David Wilson articles, 2000 - 2020

Me & My Pizza Pal Pavarotti, Camden New Journal, 29 August 2020

LEFT FIELD, now offered FREE online here

The NHS is Our Shield, Public Reading Rooms, 20 July 2020
Where is My Vote, Peoples Campaign for Corbyn FB,  06 January 2020 
El Pepe, Peoples Campaign for Corbyn FB,  02 January 2020
In Defence of Simplicity, David Wilson website, 02 December 2019 
The Crucible Re-staged, David Wilson website, 27 November 2019
Manifesto of Hope, The London Economic, 21 November 2019
Between the Wars, David Wilson website, 21 November 2019
Meeting Ken, David Wilson website, 9 November 2019
No More Tweedles, David Wilson website, 7 November 2019
Who Will Fight for the NHS, David Wilson website, 27 October 2019 
Brexit Jokers, David Wilson website, 27 October 2019
Winning the Election is Easy, The London Economic, 20 July 2019 
What Isn't Reported about Julian Assange, The London Economic, 16 April 2019
Corbyn must stand strong against attacks on Israel, The People's News, 28 August 2018
Palestinians have Right to Return and Live, The People's News, 20 May 2018
Israel's Act of Terror, The People's News, 14 May 2018
Giving the Finger to the DWP, The Canary, 11 May 2018  
Disabled Tribunal Victory, The London Economic, 10 May 2018
Disabled victory in courts: The People's News 9 May 2018  
Labour Party Remains on the Up, The People's News, 4 May 2018
Theresa May + husband + war = profit, The People's News, 26 April 2018
Criticising Israel is not anti-semitic, The People's News, 23 April 2018
The Pornography of War, The People's News, 12 April 2018
The Overton Window, The People's News, 6 April 2018
The Overton Window, The Internattional Times, 19 April 2018
Corbyn is no Anti-Semite, The People's News, 26 March 2018 
Corbyn Wise not to Spoil for Fight , The People's News, 15 March 2018
Disabled Man Taken off Disability Allowance, The People's News, 14 March 2018
The Calabash Tree, having a heart operation, 17 Feb 2018
NHS Privateers, The London Economic, 2 Feb 2018
Why Boris Johnson, a Face to be Punched, Public Reading Rooms review
My Disabled Son Stripped of Benefits, The London Economic, 24 Aug 2017
The Fool is for the Many, Jaroslav Hašek's novel The Good Soldier Schwejk, 14 July 2017
Music of the Spheres, Heathcote Williams play, 18 June 2017
Them or Us in the Election, The London Economic, 7 June 2017
Exposing Corruption in Charities, Guardian article about charity corruption, 16 April 2017,
Abandoning Refugee Children, The London Economic, 11 Feb 2017
In The Living Years, for Stand Alone under pseudonym, 16 Sep 2016
Who Speaks for the Refugee Children, Counterpunch after visit to Calais, 20 May 2016
Planet Zembar, Subdural Haematoma article in Huffington Post, 17 March 2015
Famous anti-Zionist Jews, Stop the War Coalition, 12 Aug 2014
What a Strange Way to Protect Civilians, article for US antiwar website about depleted uranium weapons, 16 April 2011
Bush in London, Counterpunch, 18 June 2008
The Collapse of Iraq's Health Services, Counterpunch article about collapse of Iraq's health services, 14 Oct 2006
Depleted Uranium Weapons, Future Trust, 2006
Gloucester Weapons Inspectors, Counterpunch, 30 Jan 2003
Music and War, as published by the European Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol 10, issue 3, 1999 and in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, University of Kansas, Fall 2000, Vol. XV, No. 8 & re-written for a chapter in Left Field



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From Havana to Bristol

 

“If I asked you what is the most corrupt place on Earth you might tell me well it’s Afghanistan, maybe Greece, Nigeria, the South of Italy and I will tell you it’s the UK.” Roberto Saviano, expert on the criminal dealings of the Italian Mafia.

With only 83 deaths to date, Cubans are 24 times less likely to contract Coronavirus than neighbouring Dominicans.

US Professor of government William Leogrande, has said “The whole organization of the Cuban healthcare system is to be in close touch with the population, identify health problems as they emerge, and deal with them immediately ."

Compare that to the UK where it would seem that the whole organisation of the healthcare system is to be in close touch with companies using the epidemic to grab hold of new business opportunities.

A good example is Serco, a firm in-line to be awarded a contract for Covid-19 contact tracing and that has already been awarded contracts for testing centres.

My personal experience of Serco’s catering skills during an extended stay in hospital motivated earlier research into the privatisation of the NHS.

 

In 2019, Serco—the same company whose logo you see on the side of prison vans—was fined and had to pay £3.7 m in costs to cover an electronic tagging scandal. The company, along with G4S, was accused of charging the government for electronically-monitoring people who were either dead, in jail, or had left the country.

 

Amongst many other privateers like Richard Branson and Virgin Healthcare, there is technology consulting company Deloitte who were awarded PPE-sourcing contracts by the Johnson government. They shipped in supplies from Turkey which breached safety standards and had to be sent back at your and my expense.

Does anyone else get the feeling that just as "Black Lives Matters" posters had to be hurriedly prepared for the movement now taking to the streets, the Johnson government had better prepare themselves to join Edward Colston.

 

 

 

 

A Long Drop Into Hell

 

I recently spoke to my friend, Oha Maslo, in Mostar. I would be there now with him and his family, but am stuck here ‘self-isolating’.

My blogs are my way of breathing out my anger against what is supposed to be our government.

Until recently, they gave no figures for Covid-19 death rates in care homes. Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland,` admitted the government "chose" not to test people for coronavirus in these homes while the pandemic spread. "We needed to make a choice about what to do with the capacity the government had back in March.”

Boris Johnson has said he "bitterly regrets" the coronavirus crisis in care homes and that the government was "working very hard" to tackle it. A "huge effort" was going on and that there had been a "palpable improvement" in recent days. He added that "it has been enraging to see the difficulties we've had in supplying PPE to those who need it, but we are now engaged in a massive plan to ramp up domestic supply”.

Meanwhile Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, announced that testing for all care workers and residents would now be available, regardless of whether they are showing symptoms of coronavirus. He went on to claim “the performance on testing has been unbelievably positive”.

Matthew Nutt, managing director of Accurocare which runs homes in Oxford and Basingstoke, takes a different view. “The left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing,” he said. “It has been a complete system failure … We don’t know when we are going to get test kits … How many more people have to die?”

Meanwhile, workers in care homes and hospitals who are trying to keep us all safe and alive could face “deportation” if the Home Office decides to withdraw their right to remain.

This is getting very personal. My brain surgeon was Nigerian, my heart surgeon Egyptian, the nurse who visited me most days, even when off-duty, Filipino.

I hope Johnson and his ministers take a long drop into Hell and with no NHS there to ease their fall.

It is very hard to calculate the coronavirus death rate in the UK because of government lies and prevarications. This is as accurate as I can be and would welcome other peoples investigative and math skills.

It seems to me that, to date, the coronavirus death rate in the UK is one death for every 1,330 people.*

Compare this to Greece which stands at one death in every 68,000 and Oha’s country, Bosnia Herzegovina, at one death in every 11,000.

This is the result of Boris Johnson’s ‘huge effort’.

Cabinet minister, George Eustice, insisted, "We don’t accept the caricature that we took an approach that was wrong. I think now we've got to focus on the here and now."

I dare him to say that loudly over the graves of the unnecessarily dead.

* I have taken the ONS' figure of 50,000 Covid-19 deaths in UK to date.

Who are the Cranks?

 

A friend asked me yesterday why I was writing so many blogs on the coronavirus. In slow motion here’s my answer.

I started this one today at 6 am after waking from a curious dream. In it, my wife and I were eating dinner cooked by one of our best friends, a life-long vegetarian. Her Irish father ran 'The Vegetarian Cafe' in London's Earls Court ten years before Cranks claimed to be the pioneers in vegetarian catering. 

In the dream meal she had seared a large slab of steak for me. I was puzzled because she told me I must eat it to stay alive. I tucked into the meat, but cannot tell you how it tasted because I woke feeling guilty. I was strangely moved because, not only had her dream-self tolerated the death of this poor cow, she had cooked it for me.

This dream was a double surprise, not just because the cook had abandoned her long-held beliefs, but also because, although not vegetarian, I have chosen not to eat cows since being given a bovine heart valve. I don’t eat pork either because pigs are intelligent. I know, lambs are cute and chickens can count!

My heart operation was the second of a trio of health crises over the last six years. First was a subdural haematoma and brain operation. Later, I had open-heart surgery, then a stroke caused by a bacterial infection that necessitated a 7-week hospital stay.

A couple of weeks ago I had a call from the Stroke Association to ask how I was getting on during the Covid-19 crisis. The friendly woman told me, “You do know you are high risk and looking at your records, you’re very high risk.”

I told her that I am lucky because I am in lockdown with my wife and that I have good friends and neighbours, including a total stranger who has been food shopping for us.

Here’s a sobering statistic. To date, a city the size of Salisbury has died from Covid-19. 

 

Ill and old, I know that I am on Dominic Cummings’ ‘to be culled’ list.

So here’s the answer to my friend’s question. This murderous government keeps my blogs going and flowing. So long as my cow forgives me for that dream meal, and my right hand continues to connect to my brain to type, I will fight these state assassins with my blogs.

I leave you on a positive note. Last night I attended a Zoom meeting of the North East Peoples Assembly. Watched by 4,500 people, I know that our numbers are growing.

And if you need help, or want to offer help to others, I recommend contacting your local Mutual Aid group.

Where the Rainbow Ends

 

“Since Blair, the NHS has been sold off piece by piece. Now, the mendacious Matt Hancock and fellow Tory extremists are accelerating privatisation under cover of a state of fear. It’s a power grab. Wake up. Get angry. Or the NHS is lost.” JOHN PILGER

The windows in my street are full of rainbows and “Thank You NHS” signs. On Thursday evenings the occupants stand outside their homes and give audible expression for their gratitude.

 

That is important, yes, but we must recognise that the NHS has already been cut to pieces and ‘profitted’ off. I've had first-hand evidence of this from my own hospital experiences as I spat out the results of Serco catering: the morning breakfasts of damp, cold toast trucked in from Swansea.

Matt Hancock recently put Serco in charge of the phone lines for Covid-19 contact tracing. At the same time, the company G4s was awarded the contract for testing and providing security at the ‘phantom’ Nightingale hospitals. Meanwhile, Capita are recruiting returning doctors and nurses. Deloitte's, with their expertise of helping government to privatise our national resources, are advising on PPE. Oh—and Amazon are delivering testing kits, the ones that are recorded as having been sent, but never reached their destinations.

There is no record of any of this important health work being carried out by the actual NHS. One more thing—the Royal Mail workers offer to deliver the kits for free was ignored.

The biggest scandal of all are Covid-19 deaths in care homes. Three years ago, in a government simulation of an influenza epidemic, Exercise Cygnus forewarned us as to what a Covid-19 type crisis could do in care homes. Its conclusion was that the UK was woefully unprepared. The report was hushed up with Matt Hancock telling us that, “Everything that was recommended was done.” The Chief Executive of Care England, Martin Green, declared this to be a lie.

Covid-19 has swept through care homes, killing nearly 7,000 up to 1 May. I personally know of a premier North London home which has recorded a death rate of 25%.

This is, I guess, the price we have to pay for ‘herd immunity’ and for keeping the anti-semite Jeremy Corbyn out of power.

Don’t take my word for it. You can read Cat Hobbs in The Guardian, David Pegg, Robert Booth and David Conn also in The Guardian, me in The London Economic and Tracy Keeling in The Canary.

 

Boris Johnson 'on the downward slope'

 

Boris Johnson says we are 'past the peak’, ‘on the downward slope’, and have 'been through a long alpine tunnel’. (Government Press Conference, 30.04.2020).

In 2012 when skiing in the Italian Alps he ran over an eight year old boy. He followed this with the admission that, "In the course of a 35-year skiing career of relentless incompetence, I have been involved in some of the most epic prangs ever witnessed."

All very amusing except for that boy, but now the setting for his ‘relentless incompetence’ and ‘epic prangs’ are no longer ski slopes. A whole nation is there for him to tumble and fall about in. Worryingly the Alpine references remain.

Here is sanity from Richard Horton, Lancet Editor who tweets this today.

Daily UK deaths this week. 813, 413, 360, 586, 765, 674, 739. We may be ‘past the peak’ but the number of daily deaths is a human catastrophe. Many of these deaths were preventable. News headlines should not be about meeting the 100 K testing target. They should be about these deaths

"He Will Do The Lancet Proud"

 

Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of the medical journal, The Lancet, was interviewed on 24 April for the Financial Times by Anjana Ahuja. A friend sent me a copy knowing that my father had been a past editor.

He died seven years ago and was delighted when Richard visited him in his care home. After one visit I asked him how it had gone. In answer he smiled and said, “A solid chap. He will do the Lancet proud.”

 

He was right.

I first met Richard Horton on the ‘Peoples Train” to the Stop the War demonstration outside the 2006 Manchester Labour Party conference. A memorable journey. Richard travelling with his wife and daughter and there to address us about war mortalities in Iraq. Tony Benn was with us, joking that we had nationalised the railways for one day. Most memorable of all were Hettie Bower and Bernhard Herzberg.

Hettie was then aged 101 (she died age 108) and Bernhard 97. They sat opposite each other and didn’t exchange a word. I was told later that she, as a German Communist, couldn’t stand the sight of Bernhard, who was a German Trotskyist.

Whatever the orgins of their political loyalties it certainly gave them longevity.

The Lancet had published a report in 2004 from a group of American and Iraqi public-health scientists whose survey had found that about 650,000 Iraqi casualties had taken place after the 2003 occupation . With forthrightness Horton said, “The best hope we can have from our terrible misadventure in Iraq is that a new political and social movement will grow to overturn this politics of humiliation. We are one human family. Let's act like it.”

Fourteen years later Horton told the BBC that the UK government response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a ‘national scandal’ accusing them of adopting a laissez-faire response by floating the idea of ‘herd immunity’. “We’ve had the biggest science policy failure in a generation,” he told the Guardian, adding these words to the FT. “I’m angry because I know how good the NHS can be. Politicians and policymakers and scientists let down the NHS and its staff. And that’s unforgiveable.”

Unafraid to speak out he said, “Some of the great advances, like the 19th century sanitary movement and the birth of the NHS, were not technical accomplishments, but political struggles.”

“Health workers in the present crisis”, he told the FT, “have been bullied and forced to see patients who clealy have or are suspected of having Covid-19 without PPE. When they raise concerns, they are belittled or threatened. It’s horrifying to see the lack of concern by some NHS management.”

Two years ago Horton was diagnosed with advanced melanoma. I had no idea about this. When in contact with me he has enquired about my health problems and said not a word about his own.

I agree with him about his experiences as a NHS patient. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in an institution where people have been so genuinely kind and thoughtful. That’s why I’m so angry that we didn’t act sooner.”

And with this comment, “I wake up and think I’ve got to make the most of every day, because I don’t know how many I will have.”

I hoipe you will join with me and insist on many many more.

Butterflies and tornadoes

 

I have always liked the story about the butterfly in Brazil flapping its wings and setting off a tornado in Texas. It suggests that tiny actions can produce massive changes.

Anne and I live in a one-bedroom flat. As high-risk I stare out at our neighbours and wonder what life is like for people living in multi-storey flats. A few minutes on the internet gives me the answer.

In Tower Hamlets an outbreak of Covid-19 hit Barnardo Gardens which houses 200 people. “No one feels safe,” said one resident on the fifteenth floor and trying to cope in this situation with two young children, “At least ten people on my landing are ill and there’s no one to help. We feel abandoned.”

 

Residents have access to just two lifts which are someimes out of use. One wheelchair-bound asthmatic woman says she feels like she’s in prison. "I just sit and look out the window all day. And that's really annoying me because I want to go out."

Have you ever received a letter from HM Revenue & Customs Tax Inspector, written personally to you and containing these words ...  "You must make payment in full by DATE. If you do not, I will start distraint action against you. This means that I will seize your possessions and later arrange to have them sold at public auction. The proceeds from the sale will be set against the debt and the costs of the action."

Not if your name is Richard Branson, Theresa May’s husband, Phillip May, or at the head of five of the UKs biggest companies who pay not one penny in tax.

Of the top 10 countries allowing billions in tax avoidance, four are British overseas territories. Branson’s island Necker in the British Virgin Isles is, of course, one of them.

When challenged Government claims that tackling tax avoidance is a priority for them, but Tax Justice Network found that the UK has “single-handedly” weakened the global corporate tax system which loses an estimated £395 billion per annum to avoidance.

This is more than three times the NHS budget. There would be funds to put an end to the suffering taking place at Barnardo Gardens.

Alex Cobham, Tax Justice Network CEOI, has said, “A handful of the richest countries have waged a world tax war so corrosive, they’ve broken down the global corporate tax system beyond repair …. The ability of governments across the world to tax multinational corporations in order to pay teachers’ wages, build hospitals and ensure a level playing field for local businesses has been deliberately and ruthlessly undermined.”

John McDonnell, ( remember him?) and speaking under the words, ‘For the Many not the Few’, during what was supposed to have been a General Election, said, “The Tories’ record on tax avoidance is embarrassing and shameful … The only way the UK stands out internationally on tax is in leading a race to the bottom in creating tax loopholes … A Labour government will implement the most comprehensive plan ever seen in the UK to tackle tax avoidance and evasion.”

Memories.

The sun shines, I can hear children’s laughter in the gardens below, and we are grateful to have kind neighbours and a police cadet we have yet to meet, who braves the long supermarket queues to do our weekly shop. He then drops it off here by bicycle. 

 

We have bought two folding chairs so we can sit outside at the front of the house and another stranger stopped by (two meters distance of course) and offered to add our food order to her delivery.

We are lucky, but my sadness and anger continues at the prolonged fate of those residents at Barnardo Gardens.

Some people are saying they hope things will return to normal once the epidemic is over. I hope not. We have to start living in recognition that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all.’ We have to behave like Brazilian butterflies and set off social and political tornados.