No room for the faithless on the moral high ground

With swine flu anxiety edging up, the religious/'spiritual' crowd are, as ever, shoving the rest of aside in the scrabble to gain ownership of human values, ie thinking things may turn out for the best and being nice to others.

In Sunday’s Observer Karol Sikora argued - though that's putting it rather highly - that because we have ‘lost’ both our faith and extended families, we’re all falling pray to panic about swine flu as apparently only those two entities can offer freedom from fear, and also support. He claimed that 'When our own mortality is suddenly questioned, we need a shoulder to lean on. If we have no family infrastructure or belief, what is there?'

Well gee, I don't know about you, but I had a family last time I looked. They're a bit ragged round the edges. The extended bit contains stepbrothers and sisters rather than grannies. They even have different belief systems. My mother doesn't like Christmas and my sister does Channukah instead. But I'm fairly sure that if I fell ill they might bung me a card, or hell - even visit. I also belong to two amazing networks known as neighbours and friends. For anyone of the faith/spiritual disposition who doesn't know how it works, you get to know people, either because you like them or live nearby, or you've been to school together, or your children have, or combinations thereof. You hang out a bit, share stuff about yourselves, and do each other little favours. Examples might be, ooh, minding their kids while they go to an interview or the doctor's, or giving them a bag of icing sugar at 10pm when they're making their child a birthday cake and have run out. (No, that wasn't me; it was my neighbour though.) Then, when crisis strikes, you help in whatever way you can. It's easy. Mr Sikora, you should try it. It might open your eyes to the joys of being human, and even make you less cynical.

Try saying 'American Dream' with your mouth closed

Every July in Wise, Virginia, a free dental field clinic treats 2-3000 of the 47 million Americans without healthcare, a miracle of almost Biblical proportions. That's right: approximately one in five Americans have no access to a dentist or doctor because they can't afford private healthcare.

President Obama has now joined the ranks of those brave - and they do need to be - politicians who want to take on the vested interests of the health insurance companies, who in contrast to the warm, caring images in their publicity, go to considerable trouble in their small print to ensure payouts are avoided as often as possible. Examples include cancelling a woman's mastectomy because a previous attack of acne had been mistakenly described by her dermatologist as 'pre-cancerous' and so the patient could be said to have lied about her medical history.

You'd be amazed, therefore, to hear that many Americans oppose free healthcare. Clean teeth and chemo for all: what's not to like? But it would spell financial ruin, or vastly reduced profits anyhow, for the insurance firms whose lobbyists do a brilliant carrot and stick job by filling campaign coffers and scaring people with images of filthy, rundown state facilities. But surely, you say, all they have to do is come over and look at our marvellous NHS. But they don't. Even many Americans who actually live here go private, believing the alternative to be a ‘Third World’ service for the poor and desperate, not the remarkable system most of us use throughout our lives. That’s the power of the private health insurance lobby.

So, Mr President: you know what you need to do. Our amazing doctors and nurses will be glad to show you around.

Don't hold your breath

Hope everyone heard the swine flu advice from Health Secretary Andy Burnham for pregnant women on the Today Programme, which was, er, to follow the advice given a few moments before by the ‘Pandemic Co-ordinator’ at the Royal College of Obstetricians. And all he could tell us to do was to “observe good respiratory and hand hygiene”. I think we got the hand part OK. Any idea what the other bit means? Wear masks? Stay in? Don’t breathe? No, me neither.

Do these people listen to themselves?

To the list of endangered professions in this country, along with car manufacturers and markers of 'A' level papers, we must now add satirists.

It began with parents at some schools being banned from photographing their own children at Sports Days - though you'd have thought they'd have just been grateful that they still had Sports Days. Then Sandy Upper School in Biggleswade stopped tinkering around the edges of paranoia and held the event without the parents altogether. Paul Blunt, of the East Beds School Sports Partnership, was quoted as saying,

"If we let parents into the school they would have been free to roam the grounds. All unsupervised adults must be kept away from children. An unsavoury character could have come in. The ultimate fear is that a child is hurt or abducted."

But, Paul: why stop there? If you want to be really sure, don't let children out of the house at all. Two of them die every week at the hands of their own family, so we look forward to your initiatives for tackling that.