I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all.
I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn’t what I needed at all. In it award-winning film-maker Julian Hendy interviewed the families of some of the 100 innocents who are randomly murdered each year by psychopaths. Hendy’s dad was one of them. It was all so sensitively, movingly done, and the ‘Why us?’ testimonies of the bereaved parents, wives and children were so heartbreaking that it made you want to cry.
The villain of the piece was the psychiatric establishment. Throughout the 1980s, we learnt — perhaps it’s the case still — it was standard practice for trainee psychiatrists to be taught that there was no connection between violence and mental illness. This means that many of the consultants running our regional Mental Health Trusts are basing important decisions about public safety on a politically correct lie.
Last year there were over 38,000 physical assaults on staff ‘in mental-health and learning-disability settings’ — higher than in any other NHS sector — yet the R.D. Laing-influenced mental-health industry doesn’t want us to know, lest we conjure up unhelpful images of mad-axeman murderers lurking in every alley. The shrinks are much less worried that you or I might end up chopped to bits than they are that one of their precious charges might feel discriminated against. That’s why there are no ‘mentally ill’ any more, only ‘service users’. And if they kill someone it’s not a ‘death’ but ‘an adverse event’ or a ‘seriously untoward incident’.
When a pair of mental-health professionals were called on to defend themselves on Newsnight, one rather foolishly ventured that 100 deaths a year was not that many. Compared with, say, heart-attack or road-accident fatalities this is perfectly true. What makes it much harder to forgive that sanguine attitude, though, is when you look into the details and realise just how totally avoidable most of these deaths were.
Stephen Newton, the man who killed Hendy’s Dad, had a history of criminal behaviour and drug abuse, with 20 convictions for some 80 offences including five assaults and two convictions for possessing dangerous weapons. He’d been visiting his local mental-health services in Bristol since 1990. In 1998 he became paranoid and was put on anti-psychotic medication. He believed George W. Bush and the royal family were cloning his children for sexual purposes and believed his son had been given a sex change to make him look like Kylie Minogue. Four days before he committed the murder, his family rang the mental- health team asking for him to be sectioned. The assessment team — which didn’t have all the facts — decided to believe his lies over the testimony of his concerned family.
After Hendy’s Dad had been fatally stabbed outside the newsagent’s, Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership (AWP) wrote to the killer’s family to say how sorry they were — but not to the victim’s. Hendy discovered during the course of his research that AWP had recently spent £750,000 of public money on works of art in local mental-health services to ‘help create a healing environment’. Angry yet?
Equally infuriating were the revelations in Andrew Gilligan’s brave and thorough Dispatches (Channel 4, Monday) investigation into the activities of the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), an Islamist entryist organisation that has infiltrated local councils and the Labour party in much the same way Militant Tendency did in 1980s Liverpool. Noisome though Derek Hatton was, I don’t ever recall him trying to turn Britain into an Islamic state or receiving so much official encouragement. For our government to have paid the IFE £10 million of taxpayer’s money to combat ‘violent extremism’ is roughly akin to Churchill offering Herr Goering a squadron of Stukas so as to help alleviate the Blitz. And with everyone from Prince Charles to Boris Johnson offering their fulsome praise to the good work done by the IFE’s base — the East London Mosque — I don’t see much hope of this disaster being remedied any time soon.
What a piece of work is Eddie Izzard. At 47, overweight and unfit, he decides on a whim to run 43 marathons in 51 days for Sports Relief. The doctor at the British Olympic Medical Institute asks him, aghast, whether he has ever done any serious running. Izzard admits to having run for the bus, on occasion, and he isn’t joking. Off stage, it seems, Izzard is a grave, tortured and driven homme sérieux.
This, of course, explains why he achieves the impossible. Eddie Izzard: Marathon Man (BBC3, Thursday) is almost as gruelling to watch as it must have been for Izzard actually to achieve. We see multiple blisters being lanced and bandaged; we hear his groans of agony as his ravaged muscles are massaged back into life; we see him often very nearly losing the plot. It’s all a reaction to the death of his mum when he was just six — as indeed, he suggests, is his transvestism.
The transvestism I can understand. But his sincere ongoing belief that the European Union and the Labour party represent Britain’s best interests? Now that, truly, is unfathomable.
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