mkpdavies

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labou...843082,00.html

Go on then, tell us what this technical term means then. I thought it meant fairly close family having babies with each other.

Mmmmm, still sounds like you are saying the people in Norfolk are inbred hicks to me.

I'm glad this was a Labour politician saying this stuff. Perhaps they can take the fruitcake crown!

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Aardvark

PC world interferes.

Is he telling the truth? That is the question.

Is the truth offensive? Sounds like it.

If a doctor of medicine has to apologise for telling the truth about a genetically transferred medical condition that affects double the numbers in Norfolk than elsewhere then we are doomed.

I lived in Norfolk for 3 years. It always amazed me that some family names I had never heard of were linked to only one or 2 villages. The same is true in a few hamlets in west Oxon - Sparrowhawks in Standlake and Aston, Oakeys in the villages near me, Gotobeds in Witney.

The 'swamp' as the locals referred to the fens west of Downham Market had the highest rate of recorded incest in the UK when I was there. There were serious problems in remote settlements.

Inbreeding is not necessarily about fathers and daughters, but you may legally marry your cousin and in a small community with limited choice of partners that is not unusual. Cousins marrying the children of cousins etc means that certain genetic features are highlighted.

If people are so stupid as to not see the medical point made they shouldn't be able to join in the debate. There is inbreeding in large parts of our country. What happens on remote islands in Scotland, small villages in Wales etc?

If the guy has made a medical statement of fact he should not be forced to apologise. This is how Hitler forced eugenics on an unsuspectiung Germany. Those who had medical proof that the Aryan race was not 'superior' were forced to recant their opinions.

Here are some medical facts - Afro-Carribean people are susceptible to sickle cell anaemia, diabetes is common in native American tribes, Hachers Syndrome (check the name, found it on one of the Jewish links from Keith Hand) is prevalent in central and east European Jews.

All these illnesses need treatment. If we deny the origins of the illnesses for PC reasons then we prevent treatment and cure. It is logical to me that closed social groups with limited options to select partners will have increased propensity to certain genetic predispositions.

I am more frightened by the idea that the guy has said something unpopular and true and is forced to defend himself against people who probably aren't doctors of medicine.

Is nobody else here worried about the PC thought police who tell us what to think? What if the MP is 100% correct? Medical research is being put back years.

Incidentally, true story - the first person to discover the link between smoking and cancer was a German researcher in 1939. The information was suppressed because it was thought he was trying to wreck the economy of nations opposed to Hitler. Hundreds of millions of people have died slow and lingering deaths as a result of the research being ignored.

Beware the thought police. :roll:

BASILDON BOY

As somebody who has been tracing his family tree for 20 years there is one village - where all the parish records survive from the early 1520s and which show that the entire population of the village was somehow related to one another - of course now with a large influx of townies and migration of the youth out of the village due to sky high property prices and lack of social housing the gene pool is being widened!

mkpdavies

Norfolk is no more inbred than the town you come from Aardvark. Not in any meaningful sense anyway.

I take it you are happy to be called an inbred?

PC is also about squashing peoples opinions ON BOTH SIDES. The people of Norfolk have every right to be annoyed and speak out at the suggestion that they are inbreds, because most people will have taken it the wrong way.

The Labour MP is right to apologise.

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Hereward

Dr Ian Gibson MP has compounded his error since by implying that the rest of us are too dim to understand the scientific principles underpinning his misplaced utterance. You see, we don't understand what he meant, because he didn't mean what we understand him to have meant.

Good innit?

Another pompous, undiplomatic scientific git! He's not helped by being a Scot occupying a constituency in England.

BASILDON BOY

Inbreeding, the mating of close kin, and outbreeding, the mating of distant relatives or unrelated organisms.

There you go - Shouldn't a UKIP MEP for this area be issuing a press release calling for his resignation? UKIP members should be writing to the press demanding his resignation etc?

prober

Rolox to PC , UKIP keep out of it , otherwise we cant say the frogs are not only inbred , but into donkeys & live in caves . ( or is it the Welsh ).

Aardvark

Actually I was born just outside Coventry. The city is one of the most multi-racial in the UK and inbreeding is only inbreeding in that everyone is a human being. I live in Carterton the garrison town for RAF Brize Norton - we have one of the most fluid populations in the UK. One year 30% of the electoral roll in one of the wards full of married quarters changed between annual elections. There are only a handful of locals since the settlement is only just over 100 years old and only achieved town status in the last 30 years.

My ancestry is very mixed. Gilmans from Ireland (originally England in the 16th century), Wessons from Leicestershire, Highams from Manchester, Hills from Devon, Windsors from Binley near Coventry, Tidmans from Foleshill near Coventry, Mac Dougalls and Greaves from Scotland. I married a Holland from Yorkshire, and she had Scots, Irish and Geordie forebears. I suspect I'm not very inbred at all, although some of my ancestors might have been.

The point is that the good doctor was using technically correct medical terminology to highlight a possible cause of increased propensity to diabetes. What is wrong with someone using language correctly. Surely UKIP is not arguing for a dumbing down of the English language because Sun readers only know 600 of the 100,000 or so English words. I get really annoyed when people call me posh or a snob because I choose to use technically correct words in my speech. It is the inverted snobbery of those who can't be bothered to read a dictionary or thesaurus, something I do regularly if I am not sure of a word or someone has used it in an unusual sense or even when my teenage daughter asks what certain words mean. People who read this forum regularly know that I am critical of people who argue without the use of punctuation, proper sentence construction or with spelling mistakes that cannot be attributed to the occasional typo, something we are all guilty of.

The furore, whipped up by the local press no doubt, is artificial. Norfolk does have a more stable population than much of England because of the lack of industrialisation. People, until the last 20 or 30 years, were more likely to migrate outwards to big cities than inwards in search of non-existent jobs. This meant that large numbers of small communities had no fresh blood and the people who remained were therefore 'inbred' in the technical sense. This happened elsewhere in the British Isles.

It is only an insult to people to call them inbred when it is meant to indicate a mental slowness. The people who use 'inbred' as an insult probably also call people 'spastics'. The doctor was not setting out to insult people therefore he should not apologise; he was trying to make a reasoned medical statement. He didn't suggest that the whole of Norfolk was inbred; the diabetes figures are in the hundreds. It was that group of people he thought had a problem. The press are to blame for misinterpreting and misquoting.

The point is that inbreeding leads to an increase in certain medical conditions. If people do not acknowledge the relatively good science of such a statement then illnesses will not be dealt with. I don't understand the problem here. In this country there are inbred people. There appear to be a disproportionate number in Norfolk. So what? There are more red headed Celts. We might not want to eliminate red headed people, but we might want a cure for diabetes.

If you were a GP and someone turned up with a hereditary illness would you tell them the truth or, because of political correctness, would you lie? If you would lie, and some posters imply that telling the truth is somehow wrong, then you would not have been able to eliminate Huntingdon's Chorea from the population. If your patient had an illness that was linked to inbreeding would you lie or tell the truth? The patient could then decide to marry someone outside of a close circle to reduce risk. That seems sensible to me.

My Celtic grandfather died of the now curable illness of pylo nephritis, he may also have had anomalous kidneys. My brother has anomalous kidneys and had a similar inflammation. My daughter is now cured of pylo nephritis and has anomalous kidneys. It appears to be a hereditary condition; it would be nice to prevent future generations having the same problem, but it won't happen if language puritans won't allow scientific discussion.

My mother's cousin had a rare hereditary condition. He married a woman with the same condition. They didn't realise that they were genetically as close as they were. Their son died at the age of 14 as a result of a defect caused by their intermarrying. Those of you arguing against a doctor using correct medical terminology would consign many more people to an early grave.

If you read some of the research into diabetes amongst native Americans you will note the Pima Indians, a small tribe, are over 90% susceptible to the condition. Ideally the tribe should not intermarry but should breed themselves out of existence in order to protect their children.

How on earth are we supposed to be politically incorrect if we won't allow discussion of medical conditions?

Do you all remember the fuss over paedophiles arising a few years ago? A consultant paediatrician was violently attacked.

As Hereward says she was saying that she meant something different to what was understood by the lynch mob.

If people have the benefit of a good education and can use language correctly we should be delighted. I'm the son of a Coventry car worker. I passed my 11+ and went to a grammar school. This enabled me to get a couple of degrees and be commissioned into the RAF. Surely people should be happy that the education system allowed me to progress, but no, the likes of Hereward were the same guys who used to attack the grammar school boys on the way home from school. No doubt, because I can use a few Latin aphorisms in my speech he would call me pompous and undiplomatic if I had to explain to people who didn't know what I meant even though I had only been using my professional argot.

I really do worry that people on this forum don't see the issue here.

BASILDON BOY

Cause we can score some political points off Labour? If it was a tory politician who made these remarks we would no doubt see Nigeal and his weenie tank parked outside their office - he would buy up every billboard space in the constituency and hold a mass protest! UKIP main site would be filled with press releases for the next 6 months attacking that tory politician.

...oh I forgot the guy that said this was a Labour MP - we leave those alone - otherwise people would think we are a proper political party and not a conservative pressure group!

andypandy

As Aardvark suggests, this is a largely knee-jerk reaction with hands fumbling for those freephone numbers oft advertsised on television for someone to claim compensation for an alledged injury, though in this case, to an assumed intellectual insult as the result of intra-generational genetic conversion.

And all this started because? A local MP making a comment on the frequency of a particular illness in a given area likely to be due to (in)breeding within a relatively small (statistically) number of the population over a period a several generations. And someone thinks this is insulting?

**** happens.