There’s a horse’s ass in the health job
I’m referring (if you haven’t already guessed) to How Horsemeat Horror Happened, and Health Hero Hunt goes NHS-Hitting. I have been listening to Radio Four digitally (via the telly) most days, searching in vain for even a scintilla of insight about what these news stories are really about, but shafts of light were there none. However, as it happens, on this occasion I do have some solid history and experience to bring to the party.
The “Oh-my-God-Jade’s-been-scoffing-Dobbin” episode has shown the British at their daftest and most gullible, I’m afraid. The media have reflected this in seeming unable to make their minds up about whether this is a story about eating poor dear horsey, or whether there really is a public health issue. The truth is that it isn’t about either of those things, it is a story about the traditional, innate criminality of the wholesale meat trade.
As a national culture, we attach the standard anthropomorphic values to horses because – as with cats and dogs – we have a sporting and quasi-domestic relationship with them. Having thus awarded them honorary human status, we believe we must not eat them, because that would be cannibalism. Thus all the French, Koreans and Chinese are cannibals, QED.
This is an idea so bereft of any scientific basis, it beats the flat Earth theory into a cocked (or even flat) hat, in that it has somehow survived to be widely believed in 21st Century Britain.
Speaking to a couple of French acquaintances I bumped into this week, they were of course wildly amused, regarding as they do the English madness about animals as even more deranged than our attitudes towards sexual infidelity. I agree with them on the first point (although not entirely about the latter) but was also struck by their objection to the idea that horses represent a health issue. On that one, they are so clearly right it seemed pointless to argue.
Treated hygienically and used within a sensible time period, there is no public health issue around horsemeat at all. I’ve tried it and can attest to the fact that it is no more a desirable delicacy for me than shark’s fin soup: it has little to promote itself beyond being less obviously gamey than venison and sometimes cheaper than steak. That’s it. And so we arrive in the end at the point where this story should’ve started: practices within the meat trade.
When a media spokesman says that the horsemeat scandal “in no way represents the tip of an iceberg”, you can rest uneasy in the knowledge that it represents an iceberg hitherto hidden entirely, but of a size more than capable of sinking the Titanic’s bigger brother. As such, said iceberg is nevertheless yet more proof of the private sector’s talent for sociopathy where profits are concerned.
The only dimension worth thinking about in Horsegate is deceit. And the deceit isn’t new. 35 years ago, I had a good friend who worked in the meat trade. He educated me about meat that’s fresh (doesn’t taste of much, but the public demands it), well-hung (right for steak, pheasant and mutton, wrong for pork and chicken) and a third sector called “needs using”. Officially, all meat falling under the third definition was sold to petfood manufacturers. Unofficially, a lot of it was sold to school suppliers.
This was going on during the 1970s. But as long ago as the 1945-52 era of food rationing in the UK, condemned meat was regularly sold into the institutional sector, once ruthless butchers had overcome the Government’s bad-meat marking system. (If you want more evidence of this, watch Pete Postlethwaite’s magnificent performance in Alan Bennett’s film, A Private Function).
We are back in that cliché called ‘regulation’: for the neocon Right, it’s a form of leprosy (for they have profit in mind); and for the fluffy Left, it is a social must-have…..regardless of need (for they have Union members’ employment in mind). A judicious mixture of common sense and social anthropology education tells most thinking folks that each situation requires a special decision. When selling something people must have (like food, water or shelter) the desire to make money will always be at odds with the social good. So any civilised society is always going to need regulation….or mutuality, or both.
Nowhere is this more applicable than in dealing with the wholesale meat trade. Manchester United’s Martin Edwards has family money amassed by his father Louis, who was a butcher. Bob Lord, the infamous former Chairman of Burnley FC, also amassed huge wealth via wholesale meat dealing. As a sector, it attracts villains, and always has: Michael (my original tutor in such matters from three decades ago) was an East End cockney who once quite seriously offered the services of people even he called “unpredictable” to deal with a particularly obnoxious crook in the advertising business who was giving me a hard time. When I declined, but asked what they might do to my bête-noir, he replied, “Wull, all depends what kinduv day they’ve ‘ad, dunnit?” He claimed the entire project would cost me “no more than a monkey”. It sounded like remarkably good value to me.
When listening to the outpourings of Jeremy Hunt, I often wish I still knew Michael, but he disappeared off my radar years ago – not least because, as soon as he heard my first wife and I had split up, he took her out to lunch and asked whether she might be up for a bit of Ugandan horizontal jogging. But last week, I once more had the nagging desire to trace him, after having read Hunt’s piffle about how concerned he was that gagging orders were threatening patient health in the NHS.
The hypocrisy of this man never ceases to amaze me. His sole purpose in uncovering faults in the NHS (and give him credit, he is very good at adopting a concerned look when he does so) is to present it as a monster….and between the lines are the unwritten words ‘which must be slain’. On this occasion, in using a most unlikely Trojan horse, Jezzer adopts the position of the seeker after liberty, a man breaking the chains of secrecy bare-handed – in the pursuit of what he had the temerity to call “open-ness”. Jeremy Hunt calling for glasnost is a little like George Galloway demanding the death penalty for Islamics: but as we have all seen so many times before, Hunt is a man without shame masquerading as a man without blame. No matter what legally binding payoff clauses NHS managers might have signed up to, it seems, whistle-blowing is the duty of every citizen.
Sadly, this was yet another story that found the increasingly hounded BBC in a frenzy of apathetic indecision. This might explain why they chose to invite the largely unknown Lord Howe (not the ennobled Geoffrey, I hasten to add) to come onto the BBCNews Channel and argue in favour of flagrant greed and illegality. Asked why the Health Secretary was supporting a one-time senior NHS bod who had trousered £500,000 to shut up and then blabbed, with a bare and straight face the Peer said, “Whistle-blowing is a vital and completely acceptable practice for revealing cover-ups in the NHS”.
Now as it happens, I agree with this sentiment – but with two caveats: first, whistle-blowing once you’ve spent the half-million of hush money isn’t really cricket; and second, why is this only true of the NHS? In the same week that Lord Howe vomited this bullsh*t onto the airwaves, Government Ministers vitriolically attacked Julian Assange’s occupancy of a foreign Embassy in his bid to evade being water-boarded by our ‘allies’ in Washington. Can we therefore now expect to see David Cameron going onto Newsnight to discuss with Jeremy Paxman why whistle-blowers about amoral foreign policy are bad, but whistle-blowers facilitating the handing over of the NHS to Tory donors is, er, good?
Regular Sloggers will by now be well aware of my severe doubts about the sanity of Julian Assange. I think his vocal delivery and general personal tics represent powerful evidence of the bloke’s megalomania….and the comments of many of his former colleagues further support that view. But none of that changes the simple point I’m making here: governments only ever support those who blow the whistle on opponents of said governments.
In closing, I would like thank followers of this site for the sympathies expressed and patience shown in the light of my current technological difficulties. I have to say, your patience vastly exceeds mine: my main desire at the minute is to steal a bus, drive to France Telecom’s head office tomorrow, and smash it into reception without waiting for anyone to open the doors. Then I could step out of the driver’s cab in classic 007 style, brush some plaster dust off my immaculate YSL suit, and say to the astonished executives approaching me gingerly, “Now are you paying attention?”
But there is a salutary lesson here, and it is this: although mobile internet is very much the Thing amongst Bright Young Things, the great majority of internet access in the West is still via landlines supplied by large telecoms companies to we slightly older and more wrinkly Things. If you wanted to switch off the ability of an entire, influential demographic to protest about or object to something, it has never been easier than it is today. And it is frustratingly effective: the feeling of being isolated from friends or loved ones – and cut off from debate – is truly Kafkaesque in nature. Having once been given the ability to commune and persuade globally, the act of taking it away is a cruelty based on, at best, unthinking idle incompetence – and at worst, mass censorship with malice aforethought.
In my case at the moment, the former factor is in play; but only the French could add a dimension of arrogance to it. When I rang FT (for the fifth time) this morning, my assertion that the Slogline was still a non-line was greeted by hoots of derision: “Non monsieur, it was fixed last Friday you seelly Englleesh personne, hohohhaha-hoheehoheehorrgh.” I won’t print here what my reply was because this is a family website, but I rather fancy the chap at the other hand had underestimated my facility with French feelthee language. “Allez les bleues mots, squire” that’s what I say.
Anyway, don’t get me started. I bid you a happy Monday, and hope to be blogging normally again by Wednesday (allegedly)….
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