When I was a student, an appalling toothache on a Sunday led me to take too much paracetamol. I didn’t take vastly too much, and only two tablets at a time, but over 24 hours about twice the recommended dose. I am pretty certain it would have done me no harm, but I was sharing a flat with medical students and they insisted on rushing me to Ninewells. There the staff acted on the presumption that it was a particularly ineffective suicide attempt, which it most definitely was not, and instead of doing something useful about the toothache they lectured me about paracetamol.
My long introduction was simply to set the scene for that lecture, which has remained vividly with me, because the picture it painted was horrible in an Edgar Allan Poe sort of way. The doctor said that when people try to commit suicide with paracetamol, they generally wake up a few hours later in hospital and find they are not dead. Most of them are pretty happy about that. But then the hospital has to tell them that they are going to die anyway. Paracetamol has destroyed their organs and in five long days they will be dead. There is nothing the hospital can do to save them. Usually they are distraught.
I have no idea if that is true or just the doctor’s way of improving my views on toothache management. But I certainly never forgot it. It led me to wonder whether today’s statement by Harriet Harman that the Labour Party will not oppose Tory benefit cuts is the equivalent of taking that last bit too much paracetamol. The frank admission that the purpose of the Labour Party is to discern what wins the election and then support that, should finally drive away anybody with any interest in principles from that party. I was not joking when I said that Osborne’s budget outflanked Labour to the left. That is true, even though it was the most unabashedly right wing budget of my lifetime.
The parliamentary opposition to the benefit cuts will come from the SNP, Plaid and Greens, but it will not be allowed much time or given much publicity. The great question remains where the great mass of the abandoned people, with their left wing views, find political expression in England. I should love to believe that horror at Harman’s position will bring a surge of support for Jeremy Corbyn. But you only have to read Guardian and Labour List comments columns to see that the majority of Labour members swallow the line that you have to be right wing to win a general election – a myth carefully fostered by the corporate media but which I comprehensively demolished here.
It was at least as unthinkable that Labour would lose Glasgow as that they could now lose Darlington or Liverpool or Newcastle. But, with Clegg having moved the Lib Dems a long way right, there is still no sign of a challenging party that can emerge other than UKIP and their racist panacea. I find it hard to see what will happen in English politics. But Labour are going to wake up shortly and find they are facing a rapid and inevitable demise.
Let’s wait and see. Corbyn is in second in terms of support parliamentary Labour parties at the moment. It is quite conceivable that he could emerge as the next Labour leader.
The early bird catches the worm. Craig your deep thinking about the rottenness of our political system puts you far ahead of the mainstream, but they will follow and the demise of the current Tory Labour Party, having heaped blame for losing the election on Ed Miliband’s spark of socialism, will be terrible.
How come Ed Miliband took responsibility for his political stance while Blair promised at very stage that he would take responsibility for the consequences of his decisions and he never took any responsibility at all ever Amen?
It will be interesting to see whether Tim Farron can restore public trust in the Lib Dems soon enough for anyone to notice or care that he will be taking the Lib Dems to the left at least as much as Clegg dragged them right.
This is not how it looks to me. My Labour MP increased her majority in this northern constituency despite being Oxford and LSE educated and parachuted in to the seat from London, without having any connections in the north. Also, she is married to a Director of the Civil Service. Careful online searching reveals a letter published in a newspaper by a former teacher of his stating he showed left wing sympathies from an early age.
Labour still have loyal support in the public sector (50 per cent of national GDP is now government spending) and in the media also.
Labour don’t have to win elections, they merely have to get their supporters into powerful positions of society which they have already largely achieved.
Osborne’s numbers are very simple, burrow £600 billion over 5 years ONLY TO PAY FOR TAX CUTS TO THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS. This is what he has ALREADY DONE in the last 5 years without getting found out,and what the US has also done over the last 10 years to increase its debt to $18 trillion. Its tantamount to the “ouzo” economics of earlier Greek governments but peddled under the guise of austerity, only instead of rich Greeks illegally evading tax and parking the national debt in Switzerland we have Osborne actually legislating our rich to escape tax, with the future generations presumably left to “Syriza” their way out of the debt burden.
The underlying theory of supply side reaganomics that postulates that all these trillions best left in the hands of the capitalists will multiply and the trickle down effect will benefit the 99% more, may have been seen by now by way of empirical evidence in the US where this business of deficit financing tax cuts started, first by Bush and continued by Obama (the cause of $10t of its 18t debt today). But the minimum wagers and middle classes there are still waiting for any trickle down real increase in their wages after 11 years of pushing up the 1%.
If you have to double the dose, use aspirin. It’s a better painkiller, and, barring a major stomach bleed, rather less toxic. 3X 300mg tabs is safe enough. Ibuprofen is better yet, but wouldn’t want to exceed the dosage with that.
Bombay Duck
Totally correct analysis, thank you, but most voters are still thinking about the consequences of the last New Labour governments serving of Delhi Belly. New Labour does not have the honesty it would take to admit that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair’s adoption of Tory Reagonomics left them holding the baby in 2007/8 when the entire system collapsed. This was a collapse of a Tory system, and they must be mad to think that adopting Tory policies again would turn out better for them.
Since Craig uses the metaphor of paracetamol for Greek debt, you could compare New Labour’s plans with a punter sitting in Corals gambling with an interactive computer on Heads or Tails. Obviously the computer, or the bankers, will always win.
Techno
“Careful online searching reveals a letter published in a newspaper by a former teacher of his stating he showed left wing sympathies from an early age.”
Careful searching might reveal that my second cousin’s former teacher said that he showed right wing sympathies from an early age. What that would say about me wouldn’t be that relevant. Or perhaps it’s a nice bit of irony there.
You also seem to be missing the serious point that Labour has supported a neo-liberal agenda for the last 20 years.
This was a collapse of a Tory system, and they must be mad to think that adopting Tory policies again would turn out better for them.
They can think nothing else. Their policy wonks did Oxford PPE too….
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/23/ppe-passport-power-degree-oxford
“The thing is this,” one graduate laughs, “PPE is such a big subject that no one can ever know everything, so we all have to bullshit like mad at times to cover up our ignorance. And we by and large get away with it. So we carry on bullshitting once we leave Oxford and most of us are still getting away with it.”
A great question in deed.
“The great question remains where the great mass of the abandoned people, with their left wing views, find political expression in England. I should love to believe that horror at Harman’s position will bring a surge of support for Jeremy Corbyn.”
Harriet Harman like’s to lead but not to do, she is risk averse to the extend that she just remains quiet when asked about PIE and her role within.
Her assumptions will not bring out the masses of lefties who have become tired of storming a shape shifting unfair electoral system.
Why should there be large opposition rallies when we know that even the opposition in the House is not reported, not taken for full by our Bias Broadcasting Corporation?
Osborne’s delayed thumb screws on the working class, the disabled and the disaffected young can only be countered from the hedonistic stages of festival grounds were half open eyes might just get the significance of the messages, but I’ll be damned, I’m not cruising festivals to jeer up young people into acting up for their future interests.
So the young are busy getting it on and the usual activists, most now residing in the Green Party and SNP, are busy trying to use the wretched disproportional voting system to get elected, knowing full well that the cards are so stacked against them and that the need to reform and rectify our climate changing ways, demands that we change our habits now.
Osborne is subjecting Britain to slow torturous change, just as he used to dish it out to his mistress. He delayed and dithered on reducing the monies siphoned into offshore havens, he does not want to shut these tax drains, he’d rather pounce on the poor and disabled with his henchman IDS.
Take some paracetamol to the DTRH, they will be needed….;)
To add, I hope that after an election delivering a new Labour vote for Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper-Ball, that Jeremy Will realise that he has not got a home anymore and that he can increase the Green parties base in Parliament by making it a fully approved group,
That way he would have a much bigger impact than to carry on trying to convince his past party poopers that the majority in Britain is not well off, that the disabled and ill need help, care and benefits.
That said, I despise party politics, it is such an unnecessary disablement, it deludes voters into believing that they are all represented, it is not interested in fair proportional votes, they like to deceive, cheat and defraud others, they like the lobby’s they slip into and the money on the side.
Dream on for democratic change? Hmmm, but don’t fall asleep dreaming, democracy will need levering into its rightful place with pitchforks, I’m afraid.
Techno,
That’s a fair point. What I would ask is what was the percentage of those in the constituency who either did not vote or who spoiled their ballot paper because there was no one they could in good conscience vote for (which seems to have been classed as a not voting in the data I have managed to find so far)?
Somewhere on the Web, I’ve misplaced the link at the moment, there is a two picture map of the UK constituencies could red in according to which party won the most votes in each parliamentary seat in 2015. The second map shows the number of constituencies in which the number of non/spoilt paper votes were more than the votes cast for the winning party in that seat.
It is a sobering chart for any opposition party that expects to be taken seriously. There are a lot more voters out there waiting to be enthused with an alternative set of policies and vision to that of that provided by the yolk of the 12 year spivs selling different brands of the same Coca Cola/Pepei Cola/Virgin Cola political product we currently put up with.
However, New Labour have made a conscious decision not to bother and chase Tory voters in a vain and naive hope that people will go for the ersatz product rather than the real thing. Thus we get Harriet Herman, married to that New Realist joke of a trade unionist Jack Dromey, sitting in a TV studio lecturing Labour Party members to think carefully who they cast their votes for. A barely concealed code for you better not vote for Corbyn you plebs.
The only issue I have with Craigs analogy is that most people who sadly choose to end their lives make a conscious decision to do so. What passes for the Labour Party at this juncture in time does not even know it is doing so. Indeed, it is worse than that because it’s faux leadership and membership are in denial of that reality.
Commentating on what Craig seems to describe as his long introduction I suspect that setting the context for his metaphor will go over some posters heads on this sight. Consequently, we may well see some brave off topic deflective comments slagging Craig off for his student drug taking past or some such nonsense.
Still, sometimes it has to be accepted that you just cannot educate pork. No matter how bland and anonymous it tastes.
I’m backing Jeremy Corbyn for leader.
“I’m backing Jeremy Corbyn for leader.”
Tom Watson for deputy.
Yes, Paracetamol O/D, about 10 grams for an average person is irreversible, destroying the liver.
Likewise the New Labour Party statecraft is permanent.
With TTIP looming and dissident exposure on the horizon we can expect imperium in imperio. The purpose of the Jade Helm 15 military operation experiment is a step closer to martial law; dissent in the UK will not land you in jail as in the US, instead large groups of ‘non-conformists’ will be gridlocked by other means.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-world-order-martial-law-scenario-u-s-government-pathological-lies-concerning-jade-helm-15-military-operation/5449292
I can’t see any of the candidates for the Labour leadership becoming PM. Not the Thunderbird puppet nor any of the three silly women and not Corbyn, a rather pedestrian and lacklustre leftist of the old school.
As to who then would be the most effective Leader of the Opposition, Corbyn has at least the capacity and will to oppose, on matters of principle as well as detail. The others are too New Labour, too Tory-lite.
Those Tories apparently wanting a Corbyn victory may have just forgotten what real opposition looks and feels like.
One must wonder at the Harriet harman approach. She seems remarkably demoralised. Is it the hopelessness of the position they (labour) now endure?
I have thought for several yeas now that Labour is ‘over’. It may drag on in some diminishing way and end up as a remnant of past times-rather like the liberals of the sixties.
however, It is curious to see them embrace their fate quite so enthusiastically( or is it institutional fatalism). It is a curious thing to see-a political party that is actually quite so dysfuntional to such a degree that they cannot muster a meaningful response to the budget . It appears that Harriet went to bed the night before and forgot she is ‘leading’ a party of opposition and needed t speak for people the following day. I wonder why she does not simply withdraw from politics, if it is such a tedious activity.
The eight tablets over 24 hrs limit is, for the average sized person, just below the dose at which paracetamol begins to be hepatotoxic. You are fortunate your flatmates acted correctly Craig.
In future for pain relief and without going to codeine you can safely stack ibuprofen on paracetamol. This is true for other NSAIDS such as aspirin too. We got this from a consultant, at Ninewells too. I have as a biomedical scientist looked up how come and we now know that they handled by different cytochrome p450 genes in the liver. Cyp450 genes are enzymes that perform different chemical actions on substances to detoxify them or in some medicines they act to activate them. Much research on their actions, particularly wrt different cancer chemotherapy drugs has and is being done at Ninewells and the U of Dundee. They have panels of mice with humanised Cyp450 genes.
Based on the contemporaneous data, during a discussion with one of the members of the selection panel (he was present and influential during the selection) for an MP for Sedgefield constituency, he recalled having interviewed six candidates and then panel deciding on a single candidate that was forwarded to the head office of the Labour party. Subsequent to which the head office forwarded their own candidate and asked the selection panel to “reconsider” their choice!
That candidate was one Anthony Charles Lynton bLiar, that turned out to be the most disastrous Labour prime minister in the history of British Labour party as history shall recall.
The withered fingers of the she devil M. Thatcher was the guiding compass used by bLiar and the subsequent mess that we are all in. Fact that most British people are left of the Labour party categorically proves the sham democracy that is currently foisted upon these. The comments on on most of the oligarch owned media etc. are the work of paid shills and “chindits”. The stark low turn out for vote proves the winners in the elections successively have been for “None of the above” party.
Election of Corbyn may be a window dressing, given the Tories in the hierarchies of the “New labour” party.
It’s obvious that Jeremy Corbyn, is a principled and uncorrupted real human, quite unlike the bland cybermen and cyberwomen he is standing against, whoever they are. I hope he wins, because it would be good to have someone in front-rank politics who knows what he fights for and loves what he knows, as politicians should do.
A combination of fiery Leftism mixed with passion and conviction could be the very thing to sweep away the Conservative Party which is nothing more than an amoral mouthpiece for creepy corporations and globalisation and represents nothing except the careers of its MPs and the interests of its donors.
There has to be an alternative to the passionless, dehumanised country were slowly morphing into.
Muscleguy,
Do you have any data/info on a suitable substitute for those people who are medically in able to take ibuprofen please?
Thanks.
Cameron will fall before this Parliament ends, dont tell it to the birds, but you heard it first here on the CM blog. The God deniers will find out there is a God, and He is very angry that coulson and rebekah got away hacking for conservative central office/murdoch, without much damage,notwithstanding the £300m NOTW woff (underwritten by talal bentley).
I’m no fan of Labour, and never have been, but for them to support what are very clearly anti socialist policies is unbelievable to me. The job of the opposition is to oppose what the government is doing so that proper debate and transparency can be achieved.
How can Labour actually believe for a millisecond that this will increase their support ?
Its time Labour had a real Labour leader, one who is unafraid to move labour back to its correct position. Although no political system can ever be perfect the old concept of Labour spending money to create a more balanced society followed by the Tory’s cleaning up the financial mess and then having the cycle repeat would not do this country any harm at all.
Labour should and must be Socialist
Conservatives should and must be Capitalist.
That way we the electorate at least have a choice !
Do you have any data/info on a suitable substitute for those people who are medically in able to take ibuprofen please?
You too? Makes me faint, and this appears to be an unrecorded side-effect. I use aspirin.
but you heard it first here on the CM blog.
Nope. I heard it first from IDS….
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11502436/David-Cameron-will-not-serve-full-second-term-says-Iain-Duncan-Smith.html
Whether you believe a word either of them utters is up to you. But if Cameron is looking to insure the Tories for a third win, he’ll have to let them fight it under the replacement PM – which means he stands down.
If Corbyn fails in his bid, then he needs to get out of the Labour Party, join up with Left Unity who in turn need to align with the Greens.
All good stuff but to call UKIP racist is a bit piss poor. Let’s blame the people for voting the wrong way – much easier than worry about their pathetic concerns – we all know better than those racist bigotted idiotic xenophobes. God, I wish they would all just be told!
Greece runs short on Viagra.
3h ago Closing summary: Finally, a deal
5h ago The new measures Greece must now implement
5h ago Analyst: It’s Merkel 1, Tsipras 0
7h ago Tsipras defends bailout agreement
7h ago Merkel: No need for Plan B
7h ago Greek government must act immediately
7h ago Tusk: We have an aGreekment
And that’s even worse terms than the referendum refused…
May they awake from paracetamol overdose without organ failure.