Beadle asked for more. Oliver Twist says no

Enough! to the injustices of the housing industry

We probably know that scene from Dicken’s novel where the titular pauper orphan boy holds up his gruel bowl before his benefactor and asks for a second helping. We are used to being in Oliver Twist’s shoes – the dependant far smaller than those in authority over us, ‘fortunate’ to be in the care of an institution. We are used to being told that their benevolent provision has saved us from the streets and the gutter but we must now submit to their regimes, their fees, their rules. If we do not pay directly but live from charity we especially must accept the menu and portions given to us. We do not return to the front of the room, to the powerful one’s area, and in public ask for more. Oliver asked politely and suppliantly, holding his bowl out, but at the level of the man in front of him.

A beadle is but one example of one of our many kinds of administrators claiming authority – often more than they really have.

I hereon concentratate on those relating to housing: local authorities, legal figures, and most of all, landlords.

Did you know that judges are in fact just senior administrators?

Administrators tend not to be chosen by the people. Landlords are those who aren’t even called to office; there is no calling or bar for them in any sense.

Like the likes of beadle, landlords claim that they too are providing something – shelter – which you would suffer without. How magnanimous of them. So it’s quite reasonable for them to have to charge you – they do have to make a living, of course. And what’s wrong with making money? Investing is shrewd. Buying and selling, gaining lucrative planning permissions, making good returns, are all skills. It is a legitimate and necessary business.

I wish to stop there and get us to roll over this stone.

And then I wish us to think about the injustice of evictions, and I’ll share some of my recent experience on that, including the legal system, the council, and charities meant to assist those facing homelessness.

My story began last summer, when on the day that covid rules ended (but so did the moratorium on eviction and rent raises), my landlord asked for more. He knew of my long term financial difficulties and that thanks to the government shutting down businesses and expecting us to stay at home for many months that I was unlikely – like so many of you – to have improved my situation during the pandemic period.

A day is coming, and is now here, where it is Oliver who has the right of refusal. It is those who hitherto charged us who raise up their bowl to us. May we? Nope. Landlords, along with others we pay our bills to, have already had so much from us. They’ve hoarded gruel and the bowls it goes in for too long. They have made us beg them for something to eat. They have made a roof over our heads and the supplies that go with it something that is conditional on us placating them. They have made it their gift, not our right. They have made this placation an endless abasement, a debt that we are never released from.

I recently pointed out that that is slavery.

I want us to think about landlordism – yes, that’s the term for it – as hoarding resources and selling them back to us, as I have already written of regarding utilities (gas, electricity, water). It is known as rentier capitalism – that of hiring out resources permanently, which the users never own, even though most housing (unlike a wedding dress or a holiday vehicle or hotel) is a long term need. The landlords set the prices, not us the dweller/consumers. We can choose to some extent where we live and with whom we contract, but unless we own outright (and are not in a managed property), third parties claim rights to repossess that home and to have control over what goes on in it – who lives with us, whatcauses we promote outside of it, expecting us to submit to inspections and repairs, and often paying their bedfellow – the insurers.

In the last couple of years, the disparity of power and the poor behaviour of many landlords (including the failures of the legal system) have been exposed to the point that a sea change is occurring, internationally.

This is the water that is surrounding King Cnut:

In Britain, the hated legislation that contains the clause which gives the landlords the right to move you on without reason or automatic recompense is the housing act of 1988 (no capitals, any more than I give for the established church). Although its section 21 is infamous – that’s the bit that allows the judiciary power to arbitarily order your forcable ejection and create you homeless – the whole act is objectionable. It was created in a little chain of acts under our then conservative government (deliberately lower case). I may surprise by saying that in one sense, I support ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s moves to sell off council housing because I want people to own their homes and I do not not think that councils are good landlords. There is much intrusion into tenants’ homes and lives, and if you’ve ever tried to get on a housing list – even and especially in a crisis – you’ll know how rubbish they are. I will talk more about that later. I do not support getting everyone on a mortgage, for it is a swindle and gives your power to banks, and makes you another kind of slave. At least this slow filling bucket with a hole does lead to eventually stopping casting money in a bucket, and the bucket becomes yours to do with as you wish – except for tax. Renters’ buckets never fill and they never get the bucket at the end.

But the late and controversial Maggie’s push to get us owning, not renting, affected landlords. I’ve seen figures that under 10% were renting around the time of this act. Landlords felt that they had less legal rights than tenants now (good, that is the right way round) and that their market was too small. Rent capping – making limits on how much could be charged – was spoiling their favourite doctrine: the free market.

So my understanding is that this act of 1988 was created to encourage a wider rental housing market with the freedom for landlords to charge what they want.

The infamous section 21 of that act gives the landlord the right to move tenants on at their whim, mostly to create more wealth for themselves. That’s right: the power of arbitrary homelessness is purely so that landlords are able to make more money. They can move on people who simply aren’t paying the rent that they’d like – or who stand up to them (eg over not doing repairs, dealing with anti social behaviour, or for turning up at tenants’ without sufficient warning – all of which are illegal).

Please sit with that a moment.

The clause about non payment of rent (section 8) which is internationally considered a common and reasonable reason to to evict is also about making wealth for the landlord, and is also unfair. We should and do have the right to withhold payment – for shoddy service (interpersonally), for lack or faulty goods (a home not fit for habitation, and breaking the intrinsic right to quietly enjoy), and if we have overpaid. To undermine this right is to create serious inequality and is a human rights issue. It is a form of slavery to say your home is at risk if you don’t keep paying for something which costs the owner little, which the landlords generally didn’t even build, and which never ends, and that rights are one-sided.

Why should landlords keep getting for doing little to nothing? Especially when it keeps us in work we maybe don’t like, giving a high proportion of our income away to them, whether we’re rich or poor.

Those who attack the notions that rent is theft and that most landlords are bad are landlords themselves, or attached to them. They’re feudal enough to consider that they offer a service that we would be without, if it weren’t for them. There’s still a lick of that old school “I own you”, “respect me, I’m your landlord.” They expect to act like that beadle and for us to be Oliver Twists, up to that point of the double helping.

I found this piece ‘The Myth of the Good Landlord’ by Tom Lavin very interesting, although I reject his solution: government ownership, at any level, is not public ownership and certainly not the people’s. Let us not confuse them; for the government is not benign – you just give it greater power and create it as a huge landlord.

I also have written several pieces of my own, often in emails to policy makers. I was not happy with the stance and [utter lack of] assistance of Shelter – Britain’s most famous housing charity – nor the Citizen’s Advice Bureau (there’s something legally dubious about the word ‘citizen’ – it means owing allegiance to your nation in return for protection.)

There are those who might protest that they are good and busy landlords, kept busy by the government’s growing demands. I have found that this list is less about real tenants’ safety and rights, and more about landlord compliance to checks which are lucrative to those that undertake them (such as gas engineers), and as one writer argued, is about keeping your chattels (ie us rent payers) still valuable (ie able to pay and not dead or suing due to gas leaks).

I was shocked at how much of a countersuit against eviction depends on not only on checking our electric and gas – even during the years we’re meant to have limited who came into our homes! – but on having a valid Energy Performance Certificates (whose real value I query).

Council workers asked me this first: they actually confessed (I recorded Mr PT at Norwich City say it) that their concern at the homelessness prevention team is to establish if they have any legal requirement to help; they and will dump you if not, not caring if you die in the gutter. This council spied on me after the notice period expired (still when covid was meant to be rife and restrictions in place), hoping that if I seemed to have moved on (rather than face the violence of bailiffs) that they could wash their hands of me, which they think they did.

They are wrong – read the below.

If you move before you’re pushed, the council can claim that you made yourself voluntarily homeless and thus you are not assisted; if you sit tight in a home you’re not welcome in with a legal case over you, you wonder if you’ll actually receive the papers inviting you to court to defend yourself and whether you’ll receive a fair hearing, and warning – or could the bailiffs just turn up? (You should have several warnings and opportunities to defend but I found that legal post doesn’t always arrive). Living with that fear is very stressful, as I heard other local families state on news last Christmas.

I say this not to scare, but to illustrate the injustice of the system which we must fight against.

I’ve wondered how much of my own experience to share. I’m aware of attempted repercussions, but I remind that it’s only slander/libel if it’s untrue; and that speaking out is whistleblowing, which is protected, and it is about protecting others from particular companies and individuals, and calling them to account to to make reparations. I write nothing to be vindictive or vexatious, although I believe I have been on the receiving end of both of those from those to whom I allude; my home and income was lost through the bloody-minded actions of others – especially particular individuals at the supposed Housing Options department and revenues and benefits at Norwich City Council, HMCTS (the court service), and my former landlord – a man who’s been investing in multiple properties since the 1970s, and had over 30 tenants when I moved in, on top of a presumed public pension and other business.

I had lived long term in a tiny one room home, not fit for purpose and with no commercial value, unable to move on. “A bolt hole, suboptimal at best,” said one visitor – “not a serious home”. “It’s the second worst home I’ve seen in Norwich” said another. “I wouldn’t swap with you.” Yet my landlord had received tens of thousands for my just being there.

Those concerned have been individually and personally put on permanent notice, and know who they are. At this time, I will just name my landlord, Clem Vogler of Norfolk. He is on the net for several reasons – his Dec 2018 Telegraph article on helping landlords avoid the new tax rules (he saved over £50,000) in which he confirms the size of his £4m property portfolio, and his work for infamous Golden Eye International, which is verified on his own website.

As for his interactions with me, his own words and actions convict him. Both are utterly provable and undeniable.

There will be repercussions for any repercussions.

I will here point out that

-the court, with its huge backlog, processed his forms (at Christmas) in under a week but failed to serve my countersuit over some months, despite his form missing sections

-the council wanted instrusive forms and compliance from me (as did HMCTS) to do anything

-there is strong circumstantial evidence of collusion

-the unfairness that Rent Repayment Orders (designed to punish rogue landlords) do not benefit council tenants or benefit recipients nor those with live-in landlords, and are again about those checks

-few lawyers seem really interested in championing tenants, especially if you need support to pay their fees (that legal dress down piece is coming). A real champion I found was a Californian firm – do look at what tenants were awarded. I like reading their site for empowerment.

Don’t feel that if this isn’t where you live that no-one can help.

I hope this inspires any genuine lawyers and paralegals to assist in this battle, and any true judges.

We need a new legal system, and many are looking to People’s Courts and Grand Juries.

I think it’s time that homes simply were: perhaps we could pay to buy, repair or build one but not to live in it, certainly not to the tune of what we’re used to paying. Homes need to be given to the those who live in them. As for landlord being compensated – they have been, all along. It’s called rent.

All those who have been part of the injustice should be ashamed

Every bully landlord – and bank – and those who support them (such as bailiffs) needs to make reparations, now.

We need to end this slavery and the system that makes it not only possible, but pretends that it’s normative.

My fomer landlords wrote in to the Telegraph nearly 30 years ago with his views on tyrants. The irony is clear: it is not just political dictators at a national level who are tyrants, it is anyone who ill uses (often self-given) power.

I was put at risk by Clem’s actions, and those of those courts and council, like so many others. Those doing so in these last couple of years especially are reprehensible and are guilty of crimes and liable for all the distress they caused, your losses, inconvenience, detriment to your income, relationships, health…… there are many in an eviction.

There are consequences for evicting people and all injustice – certainly in the next world, but I’d like them in this, now.

And I wish to see the end of landlordism and bully banks. The new world is here. Beadle’s bowl is empty.

An open letter to Christians about covid

Dear friends, sisters and brothers in the Lord

I write to urgently awaken you.

During this past year, I am alarmed not only by what is happening in the name of stopping viral spread, but that churches are not only complying, but promoting it.

A politican told me she wanted to protect lives; I said I wish to protect life, one worth living – the sort that Jesus came to give us. But there is not much living to the full in this…

Like many, I was suspicious from the onset that this was really a worldwide pandemic which merited the measures – ie, restrictions – placed upon us all.

I soon realised that I was in good company.

I’ve read and heard the work of so many whistleblowers around the world, including experts in science and medicine, such as Michael Yeadon, Wolfgang Wodarg, Sherri Tenpenny, who blast the mathematical modelling used to lock us all down (modeller Neil Ferguson is disgraced) and state that no virus is this virulent. I’ve watched Judy Mikovits in the documentary Plandemic – a narrative agreed with by a growing number. I have read the open letter signed by 1969 Belgian doctors against the portrayal of the virus and the measures used against it. I have heard the testimony of doctors coerced and even bribed into putting covid onto a death certificate and in using ventilators, which often are the cause of death. I have read about the germ theory driving our health models, discredited even by its own inventor, Louis Pasteur, but which is the lucrative and controlling model (note the many policy makers with shares and other financial interests in pharmaceuticals).

And so many more that I have pages of references and links to studies internationally.

I have also heard repeatedly that the intrusive, dangerous test used to identify covid, Polymerase Chain Reaction, is not fit for purpose; at 45 cycles of amplification, which we use in Britain, it is well over any meaningful scientific limit and anything can be found: traces of previous dead viruses and genetic material we all have. Hence the results are 90% unreliable.

I know that people who registered but didn’t take the test received letters that they had tested positive. The inventor of the original PCR test died last year, but he said that was not ever meant to be a diagnostic tool. It is used as an instrument of fear to drive up statistics and justify fresh restrictions.

I note that many of these scientists are discredited and that their work goes missing from the internet, and ‘fact checking’ has become an excuse to censor those who disagree with a pre-set narrative. London Real’s host Brian Rose was told that YouTube had a policy about the virus a year ago – before covid-19 was supposed to have started, but it was at the time of Event 201, a conference involving the Wellcome Trust and linked to Bill Gates, where a document was produced by WHO called ‘World At Risk’ (on their website) talking of a planned ‘live exercise’ in ‘global health security’. With other international groups’ agenda (such as WEF and IMF) involving economic reset and technological rollout it becomes plain that this is a plan to move us all into a worldwide all-seeing dependent totalitarianism driven by technocracy, not democracy.

Police have also begun whistleblowing: an open letter to New South Wales commissioner in Australia was recently delivered, by Cops For Covid Truth, via their lawyer Peter Little. These 70 officers realised that not only do the medical facts not tie up, but that they are pawns in bringing in tyranny, and their orders are against their oaths and fundamental law. The original signatories have been joined by many others around the world.

Among the myriad medical frontline staff similarly exercised is British nurse Kate Shemirani, who is a Christian, who has spoken out at large gatherings against lockdowns, testing, tracing and masks. The first has caused untold suffering on every level; the second, mostly false postives giving an excuse for the third, which can lead to arbitrary containment; and the last deprives wearers of oxygen, traps them with germs and lowers immunity, whilst offering no protection (virus particles are smaller than mask material) – all it does for others is obfuscates connection and makes us featureless. I’ve seen the burn-like skin damage caused by mask wearing. I’ve been directly told that putting a tube behind a mask on the face for 4 minutes gave off the chart [was it carbon monoxide or dioxide?] readings – making it like a hazardous room that isn’t safe to enter. There are urgent warnings, such as from Dr Margarite Griesz-Brisson, that mask wearing causes permanent lung, heart and brain damage and is especially harmful to children. Indeed, there are reports of their collapse. Some didn’t get up.

And then, there’s the vaccine. The alternative media is increasingly filled with doctors such as Carrie Madej, Christiane Northrup and David Martin telling us that the ‘vaccine’ is unsafe; that this new type which involves toxin coated foreign bodies hasn’t been tested; it isn’t a vaccine, it’s a device; that it can watch and even remotely control and release other substances into you; one of the manufacturers, Moderna, admits that it’s an operating system in the body with updates; that it can sterilise or cause shut down; that people injected are still infected; that those who receive it often collapse – the UK has resuscitation units by vaccine admininstration centres; that severe adverse reactions in thousands of cases have even caused health officials to withdraw certain batches. Hundreds have swiftly died, although this information is downplayed. I have seen screenshots of medical abstracts on how to vaccinate via any orifice unknowingly.

We have to ask: why is this posited as the only protection and cure? Why – and who – is vaccination so heavily invested in? Why are we pressured to have it to the point of possible exclusion from, work, study, services, and a whole new ID and passport industry springing up around it? And why are internet giants involved in medicine? Why are those who raise alarms about it so viciously and often childishly attacked?

Kate is not the only Christian who has considered it her duty to speak out. Catholic priests Carlo Maria Vigano and Robert Altiers have courageously done so; Archbishop Carlo has spoken of not only of the Deep State, but Deep Church. Evangelical nonconformists run campaigns to stop the unlawful mandates – such as Peggy Hall of The Healthy American, or churches like Cap Bap in Washington DC who sued over the fact they can’t meet in person. In New York, the governor threatened to close churches and synagogues which didn’t comply with his ever more draconian and nonsensical rules. He too received negative press coverage and law suits. “This man is not God, he will answer to Him,” one reader raged.

Yet here in the UK, I have generally seen acquiescence from churches, who have not realised the difference between guidance and law (often it is the former, which can’t be enforced) and not even made room for the government’s own exceptions, such as with face coverings. They have allowed governments to render them ‘nonessential’.

Instead, the Anglican church especially have added their own stipulations to worshippers.

It does not seem to have seen that the laws used for coronavirus measures are spurious, for they clash with all 30 of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and every country’s constitution. These are inalienable, regardless of ‘emergencies’ – and if no real state of emergency exists, then the laws such as our Coronavirus 2020 which are appended to a previous act – note the year, 1984 – are null and void. They have also expired.

There is an international class action law suit being prepared by Reiner Füllmich. He and his Coronavirus Investigative Committee deem these events – which many see as genocide and fraud, unconsenting experimentation and surveillance – as crimes against humanity.

There is also God’s law, which supersedes all others. Discussing Romans 13 takes a sermon – I just wrote one on it – but many see that passage as not supporting blind obedience to unjust earthly authorities: quite the reverse. Indeed many Bible heroes suffered imprisonment and death for what they preached. Peter – central to those of established traditions – refuses in Acts 4 and 5 to stop teaching about Jesus and healing in his name.

And yet, we….

In previous pandemics, churches were not ordered to close. In the 17^th C plague, vicars took risks to be with their flock, even the ones who were banned from their pulpits by the Act of Uniformity. We are now seeing government interference in Christian worship on that scale, but the church has gone online, not into the world, and I’ve seen few offers of help or condolence, and no Christian group in Britain questioning these laws.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke out against the established church of his country for acquiescing, if not abetting, Nazism. Of course, acquiescing – even tacitly – is abetting.

I wonder what he would say now to the established churches, the big international chains.

We may have believed that we were being responsible in stopping the spread by closing our doors, by insisting on masks and being distant, by using harmful sanitizer (look on the side of the bottle at the warnings!), and participating in contact tracing.

We may think that putting others first is Christian, but Jesus said: Love your neighbour AS yourself. Not more than, instead of you. This sacrifical rhetoric is being used to manipulate.

It is clear that this is really about mass surveillance, designed to be a new way of life, and the collection of genetic material. Heathrow is already trialling digital health passports and Ticketmaster is floating the idea of needing proof of testing and vaccination to attend their  events. Britain passed a law in October stating that which is obtained via test and trace will be kept for national security. Denmark passed a law making vaccination mandatory on pain of arrest and being excluded from society. Into 2021, I see more articles about colleges and countries developing, if not requiring these. Camps are being built, which should chill us, and people removed from homes who are deemed to be ill. Clearly their real ‘threat’ is something else. China already runs biometric recognition and a social credit score, determining what prices you pay and what you can do, depending on your compliance. British austerity has also punished – I know its victims. We already have fiscal credit rating.

It is time to awaken, to put on armour, to slumber no more.

It is not just conservative Christians seeing this: Neo Pagans and New Agers, and those without a faith, are seeing it too… the legal irregularities underlying a sham and corrupt system, the cure worse than the malady, the rife censorship that cannot even argue well. Despite our differences in belief, even among Christians, we need to rise.

Along with Dietrich, one other quote spoke to me. It was from doctor Rashid Battar, whose military experience gives him cause for urgent concern as much as his medical training.

He said: what will our grandchildren say of the adults of 2020?

Where were they? Why didn’t they do something? Why have we inherited such a world?

I want to be able to stand before successive generations and my God and say:

I stood up, even if it was a risk.

It isn’t only Black Lives Matter who say ‘silence is violence’.

There is coming a new earth, and the old order is passing away.

The side of Light and Love has already won; we battle a vanquished foe but we should be battling, for this is a medical problem, but also a spiritual one.

It is clear that dark forces are using this virus for another end.

Allowing our society to be broken down for a virus no more virulent than flu, and to have our right to corporate (and corporeal) worship removed is not something that God will say ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’ to us for.

Reiner Füllmich is evoking the term from the Nuremberg trials. Yes, we are comparable – even greater, especially if this goes where many fear it will. It may seem incredible, uncomfortable, but think of those 18^th century tea drinkers who had to face where their sugar came from; the Germans of the 1940s who realised what was happening to their neighbours… and so many other points of history. We are at such a point.

What will future generations and our God say of us and what we did and didn’t do?

I will stand and be counted – friends and siblings, will you stand with me?

Just one of so many links: https://worlddoctorsalliance.com/ including a fully referenced 19 page open letter and many articles, such as from the executive editor of the BMJ

And one on the vaccine: https://mariokenny.wordpress.com/2020/12/12/important-notes-about-the-vaccine/

Mention here doesn’t mean mutual or total indorsement

There is also further material on this blog – and about what we can stand together to do

Love Warrior Speaks Out against enforced testing, tracing and treatment

I am deeply, deeply concerned about proposals for conditions of lifting of the lockdown – which many of us feared far more than the virus.

I’ve heard it said that the priority is saving lives – but it should be to protect life, a meaningful one with full human rights. The handling so far and proposals erode our basic freedoms and wellbeing.

Community testing can easily be community tyranny – such as army administered drive through tests (which trap us), or admission otherwise barred if we don’t comply.

We also show our deep discomfort about contact-tracing apps on our phones, and how the information is mis/used. Those we contact do not opt in and we fear for arbitary arrests and containment, and of targeting specific groups of people deemed to be a threat.

We have also long been concerned about vaccinations and other enforced treatments, such as what happens to us if we refuse or appear to test positive.

This gives the state, police, and army powers, takes away ours, and gives the government samples of us and allows it to know who we know.

We query what the tests actually show, what they really do, and what is really happening.

Whistleblowers have come forward in security and science. I heard the words of doctors asked to cook figures; experts in the field who say that the lockdown has weakened our immunity and prolonged the time needed for the virus to stop; who query the level of contagion and type of contact needed to be infected; that projected figures are exaggerated and that tests and vaccinations are not necessary nor effective, and often harmful; and as well as the fear many are living in, that health issues are caused by unhealthy substances in our environment, especially wi-fi. Some of those coming forward include Rashid Battar, Derek Henry, Wolfgang Wodarg, Scott Jensen, Knut Wittkowski, and some of these can be seen on the OpenHand website.

These links to YouTube and social media often suspiciously disappear.

All the official remedies have assumed face value and allopathic models, as well as total state control.

Many health professionals are saying that naturally building our immune system whilst avoiding the unnatural substances in our world, like fluoride, chemicals, coating of pans and tins, smart devices, and 5G, as well as restoring calm, balance, and at least some freedom (especially to be outside, with others than just our household) would better ways to combat the disease.

We ask that 5G does not come and for extra care about what is being sent through out airwaves. Some can already feel and hear strange things…

We ask that this is not a time for bullying or division (I know people whose benefits have been refused or threatened during lockdown!), not a time of telling on our neighbours or setting our own against us.

We ask that this city and country leads (whereever you are) by imposing no enforcement, roadblocks, uninvited home visits, or incarceration; and instead looks to why this virus is here and what we can learn from it.

[On Sunday afternoon, I’ll have a sermon to share]

The shape of things to come

Shortly into the New Year, I’ll be considering the prison drama Bad Girls and how it’s influencing my views on punishment and justice; on Britain’s justice secretary’s comments on the European Court of Human Rights today; and scheming satirical sketches for workfare supporters.

Coming up next is my review of Death Comes to Pemberley – and whether it’s further death to my relationship with Austen…

Radiotherapy Rape

I wondered if that was a bit of a hard title – but it feels necessary.

If someone is forced to undergo bodily actions against their will, especially those that are harmful on a physical and mental level and that have altering affects, than that is rape. Rape is not purely for sexual abuse.

I refer to to the news around the Roberts family, where a court has forced a recalcitrant mother to let her son have an operation and therapy for a brain tumour that she doesn’t want – and to lose parental custody for a year, as well as banning her passport.

I cannot tell from reports quite how this got into the courts. Was it the estranged husband who raised the case, or that mother Sally took her soon away to stop him having the therapy? Did the authorities really come looking for her due to missed appointments?

I am incensed by the judge who really cannot call himself Justice anything.

Our bodies are our own, not the state’s, not the court’s, not the hospital’s. None of those places can make a decision on anyone’s behalf.

‘A mother’s choice’ in our society means she can choose not have a baby, but once born, that choice reverts to the state.

What really seems at stake here is that the mother, Sally, has defied the system. She has said no to submitting, as so many unquestioningly do, to the harsh treatments, and wanted time to explore other options. She is told that there are none and then forced to go to court. She is told by “experts” that these other treatments she considers are not “proven.” Truth – there is fear that doctors are losing their power and that the harm of traditional cancer treatments is becoming better known. And that “experts” and evidence are chosen to back up what those in power want us to know.

Sally is quite right to consider other options and query methods where damage has been done. Alternative healers often speak of the alarming statistics where the health professions harm, not cure. I don’t believe it is their way of getting our custom instead (I am wary of that); and nor do I believe that most allopathic medical staff intend harm; I am sure they are trying genuinely to assist.

But they have bought into their own medicine that there is one way – the established one – to deal with medical issues. When my own mum was dying of cancer, I found out that alternative health shops were legally unable to answer my query. I have discovered why – the 1939 Cancer Act, England, which has few search results on the net, but forbids the statement and advertisement of cancer cure other than via radio and chemotherapy.

You have to ask who made that law – people set to gain from these treatments, trying to have a legal as well as financial monopoly on cure. Donna Eden asks in her Energy Medicine book why such laws (also found in America) are there, as ultimately all genuine healers want to heal, and the prohibitions she found are not only curtailing patient choice (and her own gifts) but stopping that healing taking place.

I also discovered too the surprise of doctors when one does not simply go to the therapy rooms as prescribed, their almost anger at orders not being obeyed, at their plans not being followed. As an adult, my mother (encouraged by me) could freely choose not to have treatment – the little she did had precipitated illness, for despite having stage 4 cancer, she had looked very well til then. Yet Neon Roberts, Sally’s son, has not got that choice. No report speaks of what he wants and how much he can understand about the risks and treatments being foisted on him.

The medical profession also fears death as a sign of failure. But for those of us who see death as a passing from this to another, better world, it is not to be shunned at any cost. Perhaps we are worse at accepting child death now than when the mortality rate was higher and people were generally more religious. I think spirituality is returning, though not yet to the establishment. We feel a good life is a long one and that a shorter one, especially in children, is a life cheated. While desperately painful for loved ones, perhaps it is better to see that lives are of varying lengths and that growing into old age is not an automatic right and necessity. I believe we come into the world for a purpose and that sometimes that is fulfilled in a short time.

I do feel for the family. But this piece is about a serious and frightening point that a mother is being overruled and our bodies are not our own.

It seems that this is using emotive talk to get the courts and public to side against a mother for being open minded. It’s easy to read Dec 22nd’s outcome as rewarding the conforming, malleable father with care of the son so that what the state wants can happen. I did not like what his defence lawyer said, hinting (as did the judge) that Sally is going off the rails and being wayward – and therefore not deserving of winning the case or having care of her child.

Obviously what’s hard is that the parents do not agree on what should happen.

What’s the real battle here?

I am aware some believe in the conventional system and that others may genuinely think that this method is the best to save a life. But as Sally points out – what kind of life? And what if the other methods can also save him and be safer and less horrific to go through?

Having already subjected a little boy to a long gruelling op, he is recalled to hospital because they missed some of the tumour. That to me is rectifying their failure, fear of suing for negligence.

This is clear: no state or doctor or judge can force anyone (human or animal) of any age or mental state to have treatment they don’t want. I am sure Neon’s mum is not wishing her son to die – the reverse – but it’s not a choice that others get to make for her.

And as for evidence for other healing methods and against radioactive ones, there is plenty, but it is being hidden and curtailed. We need to ask – what is the business of medicine really about? The only answer is to heal and assist, and if it’s not doing that, then it is wrong and those wanting anything other than to do that need to resign (judges included). It’s not about drug profits or supremacy, it’s about care. And justice is just that – not imposing the will of the powerful.

I am pleased that Sally is mounting another appeal (Jan 3rd), and I’m appalled by the tone of reporting and the comments posted. I am often appalled by the views of many readers – and we are supposed to be a ‘developed’ country!