Lord Immaculate's Manifesto

While checking through my old posts for typos (depressingly abundant…depressing because I always spend so long proofreading these blogs and yet errors persist) and for embarrassing rants (found plenty of those, but couldn’t bring myself to delete any) I stumbled across an old draft which appears to be functionally complete. Presumably I had planned to enlarge upon it a little, but since I can’t remember what I had in mind I have published it below. The subject was the Dickens dossier, which I later heard had been discovered (if so one can only wonder how much resemblance it now bears, after so long, to its original form), although the whole story seems to have gone quiet, and the inquiry – or was it inquiries? – seems to be following in the wake of the Chilcot Report on a scenic tour of the universe. By the time the results are in we can expect all those in the frame to be feeding maggots.

The government has announced not one but two inquiries into the missing paedophile dossier scandal. Part of their job will be to track down the evidence which escaped shredding (and one suspects, to shred it).

We’re finally beginning to see proof of what I’ve believed for years – that the ruling establishment is riddled with organised child abuse communities (and no doubt other breeds of pervert). Government, the civil service, the judiciary, the upper echelons of the police, the media, social services, and so on, and so bloody sick.

Their existence has been signposted for decades by low sentencing for sex crimes, failure to bring attitudes in the justice system up to date – failure to prosecute in many cases – and the apparent disinterest across the board in tackling the rising wave of sex crime. Their influence is the obvious explanation for these cancers; and for the sexualisation of children via the media; for the fact that some children’s homes have been used as sex catalogues for wealthy rapists while pimps have been free to lurk at the gates of others; why a system exists in which so many orphaned children end up in prostitution.  Most of all it explains the promotion of the extraordinary belief that paedophile secret societies do not exist. If common abusers can form paedophile rings, what could rich and powerful child abusers put together? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

For too long this country has been an open house for the twisted among us. Frankly I’m surprised that the missing dossier story made it as far as the news, and I’m not optimistic of seeing any genuine crackdown as a result. Expect to see a few scapegoats hauled before the courts, but nothing more. The tone of the politicians when talking about this issue betrays a lack of passion about tackling the problem. These inquiries are designed to dampen public outrage, nothing more.

Having fallen upon hard times, Lord Immaculate has taken to broaching the odd ream of internet competitions. Nowt too taxing – enter your particulars here for a chance to win a five star trip to Pluto, that sort of thing. What y’Lord has actually won so far is, of course, a constant stream of sales calls. Like many of my fellow citizens I’ve learned to answer only numbers I recognise.

In this squalid day and age I can’t blame my suffering solely on the competition sites. Every Tom, Dick and Harry Ltd. is under suspicion when it comes to hawking potential marks around. (I promise you on my dear grandmother’s life this isn’t one of those pesky) sales calls are a menace governments have been reluctant to crack down on, otherwise we could by now, if we wished, go ex-directory as far as unsolicited overtures are concerned – a list of addressees that corporate peddlers are forbidden to contact, by decision of the would-be recipient. Neither have the powers that be put a halt to phantom ringers, those automated buggers which treat your ears to a prolonged burst of silence. One may assume various authority figures are being enriched in some way by their continued inaction.

The very least our lacklustre leaders should do is bind businesses to perform two obligations as soon as their victim is on the line:

A, announce immediately that they absolutely are after your dosh. No denying the truth (repeatedly) until you have struggled to politely extract yourself from the whirlpool of their waffle for a full five minutes. This rule can also be applied to the increasingly aggressive street merchants, door-steppers and fundraisers, who ought to be required by law to admit that they are in fact going to ask you for money, rather than lying brazenly to your face.

B, inform you at the beginning which firm or individual supplied your personal information to the dreaded database.

Therefore the wretched life-interrupters, be they human or automaton, must open their gambit with, “Hello, this is a sales call. Your number was listed by (insert name of bastard)…”

As for the aforementioned software, the kind that offers you the opportunity to opt out simply by pressing a said digit, it must be programmed never to bother the same person twice, as the damned opt out button is about as effective as a chocolate kettle.

The purpose of this legislation would be to name, shame and embarrass the companies who sell your details on. You never know, some of the more ‘reputable’ establishments might knock this pernicious practice on the head.

(Subsection: Lord Macker’s Health Manifesto)

In these times of widespread stress-related illness (isn’t modern life supposed to be easier?) our government would be doing the public a favour if it publicised the remarkable wondercure which is Jacobson’s technique, also known as Progressive Muscle Relaxation.

A simple combination of tensing while taking a lovely lungful of O² and relaxing on the exhale, this superlative retort to body tension helped yours truly recover from a beast of a nervous breakdown (basically, an anxiety attack which had started months earlier and not deigned to stop after the customary two minutes). For just a few moments of my time each day I benefit from a composure of which I had thought myself incapable.

With practice the muscles and nerves are retrained, or perhaps I could say restored…restored to a point before events took their toll and those infernal internal knots were tied. And it can be done while sat watching the telly! (It is more properly supposed to be done lying down though, so God only knows what further serenity the technique might, if performed planardexterously, be bestowing on my bones.)

If I were Prime Minister I would joyfully add it to the school curriculum – it need only take half an hour in the PE hall – taught first at the age of eight, when one would assume only a small number of children actually need it (including those like my younger self who begin to show the first symptoms of stress-related disorders such as OCD); recounted in the first year of secondary school, where the demons of puberty will lay siege to the hormones; followed later with a refresher lesson in anticipation of those pesky exams; and finally reiterated at the liberating end of school, another tool of knowledge to be carried out into the wide and often woeful world we live in.

GPs should be advised to make patients aware of PMR when it might help, and mention of Dr Jacobson’s invaluable aid should be on display along with those many other useful snippets adorning the surgery walls.

The more tautly wound you and your body are, the quicker the quack-free cure works (in my rather extreme case the effects were felt within a day or two). What would normally reduce you to a moment in the company of the jitters, with the contents of your rib cage tightening and your breathing becoming short, or maybe even to fully-fledged panic and hyperventilation (particularly common episodes among teenagers), instead triggers a deep relaxing breath, a more healthy reaction to an old problem, breaking the constriction of the lungs and sending feelgood chemicals coursing into your veins. Am I talking this up too much? It’s a veritable miracle worker in my experience; a restorative of the grandest order. Only those who already exist in the utmost state of equilibrium would notice no difference at all. It’s a life-changer.

The little gem Dr Edmund Jacobson invented back in the 1920s is a greater countermeasure than any anti-aircraft gun or Exocet missile, but unlike NORAD or GCHQ this defence mechanism has remained largely unknown and unused. So many millions of people might have reaped the rewards of PMR since the good doctor’s day, and millions more will find them yet. The sooner the better, if I have anything to do with it. Make your vote Immaculate.