Classic Harding: resistance is futile

Neil Harding: the Mouth of NuLabour Your Totalitarian Overlords.

Longrider regales us with this particularly awful story about what happens when you challenge "consent".

He points to this story that demonstrates what can happen when consent is not obtained:

Cancer registries use confidential patient data in research to combat disease but it includes names, addresses and other personal information held on case notes.

The drawbacks of this data-sharing are highlighted by the case of a junior doctor with a rare disease.

She received upsetting and intrusive phone calls about her illness from researchers. When she complained, she was suspended by her employer and even now is bound by a gagging order from publishing her case. She’s been legally gagged by a hospital trust and she’s not able to be identified because of a court order.

Frankly, reading it, I was horrified. Not only has this woman’s private information been shared without her consent; she was subjected to unwanted phone calls by researchers and when she complained, she was punished for it. This case has been dragging on for five years and the court has found in her favour. Whatever the detail of the case, it does demonstrate an appallingly cavalier attitude towards patient confidentiality and an utter contempt for privacy.

According to the High Court statement her private medical details, in fully identifiable form, were disseminated widely for the purposes of research and passed to her employers despite her withholding consent.

“Private medical details in fully identifiable form.” This is fucking outrageous by any reasonable standards.

Dr Aubrey Blumsohn has more details here, but what it boils down to is this: that a young doctor had some information that she wanted to keep private. Her entire medical history was made available to researchers without her consent and, when she complained, Cambridgeshire Primary Care Trust excluded her. For five fucking years. She had a gagging order slapped on her, the PCT spreads vicious lies about her, and then sacked her in September 2006. And she has now won "an apology"; well, whoopee-fucking-do.

And now, the crux of the matter: what did Neil Harding think of all this?

My second thought is ‘what a miserable bitch’ in refusing for her data to be used to help others suffering from cancer (says a lot about her sympathy for others - some doctor!). Of course it is her right to be a seIfish miserable person I admit, but still doesn’t alter the fact she is not acting very community spirited.

What.

The.

Fuck?

Would you like a little while for that to sink in? Let me say that, generally speaking, my view accords with The Longrider's.

What a fucking evil, misanthropic, cold-hearted bastard. I always knew that Neil was a totalitarian at heart; that he has no respect for personal privacy; that he is blinded by New Labour dogma and demonstrates a staggering ignorance of historical precedent; this I already knew, just as trying to reason with him is like repeatedly beating one’s own head with a lump of two-by-two (which is why I tend to avoid commenting on his blog these days). However, despite this, I had always regarded him as nothing worse than a bit of a buffoon, but otherwise relatively harmless (providing he is never given the opportunity to exercise his politics for real), but this really stoops to an all-time low; this is nothing short of Stalinist. He has no humanity.

So, there you have it, the “community” is more important than privacy, human dignity and patient confidentiality. Indeed, the individual is expected to sacrifice all of these for the good of the community in Hardingworld.

Quite. But then we all know that Harding isn't realy concerned about the poor, not the actual people, I mean; otherwise, as I pointed out, he would support my tax policies and not those of his precious NuLabour.

You know what? You want to help the poor? Well, stop taking their fucking money then. The fact that someone on the minimum wage pays tax is just fucking obscene as well as being insane. Gordon Brown has racheted up the Minimum Wage whilst barely raising the Personal Tax Allowance (and while we are about it, my lot are the only politicos calling for this situation to change [PDF]), and he has done this so that more people can become clients of the state—because the only way that they can survive is by filling in loads of forms and begging that one-eyed bastard for some of their money back.

It's a fucking disgrace, and your willingness to defend this belies your constant whinges on behalf of "the poor". If you actually gave two fucks about the poor, you would highlight this as an absolute fucking disgrace. But you don't.

Instead, you either mindlessly toe the NuLabour Party line and bash the Tories on the strength of things that they did over a decade ago or you moan about how the rich have too much money. Fuck that, Neil, it's irrelevant: economics is not a zero sum game and that means that when people get very rich the poor do not automatically get poorer. You know this, and yet you continue to peddle your policies of hate whilst strenuously ignoring the actual plight of the poor.

This is why we libertarians hold you in such contempt, Neil; not only because you are unable to construct a decent, logical argument devoid of logical fallacies but because you don't actually give two shits about the poor at all: thus we all view you as being morally and intellectually bankrupt.

Personally, I think we could probably add "and you're a fucking psychopath" to that list too.

Ladies and gentlemen, Neil Harding: the Mouth of NuLabour and True Face of Socialism.