Jamie Cann MP Dies Suddenly !

Ipswich Member of Parliament Jamie Cann died today October 15th 2001. The former teacher had been admitted to the Ipswich Hospital for tests on October 5th and was rushed to Addenbroke's liver unit the following day.

ADIEU

Newspaper reports that the 55 year old MP had a 'life threatening,' condition had an ominous air of finality and I just knew when I heard that he was going to die.   I suspect at least advanced alcohol related Cirrhosis or primary liver cancer must have been diagnosed, perhaps complicated by viral hepatides of one sort or another.   Little else could have remained undetected to within a fortnight of death under any kind of circumstance and it is known that the man was awfully fond of Alcohol having been embarrassingly banned for drink driving a few years ago after having championed the anti drink driving lobby.  This is particularly interesting for me personally in view of one or two other remarks I have made about a virtually identical event, following the fact of having made such a diagnosis in One's family at about the time I became acquainted with the deceased MP:  I was cheated of the credit for this by my Mother's family who were almost certainly guilty of Manslaughter in the process,  which has obviously contributed to this particular sad happening,  as well as many others.  All of which has a more than vague relevance to the question of evaluating success or failure in peoples' lives and careers,  which is all described in some detail in my CV life history.

Anyhow for those readers who didn't know him I have to say that the ghastly ignorance revealed by him having allowed himself to overlook his condition whilst entirely failing to justify his interest in seeing justice done over high profile medical investigations and a very good deal else is worth dwelling on:  if only for the simple reason of it being an event which justifies the belief that anyone can make it to the top and that we should be taking a much more down to earth view of our leaders and role models.

I'd like to say how much he'd be missed but insofar as I'd known him and he'd been my representative I have difficulty in arriving at a benign interpretation of events that accompanied his elevation and have unfortunately found it necessary to have found myself repeating consistently for at least several years now (since the time he was elected in fact) that Mr and Mrs Cann were,  if not Charlatans,  that in particular they certainly had a serious problem in that their professed interest in seeing that public concern over the performance of the Staff at St Clements hospital be allayed and that justice be done;  this was a scandal of self seeking insofar as they weren't really sufficiently well informed on the subject of 'medicine' were seeking to pretend they weren't duty bound to say something more constructive about legal problems which had evolved for one reason and another,  and did nothing except queue up for free publicity from the local Newspaper whilst apparently binning or feigning to misunderstand letters from this distressed constituent,  which has to be viewed as shabby.  I suppose I will miss him in that there is always the possibility that things might only get worse for myself personally with the rise of new Statesmen with whom I am not personally acquainted and who have no interest in even pretending to be helpful with political problems great and small.  Even if they don't give me any reason to suspect they have lied and neglected to do as they should and I may regret not having the opportunity to repay him any of the drinks he bought me:  the last one was perhaps a decade ago and I can only say that if he had put more faith in me and less in his Wife he might still be alive and can only marvel at the fates having conspired to deprive him of the opportunity to benefit from an acquired knowledge and experience of Liver complaints amongst other things.  The real problem I had with him was that my association with him and the Labour Party despite the fact that it did not exist by 1983,  was the reason I was told I was going to be denied the right to a defence against criminal charges in 1984.

I was quite heavily involved with his career for a couple of years in the early eighties (insofar as his capture of the Labour nomination was all that had happened of note in that time) and One never really likes to hear of the death of anyone who has been a friend even if they have all too apparently failed to meet ones' hopes and expectations and seem to have perpetrated a dirty double cross once elected and started courting more politically correct 'friends'.  I suppose in some ways I shouldn't go on about it as it has cost him his life and the ultimate humiliation of his public reputation as a Leader:  I even knew the head of the Liver unit he was carted off to.  He really should have listened when I assured him that advice so obviously questionably motivated and of such poor quality (especially in the field of medicine) was simply a menace to public health.  See my article (The Jason Mitchell Affair, Health Service Resources) and others.

When I met him I was a Sixth former who had always attracted compliments for politeness and humility who needed only a modest amount of investment in his future to back up the academic Scholarship he had won and should have had a bright future if a few resources had been found,  most particularly the public housing that the Labour Party were supposedly administering.  When he died I had no learned or interesting company,  only that of countless dropouts and mental patients whose interests he had claimed to champion whilst only foisting them on the naive and indulging in many a 'volte face' as far as social policy goes.  In many ways he had encouraged a hostile and combative attitude towards authority in the shape of the Thatcher regime,  which once it had been officially exchanged for Bliar's 'New Labour' had arguably contributed toward the demise of many fortunes and careers.  Once he got elected I won't say I heard only that he was enjoying the high life and making more of the influential friends he really wanted to meet (did anyone see the burnt out castle in the Papers of the Tory Grandee whose 'friend' he had become):  but I have to reiterate that my status is now in most respects less than many murderers, terrorists, asylum seekers and paedophiles and that this cannot be regarded as any sort of success.  When he won the nomination to run for the seat in the Labour interest which effectively handed him the position of MP for the Borough,  I was soon afterwards refused entry to a sixth form college ;  when he captured the seat in 1993 I was soon afterwards refused admission to the local College of higher and further education thereby terminating any hope I might have had of acquiring some worthwhile qualifications.  I always knew he wasn't quite up to various aspects of the serious role he had cut himself out for but he had once seemed to want to honestly stand up for the dispossessed and unprivileged to a certain extent and it wasn't a popular hobby in the early eighties I can tell you.  When by hook and crook I had hauled myself off the streets I did offer to work for him insofar as I wasn't willing to make the contribution from my own goodwill that he and the Party wanted for less than a prestigious sinecure as a part time personal adviser knowing he couldn't easily keep sufficient tabs on what was happening on the streets to impress the party faithful and that he lacked essential knowledge of many aspects of History and Current Affairs for someone whose intention was to govern:  suffice it to say that he (and his working class bandwagon) cost me an awful lot of good invites for little or nothing of any value or usefulness.

His main rival for the position once the incumbent was obviously going to be replaced had been a local man, Councillor Donald Edwards; he and Jamie made an interesting contrast insofar as Don was an Orphan with a big heart who remains widely admired for his honesty and simple way with folks despite a perhaps unfortunate habit of sounding off aggressively about social injustice ;  whilst Jamie was a quick talking opportunist whose guile as I say rather outstripped his intellect.  The fact remains that given that I was as poor as anyone in Town,  those petty Labour Grandees whose apparently insincere self righteousness is the subject of so many empty assertions should have been translated into the official decision that my legal rights had been violated and that I was denied legal rights whilst undergoing a continual assault.  Economic, social and geographical circumstance had conspired to make me at least witness to real happenings,  if not significant among unbelieving participants in the demise of a whole era of government and the ousting of the Labour party for well in excess of a decade as it turned out.  Suffice it to say that as far as local news is concerned that the Town would obviously be much better off if Don Edwards had been the MP this last ten years as he still manages to play the role of the statesmanlike man of the people about Town and does it well :  even if he lacked a massive intellect at least he is at least glibly honest in many respects and would probably have provided more continuity and consistency in the political process such as it is.

I cannot therefore, conceal some satisfaction for whatever reason, at almost any chain of events that puts Rosemary Cann out of a Job as the MP's Secretary, replaces the Office holder himself and firmly poses the assertion that Mr and Mrs Cann were if not entirely unscrupulous and self serving,  rather more in the way of bungling wannabees than the kind of responsible,  intelligent,  mature and capable citizens one would hope to find in such an overwhelmingly important Office.  I would personally draw attention in this respect to the fact of the party machine and the nature of the publicity game in such dangerous waters as power politics,  with regard to its demand for stereotypic images of people that can readily be understood:  insofar as he had portrayed himself rather like a traditional 'cloth cap MP' and had been a Teacher of woodworking skills.

I suppose Jamie's greatest achievement has to be his involvement with the inception of the building of Crown Pools a highly visible building in central Ipswich and a modest Icon to diminishing corporate power :  though as to what extent someone else might have done so if he had not decided to move to Suffolk remains debatable.  He did put quite a lot of energy into some local affairs though in latter years of course he had put on weight and really was beginning to look unwell which may have been why determined attempts had been made to unseat him in the recent past.  In contrast to some articles penned by the East Anglian Daily Times I reiterate that he was not a local man but an immigrant from Yorkshire who ousted a popular local man by talking faster and if anything more unscrupulously.  I perhaps once saw his Wife Rosemary Cann going to any pains like canvassing supporters in bad weather (I won't say she never has) and keeping sparsely attended meetings of interest groups going and that sort of thing and was always rather surprised at the sort of nepotism which made her into his PA,  feeling it was inadequate,  unambitious and unreasonable if not downright pathetic and that this made the business of government too much like pillow talk from a love nest :  though of course I hadn't seen or heard quite that much of what was going on and in many ways should reserve any definitive judgement.

His immediate legacy to the people of Ipswich is a spiralling rate of Alcohol fuelled violent crime and his involvement with the recovery of the Ipswich Witches Speedway team threatened with bankruptcy a few years ago was not the sort of thing of much immediate interest to the inhabitants of the dismal Council Estates that he took advantage of insofar as such hobbies are only for those with a fair bit of spare cash.  I did agree with his stand against liberalisation of the Local Government Acts and in no uncertain terms :  unconditional toleration of the opinions of others is of course essential and ought to be a value held as sacrosanct by many more people than it is.  I don't have children myself but was sure he did the right thing in saying that the large majority of people don't want their children taught that same sex relationships are natural in that the world is difficult enough to understand as it is, and the line has to be drawn somewhere between toleration and encouragement.

I reiterate that I am not at all amused at the meaningless uninformed flattery that has constituted the local Rag's coverage of this event and many associated ills.  It's all very well being nice about peoples' shortcomings, and of course once they are dead it is expected and rightly so ;  but this isn't a case of for example, some aged and much loved sweetshop owner having expired to the distress of numerous schoolchildren.  This was a man who claimed to have some inspiration into political leadership,  had taken it upon himself for good or ill to meddle with the affairs of many thousands of individuals and said far too many completely different things really,  as far as I am concerned to have endeared himself as a man of the people in the manner being depicted.  I would rather have described him as an able schemer and political opportunist whose ability wasn't the equal of his ambition.  If ever he had wrote to the Constabulary about certain difficulties of mine as he once claimed,  they ignored him :  it ought also to be borne in mind that Ipswich does have something of a problem with violent crime that it didn't ten or twenty years ago and this is obviously a great deal to do with e.g. riding the tide of disorder among a West Indian community well macerated in (out of date) marxist rabble rousing.  The Town's image hasn't been helped by the apparent expectation that all one has to do to make an impact on local politics is to kiss a few babies and make concerned comments about odd incidents in front of the single local Newspaper's Editor without actually doing anything serious about any important issue.  I refer to recent attempts to get Ipswich City status and portray it as a cosmopolitan place without any real attempt to define how it should be made so.  This at a time when the followers of Ipswich Town Football Club are supposedly happy describing themselves as 'Tractor Boys,'  which tends to reflect the patronising attitude of well to do dwellers in the countryside around Ipswich toward the inhabitants of the vast sprawling Council estates in it.  As a matter of interest at the time of writing only one of the soccer team is a local and most probably couldn't tell the difference between a Tractor and a Milkfloat.

Far from being the avuncular figure invented by the Ipswich Evening Star Jamie Cann was the only MP from any party (as far as I know) to have faced a reselection battle from within his own,  and is therefore much more likely to qualify as the most detested MP in the nation :  which is quite a serious comment on the nature of the man,  as one of a group who are detested as widely as they are along with their democratic rhetoric as the widespread disinterest (including my own) in the last,  and the next General Election amply demonstrates.

The By-Election which followed this event was a curious affair by any standards :  the Labour Party were glad enough to have the affair rubber stamped via the good offices of Mrs Pickover I believe (the Wife of the Editor of the Ipswich Evening Star), whom I strongly suspect was a good friend of Mrs Cann and was probably equally glad of the convenient red herring of a hugely significant Uefa Cup tie taking place on polling day.  Anyhow whatever the truth about this particular hypothesis or the reasons for it,  the local Papers made nothing whatever out of this ghoulish incompetence and the Labour Party were allowed to ride their national majority in the opinion polls without hardly so much as a single critical mention of the fact that this was an appalling performance from which there was going to be a good deal of damaging fallout,  even given the fact that the Pickovers were too heavily mixed up with 'New Labour' to be really honest about what had taken place.

My onetime friend Mr John Ramirez stood for the legalise Cannabis campaign I noticed and obviously,  a great deal more could have been made out of this and other health related issues.  Whilst I should perhaps hesitate to seek to offer advice as he carries some serious scarring from a Motorbike bike accident for which I have to bear some small measure of blame.  I hope he bears it in mind for the future that not all of Ipswich lies within the parliamentary Constituency and that the first step in representing a Borough is knowing where it actually is.  Having spoken to him for the first time in over a decade recently,  he was carted off to a marriage with a large (female) music Teacher shortly after the bike smash ;  I was appalled and fascinated to hear that his Father had died cruelly having been mashed by two or more vehicles on one of our dark country roads some few years ago now. . Fascinated because of some of the remarks I have made about so called official investigations into the Chinook crash of June '94 (see homepage) ;  any posited connection unfortunately remains mere conjecture but serves as another chilling reminder of how fleeting and fragile our lives are.  I was extremely sorry to hear of this event :  The Ramirez family had been good to me when I was thoroughly destitute and I cannot think of anyone offhand that I would have put further down the list for a visit from the old man with the scythe.

For an interesting perpsective on the kind of flattering charlatans patronised by Bliar's government click