Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Once again we present the Upper Class Twit of the Century


That would be Charles Windsor, whose inbreeding continues to get the better of him. The Prince of Woo "won influence over Prime Minister Tony Blair and delayed the introduction of regulations governing the sale of herbal medicines, letters between the heir to the throne and government ministers have revealed."

The story is that a European Union Directive in 2004 required that new herbal products be approved before they could go on sale in the EU. This followed many cases of people being harmed by quack medicines. Older products were grandfathered until 2011, but the definition of older would have excluded some currently on sale. Prince Chucklehead met with PM Tony Blair and wrote to Blair and various other ministers to complain. In case you didn't know, he's a big champion of anti-scientific health care fraud, among other idiocies. He succeeded - Blair ended up allowing the sale for many years of products that would have been banned under the EU directive.

The BMJ quotes Simon Singh:

These letters are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg. We have no idea how much HRH [his royal highness] has been influencing policy via unreleased memos, during private meetings and via his now defunct Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health. In a democracy it is fundamentally wrong that an accident of birth should enable someone to have secret influence upon those who determine health policy. Herbal medicine can work in a few instances, but in the majority of cases it is unproven, disproven, or downright dangerous, which is why the EU Directive on Herbal Medicines is so important and why HRH’s desire to delay implementation was so foolish.
Indeed. It is long past time that the British take these parasites off the dole and abolish the monarchy. 

No comments: