Parliamentary Petition to "review" the MHRA: it isn't just about Covid!

 Firstly, here is a link, not just to the petition to request a review of the MHRA's performance and fitness to meet the nation's future needs, but also to the Government's infuriating mandatory "response" to that petition once it reached the first milestone of 10,000 signatures.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/652008

The response manages to be arrogant, smug, dismissive, amazingly complacent and alarmingly ignorant, all at the same time! Gentle Reader, if, previously, you weren't convinced of the need to at least review how well the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority has been working in recent years (even ignoring the pandemic era as some sort of special case even though emergencies tend to punish rather than reward shortcuts) then simply reading the government's official response, and afterwards considering that this is how the UK government sees the MHRA after a long and steady stream of healthcare scandals with medicines, other products or procedures all regulated by the MHRA, might very well cause you to have another think, if for no other reason than to test whether even the government really believes its own position!

Failures of healthcare product regulation in the UK go back to the nineteen seventies and the contaminated blood products scandal, the origins of which predate the MHRA in its current form, but the cover-up and fallout from that scandal overlap with the MHRA as it is now constituted and the government is still determined to delay compensation to the victims until such time as nearly all, or perhaps even every last one, is dead.

In the meantime, numerous other dangerous products (pelvic mesh implants, for example) have slipped through the MHRA; there probably are too many instances to list them all. However, and this is crucial: no-one is publishing any data which links all the separate victim-led campaigns and class-action lawsuits together in a statistical manner which might allow Parliament or the public any insight into how well the MHRA does its job. Which begs the important question: if there is no data available to Parliament and the public allowing the performance of the MHRA to be scientifically measured in terms of how often patients are harmed by products it has approved, how can the UK government possibly know that everything is rosy in the MHRA garden?

Book review of Expired: Covid the untold story by Dr Clare Craig

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This a self-published, deeply-researched book which this reviewer purchased out of the household cat-food budget on the recommendation of Dr John Campbell. 

It can be found at this link:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C9FNHYTV/

Dr Craig communicates, with evidence, the failings of those who took decisions without it.

This is a SOLID book, in the sense that everything the author says is backed up by something! It is also compelling. The way the elite managed, first of all, to redefine an outbreak as a pandemic, and then to turn that outbreak into a global panic before inflicting massive social and economic damage whilst actually making everyone less healthy in the name of public health, makes for an hypnotic read.
I can sum it up in pretty well one sentence:

In order for a grave situation to be graspable by "the masses" the elite feel compelled to simplify it to the point where they themselves fail to understand it well enough to make ANY right decisions, legislating instead to make their many wrong decisions unchallengeable.

But for you the reader to see the truth both in my summary and in Dr Craig's presentation, it will be necessary for you to read the book itself and not just my review. 

Here is a link to this review on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2CXN8NLWCTK00/

Book Review of My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor

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Historical novel in which an Irish Priest seeks to outwit a senior NAZI official with a fascination for the Roman Emperor Caligula.

 

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This sort of thing, which fictionalises real events and real people, using their real names, needs to be done with care and in this novel it is. The subject matter has been covered before, but not as well, and most treatments keep well away from the way that the NAZI official, Paul Hauptmann, placed in charge of Rome when the NAZI’s occupied it in late summer 1943, turned a museum dedicated to archaeological discoveries connected to the Roman Emperor Caligula into his own private palace, guarded by crack troops and indeed minefields. The author of this novel does not give the issue undue prominence, but he doesn’t let the reader escape knowing that there were two important mirrors in the story:

Hauptmann and the Pope both had private enclaves guarded by private armies, which they tried to hold inviolable. And the struggle between the Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty and Hauptmann in Rome and the Vatican City in the modern age could be read as a re-enactment of the relationship between the early Christian Church and Caligula, who wasn’t the only Roman Emperor to resemble the Antichrist but he could have won handsome prizes for doing so, were any to be handed out.

This isn’t prominent enough in the plot to trouble the atheistic reader in the slightest and it enhances, rather than distracts from the adventure inherent in a good man and his loyal friends taking on a very powerful man who isn’t even friends with his own wife and children and is friends with his Fuhrer only in his dreams. This is an adversary who personifies evil by standing alone, but O’Flaherty and his friends simply serve good and certainly don’t presume to personify it.

The author is well equipped to put a lot of interesting language in the mouths of his Irish characters: “rats you could saddle” and “drunk as a boiled owl” do tend to stick in the memory, but his English characters are as good and the Italian ones nearly so.

It is all about an escape line for prisoners of war who managed to slip out of their prison camps, but this only comes about because O’Flaherty is forbidden, by the Pope himself, from interfering in the inhuman way those prisons were run. That prohibition stems from the Pope’s fear that, if provoked, the NAZIs will indeed return Rome and the Vatican: the heart of Christianity as the Pope sees it, to the days of Caligula or Nero and the reign of the beast. The rift between the Pope and O’Flaherty, who recognises the Pope’s authority and understands his reasoning, comes about because O’Flaherty realises, especially after his first personal encounter with Hauptmann, that the man does not need to be provoked before he will commit the most appalling crimes!

The title comes from the promise which Jesus made to his disciples “in my Father’s house, there are many rooms” (in some translations it is “mansions” rather than rooms). The Vatican City, where O’Flaherty hides his escapees and his own activities, is a vast, crumbling and untidy collection of forgotten rooms and passages crammed into a very small geographical space. Hauptmann’s own private Arcadia is tidy, uncluttered and expansive. Order prevails, on pain of death. O’Flaherty, living and operating in his Father’s house, simply tries to muddle through and live. Their methodologies are as opposed as their beliefs.

 

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is published by Random House on the 26^th of January 2024.

Book Review of Munich Wolf by Rory Clements

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(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

An excellent murder and survival thriller set in Munich while Bavaria was still the centre of NAZI power.

The author has set several novels before, during and after WW2 and this is one of his best so far. Partly because the hero is trying to avoid heroism at all costs.

A criminal detective and a political policeman find themselves in conflict with each other even before either knows who the other is, then they are required to work with each other whilst being alert to every opportunity to destroy each other. (This really is the way NAZI Germany worked, right up to the top. Even within Hitler’s inner circle, his preferred method was to make his associates fight each other until a clear winner emerged. This selects the plan with the strongest advocate rather than the strongest plan and the chances of success dwindle with each reiteration of the challenge process.)

Neither Inspector Sebastian Wolff nor Sergeant Hans Winter have any intention of challenging the regime as such: they are both really only trying to survive but it takes a while for them to perceive each other correctly. Constant manipulation of their actions and the general situation by those so disproportionately more powerful than their actual superiors creates a storm that they can only survive by helping each other -and in a fascist State that’s actually more subversive than blowing up railway lines.

What makes this well-researched and well-written novel most interesting is quite nuanced, in that Hitler isn’t shown as holding power by being the most extreme candidate (at least, not in 1935 when the story is set); there are others in or close to the party MUCH further round the bend, but all in one particular direction or another. This story revolves around the Thule Society, but there were other factions and sects within the Party. Even in an “extreme right” party there are left and right wings and in terms of economic policy the National Socialists were actually the hard left. In such a situation, powerful individuals oppose the rival they fear the most. The left-leaning ones fear what the right-leaning ones might do and the right-leaning ones fear what the left-leanings might do. So they agree on someone who’s not clearly right or left. The problem is that the centre-standing candidate might do almost anything and he often does. Both Stalin and Hitler came to lead their respective parties through the same mechanism.

The neo-pagan murderer in this story turns out to be so deranged that the “highest authority” in Germany comes to regret trying to cover for him. This raises the unsettling idea that the Third Reich contained and could even have been led by such a person rather than Hitler. There was potential for evil beyond even the Holocaust.

Munich Wolf by Roy Clements is published by Bonnier Books UK on the 18^th of January 2024

Book Review of the Oath of Bjorn by Tamara Goranson

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(Book 3 of the Vinland Viking Saga.)

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This is an historical novel about a clash of cultures between Norsemen (whose own culture was largely based around clashing with other cultures) and native American “Red Men” (who started without a concept of any culture which behaved in fundamentally different ways to their own). The two cultures had many things in common: family, clan and “tribe” meant pretty much the same things and whilst nationhood meant nothing to the Red Men, it didn’t really register on the Norse list of priorities either: the two Norse leaders (“helmsmen”) in the story may piously hope for some sort of reward from the King of Norway for claiming “Vinland” for him, but at no point does either behave as if the King might hold them accountable for their treacherous and violent conduct in pursuit of his favour. In this lies the explanation for why Norsemen ventured both far (Vinland) and near (Scotland) for people and lands to exploit and conquer: they were far too dangerous to each other to make remaining quietly at home a sustainable lifestyle choice.

The Red Men, though, having no previous experience of men with different measures of honour and, more especially, no respect for creation and straight dealing, suffer very badly for taking the Norsemen on trust in the expectation that they will act in good faith. (Although, part of the trouble is the Norse faith in an afterlife that rewards warriors more than hunters or fishermen.) Once the Red Men understand that they have been cheated and played for fools, their anger is great and so is their determination to punish the Norse, but Norse culture is based on the need to WIN the sort of conflict which Red Men can hardly believe is happening.

The Bjorn of this story has a Norse mother and has been brought up by a Red Man stepfather. This gives him a foot in both camps (there’s a remarkably expressive word in Afrikaans for this, which I decline to use here.) Bjorn spends most of the story attempting the impossible, which is to obey the honour codes of both cultures at the same time, and he’s also struggling against his own inadequacies in that not only is he dwarfed by the human factors which are in conflict: he’s also pretty inconsequential in the face of natural forces which the Red Men have to interact with for so much of their lives that they don’t have much to spare time in which to fight other men.

Only when everything goes wrong and all Bjorn can do is save his own life and that of his wife by doing a deal with the man he hates the most, does he realise that the forces in conflict between nature, Red Men and Norsemen are so great that living long enough to go somewhere else and try something else is not only the best that he can do: it’s the only salvation for any of the protagonists still alive at that point.

This is a good read, but it’s not a quick nor an easy read.

The Oath of Bjorn by Tamara Goranson was published by Harper Collins (One More Chapter) on the 1^st of December 2023.

Murder Anomalies #1: Victoria Hall and Jeanette Kempton

 This is the first of a series of short articles which are really part of a thinking process towards a conclusion not yet reached. (Rather than starting with a conclusion and then trying to force the facts to fit it.)

Ever since Steve Wright was convicted of the five Ipswich Prostitute murders in 2006, people have wondered aloud if he might also have killed Victoria Hall (who lived in the same village as Wright) in 1999. But this theory has only been entertained by the police from 2019, when they received more information, after releasing covert CCTV footage from the precise site where Victoria's body was found. The police had (for those twenty years) never released the exact location, because it was some distance from the road and therefore not something that a person suffering from idle curiosity was likely to locate without a lot of random wandering. What they wanted to see, was who went straight there. There were people who knew exactly where to go, and in the month following the discovery of Victoria's body, they did. "People" is a plural and that's the first part of the anomaly. If the location was known only to the killer and that was someone who worked alone, how come there was more than one visitor (in more than one vehicle) to the location?

Another part of the anomaly was that Victoria was apparently tracked all the way from the nightclub in Felixstowe, which she left at 1AM on the 19th of September with her friend, Gemma, to a point in Trimley St Mary within yards of Victoria's home, where they finally parted at 2:20AM after walking all the way.

There's a workload issue for one man doing that tracking, just as there is with one man carrying Victoria's body and arranging it, as it was found, in a running stream channelled through a ditch. (It's not just a field drain.) And, as suggested above, more than one man seemed to know the exact spot.

Steve Wright has also been nominated as a suspect in the murder of Jeanette Kempton, who disappeared in South London in January 1989 and was found near Wangford in Suffolk about two weeks later. Given that this involves a journey straight up the A12 from South London, where Steve Wright was living and working up to 1988, to Suffolk where moved back to when he got into trouble and lost his job, he's not an unreasonable suspect at all. Except that workers on the country estate where her body was found, associated two different suspicious vehicles (a hire van with tinted rear windows and a somewhat ropey white car) with the case and the police didn't conclusively trace either one. (An untraceable hire van must take some doing!) Again, multiple vehicles suggest multiple perpetrators.

Jeanette's body was too decomposed to establish her exact time of death, but the pathologist was able to say that she'd suffered a head injury about forty-eight hours prior to death. That suggests a two-day period of captivity and, again, there's a workload issue with that for one man acting alone. And how does anyone hope to establish an alibi if they are absent from their normal setting for two days? You'd need a large-enough group for everyone to turn up where they were expected to turn up, whilst keeping the victim under control. It's a bit hard to calculate the number needed, but it's obviously more than two.

At no point up to and after the moment Steve Wright was charged with the Ipswich Prostitute Murders did the police, or prosecution counsel, suggest or say anything which could be taken to imply that he acted alone and to this day they still haven't! Indeed, at the moment that Steve Wright was so charged, another unnamed suspect was in custody, where he remained, the author believes, until the following afternoon.

And at least three of the Ipswich Prostitute Murders present similar workload issues as Victoria's murder, in that the body was artistically arranged in a problematic location with flowing water. (That is almost certainly why the police have resisted any suggestion that Steve Wright acted alone, even though accepting that premise would spare them an awful lot of work and resources.)

Again, whilst a forensic psychologist who'd worked on the Ipswich Prostitute Murders was convinced that Steve Wright might well have had something to do with a similar cluster of prostitute murders in Norwich, Norfolk police say that not only do they have a DNA profile that is not his, but they have more than one DNA profile that's not his. This has been used to "prove" the psychologist wrong, but all it really proves is that there was more than one man involved in killing prostitutes in Norwich, a possibility that Suffolk Police continue to hold open for ALL the murders that Steve Wright has been convicted of so far.

{One last thought, which takes us a long way from Suffolk. One of the detectives who investigated the disappearance and probable murder of Claudia Lawrence in York, ended up wanting to charge pretty well ALL the customers from her local pub who'd been interviewed by the police, with withholding information or making false statements. He wasn't allowed to, but the fact that he wanted to is telling.}

Anyone who has read this far will now understand why the author isn't yet ready to come to any conclusions, other than the obvious one: there's something here that defies understanding with the currently-known facts. Steve Wright is absolutely not innocent; the issue is more one of how many others might be involved and why on Earth would several people (one assumes all males, but that really is an assumption) cooperate to do something so vile?

The Farshoreman: New Novel Published

When touching an interplanetary space probe sparks young women's dreams of touching the stars, an adventure in spacecraft building begins and flourishes despite pandemics, spies and stalkers.

The Farshoreman is available as a Kindle E-book and Paperback on Amazon.

Link for users of Amazon.co.uk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B47FLBDS

Link for users of Amazon.com:   https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B47FLBDS

Users of other Amazon domains can search Kindle Books for:

The Farshoreman by Matthew K. Spencer

The base prices in the UK are £3.00 for the Kindle E-book and £9.75 + delivery for the paperback. Prices in other countries are derived from this, but in some cases, especially Australia, the paperback may be disproportionately more expensive than the E-book. 

And on Smashwords and Affiliates!

The Smashwords Edition, with its own distinctive Katie Hounsome Cover Art, is available from Smashwords and its affiliates. The base price has been set to $3.81 to match the Amazon base price of £3.00

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1291276

https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-farshoreman/id6445158728 

ISBN numbers:

Smashwords ISBN: 9781005315016

Paperback    ISBN:  9798837658099

These may help when ordering either format from some retailers, such as Barnes and Noble.

 

NB: The author does not mean to criticise the BBC's proposed price increase; rather he is trying to lead the BBC by example hence the e-book price reduction from £5.00 to £3.00 or $3.81 as of the 4th of December 2023. The paperback price is dependent on the printing costs.

The author's books will also be participating in the Smashwords end of year sale for 2023.