PAVLOV’S DOGS

A child dying from a brain tumour is taken from a hospital in England because his parents no longer trust the oncologists. They take him to Spain where the family have a property. They want to sell the property and pay for targeted proton beam treatment that is not available on the NHS. It’s a chance, a slim chance, yes, but the specialists want to flood the child’s brain with broad beam radiation, leave him with potential brain damage and without any guarantee that he will live.

You might think that in a ‘liberal’ country every effort would be made to help them find the best for their child.

Not in England.

First, the NHS doctors threaten the family that if they try to remove their child, they will be prevented by a court order. Then, after the family take the only course of action open to them and spirit the child away, our sensitive police get an international warrant for their arrest and, blundering mindlessly through their politically correct agenda, the Spanish police have them handcuffed like criminals and separated from their child on the grounds that they have ‘neglected’ Ashya. That same child is now in a Spanish hospital and no members of the family are allowed to see him. The police have raided the home of the child’s grandmother, without explanation, stunningly compounding their original heartless, almost fascist, response.

The child is alone in a strange place with foreigners whom he cannot understand. His mother and father and his siblings are no longer there. And he is dying. Can you think of a more effective torture for a sick five-year-old? What will it do to his cancer?

In the meantime, his parents may be extradited and flown back to Britain to ‘answer questions’. Why could the police not send one officer to Spain to ask whatever ludicrous questions they might have? What possible questions might there be for parents trying to save the life of their child? Whose child is this? When the child dies, will the police, the NHS, apologise? It will be too late, whatever they do; the child has already had his life shortened by this affair. Those involved in such a heavy-handed approach all bear responsibility. It will be interesting to see what spurious reasons the authorities invent over the next few weeks for the sheer brutality of this affair.

The latest news is that the parents will be kept in prison for 72 hours while a judge decides whether they will be extradited. These are parents of a sick child, not criminals.

This is a child’s life that is being bandied about by idiots. I fail to understand why the police can mobilize massive resources for this family affair and seem unable to bring to book anyone involved in the Rotherham child abuse scandal.

Of course, I might be wrong about all this. I’ve been wrong before, but it depresses me to think I’m probably right.

I love my country and I’m deeply ashamed of it. I’ve been ashamed of it for some time. Recent events have deepened that shame: the Rotherham scandal, the Jimmy Savile Enquiry, the social engineering of Britain, self-seeking career politicians and greedy bankers wrecking the country and being rewarded for it, the culture of political correctness that means the Thought Police are not just a figment of George Orwell’s imagination, but are here, right now… and so much more.

The King family and the way they have been, are being, treated, is an indicator of something greater, something more monstrous, hiding beneath the vapid, ceramically enhanced grins of greasy career politicians and the sly faces of bankers.

It seems to me, that as we drift forward to an inevitable police state founded on the back of both real and invented terrorist threats, ordinary, decent British people are becoming less involved in their own fate. Decades of political correctness have ensured that we will never complain, never protest in the way we used to such a short time ago. We have become inert objects: fed with sex, sugar, drugs, alcohol and the ceaseless consumption of the scripted lives of others via soaps and ‘reality’ TV, so that actual reality becomes an unpleasantness to be avoided at all costs.

We hate our masters and rail against them interminably, but they know we will always be compliant – we have been trained to behave.

And we have one belief that transcends all others. Despite our posturing, despite our huffing and puffing, despite our weak protests against their excesses – they know better than us.

When you hear the sound of the bell, you will salivate.

But little Ashya King won’t care either way.