What Are UFOs: Part 2

Is the Psycho-Social Hypothesis Failing the Stress Test?

This is my response to the second part of CJ’s searching investigation of what UFOs are, published on his blog yesterday. In this piece, CJ explains his dissatisfaction with the Psycho-Social Hypothesis. As he explains, the psycho-social hypothesis or model means different things to different people, but it roughly states that the UFO experience is shaped by social stresses and anxieties. My view of the phenomenon is slightly different, following that of the small press magazine Magonia. This was for a long time Britain’s leading sceptical UFO magazine, with slogans like ‘Hard on Ufology, hard on the causes of Ufology’ parodying Blair’s slogan on crime. It was based very much on the psycho-social model, which to them meant that UFO encounters were internal, psychological events prompted in many cases by an external object or phenomenon. The imagery experienced in these encounters was drawn from popular culture and folklore. Thus, in the ancient and medieval worlds, people encountered fairies, angels, gods and demons. In our modern, scientific age these have been replaced by spacecraft and aliens.

CJ makes it clear that he is certainly not an opponent of the PSH, and that he shares many of the views of Jean-Michel Abrassart. Dr Abrassart is a sceptical Belgian psychologist and UFO researcher who presented a fascinating talk on UFOs to ASSAP at their weekly online Zoom meeting last week. He showed research from a Belgian perspective that UFO narratives are shaped by culture. Belgium is a multilingual country with three different linguistic groups: the Flemish, who speak a form of Dutch; the Walloons, who speak French, and a small, German-speaking enclave. His research showed that stories of UFO encounters were sometimes confined to particular ethnicities and did not cross over to the others despite all of them sharing and occupying the same country.

CJ did not take aim at the whole Psycho-Social Hypothesis but just one aspect: that mentioned above – the theory that UFO flaps appear in response to social anxieties. He also notes that many UFOs are indeed misidentified astronomical phenomena. Jean-Michel showed how many of the flaps followed the 18-year Saros or Metonic cycle. This is when the Earth and Moon adopt the same positions to each other after that number of years, and has been used to predict eclipses since the days of ancient Greece.  It also allows one to test some UFO sightings, by returning to the location with the witness when the Moon appears in the same position as the original sighting. While it sounds ridiculous that people could misidentify such a familiar sight as the Moon, there is certainly corroborating evidence on this side of the North Sea. Magonia mentioned decades ago the case of a group of British coppers who began to believe that their car was being pursued by a UFO. They knew that in reality the object above them was the Moon, but had to stop their vehicle for a moment to be sure.

CJ then goes to show how many of the classic flaps correlate with the social anxieties of the time. The sightings of Martians in the 1950s were a response to Cold War anxieties. That of the 1970s was spurred by the emerging awareness of the ecological crisis, while the dark, sinister encounters of the ‘90s reflected the predominance of paranoia and conspiracy theories in popular culture. But these flaps don’t always reflect those fears.

There was definitely more than element of paranoia in 50s Ufology, following the writings of Donald Keyhoe who was convinced that the UFOs were preparing to invade. The American Air Force general, Kolman von Kebizcy also called for America to prepare for an invasion from Mars following the 1952 mass sightings of UFOs over Washington D.C. But it was also the era of the Contactee, people who believed they had met aliens and been given messages to impart to the rest of humanity. These were generally greetings of interplanetary brotherhood and warnings about the threat of nuclear weapons, which also reflected contemporary concerns about the threat of nuclear annihilation. In some of the messages, these were a threat to the planet itself and would throw it out of orbit if used. Other aliens warned that they put not only humanity but the whole universe in peril, and were forcing the other intelligent beings of the cosmos to act. These encounters and their messages from benevolent but concerned aliens resemble the plot of the film The Day The Earth Stood Still, which was based on an SF short story, ‘The Return of the Master’.

The 1970s were another decade of great social anxiety. The report, Limits to Growth, had been published arguing that in the very near future the Earth would become massively overpopulated. Humanity would use up the planet’s resources leading to the collapse of civilisation. The Club of Rome had published its findings that the world’s flora and fauna were also threatened. This led to the foundation of various Green parties in western Europe, along with campaigns by newly formed environmental groups like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, now the Worldwide Fund for Nature, to save the whale and the tiger. Popular children’s television shows like Newsround covered these issues for their young viewers along with the threat to the Ozone layer from aerosols. There were also numerous UFO encounters, of which one of the best known is probably the abduction of Travis Walton, an American logger. This was later filmed in the 90s as Fire in the Sky. It was also the decade Steven Spielberg released his blockbusting Close Encounters, with its final scenes in which short, spindly aliens emerge from the alien mothership to meet a group of human scientists. All the people they have taken over the decades come out of the craft with them to rejoin their families. Finally, they depart, taking the film’s ordinary joe hero, Roy Neary, with them. This has undoubtedly had a massive impact on UFOs in popular culture worldwide. There were comic book adaptations and spoofs in film and television, including Britain’s own long-running comedy show, The Goodies. And the film’s slogan, ‘We Are Not Alone’, became a catch-phrase for UFOs and aliens generally. I don’t, however, recall the aliens encountered in this period giving messages about the ecological crisis. This appeared more in the 90s.

Then there was the 90s and the explosion of UFOs and conspiracy culture. The latter partly had its roots in controversies over Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the resulting Gulf War. Many on the left believed that, instead of being a war of liberation to free the country from a murderous dictator, it was instead a ‘resource war’ to steal those nations’ oil. In America protesters marched chanting ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go! We won’t die for Texaco’. These fears and anxieties were fanned still further by George Bush Senior’s statement about creating ‘a new order’. To many, this recalled Adolf Hitler and his declaration of the same thing, as well as conspiracy theories about the founding of America by the Freemasons, as shown in the Eye in the Pyramid on the dollar bill and the slogan ‘Novo Ordo Saecularum’ – New World Order.

It also roughly coincided with the publication of two books which together helped to shape the emerging abduction narrative. These were Above Top Secret by the British violinist, Tim Good, and Communion, by the American horror writer Whitley Streiber. Good’s book claimed that America had secretly made contact with the aliens and there were secret bases all over the world, plus a group Above Top Secret, the Majestic 12, set up to supervise these encounters. Streiber’s book claimed that he had been repeatedly abducted and examined by Grey aliens. The two, and the many other similar books that they inspired, founded the abduction mythology in which America had done a secret deal with the aliens to allow them to kidnap and experiment on humans, including sexually, resulting in the creation of half-human hybrid children. This myth became a social panic, with abduction researchers like Bud Hopkins and Leo Sprinkle taking their experiencers on popular talks shows like Oprah. It exerted a very strong influence on the X-Files, whose heroes, FBI agents Scully and Mulder, were on the trail of a secret conspiracy to create human-alien hybrids in preparation for a hostile alien invasion.

So what about today? The past few years have also been a period of acute social stress. This was most pronounced with the Covid pandemic and lockdown. The virus itself was sufficiently terrifying to many ordinary people, following as it did films about scientists battling deadly germs which threatened to destroy humanity. I think one of these in the 90s was Outbreak, while a similar film, The Satan Bug, was released in the 70s. There was also stress caused by the government’s response of locking down society and industry to prevent the spread of the disease. Inessential businesses were shut down and the public were allowed out only for essential activities like shopping and a day’s exercise. People naturally worried about their jobs and businesses. There were also some truly damaging conspiracy theories, in which it was claimed that the vaccines offered against the disease contained mind control chips, or that the real purpose of the lockdown was to allow the World Economic Forum to seize power and create the one world superstate.

And this is where it gets interesting. If UFOs and other paranormal encounters are produced by social stress, then we should have experienced another wave of sightings of alien spaceships, ghosts and other supernatural beings. But we haven’t. CJ has gone through the stats. People are not seeing more alien spaceships. At the same time, the male suicide rate hasn’t risen and there hasn’t, mercifully, been an increase in self-harm either. Nor are people turning to religion or the paranormal.

Not that you would know it from the press. CJ states that magazines and newspapers, including New Scientist, have been telling their readers that the stressed population is indeed turning to religion and the paranormal, and encounters with aliens and spooks have very definitely risen. The gentlemen and ladies of the Fourth Estate have duly contacted CJ to confirm their views, only to close the interviews when he disappoints them by stating plainly that this isn’t happening. I think we can be confident this is correct. Not only is he a very diligent researcher himself, but he is assisted by Becky, who did her PhD analysing the Society for Psychic Research’s Census of Hallucinations to show that the core ghost phenomenon did not change in the 19^th century. It has been said the Victorian period saw changes in ghost imagery and narratives in popular culture. For example, ghosts generally appear solid, but Victorian artists drew them as transparent simply to show they were ghosts. This may present another challenge to the Psycho-Social Model if real ghost experiences don’t match those in popular culture, as in shows like Scooby Doo or Rentaghost.

This poses the question of what is going on here. Is the Psycho-Social Model totally invalid, despite apparently holding true for previous flaps? Or perhaps the psychological and social mechanisms that create flaps during times of stress are actually more complex than previously thought, and require a number of subtle factors that have been absent during the Covid outbreak? Or perhaps this follows a continuing trend of cultural exhaustion that some have claimed is being experienced elsewhere in society and the arts.

One of these is Stephen E. Andrews, a former bookseller and the author of 100 Science Fiction Books You Must Read. On his YouTube channel, Outlaw Bookseller, he reviews and discusses literature and bookshops, especially Science Fiction. In one of his videos he discusses hauntology, a cultural phenomenon in which the arts turn back to the past and previous tropes and images. He argues that this is occurring now in Science Fiction, as authors use the same old plots and ideas, and that this is also part of a general trend in wider literature and the arts. Here’s a link to one of his videos on hauntology.

Why you “prefer the Science -Fiction Books with the old covers”: HAUNTOLOGY & SCIENCE FICTION #sf (youtube.com)

Apart from the issue identified by CJ, the 20^th century was a period of immense social and political change. This included the collapse of the European empires and the rise of America and the Communist Soviet Union to superpower status, as well as the shock in domestic culture of the emergence of the teenager and youth culture, feminism and the promise and threat of new technology like the atomic bomb, genetic engineering and information technology. These trends were reflected in the arts and literature, including Science Fiction. Aldous Huxley predicted a future in which babies would be grown in hatcheries in Brave New World, published in the 1920s. But this began to look like it could become reality in 1962 with the experiments of the Italian biologist Daniele Petracci. Petracci was experimenting with gestating human embryos outside the womb. One of these had even progressed to developing eyes and limbs before the experiment ended. And the second half of the 20^th century saw other scientific advances that seemed similarly threatening of promising. These included household robots, holidays in space and flying cars. These have not materialised, with the exception of flying cars. The Outlaw Bookseller considers that scientific advance is accelerating, but looking at books such Paul Milo’s Your Flying Car Awaits about the failed predictions of the 20^th century, it could seem instead that scientific and technological invention has slowed down. Some of this is due to the problems tackled being far more complex than scientists in the 50s and 60s believed, as in aging. It could be that in the absence of the spectacular social and technological change promised in previous decades, western society has settled down to a pattern and that some of the changes previously regarded as shocking are now viewed as part of traditional western society. There is still a suspicion towards parts of youth culture, for example, but Mods, Rockers and Punks no longer cause quite the alarm they did when they first emerged, and indeed are frequently the subject of affectionate nostalgia. Perhaps it isn’t just social stress that is required for UFO flaps, but specific social stresses about new social phenomena, and that society has become used to many of the old threats and concerns. In the absence of lunar and Martian colonies, for example, space travel seems almost routine. The exploration of space, and the possibility of alien life are still the subjects of immense interest. And any number of books, films and TV stories are still coming out about invasion by hostile aliens. But they’ve become an accepted part of the media landscape, and so the element of novelty that may have been part of the impetus behind previous decades’ flaps are absent. And so, although society was gripped by tension during the Covid outbreak, this did not lead to people turning to the paranormal, or meeting a helpful spaceman offering advice.

For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/07/ufos-cjs-angle-part-2/

1977 Programme on the Mysterious Gnome Kidnappings in Formby

This is another video from the Beeb Archive channel, and comes from a programme ‘Voice of the People’. It’s about a local crimewave in Formby when people had their decorative garden gnomes stolen. It started with one It began with the theft of one family’s beloved garden ornament, who was cut off at his feet because he was fixed to the ground. The thief left a ransom note demanding 25 pence left in an envelope at the local car park. 25 pence was worth rather more in them days, when I think you could buy cheap chews for half a penny and 2000 AD for 16p. The thief then started stealing others’ gnomes as well. The programme has a naturally jokey approach to the topic, talking about underground coppers hunting the thief and jokes about trying to restore the broken gnome with the National Elf Service. It goes on to speculate about a mad millionaire in his castle determined to have the biggest gnome collection of them all, illustrated by a suitably sinister figure on a piano. Eventually the thief put all the gnomes back. The only clue to his identity was that he had big feet by the foot prints he left behind.

I’m putting this up because there was a craze for such thefts as late as the ’90s, mostly done as pranks. The thief or thieves would steal the gnomes, but pretend it had gone for its holidays and so send back postcards to the family of the gnome from locations around the world. In America there was a similar craze for stealing the pink flamingos with which some families decorated their front yards. The landlords of one house, that had been let to students, found 100 such birds in their basement.

‘In the Garden of Unearthly Delights’ – Flicking through Josh Kirby Art Book

This comes from the Lisa Shea Artist channel on YouTube. Shea’s an artist from Massachusetts, who’s put up a number of videos flicking through various books on art. One of these is In the Gardens of Unearthly Delights, showing the amazing work of Fantasy artist Josh Kirby. Her blurb for the video runs:

‘Josh Kirby (1928-2001) was an incredibly talented artist who primarily worked in science fiction and fantasy themed art. Josh painted a LOT of intricately detailed artwork for book covers. While other artists in his time frame did shiny, glossy dragons and flawless-skinned maidens, Josh was much more interested in the more unsettling aspects of organic life. His gnomes would have bumps and warts. His dragons would have folds and injuries. He often went right past the ‘cartooney’ aspect of this genre and delved into a gritty, blemishes-and-all view which was quite refreshing. Josh was TALENTED. I know a lot of artists in this genre had impressive skills. Josh is right up there with the best of them. His use of color, his incredibly detailed compositions, it’s all just so beautiful to study. Published in 1991, In the Garden of Unearthly Delights is a comprehensive presentation of a range of Josh’s artwork styles. From the more serious to the more playful, from sci-fi to barbarians to dragons, we get to enjoy quite a wealth of what Josh created. Well recommended. Here’s a direct non-affiliate link to on Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/Garden-Unearth…‘

The book’s title is clearly a reference to Hieronymus Bosch and his great, enigmatic work, the Garden of Earthly Delights with its strange creatures. Bosch’s works appear to have a distinct, Christian religious message while the works Kirby illustrated were far more secular and often much less serious. Kirby’s best known for his covers for Terry Pratchett’s books, but he was around and working long before then. The book’s divided into different chapters by theme, such as ‘Monsters and Maidens’ and ‘Aliens and Androids’. Shea notes that his warrior women and maidens don’t wear much, but neither do many of his male warriors. He also did some realist works, such as portraits of the director Alfred Hitchcock, who he still painted warts and all. There’s a bit of controversy brewing at the moment over the possibility that Pratchett’s publishers may replace the Kirby covers. You can well understand why. For many fans, Kirby’s covers, bursting as they are with detail and exuberant action, are the definitive depictions of Pratchett’s Disc World and its bizarre inhabitants. I can see that the publisher might think it’s time to change them, and use a fresh artist. However, if this does happen it will be sad to see the end of Kirby’s brilliant, fantastic vision on Tewwy’s works.

Donald Trump Visits Camberwick Green

This is just a fun, short video from 1WTC’s YouTube channel. It’s just the titles from Camberwick Green with the Orange Man appearing from the music box. It looks like the beginning of a much longer video, as Trump doesn’t actually do anything when he appears, except waves hello and nods when he’s asked if they can go campaigning with him.

It does, however, bring back happy memories of Trumpton, Camberwick Green, Chigley and the awesome Brian Cant. And it is fun imagining what Trump would do electioneering in Camberwick Green. Or would he incite the crowd to try storming the town hall, like he did Congress in America?

Count Binface Launches His Manifesto for London Mayor

It’s the end of the week and there are a lot of very serious political issues to discuss and to rail against. But before we do, here’s a piece from one of the hopefuls running for the elected mayor of London: Count Binface. Binface, wearing a suit not so dissimilar to Darth Vader’s but with a bucket as a helmet, describes himself as an ‘Intergalactic warrior’ and Ceefax fan. The clip’s clearly taken from the local news for the London region, whose presenter states that Binface is no stranger to elections. In 2021 he got 25,000 votes. Binface states that he is, indeed, one of the novelty candidates, and is standing to celebrate British democracy and the fact that anyone can stand for election no matter how weird their getup. He is also says something about being the weirdest looking candidate, but looking at the others he’s not so sure. Don’t worry, he says, he won’t name names. His policies include: price-capping croissants, renaming London Bridge after Phoebe Waller, and making the bosses of Thames Water take a dip in it to see how they like it. He also boasts of having written out the election form correctly, unlike certain other candidates, and it will be this attention to detail he intends to bring to parliament.

Okay, Binface is clearly heir to Screaming Lord Sutch and the Monster Raving Looney Party, or, as they were parodied in Blackadder the Third, ‘the standing at the back looking stupid party’. But it’s all good fun. I’ve read a lot of politics, but the only manifesto I ever bought was the Monster Raving Looneys’ back in the 1990s. I still miss Sutch and his band. Some of it was great political satire. I remember back in the 1980s there was much debate and outrage over the EU buying agricultural surpluses to keep the prices up and the farmers in business. Thus you had the wine lake and the butter mountain. One of the Looney’s suggestions then was for people to be able to ski down said mountain. Sutch sadly took his own life after the death of his mother. There are people following in his great, democratic tradition. Other have included Flying Officer Kite and Lord Buckethead. There was also someone with a very long name ending in ‘Ole ‘Ole Biscuit Barrel, as well as bloke called Dick somebody, who stood for election in Dulwich with the motto ‘More Dick in Dulwich’. Going back to the ’80s, one of the Monster Raving Looney Party’s plans was to make Oliver Reed minister for culture.

As the Prince Regent says to the extremely right-wing Tory candidate in Blackadder III, ‘Sensible policies for a happier Britain’.

Trumpton’s Windy Miller Dances to Michael Jackson’s Thriller

Here’s another piece of fun for people old enough to remember Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley. This is a short video from the Trumptonshire Official channel on YouTube showing Windy Miller doing the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.

Three Videos Satirising Donald Trump as the Dune Villain Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

These come from the YouTube channel CJMattis Makes Games. The spice must flow!

When Trump first ran for president, the Christian Libertarian Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, got so carried away with the enthusiasm that he hailed Trump as ‘the God Emperor’. This was the title of Leto II, the strange human/sandworm hybrid, who ruled the Galaxy as a tyrant until his assassination in Herbert’s book, God Emperor of Dune.

Now imagine that as Donald Trump ruling humanity! Have fun, and don’t have nightmares.

V&A Put Maggie on Display as a Villain Like Hitler: Tory Media Outraged

This is hilarious. I’m afraid I didn’t read all of the article, or watch the video put up about it on GB News or Talk TV, I just caught the headlines and bit of the introduction. It seems the Victoria and Albert Museum have offended Tory sensibilities by putting Thatcher on display as part of a piece on villains. The others including Adolf Hitler and one of the other horrors who tortured and butchered thousands and millions. And, worse, they represented her with a sort of Spitting Image puppet.

Okay, at one level it is a stretch to put her on the same part as Hitler. She never invaded anywhere, and despite concerns at the time, she did not open concentration camps. Well, not in this country. She was friends with the Chilean dictator General Pinochet, who certainly did murder and torture anyone vaguely on the left, including stealing the babies of dissidents to be raised by good Chilean Fascists. And her mate, Ronald Reagan, backed a series of brutal right-wing dictatorships in Central and South America, as well as the Contras in Nicaragua, whose atrocities would shame the SS. Every year Roman Catholic priests and laymen gather for a vigil outside the former American army base that was the centre for the infamous School of the Americas that trained these monsters.

And to many Brits, Thatcher is a villain. The poverty and decimation of our industries and economy can all be directly traced to her policies. She is an intensely divisive figure. According to polls, the British public loves and despises her in roughly the same proportions – 50/50. Spitting Image sent her up several times as a Nazi. In the first series, they had her going down to the bottom of the garden to discuss possibly policies with her German neighbour, Herr Schmidt, who was strongly hinted to be Adolf. When she was ousted, the programme did a sketch with her cabinet in a mock beerhall dressed as Nazis singing ‘We were only following orders’. On the wall behind them was a painting of Thatcher as a medieval knight on a horse, parodying that one of Hitler. When the Leaderene finally died, street parties spontaneously broke out across Britain, but particularly in the northern communities she’d ravaged. They were burning her in effigy! This is astonishing. I haven’t seen it done on the death of any other politician.

If you are going to ask questions about political authority, and what counts as a villain, then it seems to me to be entirely reasonable to include Thatcher because of the controversy that surrounds her, her continuing unpopularity and closeness to some of the real monsters.

GB News’ Mike Graham Hates the NHS and Doesn’t Want to Pay for Nurses’ Tuition

More nonsense from GB News’ brainlet, who thinks you can grow concrete. There was a video put up by the right-wing pseudo-news channel in the week commenting on a report that found that 700 or so NHS nurses from Nigeria had all faked their exams to get here by employing Scullion Scholars. Fans of Tom Sharpe’s lurid farces will recall that in Porterhouse Blue, his satire on Oxbridge, Scullion Scholars are a group of intelligent students recruited by the porter, Scullion, to write essays for the well-heeled by less cerebrally endowed, who simply can’t be bothered. There was a panel discussion about this, which included Farmer Graham and two Black pundits, and man and a woman. The Black woman was rather indignant because the story was about Africans. Well, I got the impression that corruption is endemic across the Developing World, as well as Russia, and that Nigeria in particular had a name for it. Years ago Private Eye printed a letter to one of the Bangladeshi papers in their ‘Funny Old World’ column. This came from an outraged father aghast at parents being banned from sitting with their sprogs during the exams to help them with the answers. As for Nigeria, corruption in that country has become so notorious that a Black American female blogger complained that whenever she met a Nigerian, she was automatically suspicious of him or her. The lady on GB News did make the interesting point that regardless of faking their exams, they were still keen to work in the NHS and so should be allowed to do so. I see her point, but the nurses should be required to do the exams again or otherwise not put in position looking after patients with complex needs, because lives are at stake. The Black guy made the perfectly reasonable and humane statement that the Developing World needs medical professionals more than we do, and so we shouldn’t be taking them to work for us. Fair point! Unfortunately, the Concrete Farmer also opened his gob.

Graham declared that the NHS is an endless pit for money. This is a frequent claim by members of the right who very definitely want it sold off. The argument is that it’s an endless drain on taxpayers’ money. But back in 1979, the GMC stated that it could easily be funded into the future by the taxpayers. Britain in fact funds our NHS much less than other countries, including America. Which is part of the problem, as our NHS is chronically underfunded. As for rising costs, this is due to the partial privatisation, which increases administration costs and bureaucracy. This is to coordinate all the private companies now involved in it, and to provide a profit to these private companies’ shareholders.

He then deigned to give us all the benefit of his wisdom on nurses’ tuition. Why did they all need college degrees? It wasn’t like that in his day. Well, no it wasn’t. I can’t say for sure, but part of it may have been the general push towards academic, rather than vocational education, which is creating a generation of graduates with useless degrees because half the population have them. But I think it might also be because nursing has now become much more technological. It isn’t just about turning up with the right pills, making beds and providing bed pans when appropriate. There is an increasing amount of machinery involved, such as those I’ve been put as part of the myeloma treatment. One set are carefully regulated pumps providing the infusion of necessary medicines, while another was something like a dialysis machine that served to take stem cells from my blood ready for their storage during the high intensity treatment that kept me in hospital for two and a half-weeks, during which time they would be restored to me when appropriate. The consequences of not using properly trained nurses can be catastrophic. Years ago in Bristol there was a terrible incident of medical incompetence that left a paralysed man with brain damage. The gent in question had been left paralysed after a rugby injury. He had a machine to help him breathe, and required specialist care from a very specific type of nurse. These were supplied by an agency. This agency, however, had been unable to provide a nurse of proper type and so had sent an ordinary nurse instead. This woman did not know what she was doing and turned one of the switches on the machine down when she came in. This cut the poor chap’s oxygen supply, leading to the resulting brain damage. Nurses are also part of the team trying to keep heart attack victims alive, as you have only got to see from the various medical dramas and reality TV shows like 24 Hours in A&E. Nurse Practitioners, one of the various nursing grades, are frequently called in to provide opinions that may otherwise go to doctors. Properly trained nurses are literally a matter of life and death, and Mike Graham is once again showing his colossal ignorance by considering their training unnecessary.

He then capped this litany of ignorant bloviation by saying he didn’t want to pay for their tuition. If they want to go into nursing, they should pay for it themselves. This looks like nothing more than envy and jealousy. I strongly believe that the state should pay for the tuition of nurse, doctors, surgeons and the other health professionals. This is because they provide an undeniable benefit to the health of this country’s people, and by extension, to the economy. The more people who can be treated and nursed back to health, or at least to a condition where they can manage whatever’s wrong with them, the more people can go back to work. Some medical professionals are very well paid indeed, but this is because of their immense skill. And as well-paid professionals, they return some of their income back to the state and society through income tax. There is a shortage of people entering nursing and medicine, because of the low pay in comparison with other countries like Australia. We should be encouraging our aspiring doctors and nurses of tomorrow by paying them what they’re worth, and so we wouldn’t have to poach them from the Developing World.

And we also need to hear less ignorant nonsense from windbags like Mike Graham. After the collapse of the western Roman empire, the Byzantines – the Greek-speaking eastern Roman empire and the Arab, Muslim empire founded public hospitals. One founded by Harun al-Rashid even had a staff of musicians to soothe the trouble minds of madmen. Such civilisations did so, no doubt, because of a deep religious belief and an absence of prats with the bonkers ideas of GB News.

Private Eye Cover of Galloway Acting Like a Cat on Big Brother

This week, George Galloway managed to shock the political and media establishment by getting himself elected as MP for Rochdale on a pro-Palestine ticket. This was for a Muslim majority area which had given the Labour party a rough time for Starmer’s refusal to back a genuine ceasefire. And Starmer kept the door wide open for him by removing the whip from the Labour candidate, who dared to suggest that all may not be as it seems in the horrendous terrorist attack against the kids at a music festival that precipitated the war. Such as why did the Israelis ignore the Egyptians’ warning of a coming terrorist attack from the direction, and why did it take so long for IDF troopers from nearby bases to respond? Israel has form when it comes to false flag attacks and lies, but the pro-Israel lobby immediately responded with the customary accusations of anti-Semitism and spreading conspiracy theories about Jews. As if Asghar Ali, the Labour guy, was reading out the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and was accusing Israel of the Blood Libel, the international banking conspiracy and the medieval smear of poisoning wells so that people get leprosy. Ali wasn’t accusing the Jews, just the state of Israel, which is a different thing entirely.

Galloway’s tactics here aren’t new. He tried it out a few years ago with his Respect party, which seemed to be a mixture of Muslim activists and people from the Socialist Workers’ Party, to challenge Blair in a London constituency after the Iraq invasion. And the right has reacted in the same way, crying out that this is the fearful alliance between Islam and socialists which will destroy the west, Islamism is on the march and so on. Just as they’re doing with the pro-Palestinians marches, which are also, unsurprisingly, being denounced as anti-Semitic, despite the presence of many Jews.

No doubt various attacks on Galloway will surface in the coming months as he takes his seat in parliament, drawing on everything he’s ever said that is shameful or embarrassing. Like when Have I Got News For You showed a clip of him saluting Saddam Hussein for his indefatigability. But there’s another clip of an incident that is really embarrassing and cringey, which will also doubtless get shown. Yes, it’s that time he pretended to be a cat fawning over Rula Lenska on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006. This was on just about compilation show of most embarrassing celebrity performances for quite a little while, and is probably going to come back to bite him again. And so, just to remind you all how terrible it was, here it is on Private Eye’s cover for 20th January to 2nd February 2006. As they used to say on Crimewatch UK, ‘Don’t have nightmares’.