Boy George, Malcolm McLaren and the dangers of asbestos

As part of its Eighties Season BBC Two recently showed the excellent Worried About The Boy, a drama about Boy George's life before Culture Club. It available on the BBC iplayer until Sunday and well worth watching - even George likes it!  Douglas Booth  who plays George is perfect in the role.

I also enjoyed Mark Gatiss's portrayal of Malcolm McLaren who died recently. Shortly after his death last month I came across an article by Jeremy Laurance in the Indie which cast light on McLaren's death.

But the image I can't get out of my mind is of the young McLaren, aged twenty-something, full of flair and ambition, smashing through the ceiling of the Sex boutique in the Kings Road he was setting up with Vivienne Westwood. He wanted to create the impression a bomb had hit it. Instead, he released a bomb that hit him.


Life is fragile, we know. You can step off the pavement and be wiped out in a second. A single mistake is all it takes. But this was a case of stepping off a cliff a million miles high – and taking 40 years to hit bottom.

From the moment he swung the sledgehammer, McLaren was doomed. His partner, Young Kim, said it was exposure to asbestos dust in the ceiling of the shop that caused the mesothelioma, cancer of the lining of the lung, that ultimately killed him. More than nine out of 10 cases of mesothelioma are caused by asbestos, so Kim is probably right. It is not like smoking, which takes years of cumulative exposure to do the damage. Even a few lungfuls of asbestos can be fatal. Kim said the shop was "the only place Malcolm ever really spent any serious length of time".

To understand the scale of mesothelioma lets compare it with murder. The number of homicides (murders and manslaughters and infanticides) in England and Wales in 2008/9 was 648 yet in 2008 killed over three times as many - 2,154 deaths. But whilst our newspapers are full of the dangers of crime and the risks we face of being murdered they are silent on mesothelioma and other causes of death that can largely be traced back to the workforce.  As Laurance observes

Deaths from mesothelioma have been rising for decades and are only now peaking – a legacy of our dependence on asbestos 30 years ago. The last press conference I attended on the subject was in 2003. It was, as I reported at the time, a sad affair. There were more experts on the panel – five – than journalists in the audience (three, including me).

The week's News - Prison closing, Judge declares the war on drugs futile and organised crime offloads dollars

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The Scottish Prison Service has announced they will be closing Noranside prison over the Christmas period. Unfortunately the closure is only for a week but it is a start. Hopefully in the not to distant future we will be closing prisons for good and finding more civilised ways for resolving conflicts and avoiding harm.

Boy George has had his attempt to appear in Celebrity Big Brother blocked by his Probation Officer on the basis that his appearance would undermine confidence in the judicial service if he wins. This rather silly decision is in line with emerging culture in probation that is so risk averse that the standard answer to all requests from those subject to probation supervision is ‘the computer says no’. The increasingly reactionary Harry Fletcher of NAPO has told the Sun that the problem is that if George was in the BB house he couldn’t report to his local probation office regularly. The poor Probation staff would then clearly have no idea where he is! Good luck to George on getting this overturned.

Pablo the Drug Mule Dog now has his own page on facebook. From reading the comments not a great success.

The Daily Telegraph had a good article looking at how police fiddle crime figures.

Eric Allison has written an interesting article on the benefits of bank accounts for ex-prisoners. It is based on this research from Liverpool John Moores University.

Whilst the Home Office continue to celebrate their failed drug strategy with a party to celebrate the one millionth piss test (it was negative) a Judge in Canada has let slip that the Emperor has no clothes. Justice Elliot Allen was asked by a federal prosecutor to jail a man for growing weed. He responded "What's your basis for saying that?” before he pointed out: " People have been going to jail for drug offences for – for a couple of generations now and the drug – the drug plague is worse than it ever was." Why should he continue doing something that clearly did not work? "Isn't that a form of insanity?" he asked. The Appeal Court have given Justice Allen a slap and reminded him that his duty is to enforce the law even if it is insane, doesn’t work, increases drug use and helps funds organised crime.

Meanwhile the Daily Mail warns that 'Heroin and crack dealers are enrolling at British universities to secure thousands of pounds of cheap loans and low priced accommodation’. The evidence for this is underwhelming. They point out that students are entitled to up to £4,950 a year and 72 per cent take up their entitlement to loans. Police operations, the Daily Mail inform us, have revealed three cases where suspected drug dealers were students. Sounds like a good reason to put up university fees, jail Sociology Lecturers and abolish student financial support. Well we must protect our young.

Lastly bad news for the United States economy. After decades of drug dealers helping fund the American Government’s deficit by holding their billions of dollars of drug war profits in $100 notes organised crime is modernising and in an attempt to cut down on storage they are converting their assets into E500 notes. Any bets on the Americans responding by issuing a $1,000 dollar note?



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