Strikebreaker

 

Once you start looking for HPing themes in fiction it's amazing how much you find that was previously invisible to you. Even a story set in the distant future out in space echoes resonantly with the tones of the gas spanner, the patslide and the lodge. Strikebreaker is a short story by one of the biggest names in science fiction, Isaac Asimov. It was first published in a literary magazine in 1957 and has since been added to several other periodicals and a couple of Asimov's numerous anthologies. Its original title was "Male Strikebreaker" which implies scabbing is a women's thing, which is not true and therefore the editor's choice made no sense to the author. The story is set on a tiny planet called Elsevere, one no bigger than one of the real minor planets of our solar system like Vesta or Eris, only this is an exoplanet; it orbits another star. A group of astronauts from earth have landed on it and created a permanent base by excavating tunnels and chambers inside it. However, their long isolation has caused them to develop some unusual political and sociological traits. Because there is no natural biosphere on Elsevere they must recycle everything they use and process all waste very carefully. The threat of scarcity and austerity looms constantly and this his has led to a highly rigid and authoritarian society; including a caste system in which people are socially segregated depending on what job they do, similar to traditional communities in India. A visitor arrives at the colony, a sociologist called Steven Lamorak who is doing a study about the community, but when he gets there he finds that there is some tension in the air. Water on the planet is reused over and over again, extracted from sewage by distillation and the toilet waste is separated and used as fertilizer for the indoor farms. This job is handled by somebody called Igor Ragusnik and his family. He is the community's untouchable, a dalit. Now he has gone on strike and is refusing to process fresh water. This would eventually lead to the death of the entire community from dehydration or potable disease. His demand is for an end to his social segregation, for his child to be allowed to play with other kids and for his wife to be able to talk to other women. He is adamant and refuses to back down. The government of the colony refuse to comply also. They know that this stalemate will result in all their deaths, but the taboo of breaking the caste system is so strong that is surpasses even their survival instinct. Lamorak decides he has no choice but to intervene and volunteer to do Ragusnik's job for him in order to save everybody's life. This would force the water processor back to his duties because his clout over the others will be gone. None of the other castes know how to do the job so Lamorak has to give himself a crash course from instruction manuals. Ragusnik is obviously furious, but Lamorak tells him that he has won the moral argument and that he needs to stop now before people die. He has achieved his aim of making the other people on Elsevere aware of his feelings and so they will subsequently begin to question the fairness of their caste segregation. Ragusnik reluctantly returns to work and the crisis is over. However when Lamorak returns to the governmental offices expecting gratitude and friendship for saving the people of Elsevere, he is forbidden entry and is informed very brusquely that he is being deported and banned permanently from the planet. The reason being, he has done the work of the untouchable himself and so is therefore now also a dalit. Strikebreaker is approximately a ten minute read. Source: http://blog.ac-versailles.fr/villaroylit/public/Strikebreaker.pdf.
 
The allegory in Strikebreaker is obvious. We HP's are all Ragusniks. The caste system described in the story actually exists, but not just in India and other places where it is very formal and regimented. It also can be found in Western capitalist societies in the form of the social class system. This is becoming more complex as history evolves, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2013/04/what-class-are-you.html, but is remains an unspoken and self-organizing imperative. It is not codified by law; there is no statute prohibiting a senior registrar from marrying a porter, but the rule nevertheless exists. It is enforced by peer pressure, social approval or disapproval. Such psychological and cultural forces are very powerful and history has shown they are broken far less often than official regulations. This became obvious to me when I realized that "Jack Shaw" was far angrier with me than he would have been if I had set fire to his car or stolen his wallet etc, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2023/05/i-lied-to-jack.html. Unlike some people, especially the trade unionists at my hospital who are very leftwing, I don't think social class structure is necessarily a bad thing. In fact it may well be inevitable and natural in an organic society free from the social engineering we see so much of today. It is worth noting that in the story, Igor Ragusnik lives in a much bigger and more luxurious house than anybody else on planet Elsevere; it's a way to compensate him for his loneliness. However, when that class system causes people to behave with groundless and senseless hostility to those "beneath them", or even the opposite in the form of inverted snobbery, that society enters into a serious pathology. For example, extreme class division over many generations produces distinct racial differences between the different classes. We see this in India with the dalits being easy to spot from a difference because they tend to have somewhat darker skin. (This may be because of invasions of the so-called Ayra from what is now Iran and Afghanistan in India's ancient past. To this day there are populations in those countries whose appearance is hardly different from white Europeans. Conversely the Tamil people of southern India have distinct facial features and skin almost as black as an African's. The many language groups of India support this hypothesis.) Over time this has a dysgenic effect, reducing intelligence, adaptability and mutual fertility. HG Wells' novella The Time Machine projects that progression into the far future in which humans have changed into the beautiful but passive "Eloi" and the degenerate and aggressive "Morlocks". I have never asked any of the John Radcliffe porters' persecutors the vital question: "Why are you doing this to us?" I suspect the answer, after a long pause, would be: "Dunno!" See the links below for details. So I reject the socialist vision of universal equality and a classless society, but at the same time I oppose the mindless chauvinism we experience in our conventional world. Can't we live in a world with different classes, but with respect and humanity shown to all people? We all have a place. We are all different, but we are all equally important.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/01/well-take-it-from-here.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/01/how-dare-you.html.

Hats

 

The picture above is a still from the 1972 film Carry on Matron. Source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068339/. (I find the Carry On's generally a remarkably rich source of information for everything HP-esque. I might one day do a longer article dedicated to that particular film because it is set in a maternity unit, like where I served for nine years of my career.) Here we see a desk and/or senior porter in the uniform of his era, played by the actor Derek Francis. He is dressed in a white-and-tie, as you'd expect from more recent codes; but his uniform includes a jacket and peaked cap. Porters in hospitals are traditionally bareheaded and mostly have been for as long as records can be found. (This is a pattern I see across the civilian professions too. The traditional nurses' bonnet has also gone after shrinking considerably over the years until it was just a folded napkin tucked into a ponytail. They were phased out soon after I joined up.) I think I'd like to have worn a hat as part of my uniform. Possibly for general duties something more utilitarian would have done, like a baseball cap, the kind the police wear in some countries. The peaked cap would be suitable for more public and formal roles, like desk. A hat gives a sense of professionalism and position; self-discipline and authority. I, for one, think we should introduce it for our own uniform. Please comment below if you agree or disagree.

Is Lucy Letby Innocent?

 

Why is it only now that the question has entered the mainstream media that Lucy Letby might be innocent? Her trial is complete and now all that's left is for her to live out her life behind bars. This will not be a happy life. She will need to be held in permanent solitary confinement because HMP Bronzefield is home to some very mean bitches and some of them are mothers. How will they regard a woman who kills babies? What would they do to her if they caught her? Therefore if a mistake has been made it is very important that it be corrected. To be fair, a few journalists have raised questions previously about the neonatal nurse from Cheshire, such as Peter Hitchens, see below, but these were largely curtailed. It is possible publicity has only increased now because the end of her trial has lead to reporting restrictions being lifted. These restrictions are unfortunately indispensable so that the public, and therefore the jury, could not claim to be biased about her case. The downside of that is that the government, police and judiciary have a monopoly on the narrative given to the media and therefore said public. Lucy Letby graduated with a nursing degree in 2011 and began her service at the Liverpool Women's Hospital before moving to the Countess of Cheshire Hospital. She was determined to be a paediatric or neonatal intensive care nurse and she trained hard to qualify in that discipline. She once told people that general nursing was boring. Investigations began with typical NHS passive aggression and dithering; in 2015 a group of consultants "asked" the nursing officer to "move" Letby to a non-clinical role. She was transferred to a patient liaison team. Naturally it is a sad fact of life that in a neonatology unit (At OxRad this was called a SCBU, Special Care Baby Unit; usually pronounced "skuh-boo") babies are going to die regularly. They are often born prematurely and so cannot breathe by themselves or digest food. However, that particular unit had always experienced an average of two to three deaths per year; yet in a single month, June 2015, they suffered three. A fourth baby nearly died with a similar pathology to the other three, but was happily saved. There was another death the following month. Then the head paediatrician of the unit noticed that there was a single common factor; Letby had been on duty for all of them. This could have been a coincidence; after all she was known to put in a lot of overtime. The Trust board and Quality Care Commission rejected concerns on this basis. A year later following a number of other unexplained deaths the doctors once again petitioned the board for action, but the board refused. Interestingly once of their concerns was for the Countess of Cheshire's reputation, the very thing they used to dismiss me, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/01/ten-years-on.html. Following a fresh investigation by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, they concluded that the anomalous increase in deaths existed but had no obvious cause and therefore management could not be blamed. Around the same time Letby won an official grievance for being taken off the unit and was returned to frontline clinical care, this time at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool. Her accusers among the Countess neonatal team were ordered to write her a letter of apology. The police were first called in April 2017 and they immediately set up an undercover investigation to establish the cause of the deaths on the Countess neonatal ITU called "Operation Hummingbird". Eventually, after more than two and a half years since the spotlight of suspicion first shone on her, Lucy Letby was arrested. The irony is not lost on me that the decision to begin investigations against me took just eight days. The police found some personal journals in which she expressed negative and aggressive emotions. These included the words: "I am evil! I did this! I killed them on purpose!" This has been interpreted by some as a confession, although Letby never confirmed that formally. For all we know this could have been the ramblings of her imagination, a dream diary or notes for a fiction project etc. She did seem to have a rather morbid fixation with the tragic side of her work, looking up the relatives of the babies who died on social media. Most incriminating of all, she altered the patient notes, something also done by Dr Harold Shipman, possibly Britain's worst serial killer. She took medical records home with her and hid them in her bedroom, which is in itself a gross breach of confidentiality law. Letby's explanations for this behaviour were totally inadequate; for example she claimed she only took these classified documents home in order to shred them. However, the hospital has its own shredder; I used to take records to it myself in carefully sealed bags. After Lucy Letby left the Countess unit the unexplained deaths and injuries stopped. She has a whole life order on her sentence which means she can never be considered for probation.
 
A lot of people online have been speaking out ever since the news reported on her charges and I have been contacted personally by three individuals asking me for my opinion. A lot of them reckon she was set up as a scapegoat to conceal the institutional irresponsibility of the Trust board and unit management. I think not. If this were true then we would see NHS nurses being carted off to the slammer every week. What's more, if that were even half true, it hasn't worked. The government has now turned its attention towards the Trust officials and ordered the DHSC to carry out the "Thirlwall inquiry" which is going to destroy a lot of careers and might even result in some criminal malpractice charges. They also face a class action lawsuit from the victims' parents. The New Yorker magazine's Rachel Aviv wrote a very long article claiming that Lucy Letby was a victim of bad luck and wilful bias in analyzing statistics. She also rejected the testimony of one of the expert prosecution witnesses, Dewi Evans, because he had been criticized for his unreliability in previous cases. Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/20/lucy-letby-was-found-guilty-of-killing-seven-babies-did-she-do-it. (This article is currently invisible in my country. I have included the link in case that changes.) The Guardian have published a similar article: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/09/lucy-letby-evidence-experts-question. I have written a lot about Peter Hitchens in the past, for example https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/06/hold-your-nose-and-vote-tory.html, and am doing so again because he has joined this movement. He doubts the qualifications of the jury because the case involved a lot of specialist medical knowledge. There is no direct evidence against Lucy Letby. Nobody has even caught her in the act. None of the path reports have been designated as unlawful killing by a coroner, meaning that malicious intent does not have to be the only cause of what was done to the victims. None of the babies had, for example, a stab wound or unexpected injection mark. The defence could not, or would not, put expert medical witnesses of their own on the stand. It was only outside the courtroom that several doctors voiced their scepticism. The test to reveal insulin overdoses, for example, did not detect the drug itself, only the antibody response which can "cross react" with other substances. Similar doubts have been raised by other toxicology results listed on the path reports. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNB0CaKI3IM. Several people, including those who know Lucy Letby well, have said things like: "But she doesn't look like a serial killer!" or "She seemed so normal!" This is not evidence of innocence. Serial killers often do appear normal. In fact excessive normality is a bit of a red flag for me, for example: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2019/10/peter-croft-and-ben-emlyn-jones.html. Psychopaths have to wear a "mask of sanity", which is actually the title of the first book about the subject. They tend make this mask as conventional as possible to avoid suspicion. Because there is no real personality behind this facade there is no reason why it should have any oddities. People with eccentricities are usually those who are most likely to attract repulsion and distrust, but they tend to be pretty harmless... A name leaps to mind immediately! A good fictional portrait of the "Mr Perfect" who is really the opposite is Patrick Bateman, the antihero of Brett Easton Ellis' book American Psycho and Mary Harron's 2000 film adaptation. Letby was considered so ordinary by her peers that her nickname was "vanilla". However, this is not evidence of guilt either; some people are just naturally very nondescript. If Lucy Letby is the victim of a miscarriage of justice then is it deliberate or accidental? There seems to be no motive for a conspiracy to frame her. Nobody has benefited from her imprisonment, as I have said. She is not a white straight male so will not aid government's attempt to "balance the conviction rates". Is this supposed miscarriage therefore accidental or maybe just a product of the subconscious drive to assign blame so that things simply make sense? The justice system is supposed to control for that, but there are numerous examples of where it fails abysmally to do so. If this is the case, then an appeal would definitely be justified; but on what grounds? I think there is only one way, the same way accusations stuck to her in the first place: circumstantial evidence. Hypothetically, if Lucy Letby is an innocent woman wrongly incarcerated then eventually this will become very obvious through the same kind of research that was done to incriminate her in the first place. If the mysterious deaths continue then what could be the cause of those? Maybe the data gathered by the Thirlwall inquiry will help. Unfortunately building a statistical case to exonerate this young woman will take a long time, hopefully less time than the four years Operation Hummingbird was running. This article will probably be the first of a series of publications on this subject and I will shortly be presenting a special episode of The Gas Spanner about it. This will include a listener's question and answer session, see: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-gas-spanner-programme-89.html.

The Work by Cabal

 

My good friend and EP&DBHP "CABAL" has put ink to parchment again; this time his article is simply called The Work. It was originally written in 2009 after just two years of service, and fifteen years is a long time in hospital portering, in fact it is in anything; and his opinions have changed. He has republished this for St Theo's Day 2024. I remember him when he first joined us. CABAL had previously been assigned to a hotel in North Oxford and so had no experience of HPing or any other kind of healthcare work. He was put into it by an employment agency, the most common way anybody gets into HPing these days. I am against agencies for anything other than small scale temporary work. It is the old adage that conscripts make bad soldiers. An agency employee is literally thrust into anything and everything whether he or she likes it or not. Why should they feel any commitment or loyalty to their "placement"? It's not something they have any contractual relationship with or have any incentive to become attached to. They are less likely to bond emotionally with their colleagues or take action to gain better pay and conditions. A few decades ago agencies made up about ten thousand workers nationally. Today that figure is nine times as much. The justification is that any HP who impresses management can be offered a contract at their discretion, but some porters have been waiting years. I'm all in favour of a trial period for new employees; you should have to prove you've got what it takes to be a HP, but not for an indefinite length of time. State employers also have no incentive to favour good workers, and as I've said many times before; they strangely seem to want the opposite for some reason, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2019/05/sarah-kuteh-loses-appeal.html.
 
CABAL describes his first day in HPing and how it feels so transient and unique, before the familiarity of experience kicks in. I felt exactly the same when I started in 1988. His experience also totally gels with mine and he has also read Hard Work by Polly Toynbee, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/05/hard-work-by-polly-toynbee.html. CABAL then brings up a thorny subject, internal racism. HPing in the present day, like all low paid and low conventional status jobs in Britain, is done primarily by recent immigrants. The JRH lodge was filled with people from all over the world, but there were significant numbers in particular from the Philippines, Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent and Africa. A lot of us felt that the Filipinos especially practiced a form of national nepotism. I don't really mean that as a criticism; perhaps it is just human nature. We are naturally a tribal species after all. Many of the native porters felt they were being discriminated against in this situation. That demographic of course includes myself; but, whether it was justified or not, I never experienced that emotion personally. I found that my loyalty to my EP&DB&SP's drowned out any sense of resentment I might have otherwise felt. This is difficult for me to write about because I know CABAL and we're good friends. He is from Poland and his life has therefore been shaped by the current government immigration policy. I bear him no ill will personally and felt happy serving alongside him, as I did many other of my brother porters from around the globe. I understand why so many people want to come and live in this country, even risking their lives crossing the English Channel in totally inadequate craft. Wouldn't I do the same in their shoes? I once spoke to a young woman in sterile supplies. She was Hungarian and her mother back home in Hungary did the same job at a large hospital in Budapest. The mother earns less in a month than her daughter does in a week! However, detaching emotions and elements of my personal life and taking a step back... I oppose government immigration policy. Most native British people do. I know many people who are not racially native but have been born here who agree with me. CABAL is right that one of the reasons for this quandary is because many natives in the UK are essentially priced out of the job market. For some of us, especially if we have large families, it is actually more lucrative to remain unemployed than join the "precariat". The cost of labour has dropped so low it is just not worth working. My solution would be to find a way to raise the cost of labour and therefore enrich the activity of employment. Mass immigration is just keeping a leaking bucket full; the government is not plugging the leaks. I would include making work more pleasant and fun as well as a way to make more money; which is really what the HPWA is all about. There is a lot more CABAL could have said and he ends his article with a summary. Again, these are issues I totally understand and have covered extensively. I think we both feel inspired by the words of Polly Toynbee, that HPing has the potential to be a wonderful occupation in every way. Doing it is very important because it is an essential element of a team on which millions of people's lives depend. Why is it not? Can't we make it so? Source: https://dreamingspireart.wordpress.com/2024/06/01/the-work-an-essay-2009/.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/04/cabal-on-breathtaking.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/08/cabal-on-paper-mask.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/05/cabal-on-nurses-day.html.