Pauline Pearce was the woman caught on camera lecturing rioting youths in Hackney that they should “fight for a cause” rather than tearing apart their neighbourhood, and the footage was shared on YouTube and she  became a minor celebrity (although she was already a local radio presenter and had had a career as a jazz singer). The above profile is from the Guardian but she has also featured in the other major British papers; there is an interview with her in today’s Sunday Mirror.

A disturbing fact about her history is that she was caught bringing cocaine into the country in 1999, and nobody disputes that she was duped into doing so - she agreed to carry a jar if picked peppers for someone in Jamaica, where she had been to a music festival, to their family in England. She was advised to plead guilty and got a six-year sentence, and served three years.

Why is someone being jailed at all for a first offence when they had a convincing innocent explanation for carrying the drugs? It is quite proper, of course, to lock up people who carry what they know to be drugs or other contraband, particularly if they do it more than once, but it is well known that drug gangs use expendable “mules”, often women who are desperate because of poverty or debt. It had even been known for them to inform on one mule so that another, carrying a larger amount, can pass through undisturbed. It may also be common for people from immigrant communities where there are close links between families in their old and new countries to carry things between the two, something a white British judge or legislator might not take into account.

If someone carries an innocent looking object and has no reason to suppose that there are drugs concealed in it (and it can be concealed very cleverly - in one recent incident a wooden door was impregnated with cocaine), locking them up is simply a huge injustice, to say nothing of the effect on their dependant children. The objective of stopping drugs entering the country could be achieved by simply confiscating the drugs.

Boris Johnson has called for school children involved in the riots last week (and presumably any future similar incidents) to be removed from their school places and placed in pupil referral units (PRUs). The above article reads:

At present, only headteachers can order a child to be removed from their school and moved to a PRU.

In a letter sent to Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, Mr Johnson said: “Depriving the offender of their customary school place is something which would hit home.

“It would isolate them from their peer group during the school day, preventing bragging rights on school premises, and sends a salutary warning to other pupils that such behaviour will result in temporary ejection from the school community.

“Referring them to a PRU puts them in a unit where teachers are already skilled in addressing unacceptable behaviour but at the same time ensures that their education is continued.”

PRUs have been dubbed “21st century borstals” and host children expelled from school. There are about 420 across England and teachers can opt out of the National Curriculum.

My aunt used to run a PRU and I spent quite a bit of my time at primary school in it for my own educational reasons, as well as being a regular visitor, so I know a bit about them. They are not there to hold children as a punishment. They are there to offer some kind of education for children who, for one reason or another, cannot stay in a normal school. They include some children who are excluded for being disrupted, or who have statements of special educational needs (SEN) who are difficult to place. They also include some children who are ill (my aunt told me there had been a teenage girl with ME in her unit at one point).

It is not only headteachers who can send children to a PRU; the decision is taken by the education department. The reason children cannot be sentenced to them is because they are not part of the criminal justice system and are not meant to be. They are generally small, both in terms of class size and classroom size — my aunt’s had, as I recall, six or seven small classrooms (and a gym) which catered to pupils from the whole school age range (some have fewer — the PRU in Scarborough has only four teaching rooms). If every schoolchild who had been in any way involved in the riots last week were moved to the local PRU, it would be overwhelmed. Not all their pupils are delinquent or violent, or are involved in gangs, and some would be harmed by exposure to such people, as with anyone of a fragile disposition (such as that girl with ME).

Of course, the effect of enforced removal from school to an ill-equipped unit would doubtless have a disastrous effect on the education of those removed, particularly if they had been studying for GCSEs at the time, which might not be a good idea if we want to keep them away from a life of crime in the future. This proposal would be disastrous for everyone it would affect if it came into force and one would hope it will be treated with the contempt it deserves. It’s a wholly ill-informed, ridiculous idea.

Picture taken from the Scarborough Pupil Referral Unit website.

The naive solutions include national service, shutting down “social media”, evicing council tenants who have been involved or whose dependants have been involved, and harsh sentences for relatively minor contributions to the disorder. To deal with the matter of national service first: we have an entirely volunteer army in this country, and apart from the period of the mid-20th century when there were two major wars, we have no tradition of compulsory military service. Somehow, society managed to maintain order (and an empire) for centuries before the necessity of a major war in 1914 made compulsory service the only option. In western Europe, many countries have abolished it in the last twenty years or so; only Switzerland, Spain and Austria retain compulsory military service, and not all men participate (in Spain there is a lottery, while in Austria there are options for conscientious objection that are liberally granted). Military service is mostly found in third-world countries, many of which have recent experience of military dictatorships and which have far worse problems with violent crime than we do here (most of South America, for example). As for the discipline it supposedly instilled, we might remember that only men were conscripted and people of both sexes were involved in the recent rioting.

As for the matter of conscripting rioters, looters or other delinquents into the armed forces, this is likely to rapidly lead to a breakdown of discipline in the army rather than instil discipline into the conscripts. It would lead to conflict between the voluntarily enlisted soldiers and the conscripts, particularly as the former might fear that their positions were unsafe. If such people were sent to Afghanistan or Pakistan, it would be a disaster on the world stage as our hoodlums might rob and attack locals and perhaps British and allied forces’ supplies as well. It might even lead to outright war crimes. It should be avoided at all costs.

Regarding shutting down social media such as Twitter and Facebook, it is likely that other media besides these were used to co-ordinate attacks and attract participants, including text messaging. I find it inconceivable that everyone involved had Blackberries or used BlackBerry Messaging given the diversity of the British smartphone market (and this is assuming that most people even had smartphones). Furthermore, the same media, including SMS, were no doubt being used by innocent people nearby to keep in touch with friends and relatives, to call for help, to arrange relief to those in danger, and to simply report what was going on. I saw some tweets during the violence in north London from a disabled woman asking what chemists were open and unaffected, since she needed to obtain medication. For such a measure to be effective, it would have to cut off all mobile communications, and that would endanger innocent people particularly now that phone boxes are being closed as most people have mobile phones (and even if they were not, the boxes would likely be vandalised anyway; you can make a mobile call or send a text message hiding in a secluded place, which can be much safer than using a phone box in the middle of a street when there is a riot going on).

Third, there has been pressure to evict council tenants who have been involved or whose children have, and it was reported that Wandsworth council served an eviction notice on a tenant whose son participated in looting in the Clapham Junction area. The final decision will rest with a judge, so it might be hoped that the decision will be made once the public anger at the rioting has died down somewhat. No details have been made public about the family, except that it is a mother and son who have been threatened and nobody is suggesting that the woman is involved. On one hand, I fully support evicting people who have been making their neighbours’ lives a misery, or who have been involved in persistent criminality or using their council house or flat (and it probably is a flat) for criminal purposes such as storing stolen goods or drugs, and if the tenant allows it to go on, there is a case for evicting them. If one of their children, unknown to them, commits a crime, that should not be grounds for eviction, because it is not the fault of the head of the family but of that individual. Particularly as in this case, many people appear to have joined in the looting on the spur of the moment, it would be unfair to treat first-time offenders, let alone their families, the same way as those who cause a nuisance or a danger to their neighbours.

Finally, we come to the sentencing of people involved. It appears that political pressure is being applied to imprison anyone found guilty of any involvement, and to remand in custody anyone charged with it. I do not dispute that anyone who led people to loot, who used violence, started fires or stole substantial amounts of property should go to prison, but yesterday the papers reported that someone who had stolen a six-pack case of water from a shop that had already been broken into received a six-month sentence, and Greater Manchester Police gloated on Twitter (the tweet was subsequently removed, but it is preserved here) that a mother of two was jailed for five months for accepting looted shorts, despite not having been involved in any violence. These sentences are, of course, ludicrously out of proportion to the offences committed and highly likely to be reduced on appeal. People involved in peripheral, non-violent looting offences should not be judged as if they were responsible for the whole episode or as if they were part of a joint enterprise; their offences should be judged for what they are. Blogger Matthew Taylor suggests harsh community penalties for those involved, such that we see “hundreds of people in hi-visibility jackets being forced to spend every minute of their leisure time improving the communities they have attacked, and facing the prospect of doing the same for the next year”. He also picks apart the rationale behind the six-month sentence and finds that it does not comply with sentencing guidelines, specifically being the most serious sentence for the least serious category of theft. (There is a letter in today’s Guardian that notes that a woman who kept someone she had brought into the country as a slave in her house in London got the same sentence; violent crimes, including those which cause serious injury, commonly receive that long a sentence, or less.)

As for the reasons behind it, I think there were different groups that took part for different reasons. At the time I sent out a tweet that said to “stop saying London is burning; it isn’t. A few scumbags are going on the rampage”, but the roll-call of people prosecuted for looting reveals that not all of them were “scumbags” but were sometimes well-educated and employed and seemed to have solid careers ahead of them and had not been in trouble with the law before; some of their families turned them in. I strongly suspect that the violence in Tottenham and Manchester was organised by local gangs to avenge the killing of Mark Duggan, who was closely connected to criminal gangs in both areas, and that some were enraged by “yet another” killing of a black man by the police, perhaps assuming that any investigation would be a cover-up that would vindicate the police. (The police have actually shot armed white people dead, such as a lawyer who was shot dead in Chelsea, a very gentrified area of west London, in 2008 after firing indiscriminately at neighbours and police.)

As for the others, some of them may have been motivated by over-excitement, the opportunity to “cause a bit of chaos” or get their hands on something they couldn’t afford. In some cases, they stole things they did not even want (such as a plasma TV), for reasons they later could not explain. Some commentators, such as Peter Oborne and Pankaj Mishra, have noted that some among the higher echelons of society very recently thought nothing of dishonestly billing the taxpayer for various luxuries, and that ordinary people cannot really be expected to respect the law when their leaders, and the wealthy in society, apparently do not. I do not think this explains, let alone justifies, destroying one’s neighbours’ property, but it might explain why some people helped themselves to property from shops others had already broken into, perhaps assuming that looting a chain-store was a victimless crime.

I also suspect that many people think nicking a little bit here and there, particularly if from a large organisation that will not notice the difference, is not significant and if you can get away with it, go ahead, and this may have been reinforced by the scandals of MP’s expenses and bankers’ bonuses but was already present (and may have been behind the MPs’ behaviour that caused the scandal). What happened here was that people got carried away and thought they could get away with stealing more expensive items, and did not consider that they would get picked up on CCTV or that their families would object to having expensive stolen property in their homes. Still, if we are to punish all those guilty of non-violent thefts during last week’s violence with prison, we should reconsider our general attitude to theft, otherwise we are guilty of hypocrisy as they were only doing what a lot of people would do if they thought they could get away with it, and probably have done.

I read this and wondered why it was buried in the Family section, a supplement normally reserved for whimsical stories about family life (the same page last week, as I recall, was occupied by a story about a mother who’s proud that her daughter is a lesbian). Perhaps they want to encourage people to read the supplement by putting a serious story in there, but why don’t they have something on the front page of the main section, or anywhere in the main section (such as in the International news pages) pointing to it? If you want a serious story about an international human rights scandal (which most Guardian readers would be interested in) to get read, it needs to be in the main section, or referenced from it.

There’s a serious error of translation in the article also, or at least an ambiguity. The last paragraph quotes a man called Vladimir Rubiano, who is looking after a boy whose father was killed in the war, as saying “the guerrilla killed his father”; the italics are theirs, which indicates that he really did use the word guerrilla in Spanish. That word in Spanish means the war itself, not a fighter as it means in English, so if that’s really what he said, it should have been translated as civil war, or just war. If he said guerrillero, which is the Spanish for guerrilla fighter, it should have been translated as “one of the guerrillas killed him”, or something similar. This is significant, as it does appear that he was probably killed by government-allied paramilitaries, not guerrillas (i.e. not FARC).

“Molly”, real name Misbah Rana, is the girl who ran away from her mother in Scotland to join her father and the rest of her family in Pakistan, prompting a public panic that she might have been abducted to take part in an arranged marriage. What had really happened was that she had left of her own accord after her mother had taken her away to a remote part of Scotland, taking advantage of her daughter’s young age to separate her from the rest of her family and her religion. When I wrote about this at the time, I got a comment from “Old Pickler” (one of a number of anti-Muslim trolls who used to post her a lot at the time) saying:

She is not in a position to give her consent. Of course at the moment she regards all this as rather exotic. But this dozy idiot should realise that she can run away from Scotland but not from Pakistan.

The fact that she is now living with her family in Blackburn, not Lahore, disproves this fact, as well as any suspicion that the father was some sort of religious tyrant (he actually pulled Misbah out of a fundamentalist-run Islamic college) because he allowed her to return to England as soon as her mother could not turn up and drag her back to her boyfriend’s house in Scotland. And by all accounts, her life in Scotland wasn’t freedom; it sounded pretty miserable, living without her siblings and with her mother’s strange boyfriend in a rainy and wind-swept small town.

I notice that this newspaper persistently refers to Misbah Rana as “Molly” throughout, when this is a name which was never her own, was foisted on her during her time in Scotland and which she rejected. Perhaps this is a similar bit of ham-fistedness to the Daily Mirror’s persistent use of “Holly” to refer to Celyn Vincent (the name actually means holly, but it still isn’t her name), but the Mail has a tendency not to respect people’s choices when those choices involve Islam, as demonstrated in their coverage of female converts over the years.

Personally, I rarely get a poppy; I remember doing so when at school and perhaps I have once or twice as an adult, but certainly not every year. However, it’s the “done thing” for TV presenters, news readers and the like to wear them when they appear on TV in the week or so leading up to Remembrance Sunday, which is why Jon Snow has raised a few eyebrows by appearing on TV without one. Snow explained, in response to a comment on his blog that he was “dishonouring” the war dead by appearing without one, he responded that they died so that we could choose when to wear a poppy or not, and to insist that everyone wears one is “poppy fascism” or intolerance. Enforced greetings and symbols, badges and so on are hallmarks of totalitarian states, whether imposed on certain groups or on everyone (e.g. yellow stars in Nazi Germany, the badges everyone wears in North Korea).

A few years ago, someone called Carol Gould wrote an article in which she complained that she had been accosted near Edgware Road by an Arab who saw her poppy and demanded to know if she was of “the Jewish” (I responded here). She then claimed that a cab driver had told her she was asking for it by going to “little Beirut” and displayed “white working-class anger” at the “Islamic takeover” of Britain. She claimed that nobody among the staff at any of the establishments on the Edgware Road wore one, and exaggerated the atmosphere of devotion of British people generally for the event. As someone who, unlike Carol Gould, has grown up in this country, I can say that, while there is some degree of respect for the occasion (such as the two-minute silences in shops, for example), the events are broadcast on TV and radio and kids are taught about it in schools, there is no general atmosphere of reverence and, while attendance at the Cenotaph (where the national commemoration takes place) is large, many of those attending are sent by various organisations. The idea that everyone wears a poppy is simply wrong, even for the white population.

As for why Muslims don’t often wear poppies, there are a number of reasons — many of those on the Edgware Road are not British citizens anyway, and many of the younger generation don’t feel any connection to the forces, particularly since the 1990s when they have mostly been involved in American-led wars against Muslim enemies (though not always; British forces were deployed as peacekeepers in Bosnia and Sierra Leone during the 1990s). Many younger people of any ethnic minority background would not even consider joining the army, regarded it as a white-dominated institution, and there have been many tales of non-white recruits being victimised. On the other hand, there are those in the older generation of British Muslims who did serve in the British Army during World War II, particularly against the Japanese, so they and their descendents are perhaps more likely to be seen wearing them.

Personally, as someone whose grandfathers both served in that war, I think it’s good that this country looks after its old soldiers and that this is done through a mass appeal, not through taxation. However, we also all do contribute towards soldiers’ welfare through taxation, particularly the rehabilitation of injured soldiers as happens at Headley Court and Selly Oak (there was a feature on Headley Court in the Guardian yesterday), so nobody should feel guilty for not contributing. This is, after all, one charity appeal among many, and as was the case with the earlier piece on charity pressure, we may all have causes we find more pressing and more deserving of our money than this one, particularly at a time when the elderly and disabled are going to be badly hit by reductions in public spending, particularly in poorer parts of the country. While I acknowledge that I’ve never been “charity mugged” to buy a poppy, it’s important that the symbol does not become a matter of conformity and that wearing one is not a test of loyalty, particularly given that displays of loyalty and patriotism aren’t part of the national culture for most people anyway.

The finger is, once again, being pointed at “Shaikh” Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American preacher currently living in Yemen, whose videos were found on Choudhary’s home computer. They didn’t say what the “hate videos” consisted of, but it’s widely known that he has begun to openly advocate violence since his imprisonment in Yemen a few years ago. Before that, he was best known for his Sirah tapes, which many young Muslims listened to keenly. His recent turn means that anyone who ever shared a platform with him or sells his old CD’s is presumed in some places to be a fellow traveller with him now.

However, we can’t blame him for anything anyone who has watched his videos, even the recent ones, has done. This woman acted on her own judgement and was not told to do anything by him. Her actions should be blamed on her alone, and can’t be used to point the finger at anyone else in any way associated with him.

There’s a letter in today’s Guardian advocating that Google should use its multilingual technology to censor content based on the use of certain words, and subject material with certain triggers to human moderation. This would require them to hire a huge number of staff, when in reality, anyone can “flag” a video containing inappropriate or illegal material, but in any case, American law distinguishes between advocating and inciting, which is to direct someone to commit a crime, and only the latter is illegal. We should not expect the state, or some company, to protect us from ideas, as we are adults, after all (and as for those who aren’t, there are people called “parents” whose duty that is).

Furthermore, it’s noticeable that sentences are getting harsher, with Choudhary receiving a sentence for attempted murder that exceeds what many people convicted of actual murder receive, or what people receive for deliberate cruelty, including against disabled people. The judge informed her that, had she succeeded in killing Timms, she would have received a whole-life sentence, so one should ask whether the murder of a politician for supporting an illegal war is really a more heinous offence than some of the senseless murders in London which commonly receive life sentences with set tariffs. Anyone familiar with the Northern Ireland peace process will be aware that some terrorists known to have participated in bombings and massacres — of ordinary people, not soldiers or politicians — ended up serving less time than Choudhary will. It begs the question of why an MP’s life is somehow worth more than that of a disabled child, or an equally innocent ordinary person in south London or Northern Ireland.

This story really did shock me — I didn’t mention this earlier today in case it upset friends of mine but someone else decided to tweet it out, so … there is footage of the nurse doing what caused the damage, which I couldn’t bring myself to watch at first (it’s actually a local news segment). This guy sustained a spinal cord injury in a car accident in 2002, and since then had been a quadriplegic and had depended on a ventilator to breathe for him. If it gets switched off, you are likely to suffer brain damage or die, because your diaphragm is paralysed and you won’t be able to breathe. There’s a run-down here of what a person in that condition needs to stay alive, and that woman has back-up generators in case the mains goes off. Quite possibly, so did this guy.

This nurse, who for some reason had been employed without having been trained in caring for a ventilated patient, for some reason turned off the vent and, after the victim tried to alert her to the fact that he couldn’t breathe by clicking his tongue (because without the vent, he could not speak), tried to resuscitate him with an airbag respirator but had attached it in the wrong position. Paramedics finally did it correctly, but by then he had suffered terrible brain damage. He seems to be able to talk again, but as his sister says, his level of understanding is now the same as that of a young child:

“His life is completely changed. He doesn’t have a life now,” she said.

“He has an existence but it’s nowhere near what it was before. He is very brain damaged compared to what he was before. He was a highly intelligent man and you could have long in-depth conversations with him and now it tends to be more simplistic.”

The nurse was employed by a commercial contractor who apparently did not have adequate procedures for making sure the nurses were properly qualified for each individual patient. The patient, Jamie Merrett, had suspected that serious mistakes were being made in his care, so he set up a bedside camera, which is how the footage of this incident came to be made. This is, of course, what comes of farming out the care of seriously vulnerable patients to commercial organisations whose sole aim is to make money: the NHS abdicates the role of actually making sure the right people are being hired for the job. I think it’s a bit unfair to make a public example of the nurse who made the mistake, rather than the boss of this company; the fact is that this nurse should not have been employed to care for him in the first place, and it is the company’s responsibility to make sure that they employ correctly trained staff, and they clearly did not do that here, and their contract should be suspended immediately.

I’ve been following this story on and off since I first heard of it earlier this year (not from when it broke about a year ago), but someone Facebooked it a couple of weeks back, reproducing the year-old stories and nothing more recent. A couple from Fife (eastern Scotland) had their wedding cancelled because local social services deemed the bride, who was 17 and has mild learning disabilities (although some of her problems may have been to do with missing school for surgery on a cleft palate, and she claims that the teaching she received was inadequate), insufficiently intelligent to understand what marriage meant; they also threatened to take her baby into care at birth. I don’t know if they actually used the words dim or stupid, but that’s what the papers say they called her. The couple fled to Ireland at the last minute where a benefactor provided them with a house in County Waterford, but Irish social workers became aware of Fife’s concern about Kerry Robertson’s (now Kerry McDougal’s) alleged disability, and took the child into care a few days after his birth. However, they subsequently allowed Kerry to look after the child (named Ben) in a supervised residential centre, but most recently, they have been allowed to get married and live together as a family, without any supervision.

Most of the stories are from the Daily Mail and from other tabloids, with the broadsheets being reluctant to get on board (although the Telegraph has had some coverage of the issue of forced adoption), but nothing from any of them since last November. Mark McDougall, the husband, is particularly scathing about the Guardian on his blog, alleging that they won’t touch the issue of abusive care orders and adoptions because they rely on advertising from numerous social service departments (they do, in fact, carry a huge amount of local authority advertising), although local and community papers such as The Voice (a London-based Black newspaper) carry an awful lot too, including adoption ads for specific children. I have to say, having been reading the Guardian since I was at school, I find their coverage of politics and economics the most balanced of all the British newspapers, but they do have their biases and blind spots. Some of my friends who have M.E. are particularly irritated at their slant on that matter; they ran a lengthy article last May (for M.E. Awareness Week), but presented recent debates over XMRV as being between desperate patients and conspiracy theorists clinging to the XMRV theory for dear life and the likes of Simon Wessely who dismiss it, when it’s much more complicated than that.

Still, the facts as presented do raise an awful lot of concern. Kerry supposedly had mild learning difficulties, but despite having worked successfully as a childcare assistant at a local school, social workers deemed her unfit to look after her own child. They also seemed to be treating the case as if it consisted of a lone parent with intellectual disabilities, not as a committed couple in which only one party had any impairment. When they arrived in Ireland and Kerry gave birth, social services removed the baby and reunited only Kerry with Ben two weeks later, expecting her to prove herself to them on her own, rather than as she would be living, with her partner. Of course, there would be times when she would be left alone with the baby, but these would not be all the time when her husband was not around, as she would likely have friends with their own babies who would be able to give her some support. Those who have met Kerry say that, while she may not be “academically gifted”, she is not noticeably impaired. Her husband says he finds some aspects of her personality, such as her tendency to see things in black and white, endearing and admits that she does need help with Ben, but “it doesn’t mean she should have the right to be a mum taken away from her”, and Kerry says she does most of the caring.

The whole story is worrying for anyone with any learning disability, including anything on the autistic spectrum, seeking to have or keep a child — even, it seems, with a non-impaired partner. The attitude persists in other countries, particularly when the parents are poor or of an ethnic minority as well as disabled: I have heard of an incident in the USA where a Black blind couple were threatened with having their children removed because the local social services (or whatever they are called there) believed they were incapable of caring for a child themselves. Of course, many white, middle-class blind parents do precisely this every day; some of the couples have one and others two blind members. I remember the story of Julia Kimbell, the deaf-blind mother from Peterborough in England, who became a single parent and social services insisted that she have an assistant on hand, as (among other things) she would not know when the child was crying or was crawling somewhere dangerous. However, when she married, the need for assistance was deemed to be over.

I’m not sure if the McDougalls were supported by their family, as it’s never mentioned, but the papers did refer to their friends, although that could mean all sorts of things when it appears in a paper like the Mail. But sometimes, the family turns against the disabled member and makes decisions on their behalf without thinking to involve them. I read a blog article by a blind, autistic woman named Astrid, who currently resides in a psychiatric hospital in the Netherlands, in which she said that her family had discussed behind her back what they would do if she got pregnant and decided that the sister would adopt the child. The sister had the effrontery to tell her “so don’t get pregnant” because she was a student and would not want to have the child now. In any case, Astrid had already decided that she wasn’t cut out to be a parent, but took exception to others making decisions about her body and her possible children without talking to her. My old friend Ginny, who is also blind, once noted in her blog that some of her relatives had suggested that she should not have any children because of her disability.

Coming back to social services in the UK and the McDougalls, one might ask whether the social services were really acting in Ben’s best interests or simply to cover their own backs, or whether some kind of prejudice against Kerry’s background or the relationship itself (besides Kerry’s supposed disability, she was 17 at the time of the original planned wedding while Mark was 25). One press report from last January has Stephen Moore, executive director of social work at Fife Council, saying, “I would urge Kerry to use all the support that is being made available to her and her baby and to get appropriate help should she need it”. If his own social workers had made Kerry feel supported rather than intimidated, and suggested that they might use a bit of help rather than simply telling her that her baby would be taken at birth, they would not have had to leave their home town to begin with. There should be an investigation as to why a demonstrably competent couple were so intimidated by his staff that they had to flee the country.

Some people have compared this case to the murder case involving Frances Inglis, who murdered her brain-damaged son with a heroin overdose in November 2008. She was found guilty last week and received a life sentence, minimum nine years (that is the minimum that can be passed for murder). Why did two mothers who killed (or may have killed) their chronically sick adult children get such substantially different outcomes: one a life sentence, the other a conditional discharge for assisting a suicide?

Well, the differences are not subtle. Kay Gilderdale had cared for her daughter round the clock for seventeen years. Frances Inglis’s son had always been cared for in hospitals and had been ill for only a couple of yeras. But most importantly, Lynn Gilderdale had decided for herself that she wanted to die, and had disclosed this in her online diary (most likely on LiveJournal, where she went under the pseudonym Jessie Oliver and the handle _chaotictears_); the Mail printed an extract from that on Tuesday. Her parents had both tried to dissuade her from taking her own life.

Frances Inglis seems to have decided as soon as she learned that her son had suffered a brain injury that he was as good as dead. Without being able to ask him his wishes, she attempted to overdose him. When she failed the first time and was banned from seeing him, she went to great lengths to ensure that there was a second time, and that she killed him, more than a year later. That is not assisting a suicide. That is a twisted version of a mercy killing. It is premeditated murder.

By the way, although I made my views on assisted suicide and euthanasia clear here in the past, in the case of Kay and Lynn Gilderdale, I feel too sad to be able to condemn anyone. I didn’t know her, but I realised that I’d seen her on a documentary about ME in the 1990s (you can see a five-minute clip from it, featuring Lynn with Dr Anne Macintyre, who was recovering from it at the time, in this YouTube video; the last third of it is in this one which also features Lynn as well as a young male patient who was forced into a psychiatric unit). Back then, doctors were forcing some young ME patients into psychiatric hospitals because they refused to believe that it was a real condition rather than a psychological one, and this kind of behaviour continued into the last decade and may have led to the death of one sufferer, Sophia Mirza, whose post-mortem showed abnormalities in her spinal cord. It is rather astonishing that some doctors see someone paralysed and obviously in pain, unable to tolerate light or sound, and think that this is a mental rather than a physical illness.