Ian Hamilton QC

By Ian Hamilton

Medicine has created human slugs. Silent in granny and grampa hutches the elderly lie. Drugs prescribed by unscrupulous doctors keep them breathing. It’s breath that pays. Quality of life isn’t a consideration. The owners of the hutches are paid for the live ones just as the doctors are paid for the living on their list. Death cancels all. Life is preserved by underpaid care workers too busy to give the love they undoubtedly have. There’s money in it but not for them. The doctors and home owners take all.

Where the system breaks down is when someone escapes from a ‘care home’ as the hutches are euphemistically called. I am an escapee. In my mid eighties I do all the things men do in their sixties. My biological functions may have waned a little but my social functions remain. They don’t need listing. They are there from flying aeroplanes and riding motorcycles to solving abstruse literary problems. This is thanks mainly to the pharmaceutical companies although the medical profession may have helped, when they weren’t certifying slugs as still alive for financial purposes. Modern surgery helps too.

This has created a new problem. We have an able and experienced generation of sixties to nineties with no function in society. Unthinking doctors keep too many alive. There is nothing for us to do. In the heyday of life we were all dead by seventy. Now we are still young at ninety. Last night I spoke to a professional man. He put it thus. I spent thirty years learning my trade; I spent thirty years practising it. I was forced to retire at sixty and now I’m told I’ll spend thirty years waiting for death. Ninety is a reasonable life expectancy provided you escape the drugs from the doctors in the grampa hutches, in which case you live to a hundred and ten.

In the piece written below called A Safe Pair of Lips I made a joke of the problem but it is no joke. I wasn’t interested in the trivial job I applied for. I want more. I want responsibility. I have carried it all my life and now I’m condemned to years of idleness without it. I have tried for several responsible jobs and failed. Sometimes it is just plain prejudice that has stopped me. More often it is the fear of the interviewer that I am a better man than he is and would soon have his job. This is a perfectly reasonable fear. Let the best man win. More often insurance is the barrier. So recently have octogenarians been in the responsible labour market that actuaries haven’t sufficient figures to compile tables of risk. This is a band of insurance that lies wide open. I expect to live to see it filled. I hope an exception is made for doctors. May they never be reemployed.

 Doctors should stick to their old job of killing people. Modern doctors have transgressed without thought into demography. Since they started to care for us on a forty hour week the population has soared. Every society needs its full time killers. They claim they have the right to time off like any other worker. This is the biggest confidence trick since Britain claimed to be a democracy. Doctors have no right to time off. We paid for their extremely expensive education. We kept them in hospitals and clinics while nurses taught them how to take a pulse. Having qualified at our expense one should always be available in every practice night and day to cure or to cull us.

I have argued in a full circle. If we have a doctor every time we feel ill the problem of old age will solve itself provided we deny them access to their pills.

Roll on twenty-four hour medical treatment. Roll on death.

By Ian Hamilton

Recently I applied for an assistant’s job on a minor Quango.

What astounded me was the interest the Civil Service took in me. The job was for eight hours a week and was in no way confidential. I wasn’t to be shown the stone where they hide the spare keys for Faslane. Yet I had to fill in a twenty-one page form.

Here is a question taken at random:-

Provide two examples which demonstrate your ability to meet strategic objectives through effective planning and resource management. (Their English: not mine)

Here was one from the depths of my criminal practice. I was sure I was at home.

An old woman lay dead in bed…I began….but her husband never bothered to bury her. He wrapped her in a blanket. Every time she leaked he wrapped her in another blanket. Finally he ran out of blankets. Then she leaked on the floor. When she leaked through the floor the downstairs neighbours complained.

You and I would think that anyone able to open a job application with such brio would be worth eight hours a week in any civil service. But not them.

I tried another question: This asked what sex I was. There were seven boxes opposite which I had to name my sex. My pen flowed swiftly on the first three and then slowed. Then I remembered a chap at University who was a bit odd. He went into the civil service and did rather well. So I wrote ‘transgender’. That made four although I’m damned if I know what transgenders do. (Can anyone tell me? No please don’t.) Then I tried ‘cross-dressing’ and that was five. That was me beat. To this day I can’t think what the other two can be. What two nameless things do these civil servants get up to in their tea breaks? It’s worse than the Masons. What have I been missing all my life?

At last I found a question where I fancied myself.

Please provide two examples which demonstrate your skills or knowledge gained from dealing with the media.

I make no comment that I was applying for an eight hour a week junior’s job where I would be unlikely to be holding press conferences. Mind You I quite fancied myself. However the answer was easy.

Anyone asking such a daft question could never have heard of H L Menken.

‘Never fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrell’, I quoted.

‘Never kick an editor in the balls,’ I invented.

There weeks later I got a letter saying how sorry they were that I was not to be called for interview.

I now think I know why. It was nothing to do with the questions or the answers. It was to do with me. To be a civil servant you need a safe pair of lips, and a safe pair of lips I’ve never had,

By Ian Hamilton

Why another enquiry into the Iraq war? It will bring no comfort to the dead or to those they left behind. Nor to the limbless and the sightless. A hundred dead In Afghanistan but what about the figures for the wounded? It would be an unusual war if the wounded were not more than the dead. What was the total casualty rate in Iraq? What is the total casualty rate in Afghanistan? What is the price the United Kingdom pays in blood, limbs, sightless eyes and death? What plans are there for the wounded? Are they to be cast adrift on the NHS and then shown the door?

These questions should not have to be asked. In my youth I missed, by a whisker of months, being a pilot in Bomber Command in Europe. The death rate of those bomber crews was 44%. I do not know the rate of wounded but they must be counted too. Every night these crews went out with less than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving their tour of thirty trips. Fifty-five thousand five hundred died. These youngsters, all volunteers, died for an old bitch gone in the teeth so that MPs could have their expenses and Blair and Brown and the bankers could live their fat lives in peace. Now our gaze is directed by yet another enquiry towards Blair and away from Brown, his guilty lieutenant. These are both guilty men. Our Uk system is a guilty system. We are failing our fighting men and women.

Before any of our youth is sent to war there must be clear objectives. The people must approve of these objectives. It was manifest that the people didn’t approve of the Iraq war yet it still happened. The House of Commons has lost control of the executive. There is no one to put a brake on the blood-stained excesses of gangsters like Blair and Brown, defenders of the rich. Only 36% of the votes cast were for this government. This is not democracy. They have no mandate. Armed resistance would be justified. It would occur in any banana state except England. That is why so much of our freedom has been eroded. Their predecessors took us to war in Iraq. A dictating Junta now continues the war in Afghanistan. They send ill equipped troops to their death. Few of us know our war aims. They are stated to us in vague terms as though we can’t be trusted. They are right. We can’t be trusted. They lied to us over Iraq. It may be they are lying again over Afghanistan.

The Iraq enquiry rolls on. The ‘blame’ is being diverted towards Blair but Brown is equally dirty. He stands with his arms deep in the blood of our youth. Yet our ‘democracy’ cannot rid us of him. The alternative is Government by people who have never known anything but the privilege of inherited money.

Scotland must leave this sham democracy. Seventy years ago we fought side by side with them to save civilisation but now we must leave. Governance full of pomp and ceremony, black rods and knocking on doors, is good for tourism and for nothing else. England must act, as it has acted before, to save itself but it is England’s problem not ours. England’s enemy lies within England.

Brown that son of a manse has brought blood down on us all. Enough is enough. Whatever our youngsters are fighting and dying for it is not for Blair and Brown and bonuses. A soldier gets no bonus. It is time for Scotland to resign its commission and leave the United Kingdom.

AUSTERITY BRITAIN………1945—-1951
By David Kynaston

This book should be in every Scottish Grampa’s Christmas stocking. It’s a social history of Britain after the war.

Here’s what the press have to say about it.

A marvel….the fullest, deepest and most balanced history of our times….SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Exemplary ***** Mail on Sunday

A wonderfully illuminating picture of the way we were…..THE TIMES

Unsurpassed….a classic****** The guardian.

In the 632 pages of text there are four references to Scotland.

1) The theft of the Coronation Stone.’The awful event of Christmas  Day….’

2)  Economic difficulties

3)  A reference to Scottish TV
 
4)  The Housing situation was even worse in Scotland where in 1950 it was estimated that ….1.4 million…..were denied a reasonable home life through…squalor, lack of sanitation, and so on. 50.8% of (Glasgow’s housing) stock comprised dwellings of only one or two rooms compared with 5.5% for Greater London.

Remind your grampa that in 1950 they sent a governor called the Secretary of State for Scotland to govern us. One is still sent under the same title. He smiles and promises us sweeties as they did in 1950. Don’t trust him. He’s British and you know what Britain did to us. This history speaks for itself.

Tell Grampa that this was before Britain stole our oil and before they relaxed the banking laws so that the international banks in Scotland went bust. Tell him to note how quickly they then became Scottish banks.

Before you tuck this book into grampa’s stocking write in it these words.

Dear Grampa,

Why did you not rise in armed revolt against the British?

Are you not ashamed of the Scotland you have left to your grandchildren?