[Safe_Timber_Man]

Looks like breitbart might be picking up the 'gay judge' smear.

[Boiler]

Oh, this is just priceless.

Alfie Evans: Dad wants to build Alder Hey hospital relationship

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-me ... e-43914259

[Catkins]

Looks like breitbart might be picking u ... e' smear.

Well the 'openly gay ex-Olympic fencer' judge story backfired on the Mail last year. And Hayden is one of the most well respected family law judges practicing.

I don't know what to make about the dad. I was leaning towards thinking he's just a gobby idiot, then I saw a picture of him with Alfie and his eyes were clearly red raw from crying. He's going through the worst turmoil any parent could face and he's being whipped up by people who don't give a toss about him or his child. They are giving him false hope, fueling his paranoia and he's taking it out on the staff.

The sodding 'army' outside the hospital can go die in a fire though.

[Andy McDandy]

There's a line in the film "Quiz Show", where the unfairly treated contestant set up to lose turns on the journalists who have so far championed his cause but drop him like a hot potato when their job is done and lives are wrecked:

"You people...you don't care about people, then you just don't care about them."

[Safe_Timber_Man]

Oh, this is just priceless.

Alfie Evans: Dad wants to build Alder Hey hospital relationship

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-me ... e-43914259

He's asking for privacy and saying there's been loads of focus on their situation? He kept live streaming his dying child on Facebook and giving interviews daily? Hopefully he's either sought better advice or come to the realisation that this is not how he should be spending the finals days with his son. I wish him all the best and ideally for him to spend his time with Alfie in their own home, if that's at all possible. An awful situation all round, with some extremely ugly elements to it from the likes of the religious zealots, UKIP loons and, seemingly, some sort of shady Russia/misinformation campaign.

[cycloon]

He's only 21 to boot.

[cycloon]

From a Fox News article. I thought the Mail had mendacity cornered:

One of the key facts about Alfie is that no one knows what is ailing him. This alone should be a reason to keep him alive. His lack of definitive diagnosis should mean that, at minimum, he be kept alive until doctors can figure it out.

The confidence with which doctors are proclaiming Alfie has no chance to improve might make sense if they knew what was wrong with him in the first place. That they don’t, and are letting him die anyway, is damning.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

This:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... th-dignity

Mr Justice Hayden described this week “a father whose grief is unbounded and whose sadness, as I have witnessed in this court, has an almost primal quality to it.”
The sheer rawness of anticipatory grief can obliterate reason. What helps, I have learned, in palliative medicine, is time, space, calm and quiet. Yet Alfie Evans’s parents have been surrounded this week, at Alder Hey, by a mob of supporters who attempted to storm the entrance of the hospital, terrifying other young patients and their parents. A wider army of armchair vigilantes have stoked the vitriol – and their own agendas – from the comfort of their sofas.

[Bones McCoy]

There's one political lesson here for all of us, but particularly for any younger comrades who wish for guidance on complex issues.

Some issues are straightforrard and can be called on gut instinct, eh Windrush: You simply know what to do.

Others are immensely complex, involving law, technology, international relations, nuances of history: Alfie Evans and Brexit are two very different examples.
If your heart won't tell you, and your head is exhausted with all the angles, wait a few days.

Take a look at which side the arseholes are bigging up: Breitbart, the anti-vaxers, UKIP, the tabloids, extremist religious pressure groups.
Let them be your guide.

[Catkins]

Well, as expected Farage has been all over Fox News in the US this morning slamming the US over the Alfie Evans case.

what happens here is our state-run medical system decides there’s nothing else that can be done and backed up by the state courts, they make a decision that those parents are not fit to move their child somewhere else...and frankly what is happening today and what is happening right now is a form of state-sponsored euthanasia and I hate it.”

So former UKIP employee Pavel Stroilov stirs up legal controversy via the Christian Legal Centre, which Farage then exploits.

It's also worth noting that the father is being supported on the ground by Caroline Farrow, a fundamentalist Catholic, who writes for The Conservative Woman (discussed on this site previously) and The Universe (the Daily Express of the Catholic media), who is pushing the State euthanasia line on Sky and twitter.

Paul Diamond the CLC barrister in this was on R4 a few years ago calling for the relegalization of wife-beating for the collective good - private family matters need to be off-bounds for the State. Which may explain his legal arguments that the father has the absolute right to control his child's body.

It's a culture war.

[Safe_Timber_Man]

There's a lot of wilful ignorance of 'separation of powers' going on, too. This was not a Government decision. I guess pretending it is makes it easier to attack the NHS as a whole system.

[cycloon]

I get the religious having a stake in it, but I don't get Farage. I may be totally wrong about this, but he's never struck me as being libertarian to this degree. He's always struck me as a shit-stirrer.

As for wilful ignorance, I refer my fellow honorables to the quote from a Fox news article above. 'They don't know what's killing the kid, how can they say he has no hope of recovery?'

In other words, 'I don't know how this piano fell from the sky on to my legs, and so I am damn well not going to accept that my legs are broken'.

[Safe_Timber_Man]

I get the religious having a stake in it, but I don't get Farage.

Privatisation of healthcare. Trump v's Obamacare.

As well as the obvious sucking up to the Fox types.

[Catkins]

As leader of UKIP, Batten has said that Alife has a duty to die at the behest of the State. Stephen Woolfe MEP is now launching a campaign for 'Alfie's Law' - to overturn the Children Act provisions on a child's best interests, giving parents the final say.

[youngian]

Farage is now taking the culture war to the NHS. Quit while you’re ahead.