The pace of blogging is hotting up no end, I see my colleague peers are joining us and that’s great. I try to persuade as many of my colleague crossbenchers as I can, I think I got Baroness Deech hooked the other day but failed with Lord Walton, who reckons as he’s now in his late 80s its too late to learn to use a keyboard. But I have lots of friends in late old age who find e-mail and the net a crucial tool for keeping in touch. I’ll keep working on him…
Can I first say to all those St George’s students who are blogging me…hey, we’ve got a blog on the intranet at St George’s, on www.sgul.ac.uk. Let’s use that shall we? I’ll put in a post and you are all very welcome to add your thoughts.
A journalist asked me whether we really have the time to to this? He gave the answer himself; we will if there’s something we get out of it. Time will tell.
Someone asked how we decide about ethical issues like the controversial parts of the Human Embryology Bill? The answer is we come from our own ethical standpoints which we have developed over the years but then do a lot of listening to experts in the House who know the detail of what is proposed and can answer questions in depth. We also read lots of material put out by the various interested organisations and churches and discuss the issues with people outside the House.
I don’t find anything controversial at all about the proposed research, but that’s because I don’t accept that a blastocyst embryo is a human life. It’s a potential human life. So I don’t have any problems with all kinds of embryo research. I accept the need for some regulation, although I suspect there is far too much.
I am profoundly antagonistic to any moves to tighten abortion laws; people have very short memories, they’ve forgotten the horror of an unwanted pregancy and the outcome of illegal abortion, the inevitable consequence of trying to reduce abortions. The people pushing for a lesser time period of legality, dropping to 22 weeks or somesuch are really just demonstrating their opposition to abortion overall. The people who would really suffer from tightening the rules are the poorest, least knowledgeable women. I get irritated when people say there are mental health problems following abortion; there are in fact relatively few serious mental health problems as a direct result of abortion and certainly a great deal less than for a mother delivering a full term baby. Every decsion in life may lead to regret, relief, a closure of options, opening of others. Deciding not to have a child is as fraught with difficulties as any other major decision, but no more so.
As you illustrate with abortions, if the UK doesn’t approve the Human Embryology Bill, the eggs will be harvested and fertilised elsewhere in any case; there is at least one country who actively takes organs out of executed prisoners. Similarly, the anti-vivisectionists forced the regulated experiments out of the UK to god knows where.
I am also disturbed that several Cabinet-level MPs want a free vote rather than the three-line whip. Frankly, they should carry out their threat to resign if they can’t do the job for personal reasons. They knew the Bill was in the pipeline when they accepted positions from Brown. This will not end well either way but, for once, I won’t blame Brown.
Three cheers for Baroness Murphy !! It is this kind of common sense wisdom which we are in danger of losing if the Lords were to be tinkered with again. We have had a relatively sensible level of tweaking of the Lords in the last decade, and I think that is enough for this generation. Evolution for the Lords, rather than revolution, is I think a most sensible way forward.
I would be interested to know the views of the Lords on the subject of NHS reform generally, and Polyclinics specifically. This may be outside your remit. But the Government appears to be indulging in ‘consultation’ exercises, when the outcome appears already to have been decided. This may be harsh of me, but I have received several examples of the same questionnaire about my opinions of GP services. Questions are clearly loaded to make out that we are unhappy with the level of availability of our GP for appointments ‘out-of-hours’, when most of the respondents will not realise that what is planned is not to make our current GPs ‘open-all-hours’, but to break a relationship with one GP, and to have a ‘drop-in’ arrangement with whichever GP happens to be free at a larger clinic.
Rather like the change in bank branches from having a manager one knew and could discuss matters with, to having an impersonal, if 24 hour, ‘relationship’ with someone at a call centre.
To all the blogging Lords..
Lord Mancroft recently made some rather intemperate remarks about the nursing staff at the Royal United Hospital in Bath. I shall not repeat them here, but suffice to say he was not pleased at the alleged lack of personal courtesy to him during his stay. I shall not, of course, expect you to respond to his comments – he can answer perfectly well for himself. But it does rather illustrate a dilemma for the House of Lords in a more general way.
One of the benefits of not being an elected chamber is the perceived insulation from what might be called ‘special interest groups’, or the ‘undue influence’ of specialist lobbying companies. It does also give some important freedom from the kind of newspaper lobbying seen over Genetically Modified Organisms in foods. One the hand the perfectly reasonable ethical, moral and safety arguments are reduced to a label of ‘Frankenstein Foods’. On the other, ‘Big Pharma’ has billions invested in the technology, and millions being spent to influence legislators.
But this important breathing space can clearly lead in some cases to some noble Lords feeling that they are answerable to no one, and can say what they please, no matter how much it upsets hard-working people, without any recourse or redress, without resorting to the sledgehammer of the legal system.
Is there, or should there be, a sort of ‘ministerial code’ equivalent for the House of Lords ? Or would this cure be worse than the disease, if it led to an inability to, for the sake of example, criticise aspects of the Private Finance Initiative as it relates to the National Health Service, or to the failures of certain hospitals to address infections such as MRSA and C. Difficile.
Your thoughts, opinions, facts and speculation on proposals welcome.
Good on you, Baroness Murphy, for your thoughtful and sensible comments on abortion.
I agree that the HFE issue is being taken on by the pro-life lobby, but surely such a controversial issue such as melding human tissue with animal tissue, which in itself will horrify the average constituent regardless of scientific fact, should be taken to be at least as much a conscience issue as abortion. In this case, the free vote should be applied, since as you have stated:
“I don’t accept that a blastocyst embryo is a human life”
anyone who disagrees and holds the opposite view is entitled to vote based on that belief. After all, you wouldn’t be happy to vote for this (presumably) if you solemnly believed you were melding humans with animals, or ending a human life. Conscience votes are a recognition of the strong religious views of members, and if the public does not want their MP to vote one way or another it is their prerogative to vote them out of office or to lobby them to change their mind based on this. In terms of the Lords, every member is their for their individual expertise, and also for their experience. They are independent entities and shouldn’t be whipped on conscience issues, destroying the real purpose of the Lords.
Members of political parties can always abstain on an issue, like the bits of the HFE Bill they don’t like, or be very brave and vote against their parties. It’s no big deal.
On the other hand I don’t quite understand why the Government won’t allow a free vote on a matter they are almost certain to win anyway. We demonstrated very clearly in the Lords with the last votes on the Bill how small the ‘fanatic’ pro-life’ religious lobby really is. It’s comprised in the Lords of the practising Roman Catholics, most of the bishops (not all), a good sprinkling of Irish peers and a handful of others. I respect their wish to live their lives according to their own beliefs but strongly object to their desire to force their beliefs on the rest of us.
I’ll pick up Bedd Gelert’s comments about NHS reforms and polyclinics in another blog if I may? It seems many people have got the wrong end of the stick about polyclinics–they won’t replace existing good GP practices but provide extended primary care services including investigations like XRay and scans on site and outpatient appointments, physio, community mental health services and a whole range of things that otherwise one has to go to hospital for. GP services are reasonably good in many parts of the country but don’t work for many people in the inner City. And I can’t be the only one who would like to be able to attend in the early evening or early afternoon instead of the rigid appointment system many GPs have now? And why don’t GPs communicate more by e-mail? Of course some of them have only just learnt to use the phone. I always have the feeling I could save them a huge amount of time if they were less rigid in the way they work.
Baroness Murphy, I look forward to a further update about polyclinics. I will admit to not knowing everything about them, but the rather devious ‘consultation’ process has raised my scepticism level.
On a point related to GP services, which I fully accept is nothing to do with the Lords themselves, but around 5-7 years ago the Government were panicking that a whole generation of GPs were going to retire early and leave the NHS primary care service with a really big problem.
It was investigated, and found that doctors simply weren’t being paid enough for the stress of having to work ‘out of hours’ and do ‘on-call’ duty. So ‘hey presto!’, they gave them a big pay rise and agreed that they didn’t have to work ‘all-hours-god-sends’, and remarkably for any government, a problem was actually solved and a crisis resolved.
Hooray !! But no, that wasn’t good enough for the Government, who then decided that tinkering to solve that one problem had created some others, so now plans are afoot to, er, make them open all hours, and, er, punish them for having accepted an improvement on the rate of pay they received when they were jumping out of the NHS like lemmings.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work that the end result of this will be a restoration of the original problem, and the whole cycle will begin again.. Let us hope that the Lords can inject some ‘common sense’ so that we are going round this cycle once again..
I would dispute your labelling of the pro-life lobby as fanatical, they are standing by their beliefs, which surely is admirable in politicians, and something we see rarely today. I wish that everyone would vote based on their conscience rather than on how their party has whipped them to vote.
Also your comment: “I respect their wish to live their lives according to their own beliefs but strongly object to their desire to force their beliefs on the rest of us.”
A very admirable sentiment- but surely you could say that about any bill. Surely by voting against the general public on any number of contentious issues- a recent war for example – the house is imposing their beliefs on the public. Surely you are here imposing your views on embryo research on a section of the population- admittedly probably a minority. I understand that your background in medicine is intrinsic to your perspective in this issue, and will bow to your greater expertise in true House of Lords fashion, but I think that a code of ethics does not necessarily have to be based entirely upon modern liberal thought to be non-fanatical, and that anyone who believes that this bill is in fact allowing the merging of animal cells with human material to create children and then destroying them for research and doesn’t vote for it is a fanatic… well. I think it is easy to claim that embryos aren’t human, and if we look back through history that argument is the most commonly used for the mass mistreatment of those with no voice. I think that anyone who truly believes that embryos are children should have the opportunity to vote against this motion without fearing government reprimands for excercising their right as a member. If you truly think you will win such a vote- and I don’t doubt you are right, then I would encourage you to lobby Gordon Brown to allow a free vote yourself, so that the matter may be decided in the House of Commons: not as a Labour bill, but as a bill with the cross-party backing of the entire house. Let the constituents decide whether they back the ‘rebels’ at the polls.
To the journalist you mention I would say that this blog is opening up the Lords for people outside – giving us insight into the workings of the place and also some of the thinking, at least of some members, on the key issues of the day – and also, one hopes, enabling at least some communication between parliamentarians and members of the public (or at least a few of them!). Three cheers for the blog, I say.
There’s no reason why a man who has no keyboard skills should not contribute to a blog. Does he not have a dictating machine and secretarial assistance?
The answer to the last bigugly is that Lords are not provided with secretarial assistance, we msotly do it ourselves.
But I must pick up on CommonSenseAllianace comment. I do hope you don’t believe that “…this bill is in fact allowing the merging of animal cells with human material to create children and then destroying them for research”. If you do then you’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick. You are confusing two separate parts of the Bill; one is about using DNA from an animal cell to mix into a human cell for medical research purposes. Any cell mixture such as this could not be developed into a viable embryo. The second part of the Bill you are referring to is whether to allow parents who have a child affected by a genetic disease to select thier future children from healthy embryos they have created which will have the characteristics to help their first child. I hope that’s a bit clearer and less controversial than what you may have believed before?
i bigugly March 26, 2008 at 11:33 am
There’s no reason why a man who has no keyboard skills should not contribute to a blog. Does he not have a dictating machine and secretarial assistance?
I quite agree. There are far too many sneering snickerpusses online, who seem to believe that spotting a misplaced apostrophe amounts to winning an argument. Most of these retrogrades also seem to hold the belief that online expression as an activity is somehow inferior to the confines of the capital-intensive print media.
What they fail to understand is the epic potential of personal publishing – a liberation possibly as great as the Guthenberg press itself. And we all know what that fortunate movement led to – to paraphrase Lady Bracknell.
Dear Baroness Murphy,
A couple of technical issues with your comment to SGUL students (and presumably also staff?):
1) The SGUL intranet is not at http://www.sgul.ac.uk, it is at http://portal.sgul.ac.uk
2) There are no blogs on http://www.sgul.ac.uk
3) You might be referring to the APB – Acting Principal’s Blog – which is now defunct as there is no longer an Acting Principal
In my opinion, if you want to engage with people, you need to do it yourself and if this is your only blog — why not do it here? Otherwise, you can set up your own blog on St George’s intranet — just ask the former Acting Principal how to do it.
Dear SGUL staff
Thanks for that. You are right, I thought there was an active blog at SGUL but it seems there isn’t. I don’t really want to blog all by myself; now if other people joined in that would be different. I will talk to administration and see if we can get something started
But I do have an e-mail address at SGUL and am very happy to
respond.