Speeding towards summer - May 2024

Me in most of May

In my previous monthly round-up I mentioned how we had moved out of our house due to home improvements. We spent the first few days in May in a flat in Cardiff Bay and then had a few days as guests with our friends Bryan and Elaine. That gave me and Bryan an opportunity to try out a new game called RumbleSlam - blogged about here.

But soon the plastering was complete and we were able to move back home. Besides being unsettled by being out of the house, there have been several other things to deal with. 

In the middle of the month, a friend and colleague was made redundant, the second member of our small team to leave under redundancy in the last few weeks. In addition to the sadness of the circumstances, it's left a hole in several plans we had in work. 

I also had the unsettling feeling of knowing that the two men who attacked me back in February were due to be sentenced. I wrote a victim impact statement for the sentencing, although opted not to attend the sentencing hearing. The man who actually hit me received a ten year imprisonment sentence and his accomplice who stood by and watched was given three years in prison. 

Overall, I feel physically and emotionally fine about the whole event. I don't feel particularly nervous or panicky about walking around outside. I've walked past the place where it happened a few times. It just all feels very surreal, and I feel slightly detached from it - like it happened to someone else. The police and the witness support unit have been excellent throughout, answering questions and keeping me updated. I know they are also pleased with the quick resolution and successful conviction. 

The day of the sentencing, I saw posts on LinkedIn saying that someone I used to work for had passed away. Professor Sir Mansel Aylward CB was chair of Public Health Wales, where I worked, and requested my services supporting his think tank the Bevan Commission. I worked closely with him to write various reports and we ended up chatting about all kinds of things. I remember him telling me about hearing Aneurin Bevan speaking, and about the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster. 

Once when I was on the team running an exhibition stall for NHS Wales at a big international conference in London, I ended up having a meal with him and my fellow stall-manager, Kelly, where he regaled us with stories from when he worked in the area when it was under the thrall of the Krays. But beyond the stories, Sir Mansel always seemed interested in hearing what everyone around the table had to say. I noticed other tributes on LinkedIn from people who worked at a similar junior level to me, saying the same thing, and expressing genuine sorrow that he had passed away.

Lots happening, but also, goslings!!

On the last bank holiday weekend of the month, Cathy and I had a day trip to Torquay. This was mainly to visit the memorial stone for Cathy's parents at the crematorium. But we also had a drive along the sea front, visited the big toy shop in Paington, and had a picnic tea at Hay Tor on Dartmoor before driving home. We couldn't see much of Hay Tor because of the mist, but we did get to see some of the wild ponies that live on the moor!

Ponies!

In the wider world, we also had news that a general election has been called for 4th July with the Prime Minister standing in pouring rain during the announcement. That in itself prompted lots of comments.  

So far, I haven't received any political bumf through the letterbox, but I will be doing an election leaflet round up like I've done previously (most recently for the Senedd elections in 2021). 

The election announcement torpedoed a news story for us in work because two of the young people who volunteer in our programme had met the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care just the day before the election was announced!

Then right at the end of the month, another big politics news story broke, with Donald Trump becoming the first former US President to be convicted of criminal charges. This made me think back to when I was complaining about how boring politics was when I studied it at A-Level. I can't imagine anyone studying it now would find it dull.

I also managed to fit in five football matches in May. I will be writing them up soon and there will also be an end of season review because that's it - the season is over for me! (But I will be watching the European Championships next month...)

Being "a bit anti-establishment"

In September I wrote a post about how I didn't feel like I was feeling what everyone else was feeling after the Queen died. I had some feedback on that post. My mum said it seemed "cynical". My friend Paul said I sounded "a bit anti-establishment". 

My first thought when Paul said that was "Only a bit?" Maybe it took me saying something out of step with the prevailing sentiment to show that I'm a bit anti-establishment. But I'm not going to deny it. I think there are a lot of problems with 'the establishment' and the way things are arranged in the UK.

I've been a republican for a long time - probably all my adult life. It's nothing personal about any member of the Royal Family. As another friend, Jon, said, the Queen chose to do the public duty side of her role, and I respect the Queen for playing the hand she was dealt and playing it well. But I don't have to approve of the way the deck was stacked. (What's the saying? Hate the game, not the player?)

I studied Politics at A-level, back when politics was comparatively boring. We spent a year looking at the British political system and a year looking at the American political system. That left me firmly of the opinion that the House of Lords should be abolished. This has current relevance if you can be a Prime Minister for a mere 44 days and still give a load of party donors paid jobs for life in the House of Lords. My preference would be to replace that unelected body with regional parliaments in England that have power devolved to them.

The American system seems to have gone horribly wrong in this century, but the idea of splitting powers between Congress (the legislature) and the President (the executive) is fundamentally sound. Having an elected President gives everyone a say in who holds the top job, unlike the incredible farce we have seen recently appointing a new Prime Minister.

In the last few years I have become an active supporter of Welsh Independence. Overall, you can see a trend in my thinking - a greater say in who governs with more direct influence for voters. A self-governing Cymru will mean more direct accountability to the people who live here. 

I was recently asked if I felt an independent Wales was viable - I replied asking whether the UK still feels viable. The person I was talking to is politically astute and told me for the first time in their life they felt truly fearful for the future. My feeling is increasingly framed as 'Can Wales afford to stay in the Union?', rather than 'Can Wales afford to leave?'

I have strong opinions beyond abstract proposals for changing political structures. I think all "necessities" - power, water, housing (to an extent), broadband - should be nationalised and run as public services to ensure everyone's needs are met. (I have heard an interesting idea that football clubs should be 'nationalised' and run for the good of communities. It's an idea that had some merit to it. Social institutions are important. However, I would start with the utilities and transportation.) 

I'd also support the idea of a Universal Basic Income, to remove financial stress from people and really free up creative endeavour and innovation. Wages would then reflect the value of a particular job in society and work would have greater inherent value. 

Universal Basic Income is a way to break the poverty cycle and reset our society. There is good evidence that the solution to poverty is actually to give poor people enough money to live on. That sounds so blindingly obvious it feels almost like sarcasm. But it's hard to argue against, unless you are willing to ignore all the research and cling to your prejudices that all poor people are stupid or irresponsible. Of course, some people might prefer the UK to be a nation of foodbanks and misery. They can keep voting Tory. I'm not going to apologise for wanting things to be better than that.

Don't know the writer; agree with the message

Because of its ever-presence in the lives of almost everyone who is alive, people forget the NHS was considered radical and revolutionary in its time. It was vigorously opposed by the Conservative Party of its day (and also by a lot of doctors!) and even now the idea of free healthcare available at the point of need is rare around the world. I believe in the NHS concept and believe it is worth defending, which is becoming increasingly necessary as it is being deliberately under-funded and privatised by stealth. 

My point about the NHS is that, generally, we can get used to radical approaches. Welsh Independence, or republicanism, or nationalising utilities, or Universal Basic Income, may all appear radical and unachievable. But so did the NHS when Aneurin Bevan first entered politics. 

So, having said all that, overall I'm happy to be described as "a bit anti-establishment". The only bit I would quibble with is the word "bit".

The "smoking gun" on that Aneurin Bevan 'quote' I investigated almost six years ago

Way back at the end of 2011 I wrote a post about the provenance of quotes, with three examples of quotes and stories that I felt were not authentic. A couple of months later I proved one of the stories - about the violinist Itzhak Perlman - was totally untrue, because I emailed his agent and got a reply debunking the myth.

One of the quotes was attributed to Aneurin Bevan. I could not find a source for it and the people who quoted it couldn't give me a source either. Then back in January 2015 I had the bizarre experience when I asked a Tweeter if they knew the source of the quote and they linked me back to my blog post questioning whether the quote was genuine. When I pointed that out they didn't bother to reply.

On and off I've noticed the quote still appearing on Twitter, often in this format:

And so to a few days ago when I got a mention on Twitter from a chap called Alex Marklew.  I had not heard of Alex before but he had written a piece on Medium.com about the same quote. In his tweet he acknowledged my "initial digging" around the quote and he linked to the original blog post and quoted from it.

Alex definitely went further than I did, fruitlessly scouring the biographies that I'd been pointed towards but hadn't had time to read. He also seems to have gone deeper into Hansard than I ever did. And, most excitingly, he has found the quote, except it was not said by Aneurin Bevan. It was a summary of Bevan's position by a British sociologist called Thomas Humphrey Marshall, who wrote 'Social Policy in the Twentieth Century' (published in 1967). Alex has the exact quote in its context in his article. Then in 1978, Marshall's line was quoted in a paper called 'Medicine, Health, and Justice: The Problem of Priorities', with the quote attributed to Bevan. Alex refers to this paper as 'Patient Zero' - the source of the quote as a false 'Bevanism'.

I think Alex Marklew has solved this mystery, which I never thought would be, and I'm grateful. It was one thing on my list of things to get round to one day and now I can cross it off without having to lift a finger.

The question now is, does it matter who said it? I mean, yes, in one sense it does because misattributed quotes are basically lies given false authority based on who allegedly uttered them. But the question is do we still agree with the message, regardless who says it? I do. I think this quote from Thomas Humphrey Marshall captures the essence of why healthcare should be freely available to everyone. I'm not too bothered that it was said by someone writing about Bevan and the NHS and not by the "Father" of the NHS himself (as seen in the meme photo above). But I'm glad I now know who we should credit with saying it.

When you are your own citation

Three years ago I wrote about the difficulty I had finding a source for a quote by Aneurin Bevan. On and off I've kept trying to find the source, especially when it pops up on Twitter like it did tonight.

So, I asked for the source of the quote and had a surreal sensation when someone replied citing my blog post from 2011. That's the blog post which basically says there is no known source and the person who used the quote at the event where I heard it the first time doesn't know where it is from.

I'm fully expecting the next response to be a link to the white paper where I was forced to fudge the authenticity issue that led to my original blog post.

If anyone does know where that quote is from, I would love to know.

Provenance

I’m increasingly troubled by the issue of provenance – how do we know what we read is in any way true or not.

Recently I wrote a white paper about the founding of the NHS, based on presentations by three eminent professors. One of them included a quote from Aneurin Bevan in his PowerPoint. The quote was:

“Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.”

I agree whole-heartedly with that statement – it succinctly sums up the issue at the heart of universal healthcare. But, as this was going to be a white paper, I felt I ought to reference it. That’s where the trouble began.

I read Bevan’s key work ‘In Place of Fear’ and it wasn’t in there. A quick scout of ‘quote websites’ on Google didn’t turn up anything. In fact, the only reference I could find on Google was to another presentation by the same professor, where again the quote appeared unattributed. So, I contacted the presenter who said he thought he’d noted it from the many-hundred page biography of Bevan by Michael Foot, but he didn’t have the reference.

He obviously also had a fruitless web search, because in his email he said: “The quote doesn't come up on Google, which makes we wonder if it was part of something Bevan said rather than wrote.” And then he added: “But it rings so true as a Bevan quote that I can't imagine anyone will challenge its authenticity.”

That wasn’t quite good enough for me, so I went further. I got in touch with the Aneurin Bevan Society, and the person who got back to me said they thought it was in his speech at the final reading of the NHS bill in 1948 and also mentioned the Foot biography.

I looked through Hansard for the years surrounding the formation of the NHS (not just ’48), but I couldn’t find it. I didn't have the time to trawl through the biography, so I fudged it in the paper – saying the professor quoted Bevan, but without noting the lack of source. So far, he was right. Nobody has challenged its authenticity.

Then again, within the last few weeks I was writing another paper based on a presentation and there were two quotes attributed to Gandhi. The good thing is that Gandhi is a bit more famous on Google than Bevan and it didn’t take long to find out that the quotes were probably spurious.

The first quote was:

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us. - We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption to our work. - He is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider in our business. - He is part of it.
We are not doing him a favor by serving him. - He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

All well, good and laudable in a healthcare context. Anything that refocuses the work of clinicians on the people they are caring for gets the thumbs up from me. And, although I don’t personally like the use of ‘customers’ in a healthcare setting, I have seen enough family members receive poor customer care from the health service to hope this maxim takes root.

But I still had a problem with the quote – I wasn’t sure it rang true for Gandhi. Sure enough, Wikipedia’s extensive halfway house of uncorroborated quotes had it in storage – noting that the common attribution of the quote didn’t match the known facts of Gandhi’s life. Several websites seeking to affirm it as a genuine quote report that Gandhi said it on a visit to Johannesburg in 1890, but Gandhi’s first visit to South Africa was in 1893.

Something was screwy there. The Wikipedians and other editors noted its similarity to a statement popularised by an American entrepreneur called L. L. Bean. But no-one knew where he had got it from, or whether he coined it.

The second Gandhi quote was the famous “Be the change you want to see in the world” aphorism. As the first quote had proved probably spurious, I thought I’d better check this out. As a quote, it doesn’t appear in any of Gandhi’s published works, but it was attributed to him by his grandson, Arun Gandhi. So maybe it was genuinely something Gandhi said. I’d rate the chances of it being authentic as 50/50.

My problems with ascertaining whether quotes were true remind me of a piece of fact-checking I did when I worked for a Christian family charity. The founder of the organisation is a well-known public speaker and often tells stories as part of his presentations. One, which I heard on numerous occasions and I’ve heard told by another well-known Christian speaker, concerns a world-famous violinist called Itzhak Perlman.

The basic gist of the story is that Perlman (who was born in Israel in 1945) contracted polio and was crippled at a young age. He is now a world-famous concert violinist. When he plays, the audience have to wait for him to limp onto the stage on crutches and position himself.

One night at the concert hall, Perlman had just started a violin solo and one of the strings snapped on his violin. Instead of stopping, he carried on playing, rapidly transposing the notes as he went so he is played them on different strings than usual. When he finished, the auditorium sat in stunned silence for a heartbeat than explodes in rapturous applause.

Perlman signalled for quiet and hauled his crippled body upright. He turned to the hushed crowd and announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, all my life I have sought to make music with what remains!”

That’s the story. The moral – that whatever hardships in life leave you in some way deficient can be overcome – that you too, whatever your struggle, can ‘make music with what remains’ is uplifting. I saw people powerfully moved by the story; some moved even to tears.

I wondered if there was more to the story, so I Googled it. And that’s when I discovered there’s a small problem with it.

As far as anyone can tell, it’s not true.

The details are correct – Itzhak Perlman is a world-renowned violinist. He did have polio as a child and was crippled as a result. So far, so good. But the ‘with what remains’ story didn’t happen. It’s never been mentioned in any review of his concerts – although it has been noted that once when he broke a string, he entertained the crowd with jokes while his violin was re-stringed.

As Snopes.com says “Apparently if Itzhak Perlman ever did continue playing a concert piece after one of the strings on his violin broke, at least one newspaper considered the feat less remarkable than his performing a stand-up routine in similar circumstances.”

The slightly cloying sentiment isn’t the reason the story annoys me. What annoys me is the way it’s been presented as true, yet a 1 second search on Snopes reveals that it is most likely made up.

I think anyone who uses someone else’s words when they present should name the source, or at least check whether a story they tell actually happened. I do.

People – particularly those with a trade in telling feel-good stories and sticking them in books – might say ‘Well, it doesn’t matter whether the quote is genuine, as long as it sounds genuine, or has a good point to make.’ But if we’re just making shit up, then where do we draw the line?

We’re not even talking about centuries-old beliefs or legends from the dawn of time. We’re talking about people and events that happened within living memory. I work with someone who heard Aneurin Bevan speak at a public event in Tredegar. Gandhi wrote an autobiography, his various writings are still in print, and there have been several biographies about him. Itzhak Perlman is still alive.

So, how come so much misinformation can exist? How can sourceless quotes be taken at face value, or when sources are described, they are easily disprovable (thinking of Gandhi’s speech in Jo’burg three years before he set foot in South Africa – which incidentally wouldn’t be ‘South Africa’ for another 20 years).

I think these are issues in a healthcare setting – because clinical practice should be based on evidence and the facts should be right. I think it’s even more crucial in religious circles, particularly if you are trying to draw spiritual lessons from them.

Or to put it another way, if the facts are malleable when it comes to a violinist who still walks among us, how much credence should we give to anything said 2,000 years ago? 

Those are important questions. They show why provenance matters.

Some other bits of writing & stuff

Occasionally I engage in some self-promotion.

A pessimistic article I wrote for When Saturday Comes has attracted at least one angry commentator detracting my status as a Shrewsbury fan. Surprisingly I'm less than bothered.

I don't usually plug stuff I've written for work, but I was involved in the creation of a recent white paper about the guiding ethos in the NHS, and whether its founder, Aneurin Bevan, would recognise it. I found it fascinating to write it and maybe you'd find it interesting.

While we're on the subject of work stuff, I had the privilege to direct some information videos about work being done to prevent falls among elderly and infirm people back in May. They're now online, so if you want to rate my ability as a documentary film-maker, you can watch them here. I suggest the ones filmed in Cardiff and Llanidloes - if you like dogs you have to watch the one from Llanidloes. (I was helped massively by a very talented cameraman / editor - this is his website.)