Sir— We have, over these past few months, seen a sharp rise in hostile activity against our profession. The government, and its evil henchmen, have been waging war against us on many fronts. They have sown malicious stories in the press, and have imposed many vexatious rules upon our work. They have mobilised, and strengthened, the power of their police – that crooked bunch of miscreants and misfits, the General Medical Council – and pursued a policy of harassment against our colleagues whose only crime has been the innocent prosecution of their professional duty.
At the same time, we have found, to our sadness, traitors in our midst. There are those who betray our calling; who, when the hour is upon them, shirk their duty, and place themselves in subjugation and subservience. We have seen frailty and failure triumph over sense and decency, and the innocent have died.
There are those who say that this is a phoney war; that there is nothing that could not be resolved at the conference table. Each one of these appeasers hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear – I fear greatly – the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, ever more loudly, ever more widely. It will spread to the South; it will spread to the North. There is no chance of a speedy end except through united action; and that is what we must do. We must unite in our struggle against the tyranny of Nazidom.
To form a new organisation of this scale and complexity is a serious undertaking in itself, but it must be remembered that we are at the preliminary stage of one of the greatest battles in our professional history, that we are in action at many points in London, and in Manchester, that we have to be prepared in the Courts, that the media battle is continuous and that many preparations have to be made here at home. In this crisis I hope I may be pardoned if I do not address you at any length today. I hope that any of my friends and colleagues, or former colleagues, who are affected by the political reconstruction, will make all allowance for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act. I would say to you, as I said to those who have joined our cause, I have nothing to offer but blood toil tears and sweat.
We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory – victory – at all costs, victory, in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the medical profession; no survival for all that the profession has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, ‘Come, then, let us go forward together with our united strength.’
Ah, the conference table…. The chattering pleasantries in the committee rooms in hospitals and universities and colleges and regulators and government departments…..
Churchill knew when “jaw, jaw” had been tried and found wanting. The medical profession does not have such clear vision.
But for them it doesn’t need to be “war, war.”
It just needs to be “no, no,” Dr No!
Together.
And mean it.
It works.
Practical Tip: Start it off by ensuring doctor to doctor referrals without the middlemen.
That’s why I’m called Dr No!
A great post and one very much in keeping with my own thoughts on the current situation in Britain.
I think of my first cousin once removed, Major Charles Ferguson Hoey MC VCs reported last words before his Bren Gun attack on the Japanese in Burma and feel even more determined: ‘it is of vital importance we capture our objective and we will do it whatever the cost’ and feel even more determined. An eyewitness account is given on the following website in a speech by his other cousin, Johnny Haddock, also an old Dragon. ‘I saw Major Hoey, his face was covered in blood…’ :
http://www.burmastarbc.com/haddock2.htm#2004
Imagine that !
I found the following radio clip last week recorded at the end of the war:
http://archives.cbc.ca/war_conflict/second_world_war/clips/16790/
This summer I went on a pilgrimage to Lincoln cathedral and read Luke 12 and a poem written by Charles Hoey’s mother. I prayed for courage and left a prayer request to thank God for Major Hoey setting such a very perfect example:
http://katemiddleton-lsu.blogspot.com/2009/09/major-charles-ferguson-hoey-mc-vc.html
My amah told me in Malaysia in about 1972 about the Japanese marching into KL with heads on poles, terrorising the local people. They killed her father, a train driver. She hated them and encouraged me to do likewise. I wondered what made people do things like that.
But someone had to stop them. It has recently been claimed that Hoey’s attack was the precise moment when the war turned in Burma in ‘For your tomorrow: Canadians and Burma Campaign’.
It seems a wasted effort when thoroughly dishonest sub-literate criminals like Deenesh Khoosal are clinical examiners for the GMC and ‘experts’ in women like me. Khoosal has a reputation for being ‘fearsome’,’arrogant’, ‘deceptively chatty’ and ‘extremely uncaring’. He has got himself on a police committee as well which explains the police’s reluctance to investigate him properly. His arrogance is demonstrated by the fact that he apparently told Sargeant Angie Murray who arrested him on September 4th 2008, that he hadn’t got time to be arrested. He probably had important GMC work to do.
I went to the police on March 26th 2007, the morning after putting up a website dedicated to my grandpa, Dr JTS Hoey. I last saw him in May 1976 when I was at the Dragon School. It emerged in 1996 after I had had four hours of GP counselling, that I had never got over my grief at his death.
I was then tortured by the ‘Christian’ Jean Christie for three years between 1998 and 2001 when I was at university. This evil woman was trying to extract a confession from me under the NHS that I am not really a girl as I have now discovered from the notes. I used to say, ‘I feel like a Jew in Nazi Germany’. The comparison was made in the Commons in 2004 after the evil hypocrites in the Government has argued for years that not having an appropriate birth certificate after NHS treatment was a mere inconvenience and lost in the European Court of Human Rights. They lost in 2002: ‘Stress, humiliation, and feeling of anxiety, vulnerability and humiliation’ leading to ‘suffering and distress’. Like having a star.
The authorities would still like me dead. Kath Barnes of Bittene CID has informed me that I am not entitled to protection against domestic violence and harassment by my parents, in spite of having acknowledged that is what is going on in my CID witness statement. Thames Valley Police have refused to investigate my father, Lawrence John Middleton CMG for child abuse and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. I have supplied them with school reports and medical records going back 30 years which show that everyone knew he was destroying me. ‘Rather arrogant, quick tempered, hostile, dominant, aggressive’..these are some of the adjectives applied to him by ‘psychiatists’. This must have been the reason why he was appointed British Ambassador to South Korea. That does not give you the right to destroy another human being.
I was apparently ‘pretty, attractive, ‘v feminine, ‘articulate’, ‘of above average intelligence’, likeable, delightful and a privilege to work with’…’in a highly emotional state’ and ‘very distressed. Nobody told me and nobody will intervene.
On 19th January 1983, Khoosal wrote, I think the prognosis is pretty pessimistic in view of father’s attitude. He seems to believe in the old paradgim – spare the rod and spoil the child. I have tried to tell him you won’t get far by laying down the law with a seventeen year old but I doubt this would have any meaning for him’. That is from a ‘doctor’ who had just committed a criminal assault against me, driving me to my first suicide attempt. I have told the medical profession what happened ever since at regular intervals and have had no constructive assistance until Rita’s article.
Witness statements for the police about the harrassment and undermining by my parents by my former boyfriend who has known me for twenty years and current fiance which include the fact that I have made multiple attempts at suicide because of the abuse in the past have been ignored. I want to live now I know the truth but am being systematically denied the conditions I need to recover from the trauma. I will continue to fight to the death…or until justice is done.
On 25 March 2007, my mother persuaded the police to kick in the door of the house in which I live while I was in the pub celebrating the website for my grandfather and the storming of Horseshoe Hill by the Oxford and Bucks Light infantry on August 18th 1916. I had had to fight a huge psychological battle to retrieve the poster left to me by the family of ‘Mr Martin’ who had died at the time as my grandfather. She refused to let me see the photographs and I stood before her and said that she was extremely fortunate that I had slightly more self -restraint than Rod Newall because what his parents had done to him was a walk in the park compared to what she had done to me.
Rod murdered his parents in 1987 for treating him and his brother in much the same way. Jock Mullard at Radley College told me on November 5th 2007 that both boys used to turn up covered in bruises where the parents had been beating up the boys. Jock later denied that they knew what was going on with the Newalls but they certainly can’t deny it with me because it was all put in writing. Likewise with the medical profession. My mother lied to me in 1984 before sending me to be tortured by crashing between ‘doctors’ to traumatise me. They destroyed my health and ruined my career. They are evil or sick to have done what they did and then send me to Cornwall alone and traumatised. I want nothing to do with these torturers.
I won’t accept the inevitable conclusion without a fight. These situations end up in murder or suicide. I have no intention of breaking the law; it is against my principles. The point is that these criminals need to be brought to justice. If it doesn’t happen and I have the heart attack for which my GP wants me to take pills than everyone will know why.
As Elliot puts it, ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’.
It will be a murder by the medical profession and the authorities . Some anonymous coward has commented on Rita Pal’s article on NHS exposed that I make Khoosal’s assault on me sound like attempted murder. If a ‘doctor’ behaves so violently to an ‘upset’, ‘vulnerable’ seventeen year old who has been sent to him for counselling that you drive her to a suicide attempt – the known result of abuse – then that is exactly what it is. Especially when the ‘doctor’ lies to everyone throughout the encounter and shows no remorse.
They have made me old at 44:
‘Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
writes Dylan Thomas. I eventually took my first in English in 2002, nearly twenty years after deciding to ‘do English and do something intellectual’.
My work had epithets used about it such as ‘brilliant’, ‘sophisticated’ and of ‘extraordinarily high – indeed publishable – quality’. I apparently could have been a lecturer.
Instead, I am sitting here suffering from what my GP is calling ‘nervous debilitation’ caused by a lifetime of trauma and most recently by Hampshire police who have admmitted treating me in the same way as a raped 18 year old who committed suicide. Theu have put in writing that Inspector White has a ‘dismissive nature’ and came round ‘wearing a Gestapo coat’! They had an email in 2007 from my fiance saying that in the state I was in after their treatment of me, I might have done the same thing.
I don’t like it here any more. I want to leave Britain but on the other hand why should I? The last two pages of the diary I wrote in my study at Radley, retrieved in 2008 from the Warneford begin, ‘Life is not a toy to tamper with at will. It consists of objectives of varing importance. These include career (or more immediately scholastic success)…
The medical profession have tampered with me at will, without consent.
I reported Khoosal to the police wearing my Napier tartan and a Royal Naval reserve medical offiers jacket which just happens to fit me and once belonged to someone called Murray of HMS Wessex. Whilst waiting for CID I told the officer the story of my cousin Charles Hoey and said, ‘think how much damage I could do with a Bren gun’. He didn’t believe me.
Certain members of the medical profession disgust me with their arrogance, cruelty, sense of entitlement and belief that they are above the law. They are no different to Nazi war criminals. No five year get out clause on ruining someone’s life.
But my own is not completely ruined yet. I am severely wounded by a lifetime of abuse but not dead yet. In November 1988, Peter Redgrove, the greatest poet of his generation said to me in his study in Falmouth, ‘I think you will go through hell and then you will be a wise woman and you will be able to do the same work I do; on the principle of the wounded healing the wounded’.
In 2006 I asked Judith Green, Cambridge counselling examiner, whether she had read ‘The Wise Wound’ and she said ‘brilliant book…brilliant’. I told her about what he had said and she said, ‘Amazing, Kate, Amazing!’
I think of my grandfather the doctor in light of that Jungian archetype. It was a question of decency fairness etc to put up the following website in honour of his courage; qualities the GMC do not understand It is also an inspiration to think of him providing ‘comic relief’ in spite of ‘heavy shelling’ whilst battling to expose my enemies. Khoosal wrote in the notes, Christian, still believes in God. Luke 12: ‘there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed…’
Dr JTS Hoey – Croix de Guerre:
http://www.clyde1924.plus.com/jts_hoey/index.html
Kate – Thank you again for your comment. It has much to say.
You matter, not just because you are a person, but also because you are both highly intelligent, and highly articulate, and that means you can do something about the crimes – I do not think in any way that that is too strong a word to use – that have been committed against you, and numerous others like you. You are, in a very real sense, in a position to be the wounded healer.
One of the many troubles facing the medical profession is a tendency to look the other way. We do not like raking muck, lest some of it stick to us. We prefer to sleep-walk, even when the briefest glance would reveal that there is much wrong, and many are in peril. And all the while, the big ones get away.
I think the first step is to realise that the GMC is there not to protect the public, but to protect the government. It is just one huge over-inflated risk management tool. The idea is that government can say, when something goes wrong, as it will go wrong, Hey! – we did our bit! It’s not our fault!
So there is a whole lot of goal displacement going on. The GMC fail to do what they should be doing – reigning in the rogue doctors. Instead, they harass soft targets and innocent doctors. Like I said, the big ones get away.
Meanwhile, the profession continues to sleep-walk. They do not see the abyss that lies ahead. They continue to believe it will be “alright on the night”. It wont, because it will be a night of long knives, and beyond that there will be many nights of long knives.
I am talking, of course, about revalidation. This corrosive and destructive plot, which presumes incompetence until proved otherwise, will, at its introduction, knock the floor from under the feet of the sleep-walkers. Their already low morale will sink to depths previously unimaginable. The profession will be in turmoil. That will be the time to strike. That is why this post was called “The Gathering Storm” The storm is not yet upon us. We shall need all our strength when it does arrive. But:
“I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our ourselves, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”
And that, of course, is why we must never surrender.
Kate
Dr No is ye ol Smoothie 🙂 He is right on many aspects about you. You are highly intelligent and articulate.
Rita P
Thank you so much for your kind words, both of you. You two inspire me with confidence.
I’ve been fighting to get the truth out about this precisely because I felt a moral obligation to do so. One of the reasons I ended up being tortured by Jean Christie between 1998 and 2001 was as I put it in 1996, ‘not knowing who to trust any more’ and a ‘lack of self esteem and self confidence’. So it is very lovely to have two doctors with integrity being so complimentary.
My experiences have broader implications than just the fact of me being female. As in the book/film Clockwork Orange it raises questions about the morality of interfering with someone’s God given nature and experimenting on people.
I wonder if you have read ‘V for Vendetta’ or seen the film? The orignal idea was for someone like me, a ‘transsexual terrorist’ called ‘The Doll’ but it was thought to be too radical in 1982.
They then came up with the idea of ‘V’, who has been experimented on in a concentration camp, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.
Remember, Remember, the fifth of November…. V is a ‘romantic anarchist’ rebelling against a Nazi regime which has taken over Britain. The predictions Alan More made about security cameras etc have all come true and the future is here.
My rebellion started in a concentration camp instituted to turn you into a ‘nice chap’: Radley College:
http://www.radley.org.uk/
You will find here the letter I wrote home on Novenber 5th 1982 with ironic references to an adolescent girl ‘playing up’ in the way they tend to (designed to pull the wool over my parents eyes) and provoking my hosuemster into giving ‘a social [house]prayers on the necessity of rules and why Anarchy wouldn’t work!’
http://katemiddleton-lsu.blogspot.com/2009/08/guy-fawkes.html
Psychiatists seem to see themselves as society’s policemen and judges of what they consider ‘normal’. This is a very dangerous attitude. They remind me of playground bullies. If it were not for Lynn Conway – also in my position – I would not be writing this now. She is the mind behind the technology that led to the the pentium chip. Google her name for her website.
The following trailer for the movie has the great line in it ‘people should not be afraid of their Governments, Governments should be afraid of their people’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XKa8VE7ILI
I spent twenty years trying to find out what had been done to me in 1984 ( very literary of them). When I finally got the evidence in 2004, I was just like Evie Hammond or V with the realisation that there was nothing inherently wrong with me – it was deliberately induced injury. As in Clockwork Orange, the ‘doctors’ made me very vulnerable to further abuse.
What they did to me was evil. It was a witch hunt against the idea that being a woman is just as good as being a man – if that’s who you are. We should all the right to be ourselves if it does not hurt anyone else. I have turned my comment into a post on my own blog:
http://katemiddleton-lsu.blogspot.com/
Thank you again for your kind words