October 2008 Archives

We're supposed to be very excited about the purple tomato.

This is the sad looking salad item developed by scientists in Norwich which has changed colour because it has been genetically modified by being given two genes from a snapdragon.

The result is that - as well as being purple - it carries increased levels of something called anthocyanins which may offer protection from some forms of cancer.

Perhaps.

We can't be sure because the only tests so far have been carried out on mice which themselves have been specially bred to be peculiarly susceptible to developing cancer in the first place.

And in any case there are a few problems here.

Even if the purple tom does have some anti-cancer properties, how are we going to get people to eat it? As everybody knows, the population is already resistant to eating anything vaguely healthy, which includes salads.

If we can't get people to eat nice red tomatoes how on earth are they supposed to be persuaded to eat purple ones?

Anyway, the new tom contains only the same amount of anthocyanins as a spoonful of cranberries. So why not eat a spoonful of cranberries then? Or a snapdragon for that matter?

The truth is, of course, that the gushing announcements of this research - paid for with our money - have more to do with the promotion of GM technology than the realities of healthy living.

The Government is, for some reason, desperate to foist GM crops upon the British countryside despite the potentially disastrous effects they could have on our soils and all existing plant life.

So it is desperate for a few public relations victories in order to convince us that GM is a cute and cuddly science that can do us nothing but good.

Indeed, news of the purple tomato came alongside the leak of papers that reveal a new EU campaign to push GM down our throats.

The initiative - agreed by representatives of 27 Governments including our own - is designed to speed up the widespread introduction of GM crops and to "deal with" public resistance.

Prepare yourself for news of the bright orange lettuce that makes you thinner, richer, younger and much more attractive to the opposite sex.

Over 600,000 children in England and Wales go to nursery for up to ten hours a day.

A report into what they eat there has revealed some alarming findings. Tens of thousands of the toddlers are being crammed with junk food that is actually banned in schools. Some establishments spend as little as 25p per child on the meals eaten throughout the day.

According to the organic campaign group the Soil Association, which commissioned the report, what our youngest citizens are surviving on is "unhealthy, highly processed and potentially dangerous".

This is of course a scandal. And it is blindingly obvious that nurseries should have been included in the guidelines which are supposed to be combating poor health and obesity in our schools.

But this is the second worrying insight into life in nurseries that we have been offered in the space of a few months. The last one, from Ofsted, revealed that almost 700 nurseries were "inadequate".

But these remain details. Here we have well over half a million children who are being brought up in mini-communes by strangers, deprived of any real family life and certainly banished from the love and understanding of their mothers and fathers.

The fact that they are being fed junk and not given the level of care and stimulation they need is scandalous.

But the big question remains unanswered -should we be inflicting such a start in life on hundreds of thousands of children at all?

Name five our Britain's Olympic gold medal winners. Tough isn't it? The grand parade through the streets of London demonstrated not how well we remember their achievements. But how quickly we have forgotten.

And there's a reason for that. The Olympians are a special breed of once-every-four-years competitors who otherwise represent no interest to the rest of us at all. Even if someone rushed into the house and told you that Chris Hoy (big Scottish bloke who won three golds) was cycling round the local park I doubt if you would be bothered to go and ask him why.

And unless you were a member of her family then the idea of marching down to the swimming pool to watch Becky Adlington (blonde lass from Mansfield) would be about as inviting as a ticket to An Evening With Anne Diamond.

Not that our lack of interest in archers, small bore rifle shooters or badminton players, makes us very different from any other nation in the world. It's just that, for some reason, we have thrown so much cash at the Olympic project in the past four years that in Beijing we actually won a lot of metalwork.

And now we can't stop. Because of one of the most inexplicably dumb decisions in modern history we now not only have to keep paying a small army of competitors to maintain their skill levels for the next four years we are going to have to cough up for bringing the whole shooting match to London.

Even when the costs was going to be a mere £9 billion this was plain bonkers. But already we can see the figures spiralling. The revelation that the Government has had to order a £95 million bail out of the Olympic village plan is being explained as an inevitable consequence of changing economic times. How often are we going to hear that in the next two or three years?

Given the collapse of private funding a £40 million leisure pool and fitness centre which was going to be one of the "legacies" of the 2012 event has already been ditched. And presumably it is desperate times which have forced the organisers to accept a monster sponsorship deal from Cadbury's. So the event that was supposed to drive our young people into a frenzy of physical activity and make them thin has now become a marketing opportunity for a company selling a product which can only make them fat.

But it's not just that the overspends, the cutbacks and the compromises have started already that makes the London Olympics such an appalling mistake.

At time when thousands of Brits are being thrown out of work and families across thee country are being forced out of our homes we are paying hundreds of people whose names we can't remember to practice sports we are not interested in order than it four years time they might have the chance of doing something totally forgettable,.

The question of what you have to do to get sacked by the NHS just won't go away.

Take the shameful goings on in Northwick Park Hospital, London for example.

An official inquiry has found that in the hospital's Fletcher Ward four elderly and confused patients were tied down with straps or sheets, totally against caring guidelines or common decency for that matter.
An obvious sacking offence you might think.

Not at all. The inquiry found "no evidence pointing conclusively to any individual member of staff." So no one has even been reprimanded.

So let's turn to the blunders on maternity wards across the country. New figures from the National Patient Safety Agency show that they have doubled in the past two years. Total errors by staff involving medication, record keeping or equipment reached over 70,000 in twelve months. One in ten mothers-to-be now suffers treatment so slip-shod that it is serious enough to be reported. Two women a week now die on our maternity wards--twice the number in the Eighties.

So clearly, faced with these grim facts, we should see a dramatic rise in disciplinary measures against those responsible. But of course no details of action taken--if any-- are reported.
But then no such details are ever made public.

We are left to assume that the NHS is not only a service which offers treatment which is free at the point of delivery to patients. It also offers employment which is apparently free of blame or disciplinary action. No matter how gross is the incompetence or how heartless the treatment.
Stay well.

Confectionary giant Nestle has launched an offensive new TV ad for its product Aero Bubbles.
It features a naked man--well naked all but for a strategic towel--posing, strutting and burbling about body temperature.

This is an advertisement aimed directly at those women who Nestle obviously believe are so simple minded that they can be lured into buying chocolate by sex.

Any male who--like me--finds himself contemplating why he finds this few seconds of TV time so gratuitously awful will find himself chewing over some familiar arguments.

This ad is sexist and demeaning. It undermines masculine dignity by portraying the male involved--who is model turned actor Jason Lewis--as meat.

These thoughts are familiar because they are exactly the arguments deployed by the feminists of the Seventies and Eighties who so strongly objected to the portrayal of women as what we used to call "sex objects".

Well, a quarter of a century later, I see what you meant sisters.

Back then all red blooded males would respond by suggesting that the feminists lacked a sense of humour. It was all just a bit of fun, wasn't it?

Well, obviously, the Bubbles ad is--at some level--supposed to mock itself.
But to this male it's not so much a belly laugh as stomach churning.

Mr. Lewis, an American, was previously best known for a role in Sex In The City where he was, apparently, called the Absolute Hulk. It can only be a matter of days before he becomes known as the Aero Hulk. And amongst the homosexual community as Bubbles.
I do hope he objects.

I understand, of course, that this is just the most blatant example yet of the inversion of male/female sexual dominance. But Nestle should feel utterly ashamed of itself for indulging in such depths of naked sexism and vulgar titillation.

Meanwhile any air-headed female who is lured by this sleazy piece of work into actually buying the product deserves to put on at least two pounds overnight.

And if this makes me a masculinist--which is a feminist approaching from the opposite direction--then I'm proud of it.