Ed.: Below we publish two letters which the author, Ann Farmer, has sent to the Daily Mail on the same day. There, they’ll surely linger in a computer equivalent of a dusty filing cabinet, never to see the light of day. The links to the relevant articles in the DM are given in the letters.
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BBC’s bespoke announcers ‘oop noorth’
Sirs,
The BBC will ‘introduce “bespoke” regional voiceovers between programmes to make the corporation feel less London-centred’, as announcements between programmes are ‘made in local accents for BBC1 in the North West, North East, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire’ (‘BBC’s regional voiceover makeover’, Daily Mail, June 4, 2021).
Conspicuously absent from this list are the Cockneys, but they have long since been shunted out to the London suburbs and Home Counties by woke, left-wing luvvies – many, no doubt, working for the Beeb – who have priced them out of their traditional areas.
Perhaps, then, this move is aimed at winning back all those regions that traditionally voted Labour; one can imagine the W1A-style meeting in which a BBC exec breathlessly suggests that if the viewers in these benighted, Brexit-supporting regions could hear announcers speaking in their own language they might stop being bigots, racists and homophobes. They might even do a remake of Victoria Wood’s famous continuity announcement: ‘We’d like to apologise to viewers in the North. It must be awful for them.’ Not so much bespoke as misspoke.
Respectfully, Ann Farmer
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The rich seek sympathy, the poor suffer: the madness of mental health
Sirs,
Jan Moir says ‘the most astonishing aspect of the mental health debate is that the focus is almost entirely on celebrities or sports stars or dukes suffering from the low, blue flames of “depression” or “self-esteem”’; meanwhile, ‘a furnace of terrifying insanity roars among us, almost without comment’ – the ‘profoundly ill’ and their ‘loved ones who have to deal with the consequences’ of ‘life-wrecking mental disorders which require endless medication, intense therapy, hospitals, clinics, plus the constant attention of qualified professionals’ (‘Real mental illness is a tragedy. Stars need to know it’s not just being sad’, Daily Mail, June 4, 2021).
Real mental health care has always been the Cinderella of the health service, and since the introduction of ‘care in the community’ – or, more to the point, ‘don’t care in the community’ – things have got even worse. Once upon a time, mental patients were hidden away, ‘out of sight, out of mind’; now, the only time the mentally ill are noticed is when they are ‘out of their minds’ in a public place, harming other people, as with the cases mentioned by Ms Moir.
Perhaps the most horrifying case is that of Jonty Bravery, who ‘threw a little boy off the viewing platform at the Tate Gallery in London’, informing ‘horrified witnesses’ that he was ‘mad’.
Many such cases, especially involving young people, involve drug abuse, but the woke classes are more likely to call for the legalisation of cannabis than for a war against drugs; their main interest in suicide is in legalising assisted suicide for the sick and warning that people might taken their own lives if ‘mispronouned’.
They show little interest in scandals like that of Winterbourne View in 2012, and seven years later at Whorlton Hall, where mentally disabled residents were subjected to appalling abuse, which remained hidden until – to the credit of the Corporation – exposed by the BBC (link). In the wake of Whorlton Hall, Care Minister Caroline Dinenage condemned the abuse as “appalling”, and told Parliament: “We won’t tolerate having people out of sight and out of mind.”
Sadly, once the headlines have disappeared, it is back to business as usual. However, if wealthy and privileged – and very public – mental health sufferers like the Duke and Duchess of Sussex spent a few days in a publicly funded ‘care home’, one suspects they would get better very quickly.
There are of course many people with depression and/or anxiety who cannot afford private mental therapy, and whose real problem is not mental but spiritual; but with all the emphasis on ‘mental health’, these days anyone with a religious belief is likely to be treated as an old-fashioned ‘mental case’.
The real victims in all this are the silent sufferers who have not harmed anyone else; in fact, the more serious the suffering, the less likely they are to speak of it until they commit suicide – the ultimate act of self-harm.
Paradoxically, the more people speak out about their mental suffering, the less likely it is that they will harm themselves or anyone else – except by increasing the levels of depression and anxiety among those who have the misfortune to hear them. This is the madness of mental health – the rich seek sympathy while the poor continue to suffer.
Respectfully, Ann Farmer
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Ed: If any of you have written letters to Newspaper editors, to your MPs, to your local council chiefs – letters which the MSM won’t publish, letters which will receive only a generic reply acknowledging receipt but nothing else, then do send them to us. We’re happy to publish.
Publish the unprintable : A cricketer was overlooked by selectors for years . In first test Took 7 wickets and scored as many runs as Joe Root( batsman, captain ) .
gets sacked for tweets from 8 years ago …long before selectors imported a crock from the Carribean who does not like playing for England.
So Why so much delving into teenagers tweets instead of medical checks on Joffra Archer.
Cricket selectors gone woke, covering up their failures to develop English talent.
Complaining about things is the first step. Second comes facts. Then Organising them into learnable chunks. Then aTextbook or dissertation. Then people who follow and continue or analyse and expand. Then comes treatment ( At which point Business steps in and thwarts further study). Finally after a battle with Big Pharma, CURE (S )
Textbooks are milestones. I suppose Wiki is the modern untrustworthy varient. Which says it all really.. Perhaps a section for quotes including the ” We apologise to viewers in the north etc.” as a Westminster variant.
Excellent example of power through humour. Love Victoria Wood’s parody of a BBC apology to northern viewers ‘it must be awful for them’ and the ‘mental’ image of the depressed and depressing Sussexs’ public care home instant recovery – Our Cultural Elite, MSM and Social Media Oligarchs are more insane with every passing day – But the latest news that somehow got out that Fauci created Covidin Wuhan Lab is a chink in the global blanket of censorship that may turn into a flood a bit like the ever greater flow of the Icelandic lava. (You have to wonder if Vanity Fair was so not expected to have investigative journalistic tendencies that the CCP had overlooked intimidating them?)
Left wing Bbc ‘regional accent’ presenters eh?
I can just imagine the Scottish one transmitting from Glasgee with an impenetrable Mick McGahey accent.
See yous Jimmies an Mohammeds.
I divna ken if you’ve seen noo fashon. Wa suits. Aye wa. And no just part – ah wa! Ticht un oksters is noo too. Brawe. Ye old copee, Looses isshut, so yee nede to cast abute.
In Forfa there fresh Bridies. Get anunyanun for yorsenand a nunonyanun one for the quine.
[Just giving a flavour (ha!) of what bbc will sound like in NB].
BBC Ann does not tell us if she funds that that offends her. But anyone who complains about the bias and agenda of the BBC and still pays to keep the show on the road are wasting their breath.
Both letters are very ‘telling’. The first indicates without question what a pretentious, pointless, condescending and totally ‘up their own backsides’ organisation the BBC really is! Why anyone would listen to anything that they produce is beyond my comprehension. In fact anything I happen to see come through on the news flashes I get on my current phone are instantly deleted!
The second letter proves just how absolutely the Bliar years set their poisonous seal upon ‘celebrity-is-all’! From the day Bliar invited celebs into Downing St to illustrate his vision of ‘Cool Britannia’ it was obvious that the cultural standards of Britain were due for the chop!
Mental illness was, as the writer said, routinely treated as ‘untouchable’ and the sufferers persecuted beyond barbarism! Not much changes it seems. The reason why so many ‘suffer in silence’ is because – unless you are a ‘celebrity’ – if you make the fatal choice of contacting the ‘No-Help-System’ you are more likely to be ‘marked’ as not worth preserving, in the current climate of ‘throwaway people’!
Care Ministers come and go but the mindsets do not change from one to another. The current issue is equally as useless and uncaring as the last – goodness knows how many!
Ralph Prothero is right when he says ‘we aint seen nothing yet’! (I have paraphrased his actual worded comment!). We are descending into the abyss!
We’re descending into the abyss because : ” The NHS is not just a nationalised industry, it’s a massive chunk of the old USSR parked in the middle of our national life.
It was set up in the late 1940’s as a socialist health service by the Labour government, when most people on the Left were still besotted with the Soviet Union.
It is inevitable that is has come to be run for the sake of the bureaucrats who manage it, just like the old USSR. You ain’t seen nothing yet, things will get far, far worse.”
(Was that the comment from yesterday that you’re referring to Frederica? )
The third paragraph should start “It is inevitable that IT has come to be…” (not “is”). Failed to spot that slip, sorry.