Are the Tories going to live to regret trying to cover Lord Ashcroft’s back by questioning the tax status of a number of high profile Labour donors?

After last week’s news that Lord Ashcroft is a ‘non-dom’, the Tories were quick to accuse Labour of hypocrisy in accepting donations from their own allegedly non-domiciled supporters.

Ashcroft’s own statement named Lord Paul and Sir Ronald Cohen as being ‘non-doms’ who’d donated significant sums of money to Labour, shortly after which Iain Dale followed up with this expanded list of other Labour donors whose tax status may well be the same as Ashcroft’s:

Lord Paul – £69,250 in donations to Labour, including £45,000 to Gordon Brown’s leadership campaign. A close friend of Gordon Brown and appointed to the Privy Council last summer, he has admitted to being ‘non-dom’.
Lakshmi Mittal – £4.125 million in donations to Labour.
Sir Ronald Cohen – £2.55 million in donations to Labour. Cohen was appointed chair of the Social Investment Taskforce, which was announced by the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown.
Sir Christopher Ondaatje – £1.7 million in donations to Labour.
Sir Gulam Noon – £532,826 in donations to Labour.
William Bollinger – £510,725 in donations to Labour.
Mahmoud Khayami – £985,000 in donations to Labour including £5,000 to Hazel Blears’ deputy leadership campaign. He has helped bankroll two flagship schools, one of which Gordon Brown opened, and was personally thanked for a donation by Tony Blair.
Dr David Potter – £90,000 in a donation to Labour. He has previously delivered a lecture at Downing Street.

And then invited his readers to compare this list with Lord Ashcroft’s donations to the Conservative Party via Bearwood Corporate Services – which is exactly what I did, only to find something very interesting that I’m sure Iain didn’t want to call attention to.

With the exception of Lord Paul, who donated most of the £69,000 he gave to Labour via his UK registered company, Caparo Group, all of the other donors on Dale’s list gave money to the Labour Party as individual donations which were made in their own name and not through a limited company.

What this indicates as that the donations we made from personal funds, i.e. income that had either been earned in the UK, or possibly earned overseas and then remitted into the UK. Either way, that income would have been taxed in the UK.

Exactly how much tax would have been paid is impossible to say. It all depends on how the income was declared to HMRC.

If it was declared as earned income then it would have been taxed at the higher rate of income tax which was, until recently, 40%.

If it was earned through share dividends then it could have been taxed at anything from 10-20 percent, if it fell below a basic tax limit that current stands at £37,400 per year. Above that figure, the tax rate for income from share dividend is 32.5%

Or it could have been earned as capital gains from the sale or disposal of property, shares and other assets, in which case they would, from April 2008, have been taxed at a flat rate of 18%. Before that, a fairly complex system of tax reliefs applied to different types of capital gains under which the tax rate could vary from as little as 10% on business assets held for more that two years to as much as 40%.

By way of a complete contrast, last week’s Electoral Commission report on Bearwood Corporate Services gave this account the methods used to transfer money to the company in order to enable it to be donated to the Conservative Party.

BCS’ accounts indicate that the funds used for BCS’ donations were not generated wholly from BCS’ own trading activities. Funds passed on three occasions to BCS by way of share purchases. On two occasions, funds passed from a Belizean based company, Stargate Holdings Limited (Stargate), to a UK based company known as Astraporta UK (AUK). Funds then passed through share purchase from Astraporta UK to Bearwood Holdings Limited, another UK based company. The final step was for the funds to be passed through share purchase from Bearwood Holdings Limited (BHL) to BCS. There was subsequently a third purchase of shares in BCS – this time directly by Stargate. Stargate is registered in Belize and the Commission was unable to obtain any meaningful information about the sources of its funding.

And, in 2008, The Times published documents that outlined how the money was moved from Belize to the UK via a series of share deals in which Stargate Holdings purchased £6million in shares in Astraporta UK, which used the money to buy £5.54million worth of shares in Bearwood Holdings, which then bought £4.79million worth of shares in Bearwood Corporate Services.

On each of deals, the only tax payable was stamp duty, which is levied at a rate of 0.5% on each transaction, allowing Ashcroft to transfer £4.79milion in the UK at an effective tax rates, once the value of each of the transactions in taken into account, of only 1.35%, compared to 10%-40% tax rates that would have been levied on the income used by Labour’s alleged ‘non-doms’ to find their donations to the Labour Party.

This is all perfectly legal, of course, but a hell of long way from being open, transparent or, indeed, ethical – as far as I’m concerned – particularly as the Conservative Party has benefited from these transactions to the tune of £4.7million in cash and in-kind donations since 2003.

Disclaimer – for the avoidance of any doubt, the word ‘dodged’ used in the title should be read as meaning ‘avoided’ and not ‘evaded’ in the context of the tax issues discussed above.

Although its been widely reported that the Electoral Commission has ruled that the £5.1 million in donations that the Conservative Party received from Bearwood Corporate Services were made legally and within the rules set out by PPERA, very little has been said about the detail of its findings beyond noting that the Conservative Party were rather less than cooperative during the investigation.

In truth, if you read the Commission’s findings, their investigation raises considerably more questions than it does provide answers.

It has, for example, been widely regarded as an open secret that BCS has been the main vehicle through which Ashcroft has donated millions of pounds to the Tories, and yet the Commission’s report states that:

There was however no direct, or cogent circumstantial evidence before the Commission of any channelling of funds for donation by Lord Ashcroft, either directly to BCS or via anyone else. Nor was there evidence of an agreement between Lord Ashcroft and BCS that BCS would make donations on his behalf.

No, I’m not making this up. Despite considering the following list of facts:

• references to donations contained in Lord Ashcroft’s book ‘Dirty Politics Dirty Times’;

• the fact that Lord Ashcroft authorised the making of donations by BCS, and the fact that solicitors for BCS stated that this authorisation was given by Lord Ashcroft in his capacity as a representative of a corporate director of BCS;

• the fact that, prior to the 2005 general election, Lord Ashcroft was involved in the process by which donations were requested by, and funds allocated to, local candidates and Conservative associations;

• the fact that after the 2005 general election Lord Ashcroft continued a similar role, with the party as Deputy Chairman, formally heading the target seats campaign;

• the fact that donations from BCS were often referred to in internal party communications as ‘Ashcroft’ donations, either directly or ‘via’ BCS, with Lord Ashcroft regularly being referred to as the donor

… the Commission came to the conclusion that it had insufficient evidence to conclude that the money came from Ashcroft.

So where was all this money coming from?

It seems that the Electoral Commission hasn’t got the faintest idea…

BCS’ accounts indicate that the funds used for BCS’ donations were not generated wholly from BCS’ own trading activities. Funds passed on three occasions to BCS by way of share purchases. On two occasions, funds passed from a Belizean based company, Stargate Holdings Limited (Stargate), to a UK based company known as Astraporta UK (AUK). Funds then passed through share purchase from Astraporta UK to Bearwood Holdings Limited, another UK based company. The final step was for the funds to be passed through share purchase from Bearwood Holdings Limited (BHL) to BCS. There was subsequently a third purchase of shares in BCS – this time directly by Stargate. Stargate is registered in Belize and the Commission was unable to obtain any meaningful information about the sources of its funding.

Although it was unable to establish where the money actually came from, the Commission was able to cover its own arse by invoking a loophole in PPERA.

There is, however, no requirement in PPERA that the funds a company donates to a political party must be generated from its own trading. The possibility of overseas parent companies donating through British registered subsidiaries was raised during PPERA’s passage through Parliament and accepted – so long as the British subsidiary was itself carrying on business and was not acting as an agent for the overseas company.

In short, PPERA was drafted and passed into law with a built-in loophole that would enable foreign donors to covertly channel money into British political parties via a British trading subsidiary without disclosing the actual source of the money. All a donor has to do, to conceal their identity, is ensure that the furthest link in the financial chain leading back from the donation ends at a tax haven, an offshore jurisdiction that offers shareholders absolute secrecy and confidentiality.

So much for the open and transparent funding regime that PPERA was supposed to deliver.

It allowed political parties to bypass rules on the registration of donations by accepting loans, which weren’t disclosed to the public until the ‘loans for peerages’ scandal blew-up in Labour’s face.

It allowed wealthy donors to hide their identity behind unincorporated associations, such the Midlands Industrial Council, which were under no obligation to disclose either the source of their funding or their membership.

PPERA still allows Tory MPs to register free flights donated by another of Ashcroft’s offshore operations, Flying Lion, at the equivalent cost of a commercial air ticket, even if the recorded value of the donation would not cover the material costs of the flight, i.e. fuel, maintenance, hanger fees and salaries for the pilot and co-pilot. Last time I looked at this in detail, in 2008, the estimated difference between the total cost of the flights provided by Flying Lion and the amount recorded as non-cash donations came in at over £600,000 on flights costed at £787,000 but declared as only £175,000 in non-cash donations. Had the Tories used commercial charters for these flights then the cost would have been over £1.5 million at genuine commercial rates.

Now it’s apparent that there’s yet another loophole in the law that allows secret donations to be made to political parties, one that BCS has used to funnel substantial sums of money into the Conservative Party from what the Electoral Commission concedes is a wholly unidentifiable source.

What about the conduct of the Tories in all this?

Under PPERA, it’s the parties themselves are responsible for ensuring that they comply fully with the law and that hey only take donations from permissible (and therefore, identifiable, sources).

As I’ve already noted, the Commission found that donations from BCS were regularly referred to as ‘Ashcroft donations’ in internal party documents and in a book written by Ashcroft:

The Commission considered the evidence obtained from the party for the period during which the donations were accepted. The Commission took into account internal e-mails and documents from the party, including from constituency associations which had received funding from BCS. It also took into account comments made by Lord Ashcroft in his book ’Dirty Politics, Dirty Times’.

This led the Commission to the view that:

Based on this evidence, the Commission formed the view that there was evidence to suggest that, at least since 2006, the party would have had reason to question whether the donor was Lord Ashcroft rather than BCS.

So, not unreasonably, the Commission decided to ask the Tory’s treasurer for their view:

The registered treasurer was clear in his written answers to the Commission’s questions that he was in no doubt as to the identity of the donor, and that references to Lord Ashcroft as the donor were ‘loose language’ rather than to be interpreted literally.

So Ashcroft is what? A metaphorical donor?

Or, perhaps the Treasurer was given an assurance that everything was on the level and all above board, for whatever that might be worth these days.

What we do know is that it was at this point that the Tories clammed up on the Commission:

The Commission’s current powers do not allow it to require anyone to attend an interview. The Commission asked various officers and staff within the party to attend interviews on a voluntary basis, but these requests were not agreed to.

So what did the Commission do after getting stonewalled by the Tories?

Based on the evidence before it, the Commission considered that there is insufficient evidence to conclude, on the balance of probabilities, that the party was uncertain as to the identity of the donor when accepting the donations.

It took the Tory’s treasurer at their word and closed the case, even though the obvious interpretation of the party’s refusal to allow its officers and staff to attend interviews with the Commission to ensure that no one could drop a bollock.

Never mind publishing its report on the internet, the Commission should really have had its findings painted on a fucking wall in pure whitewash.

Where this leaves us is with £4.79 million, which BCS gained via a chain of share deals leading all the way back to Stargate Holdings, that cannot be traced back to an identifiable source but which, when donated to the Tories, was more or less under the exclusive control of Ashcroft, who both authorised the donations and determined where the money went – because the Electoral Commission were unable to determine, conclusively, whether this was his money or not.

What we know today, that we didn’t know even last week, is that Ashcroft is a non-dom and that he, therefore, pays UK taxes on his foreign earnings only if he decides to remit the money in to the UK. Although he, and other senior Tories (including David Cameron) tried to buy a bit of cover by drawing a couple of non-domiciled Labour donors into the story (Lord Swarj Paul and Sir Ronald Cohen) there are some very important differences between their position and that of Lord Ashcroft.

For one thing, it’s a bit of a reach to call Lord Paul a major Labour donor when the Electoral Commission’s records show that he’s made only one personal donation to the party (a mere £10,000 in 2001) while his company, Caparo, has donated the princely sum of £14,250 in three donations, one in 2002 and two more in 2008. Caparo were a little more generous with Gordon Brown during the period when he was raising funds for his campaign for the Labour leadership, but only to the tune of £45,000 in two donations, which is loose change compared to the amount that Ashcroft has funnelled into the Conservative Party since 2003.

Cohen is a significant donor (£2.05 million since 2001) but where both Paul and Cohen differ from Ashcroft is in the fact that both hold remunerated positions with companies registered in the UK, which means that their salaries are automatically subject to UK income tax, even if their foreign earning aren’t. Ashcroft’s remunerated position, according to his recently updated entry in the Lords register of interests, is with BCB Holdings, his main Belizean operation.

As such, Ashcroft will pay income tax in the UK only is he remits any of his salary into the country to cover his living expenses while he’s here, and its Ashcroft who decides how much to remit in and, therefore, how much tax he actually pays.

Further examination of his current register entry, plus a little extra digging, gives this information for his registered holdings…

Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be very much there that actually generates an income for Ashcroft in the UK. All of his seemingly profitable holdings appear to be offshore or held via offshore companies, and most of the rest, give or take his recent investments in Conservative Home and in Iain Dale’s Biteback Media, appear to be running up losses and not paying any dividends.

As for Bearwood Corporate Services, which was only added to Ashcroft’s entry register entry in the Lords register of interests at its most recent update (March 1 2010), it’s 2006-7 accounts showed a loss for that year of £629,828. For the same financial year, the Electoral Commission’s registers show that BCS made £59,136.75 in cash donations and £551,487.67 in non-cash donations to the Conservative Party for a total of £610,624.42, a figure that differs from BCS’s recorded loss for the year by only £19,200.

Bearing all that in mind, you have to wonder just how much tax Ashcroft has actually been paying in the UK?

Is it more, or less, than the amount he’s slipped the Tory Party via BCS – assuming, like just about everyone else, including most of the staff at CCHQ, that it is Ashcroft’s money?

Of course, if the £4.79 million that moved from Stargate Holdings to BCS via two other companies is Ashcroft’s money then he won’t have paid any tax on it, which he would have done had he remitted it to the UK, personally, in order donate it to the Conservative Party.

By way of a complete contrast every single penny of the £2million that Sir Ronald Cohen donated to Labour was registered, according to the Electoral Commission, as a personal donation and will, therefore, have come from income either earned in, or remitted to, the UK on which at least Capital Gains Tax will have been paid.

Bearing all that in mind, I’m starting to wonder whether HM Revenue and Customs might not have had more success in getting answers out the Tories than the Electoral Commission.

In the wake of the publication of the Science and Technology Committee’s evidence check on homoeopathy, the BBC managed to dig up someone to go on TV and claim that homeopathy cured her cancer:

Gemma Hoefkens is, as the BBC report notes, a practising homeopath – she currently charges £50 for a first consultation and then a further £40 throw for follow-ups (including water).

Hoefken’s website also includes two separate accounts of her cancer treatment, which the BBC really should have checked through more carefully before giving this woman any air time. Taken together, both accounts cast serious doubts on her claims. One was published in Woman’s Own magazine, the other is a Word document written by Gemma herself and its the latter that this post will look at, although I will point out any salient differences between the two accounts as I go through it.

Oh, and I have got copies of both files stored in case anything falls down the Internet memory hole…

So, to begin at the beginning…

I was a school registrar in London, aged 26, when diagnosed with cancer. That was 1996. Previously, in July 1992, I had had a condition called hydrocephalus, or water on the brain. I had an operation for this and had made a good recovery. However, as time went on I began to get some alarming symptoms . My short-term memory was really bad at times, making my job very difficult. My eyesight got worse, so that I would bump into things sometimes and I would sleep so deeply so that I could not be woken. Strangely, these symptoms would come and go and I had them checked by a doctor.

In the Woman’s Own (WO) article, Hoefkens’ states that she was an administration assistant, not a school registrar.

My GP in 1993 referred me to St Bartholomew’s Hospital where I had a brain scan. I was told there was nothing wrong with me, it was my imagination. I was not convinced and my symptoms were getting worse. Later that year, I asked my GP for another referral and in June 1994 and I had another brain scan at Kings College Hospital. It revealed a growth in the middle of my brain. I was assured that this did not need any treatment because it was so small – the size of the little finger.

The WO article uses the term ‘tiny masses of tissue’ to describe the findings of the second brain scan, which seems a better description given that a growth that was literally the size of someone’s little finger is anything but small.

However in January 1996 I was told at Kings College that I had a few tumors but they were benign. They were too deep to operate on and I was advised to have a brain biopsy. I was then informed that I should have radiology treatment at St Bartholomew’s. It was terrifying. I had to lay face down on a table and have a mask bolted down over my face, so that I would stay perfectly still whilst the treatment took place. At my first appointment, the treatment was about to begin when the radiologist burst through the door and shouted “stop”. The treatment could not proceed. They had discovered more tumors down my spine.

Here the two accounts begin to deviate significantly.

The WO account states that Hoefkens was referred to the Maudsley Hospital – which is south of the Thames, near Waterloo Station – and not to St Barts, which is north of the river and close to Smithfield Market. It’s not a huge difference in terms of distance (2 miles) but it is a different hospital.

Somewhat more curiously, the WO version of Hoefkens treatment makes no mention whatsoever of the apparent incident in which she claims that a radioographer stopped her first treatment due to the discovery of metastatic tumors on the spine, nor does it suggest that Hoefkens’ cancer ever spread beyond the brain.

It seems a little strange, to say the least, that women’s magazine would choose to omit such a seemingly dramatic detail from a story of this kind.

I then had to be marked up on my back with a pen – to let the radiographers know where the tumors were so they could direct the radiology on my spine as well as on my head. I was often violently ill after the treatments and all my hair fell out in one weekend – well, apart from a few strands. I looked like a baby chick. I thought, as long as I was going to get better, I would put up with it as it was a small price to pay.

The first sentence of this paragraph seems to suggest that a radiologist took it on themselves to vary Hoefkens’ treatment, while she was on the operating table,without any apparent consultation with her cancer specialist or prior clinical investigation of the ‘tumors’ that were allegedly found on her spine.

Is this really plausible?

It seems a little unlikely to me, but I’m not an oncologist.

Months later the results showed the radiology had removed the tumors from my spine but this was not enough. The radiologist advised me to have chemotherapy. My trust was in their hands and I believed their treatment would save me. “Doctor knows best”. It was years later I realized that I had fitted perfectly with traditional British culture.

According to the WO article the ‘months later’ referred to here means two months, which is the point at which it was suggested that Hoefkens undergo chemotherapy as it appeared that the radiotherapy had failed to have an impact on her cancer. Again, no mention is made of any metastatic tumours on her spine.

I returned to the hospital and along with the chemotherapy, I had huge doses of steroids, aimed at preventing any more inflammation or growth of the tumours. In four weeks I had put on four stones in weight, I did not recognize myself in the mirror. My eyesight was getting worse, I had double vision, could only see an arms length away and even that was all fuzzy. My eyelids did not open voluntarily. I had to hold one eyelid up to see anything. When I could walk, I needed a stick. As things got worse I was issued with a wheel chair.

Both accounts are at least consistent in noting that Hoefkens was prescribed steroids alongside her chemotherapy

Friday, 13^th October 1996 The consultant told me the treatment was making me worse and there was nothing more he or the hospital could do for me. He asked if I would like to stay in hospital, go to a hospice, or go to my parents home. He wished me all the best and said “have a very good Christmas”. I realized some months later that what he had said indicated his thinking was that it would be my last Christmas. In his report to my GP the consultant’s registrar wrote “I have explained the scan findings to Gemma and her mother. I have explained that chemotherapy has not helped since her disease has progressed during her treatment. I have also stressed that there are no other viable options for treating the disease but that treatment will now be directed at the symptoms”.

The 13th of October 1996 fell on a Sunday, not a Friday. I expect that what Hoefkens’ recalls is that she got the bad news on a Friday and that it was the middle of the month at which point superstition takes over and makes the date the 13th.

To recap the story, Hoefkens appears to have been diagnosed with cancer in January 1996 and in subsequent nine months received a course of radiotherapy followed, a couple of months later, by a course of chemotherapy during which she was also given steroids.

All of the symptoms she describes from the point at which she began her treatment are consistent with the side-effects of treatment for brain tumours. Brain cancer is known to be a type of cancer in which, after treatment, things tend to get worse before they get better as the treatment, itself, causes inflammation in the brain that typically affects both motor and cognitive functions, particularly short-term memory. As such we should not be surprised that Hoefkens is, at times, a little vague on some of the details.

Nevertheless, there seem to be quite a few questionable elements here.

This raises the question of exactly when these accounts were written.

The WO article is undated but gives Hoefkens’ age as being 29 at the time it was produced, which seems to date the article to 1999 – the actual pdf document has a creation date 0f November 2003. This is also consistent with a reference to Hoefkens starting a three year homeopathy course in 1998.

The MS word document states that it was written around 10 years after Hoefkens’ last follow-up appointment with the doctor who treated her in London, which occurred in 1998, and refers to the death of the homeopath who ‘treated’ her, which occurred in 2006, This confirms that this is the later account and that it was written around nine years after the WO piece.

In between the two, Hoefkens also pops up on the radar in an article that appeared in the Birmingham Evening Mail in November 2002.

As with the WO article, the Evening Mail article makes the claim that Hoefkens was told that she had only six months to live, although this is not referred to in her 2008 account where she states only that he consultant told her to ‘have a very good Christmas’ after advising her that treatment would be discontinued. She then adds:

I realized some months later that what he had said indicated his thinking was that it would be my last Christmas.

Which appears to confirm that she wasn’t, in fact, told that she had only six months to live.

The Evening Mail article, which appeared at the point at which she’d completed her course and was setting up her own homeopathy practice, also adds a couple of additional details that do not appear in either of the other accounts, in addition to being the first account to refer to her being treated at St Barts rather the Maudsley Hospital, to whit:

“Doctors told my parents that the nicest way I could go was to slip into a coma.”

And…

“At one point my opticians could see the tumour wrapped around the optic nerve but now they can’t see it at all,”

The next section of the 2008 account goes on to talk about her returning to live with her parents and the other woo she received, although that does contain one interesting passage:

The homoeopath, Janice Butcher, came to my parents’ house, as I was unable to visit her. She was very pleasant and kind, asked me lots of questions and gave me some very small white pills. Within a day or two some more bottles arrived which she described as organ remedies and one of those was a blood remedy. Miraculously, shortly afterwards, my blood-count rose which enabled me to avoid an already planned blood transfusion organized by my doctor.

No date or timing information is given here, although the wording of the previous passage suggests that it occurred not long after Hoefkens returned to her family home and, therefore, most likely within a matter of a few weeks after her last appointment at the Maudsley hospital and at a time when her body was still experiencing the effects of the chemotherapy she’d received.

The evidence for this last assertion is to be found in the reference to a planned blood transfusion – anaemia is a common side effect of a number of drugs used in chemotherapy and a blood transfusion is a standard treatment for moderately severe anaemia.

That said, its not just the red blood cells that can be adversely impacted by chemotherapy – it also suppresses the immune system and inhibits the production of the white blood cells that help the fight off infection.

Further to that, there is also solid evidence to show that the immune system plays a significant role in fighting off cancer.

On its own, the immune system is very unlikely to be strong enough to clear out an established tumour, although cases of spontaneous remission have been documented on occasion.

There is, however, a significant body of evidence which supports the view that the immune system can and does help to rid the body of cancer if that cancer can be weakened using chemotherapy or radiotherapy, in fact that’s pretty much how the latest generation of extremely expensive (and controversial) cancer drugs, which use monoclonal antibodies, work. These new generation drugs are, typically, given in combination with older chemotherapy drugs – which attack the cancer itself – in order to compensate for the adverse impact on conventional chemotherapy on the patient’s immune system, enabling the cancer to be attacked on two fronts – chemically and by the patient’s artificially-boosted immune system.

Once you appreciate that, then it become clears that there is a perfectly viable method of accounting for Hoefkens’ recovery that doesn’t rely on the power of woo and magic water.

In October 1996, Hoefkens was told that direct treatment for her cancer was to be discontinued because – according to the registrar’s statement – the disease had progressed during treatment. What this suggests is that growth of the tumours had continued, if not accelerated, during the period that she undergoing chemotherapy, most likely because the chemotherapy had impaired her immune system and it was this that was previously holding back the growth of the cancer.

In the circumstances, the treatment appeared to be making Hoefkens condition worse and she appears to have suffered terrible from the side-effects of the combination of chemotherapy and steroid treatments, all of which makes the decision to discontinued treatment and move on to the management of symptoms as reasonable judgement call. Remember, the first rule of medicine is ‘do no harm’.

What the doctors could not have known, given that this decision appears to have been based on evidence from scan and not from a biochemical analysis of the cancerous tissue, was that the chemotherapy had weakened the cancer but that the effects of this were being masked by impact that the treatment had had on her immune system.

Several weeks later, her blood count rose ‘miraculously’ allowing her to avoid undergoing a blood transfusion as a treatment for anaemia – and this is consistent not only with the reference to her blood count but to the severe fatigue she reports as well – all of which suggests that her body is starting to return to normal after being throw severely out of kilter by the treatment.

And, if her red blood cell count is getting back to normal, then its not unreasonable to think that the same may also have been happening to her white cell count and that her immune system is starting to kick in much more effectively than it was only a few weeks previously.

There’s no miracles here, nor do any of the improvements that Hoefkens experiences have anything to do with the homeopathic remedies she was given – not beyond placebo, anyway.

What we have, instead, is evidence for a delayed remission brought about by, in the first instance, the weakening of the cancer by the use of chemotherapy and then its remission as a result of it succumbing to a revived immune response.

Miraculously is entirely the wrong word to be using here when coincidentally fits the evidence nicely and doesn’t require the acceptance of an exceptional claim in the absence of exceptional evidence.

Everything else in that section of her 2008 account covers the woo she was given, leaving us to pick up the clinical side of the story at this point…

In early 1997, one year after I had been sent home to die, I returned to London and moved back into the shared house I used to live in before my illness. I would still be extremely tired but I was independent again and that felt great. I did not go back to work as I continued with my recovery. In June 1998 I telephoned St Bartholomew’s Hospital to make an appointment. They remembered me and could not believe it – “You sound so well”. They thought I would be “pushing up the daises” by then.

Again, the dates are out – she was told that further treatment for the cancer itself would be withdrawn in October 1996, so one year after could not have been early 1997.

There’s also a possible issue with the claim regarding making an appointment with St Barts, and not just because the WO article states that she phoned the Maudsley Hospital. Hoefkens claims to have contacted the hospital to make an appointment in June 1998, while the WO article, which appears to date to 1999, refers to Hoefkens calling the hospital ‘recently’ and comes after Hoefkens refers to starting her homeopathy course in October 2008.

That said, towards the very end of the 2008 account, Hoefkens places the start of her studies as a homeopath as having taken in 1999, after the appointment at St Barts, and she also claims ot have undertaken a four year rather than a three year course, despite this being inconsistent with the article that appeared in the Evening Mail in 2002.

As for the appointment itself:

At the appointment I saw the same consultant. He did a few tests and said that I had made a “remarkable recovery”. He offered me a scan but I did not want one. I knew what it felt like to have a tumor and I did not want to put myself through all the tests again. I told him about my homeopathic treatment and that I attributed the recovery to that. He walked across the room as if gathering his thoughts, then gave his opinion. He said my recovery was probably due to a delayed reaction to the chemotherapy.

It’s not entirely clear what tests the consultant carried out but, on the face of it, its seem unlikely that he was able to do anything more than assess Hoefken’s general state of health, which was much improved by this point, rather than the extent to which the cancer may or may not have regressed.

Both accounts are consistent on one point, that Hoefkens declined a brain scan and unless she’s subsequently undergone a scan there is no way of being sure whether she has, indeed, been cured.

There are almost 100 different types of brain tumour and the only thing we can say, from the evidence we have, is that the tumours that Hoefken’s had appear to have been malignant, although its also not unknown for benign tumours to be treated with radiotherapy and chemotherapy if they are found to be causing a problem for the patient.

In short, Hoefkens may very well still have brain cancer – we don’t know and neither, it appears, does she, not unless she’s had a scan, that she hasn’t mentioned, and been given the all clear.

She could be entirely free of cancer, as she claims, or the cancer may still be present having regressed but not disappeared entirely. It could even still be progressing, albeit at a much slower rate than it did at the time before and during the period she was treated by a real doctor rather than a quack.

Given time, Hoefkens may even end as yet another name on the growing list of quack who’ve claimed to have been cured of their serious illness, right up to the point at which they succumbed to that same condition.

What we can say here is that there appear to be too many inconsistencies and embellishments in the various accounts that Hoefkens has given over the last 10-12 years to place any real store in her claim to have been cured of cancer by homeopathy, especially as a close and careful reading of those accounts throws up a far more plausible explanation for her cancer going – seemingly – into remission than any amount of anecdotes about the healing power of magic water and sugar pills.

The first time I was threatened with a libel action over a blog post, the threat came from a guy who was hawking a ‘zero emissions’ power generation system around the internet, looking for investors.

The scam was easy enough the spot. The guy was claiming that you could electricity out his machine without putting any fuel in. Just your average perpetual motion scam and one easily dispelled with the magic words, ‘Second Law of Thermodynamics’.

What got me the personal nastygram, rather than any of the other bloggers who’d called this as a scam, was a throwaway comment in which I accidentally hit the nail on the head by pointing out that this looked a lot like a classic flywheel scam.

For anyone not au fait with power generation quackery, flywheels are large metal disks/cylinders that store mechanical energy when they’re spun; energy that can then be used to drive a turbine and create electricity. Two of the biggest in the world are actually to be found in the UK at the JET nuclear fusion research centre in Oxfordshire, where they’re used to store energy so that the centre doesn’t blow out the National Grid every time they run a fusion experiment.

The flywheel scam works by suggesting to the mark that it’s possible to tap off just a little bit of the electricity that generated when you hook the flywheel up to a turbine and use it to keep the flywheel spinning.

It isn’t. The Second Law tells us that you can’t get more energy out of a flywheel than you originally put in, but to a layman who doesn’t understand physics it can sound plausible enough keep them interested for long enough to perform a quick walletectomy.

Blinding the public with science has long been a favoured tactic amongst quacks, charlatan, snake-oil peddlers, con men and outright frauds going right back to the days when medieval alchemists used an assortment of chemical trickery and sleight of hand to con wealthy patrons into believing that they could really turn lead into gold.

It was the discovery of electricity, and then electromagnetism, during the late 18^th and early 19^th century that initiated the age of technological quackery. These new, poorly understood but, crucially, unseen forces readily struck a chord with the public through its widespread belief in vitalism and the quacks rapidly moved in to peddle their patent remedies creating what is, today, commonly referred to as ‘energy medicine’.

This is branch of quackery to which homeopathy belongs, one that divides neatly into two distinct strands.

Putative energy therapies, which include homeopathy, acupuncture, qi gong, reiki and theraputic touch/distance healing purportedly work by acting directly on ill-defined bodily ‘energies’ for which there is no scientific evidence whatsoever but which tend to be referred to using either as ‘spiritual energies’ or by their Chinese (Qi or Chi) or Indian (Prana) names.

You might just as well refer to them as ‘The Force’ for all that they actually exist, not that that stops anyone peddling remedies and therapies based on them.

Veritable energy remedies, on the other hand, make use of well known scientific ‘forces’; most often light, magnetism or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Perhaps the most outrageous claim ever made in relation to this branch of quackery was made by an American devotee of electric medicine, Frederick Augustus Baker, who suggested that giant electromagnets would, if properly placed, eliminate the ‘malicious energies’ at the centre of the earth and eradicate the cause of all human sin.

If that all sounds a bit Jules Verne/Doug McClure then rest assured that electric medicine remains very much alive and well and its out there bilking the gullible.

At the cheaper end of the market you find it in everything from the absurd copper bracelets (as sold by Boots) that are supposed to bring relief to arthritis sufferers to the dime-a-dozen energy pendants that allegedly either channel healing energies or stop the wearer’s brain from being fried by the wrong kind of electromagnetic radiation, i.e. the sort that comes from mobile phones and wireless networking kit.

At the serious end of market, in terms of both cash and consequences, there are the peddlers of so-called electromagnetic therapies who claim to be able to reduce cholesterol, get rid of parasites, treat allergies and, worst of all, cure cancer and HIV/AIDs.

In 2007, The Seattle Times ran an exposé of these so-called ‘miracle machines’ and uncovered a number of genuinely horrifying cases of people who were persuaded not to seek help from mainstream medicine, including:

-          A woman suffering from unexplained joint pain who was persuaded to rely on one of these devices rather than see a doctor. Seven months later, she died in hospital from undiagnosed leukaemia.

-          A mother who withdrew her five month old child from chemotherapy for cancer and took him, instead, to an energy medicine clinic – no prizes for guessing how that one turned out.

The early 20^th century gave quacks a new scientific ‘toy’ to play with – radioactivity.

Radium was discovered in 1898 by Marie Skłodowska-Curie and her husband, Pierre. Within five years, quacks like George Eaton were happily promoting the curative properties of ‘Radium Water’ and before long radioactive material found its way into bread, face cream, toothpaste and even suppositories – there’s a nice collection of radioactive quack cures here, including some which continue to be sold even today.

Needless to say that one didn’t end well either, although it wasn’t until the late 1920s and the case of the Radium Girls – watch dial painters working for the US Radium Corporation, a major supplier of radioluminescent watches  to the US military – that people got the message that radioactivity was not something to be trifled with, let alone ingested.

Today, at the beginning of the second decade of the 21^st Century, the age-old quack practice of blinding people with science has taken on a new form and a new breed of self-styled ‘scientific’ homeopaths has emerged to peddle the idea that homeopathy isn’t just plain old water, its quantum mechanical water.

Different century, same old shit. Just take whatever it is that currently passes for ‘big science’ – whether its electricity, radioactivity or quantum mechanics – load up on the jargon and then pretend that that’s how your quack remedy works. It’s all bullshit, of course – although it has spawned one beautifully constructed spoof that’s well worth reading – but as usual it’s plausible sounding bullshit if you’re a layman and that’s what really matters if you’re going to make a fast buck.

And a fast buck is precisely what being made here.

Across Europe, Homeopathy is a £1.5billion euro a year industry, for all that it likes to play David to Big Pharma’s Goliath, albeit one that differs from the far less reputable practice of selling snake oil in only one significant respect.

Snake oil – as it was sold in San Francisco in the late 19^th century – actually had a bit of snake in it.

To most people Fiona Phillips is just a former GMTV presenter who, on Strictly Come Dancing, demonstrated to the world that she has two left feet.

On the evidence of her latest column in the Mirror, she’s also a raging crank who makes piss poor excuses for quackery…

MMR doc’s just guilty of caring

Surprise, surprise, the doctor who highlighted a possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism has been found guilty of a series of misconduct charges.

Well, Dr Andrew Wakefield didn’t stand a chance, did he? Not up against the might of the medical profession.

Okay, here we go. It’s time for the inevitable Martyrdom of St Andy that the anti-vaccine whack-jobs and woo peddlars have been building towards since it was first announced that the General Medical Council would be investigating his conduct.

He has been branded dishonest, irresponsible and that he showed a “callous disregard” for the suffering of children.

Odd, then, that he now continues to work in the field of autism in Texas, where he set up Thoughtful House, a non-profit autism centre.

Let’s get the ’still working in the field of autism’ crap out of the way first. shall we?

Thoughtful House is a vanity project set up by Wakefield and liberally funded by anti-vaccine cranks, one in which ‘not for profit’ is a relative term; Wakefield is pulling down a reported £145,ooo a year as the centre’s Executive Director.

As for being branded dishonest and irresponsible, the GMC’s meticulously drawn up findings use those exact terms to describe Wakefield in this passage of their report:

In reaching its decision, the Panel notes that the project reported in the Lancet paper was established with the purpose to investigate a postulated new syndrome and yet the Lancet paper did not describe this fact at all. Because you drafted and wrote the final version of the paper, and omitted correct information about the purpose of the study or the patient population, the Panel is satisfied that your conduct was irresponsible and dishonest.

Wakefield lied to the Lancet about the underlying purpose of his research when he submitted the now infamous paper that kicked off this whole farrago.

He also, as the GMC’s findings set out in detail:

- Accepted almost £440,000 in fees from lawyers seeking evidence to support litigation that parents of children with autism intended to bring against pharmaceutical companies on the basis of a claimed, and wholly unproven, causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

- Set up a company with one of the parents of the children included in his study with the intention that this would develop and promote an alternative MMR vaccine, going so far as file a patent for the product he intended to put up in competition against the existing MMR vaccine .

Wakefield failed to declare either of these clear pecuniary interests.

His financial misdemeanours, however, pale into insignificance when set against his conduct towards the children he used in his research.

As the GMC’s findings disclose, Wakefield was not, in the position he held at the Royal Free Hospital, authorised to take the case management of cases involving children nor did he seek approval from the hospital’s ethics committee for his work.

Acting in complete disregard of any established protocols or ethical standards, Wakefield subjected the children included in his study to a series of invasive medical procedures, including colonoscopies and lumbar punctures, for which there were no clinical indications.

He even went so far as pay £5 to children who attended his son’s birthday in return for blood samples for use in his ‘research’, an act that he went on to make jokes about during a presentation to the Mind Institute in 1999.

Wakefield cares so much about children that he uses them as lab rats and then makes jokes about it afterwards.

His passion for the subject, and refusal to abandon children with autism to a life of respite care and pity, earns him plaudits from parents grateful for his work.

His aim, he says, is still “to provide the best possible treatment for these children and to conduct research in order to ensure continuing improvements in the quality of treatment available”.

Of all the dishonest arguments deployed in Wakefield’s defence, easily the most disreputable has to be the suggestion that we should disregard his unethical behaviour because he has the support of the parents of these children.

Can you think of any more perverse argument than the suggestion that we should trust the judgement of people who willingly put up their children for use as guinea pigs in medical experiments conduct by a man who’s now clearly been shown to have been a total quack?

Perhaps the most bizarre vignette in the evidence against Wakefield is the evidence that one of the children included in the study – child 10 – was subjected to a ‘medical experiment’ in which they were administered with the ‘transfer factor’ that Wakefield patented as his alternative MMR ‘vaccine’. It was the father of this child that Wakefield put forward as the putative CEO of the company he set up to market this new ‘vaccine’.

For the uninitiated, Transfer Factors are a largely discredited fringe conjecture in immunology based on an unproven theory that special substances can be harvested from white blood cells. Wakefield’s ‘recipe’ for the experimental treatment given to child 10 entailed infecting mice with the measles virus and extracting and processing their white blood cells. This ’serum’ was then injected into a pregnant goats, which were then milked after giving birth. This goats milk was then used to create the experimental ‘drug’ given to the child.

Wakefield’s collaborator and ‘co-inventor’ on this patent is Herman Hugh Fudenburg, an American doctor who, in 1995, was banned indefinitely from prescribing after he was found to have unlawfully obtained controlled drugs, including benzodiazpines (sleeping pills) and diuretics for both his own use and for a member of his office staff. Despite being effectively struck off in his home state, in 2004 Fudenburg claimed, in an interview with Brian Deer, that he’s continued to treat children with autism from his own home, allegedly ‘curing’ them using his own bone marrow.

Should we not be asking, instead, whether these people are even fit to bring up a child, given that they cling to their ridiculous faith in Wakefield in the face of overwhelming evidence of his general incompetence and utter disregard for basic ethical standards?

The General Medical Council (GMC) verdict, which ruled that Wakefield and two eminent colleagues, Professors John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch, had acted unethically, did not investigate whether Dr Wakefield’s findings regarding a possible link between MMR and autism were right or wrong.

It focused on the methods of research used, some of which were undoubtedly questionable, but which were performed in the name of finding solace for desperate parents convinced their children had changed for ever following their one-size-fits-all MMR injection.

Undoubtedly questionable?

That’s surely got to be an early contender for the understatement of the year, not to mention a pretty spectacular display of moral relativism on Phillip’s part.

The fact of the matter is that study after study, conducted in the wake of the MMR scare initiated by Wakefield and heavily promoted by the press, has shown no causal link between autism and the MMR vaccine and no reputable researcher has ever succeeded in replicating Wakefield’s original findings.

This is, to say the least, hardly surprising when one considers that the laboratory to which Wakefield sent his samples for DNA analysis was found to have been contaminated with plasmid that contained the measles virus.

Dr Wakefield has said the findings were “unfounded and unjust” – and he was backed by parents who, rather than thinking him to be dishonest and irresponsible, actually consider him to be a hero who might eventually guide them out of a long, dark tunnel of despair and disbelief.

In court after the verdicts were read, one woman shouted: “These doctors have not failed our children.

You are outrageous!” And outside another said: “They were just trying to protect our children.”

Protect these children from what, exactly?

Sadly, not from their own parents’ stupid and irresponsible beliefs, nor indeed from the anti-vaccine movement which has become increasingly vicious in its efforts to browbeat its critics.

I wonder if, in her next puff piece, Fiona would care to reflect on the treatment meted out to some of her fellow journalists who’ve dared to lift the lid on the anti-vaccine movement.

Amy Wallace wrote an article for Wired that covered a lot of bases, including the degree of abuse levelled at Paul Offit, the developer of a rotavirus vaccine that could save thousands of lives every year – rotavirus is a leading cause of severe diarrhea in infants and young children.

By way of responses to her article, Wallace received messages via twitter in which she was called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute and a “fking lib.”.

You might think that this is just the usual crap you get from internet fucknuts but by far the most reprehensible response Wallace received was an ‘essay’ by JB Handley, the founder of the ‘Generation Rescue’ anti-vaccine organisation (which is heavily promoted by Jenny McCarthy) entitled “Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine.”. The first version of this essay, which Wallace was sent but which Handley did not publish on the Generation Rescue website, implied that Wallace had been date-raped by Offit, although this was altered to the clichéd ‘drinking the kool aid’ metaphor in the version that Handley did post online.

Chicago Tribune journalist, Trini Tsouderas, was extensively smeared after the Tribune published a series of exposés of anti-vaccine canard and our own Brian Deer, who’s done more to investigate and document Wakefield’s scandalous misconduct than just about anyone else, found himself on the receiving end of a homophobic attack by the UK-based anti-vaccine fucknut website, One Click Group:

By all accounts a gay man and therefore unlikely ever to have to face the multiple vaccine risk agonised over by parents from around the world in relation to their children, Brian Deer has made it his business to portray the parents of these autistic vaccine damaged children as deluded mendacious chancers.

Deluded?

Yes, although most would be better cast as the victims of mendacious chancers like Wakefield than as chancers themselves.

For hundreds of parents like these, the thought that the GMC may now strike Dr Wakefield and his colleagues off the medical register will amount to a light being switched off in what is, for them, an already bleak world.

I’m not entirely sure that there’s any ‘may’ about the next stage in the proceedings – given the severity of the charges that will stem from these findings, Wakefield is a goner as far as the UK is concerned, and not before time.

If Phillips want to sympathise with parents who’ve been royally led up the garden path by Wakefield’s unethical actions then that’s fine, but let’s not make out that he’s anything other than a unscrupulous bastard who rooked some of these parents in allowing their children to be treated as if they were laboratory animals to be prodded, poked, and subjected to a raft of unnecessary medical procedures in pursuit of a false hope.

If the furore surrounding the hacking of a webmail server at UEA’s Climate Research Unit has achieved anything at all it’s been to push the issue of scientific probity and integrity firmly into the spotlight. By far the most damning, but still unproven, allegation levelled at the CRU’s scientists is that they deliberated distorted and manipulated the evidence to shore up AGW theory and, on the basis that I’m entirely in agreement with the proposition that distortion and manipulation of evidence is a bad thing I think it only fair that we apply that same standard to some of the arguments put forward by some self-styled AGW ‘sceptics’.

Oh, screw it – we’re not talking about genuine sceptics here, we talking about Mad Mel, who’s used her blog at the Spectator to direct yet another signature rant at the BBC (as recommended by Iain Dale) because it neglected to put up a complete fruit-loop against Ed Miliband on the Today programme:

There was no informed scientist in this interview to put the zealot Miliband on the spot and expose his ignorant absurdity. At least though Today’s presenter John Humphrys did his best in trying to challenge him. But no balance at all was forthcoming in the subsequent item –billed as the first of three in-depth reports on the state of the scientific evidence of global warming – by Tom Fielden. This told us that global warming started with the industrial revolution, that it was proved that global warming was happening and humans were responsible and that the scientific debate was effectively settled.

Yeah, sure we’re picking on Mad Mel yet again, even though its common knowledge that she exhibits perhaps the worst case of the Dunning-Kruger effect to be found anywhere in British journalism, but on this occasion the reason for picking on her is both instructive and entirely relevant to the matter at hand because she goes on to state that:

This was just yet more anti-scientific ignorance and ideological propaganda. There is no such ‘overwhelming consensus’ of scientists; more than 700 of the most distinguished climate-related scientists are on record expressing deep scepticism of AGW. Is Miliband saying therefore that these eminent scientists are themselves ‘profoundly irresponsible’? Does Miliband even know they exist?

She’s referring here to a list of allegedly sceptical scientists compiled by Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma/Exxon-Mobil) who, just from his biography on Wikipedia, looks to be a bigoted wackaloon after Mad Mel’s own heart. He loves God, Israel, torturing Iraqi prisoners and his campaign contributions from the oil, gas and energy industries – in 2002 he received more oil and gas contributions than anyone other than Texas senator John Cornyn –and he hates immigrants, gays and genuine climate scientists.

Inhofe was, until the Democrats took control of Congress, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and he remains the ranking minority member on that committee. Its from that position that he published an initial list of 400 scientists that he identified as AGW ‘sceptics’, a list that since expanded on twice, raising the number of alleged sceptics to, first, 650 and more recently to around 700.

It’s this list that Mad Mel is referring to as containing ‘more than 700 of the most distinguished climate-related scientists’ and, as you might well imagine, it’s mostly a complete crock of shit.

In July, this year, the Center for Inquiry, an independent US-based organisation that is committed to defending scientific integrity published a first-order analysis of the 687 people listed in the ‘Inhofe list’ as of January 2009. It found that:

-          Slightly under 10% of the individuals on the list could actually be identified as climate scientists.

-          Around 15% of those listed had actually published in the recognisable refereed [peer reviewed] literature on subjects related to climate science

-          Around 80% had no refereed publication record on climate science whatsoever – and

-          Around 4% were on record as favouring the current IPCC-2007 consensus and should not, therefore, have been included on the list.

It appears that the main method used by Inhofe to compile his list has been that of quote-mining articles from newspapers and blogs for anything that sounds vague sceptical so, as you might well imagine, there are several documented cases of bona fide climate scientists who’ve found themselves added to list on the strength of comments taken entire of context or because of published misrepresentations of the work, views and opinions. Only three of the individuals on the Inhofe list are among the 618 listed authors of the IPCC Working Group 1 report for AR4 (2007). Of these only one, John Christy, is actually a sceptic. The other two, Erich Roeckner and Oliver Fraunfeld make the list due to the quote-mining methods used in its creation.

Perhaps the prime example of deliberately misleading quote-mining on the list relates to Dr Joanne Simpson, a former NASA atmospheric scientist who is quoted by Inhofe as having said:

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organisation nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly … As a scientist I remain sceptical.”

Ellipsis alert! There’s something missing from that quotation, and that something turns out to be this:

What should we as a nation do? Decisions have to be made on incomplete information. In this case, we must act on the recommendations of Gore and the IPCC because if we do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate models are right, the planet as we know it will in this century become unsustainable. But as a scientist I remain skeptical.

Remember, manipulating the evidence is a bad thing.

The list also contains some fine examples of resume inflation and it fair share of creationists, including Chris Allen, a TV weatherman at a Fox affiliate in Kentucky who has no college-level qualifications and Prof, Edward Blick of the University of Oklahoma whose main argument against AGW appears to be this:

For thousands of years our earth has undergone cooling and warming under the control of God. Man cannot control the weather, but he can kill millions of people in his vain attempt to control it, by limiting or eliminating the fuel that we use. How does God control our warming and cooling? Scientists have discovered it is the Sun! Amazing, even grade school children know this. The Sun’s warming or cooling the earth varies with sunspot and Solar flairs[sic].

Well, there’s no need to worry then because god will fix things for us.

For more background information on the Inhofer list, there’s a good selection of links provided by Greenfyre, including a list of sceptical economists, many of whom appear to share Inhofe’s taste for petrodollars.

I have, however, saved the best until last.

While I was looking through the full list I came across a name that would mean little or nothing to the mostly American bloggers who’ve been investigating the Inhofe list but which will be so much more familiar to the Ministry’s largely British audience…

…because there, on Mad Mel’s list of ‘more than 700 of the most distinguished climate-related scientists are on record expressing deep scepticism of AGW’ I found the very well known horticulturalist, BBC TV gardener and occasional chat show host ALAN TITCHMARSH.

Seriously, I am not joking here… Alan Titchmarsh is genuinely on the Inhofe list of ‘scientists’ who are also, allegedly, AGW sceptics, the one that Mad Mel claims is made up of ‘distinguished climate-related scientists’.

You couldn’t make it up, and I’m not.

Much has already been written on the subject of the first two oral evidence sessions in Science and Technology Committee’s investigation of  homeopathy, more than enough, in fact, to allow me to point you in the direction of a couple of articles by Ben Goldacre and Skepticat’s excellent commentary and let you take it from there.

What’s just as interesting, and in parts rather worrying, in the transcript of the final oral session in which Mike O’Brien, the Minister for Health Services, Professor Kent Woods, of the MHRA, and David Harper, the Chief Scientist at the Department of Health, found themselves under the spotlight and, in O’Brien’s case, responding to the committee’s delightfully probing questions with complete and utter gibber.

Looking, first, at the evidence given by both Woods and Harper, the impression that I certainly get is one which stands as a sad and desperate indictment of the corrupting influence of politics on science and scientific inquiry. It’s perfectly obvious that both are fully aware of the fact that there is absolutely no credible scientific evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy beyond the placebo effect and no scientific basis for any of the theoretical claims made for how homeopathy allegedly ‘works’.

Homeopathy amounts to nothing more or less than giving people water and/or sugar pills in the utterly misconceived and superstitious belief that symptoms can be relieved and illnesses cured using sympathetic magic. The ‘principles’ on which homeopathy is ‘based’ are derived directly from medieval alchemy, and particular from the doctrine of signatures.

Despite this, both Woods and Harper were forced to dissemble in order to defend the current public public policy, under which sizeable sums of taxpayers’ money are being frittered away on providing ineffectual palliatives to people with utterly idiotic beliefs.

This is Woods’ response to a direct question about whether there is any evidence to show that homeopathy works beyond the placebo effect:

One has to look at the totality of the evidence and in my view there is no single piece of evidence that gives that reassurance. It is difficult from the point of view of research in that the underlying theory does not really give rise to many testable hypotheses and therefore I think the research effort has been bedevilled by that. One could then ask what about the empirical evidence that homeopathy has a beneficial effect and, as you have heard, the studies are ambiguous; they present a variety of results.

So, the short answer is ‘no’, but Woods then goes on to add:

From the point of view of evidence, certainly from a regulatory perspective, it is very important evidence that something like ten per cent of the population have used a homeopathic remedy or have gone to a homeopath in the previous 12 months, and that I think is a starting point for deciding what is the public health significance of this phenomenon.

Well it does take us some way toward a usable measure of the prevalence of gullibility in the general population, so I suppose there may be some public health significance in that, but don’t think for a minute that Woods is either finished or that that’s the conclusion he’s building up to:

It is the way in which they are used rather than, as you said in your very first words, the argument about whether homeopathy works or not. I think in terms of developing evidence we have to acknowledge that there are some people who firmly believe that homeopathy works. There is a degree of use which suggests we might have to consider the public health implications of a significant group of people using homeopathic remedies and if there are potential public health implications, how should we regulate it,

Or we could invest in a public health campaign which tells people the truth about homeopathy; that it has absolutely no medicinal value beyond the placebo effect and that they, and the NHS, are pissing money down the drain on cake decorations coated with distilled water. Much of the work that public health departments carry out under the broad heading of ‘preventative medicine’ consists of providing the public with accurate information in the interests of trying to help them protect themselves from their own stupidity and there’s absolutely no valid reason why that tried and tested approach cannot be used with homeopathy. Yes, homeopathy is a £1.5 billion a year industry across Europe but that’s still peanuts compared to size of the global tobacco industry and that didn’t prevent public health professionals from publicising the link between smoking and cancer.

The only significant regulatory issue we need to be concerned with here is that of just how big the words ‘WARNING: There is absolutely no credible scientific evidence that homeopathy works’ needs to be on the packaging and any accompanying leaflets or other literature and that’s one that I can happily sort out – just make it double the point size of the title font, bold, bright red and put it right at the front/top where it can’t be missed. Sadly, that response seems to firmly off the agenda:

Q235 Dr Harris: But for them to be protected from being led to believe that it works when there is no evidence that it works is a valuable public health message to get across, all other things being equal. Would that be good?

Professor Woods: It is certainly not our intention to do that.

Remember, Woods knows perfectly well that homeopathic ‘remedies’ are a crock of shit but he, and the MHRA, has absolutely no intention of informing the general public of that fact. At best that seems entirely unethical. At worst its the active facilitation of the sale, for profit, of worthless ‘remedies’ in the full knowledge that these preparations have no medicinal value beyond placebo and that would seem to be open collusion in a public fraud.

As regards Professor Harper’s contribution, I actually feel rather sorry for him as he was clearly put in the desperately unfortunate position of trying to defend a Minister, O’Brien, who was simply gibbering away nonsensically for almost the entire session.

As a result, Harper got drawn into playing the old ‘mixed opinions’ canard:

Professor Harper: This is clearly a very challenging area. There are mixed views from the scientific community, as you are well aware from the evidence that already has been given, but I think it is undoubtedly the case that the majority of independent scientists feel that the evidence is weak or absent.

Q177 Chairman: Can you point us to any specific piece of scientific evidence which would stand up to normal scientific scrutiny that the Department has used to support the Government’s policy on homeopathy?

Professor Harper: There are a number of meta-analyses and randomised clinical trials and I think you have heard and seen from previous evidence that it is possible to be quite selective about how that information is used. One of the real difficulties that we face is that it is not so much a lack of research or a lack of randomised clinical trials; it is a lack of agreement between experts working in this field.

If you’ve ever taken the time to look at the quality and construction of the kind of homeopathic trials that do appear to produce positive (i.e. better than placebo) results or read of the systematic reviews of the evidence you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that the word ‘expert’ is all-too often (and inappropriately) over-used, often in circumstance in which ‘quack’ would be by far the more accurate term, a point to which Harper finally alludes right at the end of the session:

Q255 Dr Harris: Professor Harper, you said earlier that you thought there was an evidence base on RCTs, meta-analyses and systematic reviews to underpin a decision about whether NICE is efficacious, therefore effective beyond placebo, and therefore cost effective because you can cost it. How, therefore, do you respond to the assertion that there is not a testable evidence base, which is what the Minister said just now or before, to judge whether the spending of this money, in itself, on the basis of effectiveness and cost effectiveness, is a valid question to test, because that would suggest we need more research of the RCT type, which you thought we did not earlier?

Professor Harper: What I tried to flag up earlier is that there is an evidence base but it is subject to different interpretation, and that is at the crux of the challenge we face on this. It is a very difficult evidence base to test, so there have been quite a number of randomised clinical trials. Whilst I am not a homeopathic practitioner, homeopathic practitioners would argue that the way randomised clinical trials are set up they do not lend themselves necessarily to the evaluation and demonstration of efficacy of homeopathic remedies, so to go down the track of having more randomised clinical trials, for the time being at least, does not seem to be a sensible way forward.

In reality, RCTs are ideally suited to assessing the efficacy of homeopathic ‘remedies’. The delivery mechanism used in homeopathy, ingestion of a pill or liquid, is identical to that used in trials of the vast majority of pharmaceutical drugs, all of which are readily controlled by either placebo or by reference to an existing treatment, one that is typically the best that’s currently available.

I’ve left O’Brien to last because he genuinely did spend the entire session talking complete bollocks. so much so that its actually difficult to pick out the lowlights of his performance without fisking the entire transcript.

Nevertheless, he did manage to throw in this staggering response to a line of questioning that about the funding of homeopathic  research and, tangentially at least, about the £910,000 that the NHS has given to OfQuack:

Mr O’Brien: Of course, we have spent some money, in fact £910,000 over three years, in trying to get some regulation set up in this area. We also took the view at the start of this year that it would be useful to undertake some testing of some of the homeopathic “medicines”. At this point we have not started such a study. We were looking to see the outcome of the Northern Ireland study which did not deal with homeopathic medicine but did deal with complementary and alternative medicines of different kinds. We took the view that we would wait a while to look at the overall budgetary situation before deciding whether to proceed with this.

Q186 Chairman: In terms of Government policy in terms of homeopathy you are not really saying that it is evidence-based other than that there is a community who believe that they work?

Mr O’Brien: Yes.

Q187 Chairman: And you feel that that is acceptable?

Mr O’Brien: And also that there is a placebo effect, so there are the two arguments there. Certainly in terms of the placebo effect there is a view that that makes a significant number of people better, if indeed it be a placebo, and there is also a community of GPs and others who take the view that this is an area which does work, and therefore we take the view as ministers that it is not our job in relation to this, which is a somewhat controversial area – again I say in inverted commas – of “medicine”, to stop clinicians who take the view they want to prescribe it from doing so.

Q188 Dr Harris: Could I just pursue that because I understand where you are coming from and I empathise with your position. I do not think it is controversial in any of the evidence we have had that there is a placebo effect and that might well be powerful enough to justify a number of policies based on it, as Professor Woods said.

Mr O’Brien: Can I just pause you there. We do not need to justify it. What we need to do is the opposite. We would need to justify stopping the funding now. It is a subtle but possibly important difference.

From experience, I suspect that the Public Accounts Committee might well take a different view on the question of exactly what O’Brien does and doesn’t need to justify when it comes to spending taxpayers’ money on homeopathic research, particularly in view of Professor Harper’s evidence which indicates that there is no real shortage of research, itself, just a very marked and glaringly obvious shortage of research that provides homeopaths with the evidence they wish existed.

As such, the correct response here is not throw even more good money after bad but to ask homeopaths “which part of ‘it’s fucking water’ do you not understand?”.

This is after O’Brien has admitted, on the record, that there is no credible scientific evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy, BTW:

Q174. …Does the Government have any credible evidence that homeopathy works beyond the placebo effect?

Mr O’Brien: Certainly there is the placebo effect. There was also some research done in Northern Ireland in an examination of the effect of a number of complementary and alternative medicines not including homeopathy.

Q175 Chairman: Keep with homeopathy.

Mr O’Brien: In that case the straight answer is no.

Still, if you think that O’Brien was plumbing the depths of absurdity with his response to the questions about funding homeopathic research, wait until to see what he had to say when pressed on the question of the NHS providing homeopathic ‘treatments’ at the taxpayers’ expense:

Q245 Graham Stringer: Should NHS spending not be dependent on proved effectiveness or efficacy, whether it is £10,000 or £12 million?

Mr O’Brien: You are asking two slightly different questions: one concerns effectiveness and the other efficacy. It is arguable that if two people, ie the clinician and the patient, genuinely believe that homeopathy works, and it happens to but maybe not in the efficacious way they believe, then is that something that the NHS should stop spending money on? That is essentially your question. My answer is that at this point I have not got the evidence to do that, and I would not seek to do that.

So, what he’s saying is that doctors are entitled to prescribe anything they like, even a course of Ju-Ju, as long as they and the patient are gullible enough to believe that it works unless there is absolute proof that it doesn’t work.

If doctor and patient are both idiots then you have to try and prove a negative before O’Brien will step in to point out that sacrificing a goat and consulting an astrological chart drawn up its congealing blood is not a valid diagnostic practice within the NHS.

You can just tell, even without looking it up, that O’Brien is a fucking lawyer, can’t you!

That said, perhaps the single most staggering exchange in the whole session occurred when O’Brien was pressed on the decision taken by West Kent PCT to discontinue funding for homeopathy after its own study of the effectiveness and efficacy of a homeopathic hospital led them to conclude that it was ‘a waste of public money’. I have edited the transcript for brevity, but you can read it in full by following the link I posted earlier:

Q249 Graham Stringer: …The real point is that you do have more evidence than you are owning up to at the moment, because West Kent PCT looked thoroughly at the effectiveness and efficacy of the homeopathic hospital in West Kent and we had the person here who carried out that survey who said, in words of one syllable: “This is a waste of public money”. So if West Kent believes that spending that money is a waste of public money, why is it different in Liverpool or Gloucester or wherever else these hospitals are?

Mr O’Brien: As far as that study is concerned that was an examination of a particular clinical experience and the person who did it was entitled to reach the conclusion they did. There are others who take a different view. They may not have done any substantial empirical peer reference study that will enable us to say: “This works”, but the question for me as a Minister is not so much the one you are putting to me, in a sense, which is fairly reasonable, but is there a justification for stopping spending in relation to homeopathy now, and my judgment is there is not that amount of evidence to justify me stopping spending on homeopathy.

As you can see, O’Brien is still demanding proof of a negative, even in the face of an empirical study which demonstrated that the NHS in West Kent was pissing money down the drain by funding a homeopathic hospital.

Believe it or not, we’re actually beyond the usual realms of policy-based evidence-making here as what O’Brien is advocating is actually policy-based evidence-avoidance. If the government plan to continue to fund homeopathy because of a lack of case-by-case empirical evidence to show that its a waste of time and money then its creates a clear incentive for homeopaths to avoid doing any actual research, like the plague, on the basis that uncertainty is their best and only guarantee of staying on the gravy train.

To be honest, If I was a shareholder in a pharmaceutical company I’d be getting seriously pissed off by now, because any return on my investment comes only after the company has spent several years and millions of pounds on tests to prove the effectiveness and efficacy of its products just to get them onto the market and, particular, onto NICE’s list of approved and recommended treatment and yet these bastards are able say ‘but we believe it works’ and get their noses straight into the fucking trough.

And Mike isn’t finished yet…

If you are asking me a different question which is whether I can justify all the spending on homeopathy today the answer would probably be “No” too, but that spending is there and a significant group of people believe it works, and therefore my view is that it would be illiberal and a denial of personal choice, because there is a significant “scientific” community behind it who take a view that it should be allowed to continue.

‘Personal choice’ is an argument for not banning homeopathy outright, and no one, even its more ardent opponents is advocating that other than in regards to some of its most irresponsible and dangerous claims, i.e. homeopathic ‘treatments’ for HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, etc. these being instances in which Mill’s harm principle is clearly applicable.

It is not, however, an argument for spending taxpayers’ money on woo.

If people want to piss their money away on an idiotic belief in sympathetic magic then by all means let them do so – its the whole business of pissing taxpayers’ money down the drain that sceptics, like myself, find utterly objectionable and indefensible.

Q250 Graham Stringer: I will move on but I do find it an extraordinary liberal view that we have a study within the NHS which shows it is not effective –

Mr O’Brien: I think, with the greatest respect, Graham, that it is extraordinary indeed. I am expressing the liberal view and Evan Harris is expressing the illiberal view.

Dr Harris: Evan Harris is not expressing anything!

If Evan was expressing any view at all, its the rational view. O’Brien’s view is just gibber.

Q251 Graham Stringer: Do you think we could get out of this difficulty with different parts of the NHS spending public money on quite different criteria by getting homeopathic treatments evaluated by NICE?

Mr O’Brien: I have no objection to NICE evaluating this but they do have a couple of problems with it. Firstly, they have a large queue of drugs that they need to evaluate and there are greater priorities. Secondly, there is a somewhat limited evidential base and before evaluating things NICE want to see an evidential base, and for the reasons we have already discussed it simply is not there at the moment. They could decide to spend a lot of public money – probably with great objection from some people on this Committee – establishing that evidential base, but that is not a priority for them or us at the moment.

Hang on a second, Mike…

Professor Harper: There are a number of meta-analyses and randomised clinical trials and I think you have heard and seen from previous evidence that it is possible to be quite selective about how that information is used. One of the real difficulties that we face is that it is not so much a lack of research or a lack of randomised clinical trials; it is a lack of agreement between experts working in this field.

So your scientific advisor is actually saying that there is an evidence base that NICE could review, if only you had the balls to look past the fog of homeopathic bullshit that being put up around it by people with a clear vested interest in keeping their seats on the NHS gravy train.

As a final thought, I want to quickly go back to what quickly became the signature admission of this entire inquiry, that of Paul Bennett, the professional standards director and superintendent pharmacist of Boots:

Q3 Chairman: So you sell them? [homeopathic remedies]

Mr Bennett: We do indeed sell them and there is certainly a consumer demand for those products.

Q4 Chairman: I did not ask you that question. I said do they work beyond the placebo effect?

Mr Bennett: I have no evidence before me to suggest that they are efficacious, and we look very much for the evidence to support that, and so I am unable to give you a yes or no answer to that question.

As it happens, I found myself in a branch of Boots over the weekend, doing what most men do in their when dragged along into the shop by their partner, i.e. standing around and feigning interest in the contents of one of the shelves while waiting for teir better half to be served.

One of the more important parts of this particular ‘game’ is that of finding a bit of neutral ground to stand in, somewhere where you won’t look either noticeably out of place (e.g. the feminine hygiene products aisle) or as if you’re shopping for treatments for an embarrassing condition (the Anusol aisle is major no-no). On this particular occasion the nearest safe haven turned out to be an aisle which contained a rack of aromatherapy oils and an assortment of other woo and so, in order to maintain the necessary low profile, I picked up an item of the essential oils rack and started scanning the small print.

It turned out that what I’d picked up was a small bottle of tea tree oil, one that was being marketed as Boots own-brand ‘anti-septic oil‘.

Now there’s nothing wrong with that, per se, as tea tree oil does have measurable anti-septic, anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties when used in a high enough concentration (above 4%). What did catch my attention, however, was a warning in the small print on the packing, just under the bit about recommended uses:

Do not use if:

• You suffer from epilepsy
• You suffer from skin allergies
• You are pregnant or breastfeeding
• You are using homeopathic remedies.

Seek professional advice before using pure essential oils under these circumstances.

As far as I can tell, the warnings about using tea tree oil when pregnant, breastfeeding of if you have epilepsy look to be standard disclaimer warnings of the ‘we don’t know if it’ll cause a problem but would prefer not to blamed if shit happens’ variety. One thing all producers of medicinal products, even the ones based on woo, are cautious of is the always dangerous combination of the availability heuristic and the post hoc fallacy.

People have a known tendency to assume a causative link between unrelated events which occur in close proximity, even if those events are unrelated and their proximity no more than a coincidence. If someone is unfortunate enough to have an epileptic fit (especially if they’ve not had one for a while) or if they have a miscarriage or their baby falls ill then they have an innate tendency to look for the cause of the problem in events that may have taken place just prior to the incident in question, and particular in anything that stands out as being unusual, different or that amounts to a change in their normal routine. So, if someone uses tea tree oil for the first time and, a few hours later, they have a fit then there’s a very good chance that they’ll automatically assume that the two events are connected and that, therefore, using the oil is what caused them to have the fit.

So, even if there’s no evidence to show that a particular product causes an adverse reaction during pregnancy/breastfeading or serves as trigger for epilepsy, the manufacturers will still put a warning on the packaging as an arse-covering measure.

As far as I can see, there is no particular evidence that tea tree oil does cause problems for people with epilepsy, in fact I’ve run across forums and message boards where its being recommended by members for use to counter the side-effects of certain epilepsy drugs which are known to cause outbreaks of acne in some patients. As for pregnancy and breastfeeding, I could not evidence of adverse effects either, but that’s hardly surprising given the obvious problem of trying to carry out safety-trials on pregnant women.

But homeopathy?

As warnings go that one amounts to ‘not to be taken with water’, which is absurd, of course and having taken a quick look around I can find nothing whatsoever to suggest that homeopaths take the view that tea tree oil should not be used externally when using homeopathic remedies, which makes this a redundant warning, yes?

No, not really.

The warning does serve a purpose, not because it has value in itself but because it creates/reinforces the false impression that homeopathy does have an effect other than as a placebo. It exists solely to place homeopathy on the same footing as other genuine medicinal products which do, for genuine reasons, carry warnings about known, and problematic, interactions with other drugs and medicines.

The warning not to use tea tree oil if taking homeopathic remedies is just another facet of an elaborate fiction created by a £1.5 billion industry to suggest to consumers that homeopathy actually works, even though there is no credible supporting evidence for that or anything of the other claims made for homeopathy beyond the fact that makes a perfectly viable placebo…

…and its a fiction that Boots seem to content to participate in, given that the warning appears on one of their own, Boots-branded products.

There is only one thing I enjoy more than exposing junk-science scams and that exposing junk-science scams where the perpetrator is dumb enough to try it on.

This morning, three comments were posted on my recent exposé of the ‘dowsing for explosives’ scam in the space of 20 minutes, all purporting to be from satisfied users of the ADE651 dowsing rod.

‘Frank’ claims to be ‘head of security for a large organisation in France’ and to have provided, in his comment, ‘the other side of the argument’ in which he accuses skeptics, like myself and James Randi, of making childish and unfounded accusations about the ADE651 dowsing rod.

That comment was posted at 10:50 GMT.

At 10:58, ‘Dani’ pops up and claims to have found ‘tests’ on the internet which prove that the ADE651 dowsing rod ‘works fine’ – the ‘test’ turns out to be Frank’s comment, which Dani is trying to Googlejuice.

Finally, at 11:11, ‘M Yasin’ shows up and he’s a ‘using the ADE651 in a private organisation in Cairo Egypt’ and ‘cannot believe all the abuse this product is recieving from people who have never used the product and have never worked in security before’.

Needless to say, all three comments were posted from the same IP address – 79.173.199.150 – which is on a bog standard ADSL circuit owned by Orange’s Jordanian telecoms operation, providing a neat link back to the company that originally sold the device, Cumberland Industries, which had a shell company and mail-drop address in the UK (see Techowiz’s comment) but actually operated out of Jordan.

Now that last entry throws up a rather interesting name in connection with the Middle Eastern end of this fraud – Marwan Nasser – who, it seems, could quite easily be the same Marwan Nasser referenced in this Haaretz article as a ‘reputed organized crime boss’ and by Y-net news as having been sentenced to 15 years in prison for, amongst other things, racketeering and money laundering.

Yes, it could easily be a different Marwan Nasser, but the involvement of an organized crime ring in this scam would go a long way to explaining how and why a bunch of worthless, useless, dowsing rods have been sold to Iraq’s security forces at up to $60,000 a pop.

What is, however, entirely clear is that someone has tried it on here, and is trying to astroturf their way out of being exposed for the frauds that they are, all of which makes them a really dumb cunt for trying on with me.

So, remember, all three of the ‘pro-ADE651′ comments came from the same Jordanian IP address, which proves conclusively that fake testimonials are being used to pitch the product and this, in turn, neatly confirms that this is indeed a deliberate and carefully contrived fraud; one that someone in a position of authority should really be investigated, especially if the Marwan Nasser behind Cumberland Industries in the same one that was sentenced to 15 years in prison by an Israeli court.

I learned a new word this week – EmoTrance.

EmoTrance is the new name for bullshit.

In the last week, its received no less than two articles worth of coverage in The Times’ educational supplements; one, a vomit inducing piece of brainless advertorial by Adi Bloom, an arts correspondent with a taste for ‘kitsch’ – i.e. fucking gullible – the other a tidily reflective piece on the well-founded criticism of EmoTrance as a bunch of unscientific psychobabble on which Prof. David Colquhoun has been pulling overtime in comments.

What is EmoTrance?

Well, according to its creator ‘Dr.’ Silvia Hartmann, EmoTrance is ‘the newest energy modality in the world, created by REAL people for REAL people’ and ‘a practical system for energy healing and energy working was developed by a team led by women, and which did not exclude any human being, including women and children, in both theory as well as practice’.

I’m not ever going to bother debunking all that in detail.

What EmoTrance actually is, is just the usual new age grab bag of vitalism, bastardised Eastern mysticism and Western pseudoscientific psychobabble, none of which has any foundations in actual science, let alone any supporting evidence for any of the claims made for its efficacy or how it ‘works’.

It is a practical system for rooking the terminally gullible and relieving them of the burden of having far more money in their bank account than they have common sense, but what make this particular exercise in flogging snake oil all the more reprehensible is that its currently being targeted at schools using a sales pitch that relies on the wholesale pathologising of normal childhood development and preying on the anxieties of over-protective parents.

In a rational society we’d call it fraud but as we have a legal system in which being utterly fucking deluded is a viable defence we’ll have to settle for calling EmoTrance a steaming pile of bullshit that only complete fucking mouth-breathing moron would be gullible enough to buy into.

As for ‘Dr.’ Silvia Hartmann, she has a ‘PhD’ from the Universal Life Church, which she bought off the internet for $29.99 about which she has this to say…

For those who would argue that the PhD isn’t “real” or that I don’t deserve it because I didn’t attend a University, I can only shrug and say that as far as I am concerned, I’ve paid my dues with 15 years of full time research of theory and practice in applied animal behaviour, resulting in The Harmony Program as my thesis and innovation to the field; followed by 5 years of full time research into language, mind and metaphor which produced Project Sanctuary; and another 5 years worth of research, practice and publication in human emotion and the human energy system, which resulted in the three volumes on EmoTrance. I am personally satisfied that this is good enough on every level and I *love* my ULC PhD, which gave me the opportunity to look back on my work and contribution and acknowledge myself, to myself, and for no other purpose.

No, Silvia, you’re not a doctor. You have absolutely no legitimate claim to the title ‘Dr.’ or to use the letters ‘PhD’ after your name because you bought your degree off the internet for 20 fucking quid.

It’s a crock of shit, and to prove conclusively that its a crock of shit you can now all refer to me as the Reverend Unity because, in the last couple of minutes I’ve become a fully ordained Minister of the Universal Life Church, just like Silvia, and I have the certificate to prove it…

For the record, I have actually been ordained under my real name, which I’ve edited out the image above, so the whole thing is 100% kosher according to the rules of the Universal Life Church, all of which makes me eligible to become a Doctor of Divinity or Metaphysics for $29.99.

I could also become a Master of Wicca for the same price, while for a mere $11.99 I can take my pick of any of the following list of religious titles…

Abbe, Reverend of Rock ‘n Roll, Abbess, Abbot, Ananda, Angel, Apostle of Humility, Apostolic Scribe, Arch Deacon, Arch Priest, Archbishop, Arch cardinal, Ascetic Gnostic, Bible Historian, Bishop, Brahman, Brother, Canon, Cantor, Cardinal, Channel, Chaplain, Colonel, Cure, Deacon, Dervish, Directress, Disciple, Druid, Elder, Faith Healer, Evangelist, Emissary, Father, Field Missionary, Flying Missionary, Free Thinker, Friar, Goddess, Guru, Hadji, Healing Minister, High Priest, High Priestess, Imam, Lama, Lay Sister, Magus, Martyr, Messenger, Metropolitan, Minister of Music, Minister of Peace, Missionary, Missionary Doctor, Missionary Healer, Missionary of Music, Missionary Priest, Monk, Monsignor, Most Reverend, Mystical Philosopher, Orthodox Monk, Parochial Educator, Pastor General, Patriarch, Peace Counselor, Preacher, Preceptor, Priest, Priestess, Prophet, Rector, Rabbi, Religious Preacher, Revelator, Reverend, Reverend Father, Reverend Mother, Right Reverend, Saintly Healer, Scribe, Seer, Shaman, Soul Therapist, Sister, Spiritual Counselor, Spiritual Warrior, Starets, Swami, Teller, Thanatologist, The Very Esteemed, Universal Rabbi, Universal Religious Philosopher, Vicar, Universal Philosopher of Absolute Reality, Wizard, Gothi, Gythia, Psychic Healer, Minister of Rock ‘n Roll, Rock ‘n Roll Missionary, Rock Doctor (R.D), Rock ‘n Roll Minister, Child of the Universe, Prince, Spiritual Healer, Saint and Pope.

Decisions, decisions…

Having become an Ordained Minister I think its only fair to warn you that I will now be offended by everything and will sue everyone who disagrees with me for religious discrimination and shit.

Oh, and I will be setting up a paypal account for you all to send me 10% of your monthly income in return for my munificent blessings…

…now where do I sign up to open a school?

An adventure into drugs policy, risk and mortality statistics…