aspire to prosper here.

Number four: Our lawmakers must respect the rule of law and immigration is no exception. Failure to enforce our immigration laws is unfair to those who obey the law and follow the rules to enter the country legally. Those who enter and remain in the country illegally should not be rewarded with legal status or other benefits. When politicians condone such behavior they only encourage further illegal conduct.

Based on these principles, immigration reform should include transitioning to a merit-based system. We should end practices like chain migration, birthright citizenship, the visa lottery, arbitrary per-country immigration caps, and any form of amnesty for those here illegally. We must close loopholes that prevent enforcement of our laws and have overwhelmed immigration courts, allowing illegitimate asylum claimants and other lawbreakers to remain in the U.S. indefinitely.

And we must take on these issues one by one. A comprehensive “deal” subjects the fate of policies with universal appeal to the fate of the most controversial topics. The key is to begin by working on the solutions on which most Americans agree.

We must and can address this issue in a manner that is fair, responsible, humane, and prudent. This is too important an issue to not get right and too important an issue to be driven by partisan agendas. Let’s stay focused on what is best for the welfare of all Americans, both those of today and those of the future.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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