Spot on, Sir John

Sir John Major is spot-on with his comments about the difference between Tory sleaze in the 1990s and Labour sleaze now. And rather than bluster on about how useless a Prime Minister Major was, Labour people ought to have the good grace to accept it.

Dr Crippen "not dead" shock

Over the past couple of years, one of the best and most informative blogs around has been NHS Blog Doctor, written by an anonymous GP who styled himself Dr John Crippen.

Unfortunately Dr Crippen had a long break over the summer and has not posted anything since October 17, which was understandably the cause of some perplexity among his regular readers.

Earlier this week, someone purporting to be a colleague at his workplace left the following comment:

I am a senior partner at 'John's practice, I have only become aware of this 'weblog' after accessing his email account through our internal system. Other partners have read this website, but none of us knew who the author was - although in retrospect there are a number of clues we could have picked up on!

There is no easy way to say this, but the doctor known as 'John' or 'Crippen' passed away in a road traffic accident mid-October. Although I appreciate the esteem in which many of you obviously held him, I must ask that the emails cease as of now - they are all redirected to our mail server and this is causing some difficulty.

Dr. Crippen's identity may no longer need to be secret for his own purposes, but out of respect for his family and remaining colleagues I shall not be sharing this here, neither will I post another message or reply to any left. This webblog will be removed once I can circumnavigate the security protocols for obvious reasons of confidentiality.

This said, I thank all who visit here for their support of our dear, and much missed colleague.

Kind regards, Dr.P.

I thought this comment was exceedingly odd, not least because the bit about deleting the blog and "circumnavigating security protocols" sounded more like the work of a censorious saboteur than someone genuinely concerned to protect "confidentaility."

Subsequent investigations by myself and a number of other bloggers revealed there had been no road accidents reported anywhere in the UK between 17-31 October involving the death of any GPs.

The esteemed swearblogger Devil's Kitchen now claims to have proof that Dr Crippen is not dead, just that he has had enough of blogging for the time being.

If that is so then I'm glad he's still with us - but if he has indeed given up blogging it's a sad loss to the 'sphere.

The real scandal of the New Labour years

Harold Wilson once said that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing. Despite the focus of the last few weeks, I have long believed that the real scandal of the Blair-Brown years is not Sleaze, nor Iraq, nor even the fact that they managed to employ Alastair Campbell. It is the fact that a Labour Government - a Labour Government as Neil Kinnock would have put it - has managed to preside over an increase in inequality.

Today's report by the Sutton Trust provides further hard evidence of this catastrophic policy failure for a party of the centre-left.

Of course it wasn't Labour that started it. The decline in social mobility and emergence of a British underclass over the past 30 years is first and foremost the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. But the fact that the gap has continued to widen in the past ten years is proof, if ever it were needed, that the role of New Labour has essentially been to perpetuate the Thatcherite settlement rather than challenge or overturn it.

Some people will point to the demise of the Grammar Schools as a factor in preventing children moving out of deprived backgrounds. Others will blame house prices. Others will fatalistically conclude that the establishment always reasserts itself, and that the effortless superiority learned at public school will always be worth more in the job market than countless A-grades.

Either way, the political upside is that there is a challenge here for Gordon Brown which, if he can grasp it, might even yet give his government the moral purpose it currently lacks, and a way back from the political malaise in which it finds itself.

There is also, if his pride will permit, an old adversary who could help in that task - former Cabinet minister Alan Milburn, who was warning about this as long ago as 2003.

Back then Milburn wrote: "Getting Britain socially moving demands a new front in the battle for equal life chances. The most substantial inequalities are not simply between income groups but between those who own shares, pensions and housing and those who rely solely on wages or benefits."

It was designed as a possible prosepctus for the third term. Four years on, is it too much to be hoped that such ideas could yet form the basis of Labour's programe for a fourth term in power?

Cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

More than 80pc of you say Harriet should go

Despite the current focus on Jacqui Smith - a sacrifical lamb if ever there was one - Harriet Harman is not yet quite out of the woods over the dodgy donations affair. My poll shows that 84pc of readers of this blog think she should resign and I reckon that is pretty close to where public opinion as a whole currently stands.

Clear favourite to replace her was Jon Cruddas with 38pc of the vote to 15pc for the next highest-placed candidate, Alan Johnson, 13pc for John Denham and 12pc for Hilary Benn but there appears to be much less interest in this potential contest, possibly reflecting the fact that after this summer's interminable marathon, we're all feeling a bit deputy-leadershipped-out.

No way to treat a great English composer

For those who haven't heard the story, it seems the BBC has sent a rejection letter to an independent producer who wanted to make a film about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, citing lack of topicality (or "findability" in the new jargon) as the reason.

The letter includes a now-infamous request to the producer in question to let them know about any forthcoming premieres of Mr Williams' work, so that this apparent "findability" deficit could be addressed. As any fule kno, Vaughan Williams died in 1958 and the whole point of the proposed film was to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death next year.

I have to confess that this story, originally published in the Observer, had me checking the date on Sunday to make sure it wasn't an April Fool, but I'm not going to blog in detail on it because (a) it's a few days old now, and (b) The Half-Blood Welshman has said all I would really want to say on his blog.

Suffice to say that RVW was, as Half-Blood says, a signifcant musical figure. One of his most under-rated pieces, in my view, is Five Tudor Portraits, which I sung at the Royal Festival Hall in 1978 as part of the Hertfordshire County Youth Choir. Happy memories.

Is Richard Dawkins a tad confused?

I've avoided commenting on the whole "Christianophobia" debate thus far, mainly because I think protesting about "wintervals" and the demise in school nativity plays is the kind of thing that makes Christians look slightly absurd - in much the same way as I regularly despair of that group of people in the Church of England who think the biggest issue facing Christians today is not injustice, or poverty, or climate change, but homosexuality.

However the recent intervention on the issue by the UK's most well-known atheist Richard Dawkins has finally compelled me to put finger to keyboard.

Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, claims to be a "cultural Christian" who, far from wanting to marginalise Christian traditions and "purge our society of its Christian history," is quite happy to take part in some of them himself.

He then comes out with the quite remarkable statement, for someone of his stated views: "I like singing carols along with everybody else."

Let's look at the words of some of those carols for a moment. How about:

"Christ by highest heaven adored,
Christ the everlasting Lord"
(Hark the Herald Angels Sing.)

Or

"Not in that poor lowly stable
With the oxen standing by
We shall see him, but in heaven
Set at God's right hand on high."
(Once in Royal David's City)

Or

"Yea, Lord, we greet thee,
Born this happy morning,
Jesus to thee be glory given,
Word of the Father,
Now in flesh appearing....
O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord"
(O Come All Ye Faithful)

There is no doubt what all these carols are saying - that Jesus is the Lord of creation, or in the words of St John, the eternal Word who was not only with God in the beginning, but who was God.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad that Richard Dawkins likes singing carols, glad that someone who has been as militantly anti-Christian as he has even celebrates Christmas at all.

But as he sings them again this Christmas, I hope he can reflect on what they really mean - and maybe ask himself again the question "....and is it true, this most tremendous tale of all?"