Campaign Music: Ev’ry Valley Shall Be Exalted
George Friedrich Händel
"Messiah" - John Tiranno
Listen and read this
One Click Group Director Jane Bryant writes:
Summary
Saunders Solicitors LLP have confirmed to One Click that we have reached our target of £10,250 set by the Legal Services Commission as their requested contribution to attempt to challenge the appalling and much derided CFS/ME NICE Guidelines in the High Court.
Many thanks are due to every person and every organisation around the world that has honoured their commitment and made their pledge for this historic case that is set to make legal history and precedent in more ways than one.
Introduction
How can one possibly encapsulate the work, the commitment, the honour and the sheer integrity of so many people from the four corners of the earth in the space of four months since One Click launched the CFS/ME NICE Guidelines Judicial Review in September 2007? The sheer grit? The determination? The fair dealing?
The few short words that I pen to you today at the close of the One Click Legal Appeal to challenge the appalling CFS/ME NICE Guidelines in the High Court could never do proper justice to what we have all together achieved.
When Saunders announced that we had reached our financial target I had to step back. Step back, worn out. Step back to review what this means for all of those who have contributed from around the world. In particular I needed to step back to see what this means for my son Ben, your young One Click Group Technical Director.
Politically and medically consigned to the ME/CFS label human scrap heap since the age of ten subsequent to the viral illness that nearly cost him his life, for Ben, now age seventeen, the CFS/ME NICE Guidelines were the last and final straw.
Self-forged through the tender-age cauldron of ill health adversity and political manipulation of due process, Ben knew that if the psychiatric abuse of patients suffering from the ME/CFS neurological illness as defined by the World Health Organisation under ICD-10 G93.3 was permitted to go on unchallenged with the psychiatric lobby being given millions upon millions of pounds sterling by the UK government to further their atrocious and entirely unscientific experiments on the vulnerable and the sick, what had been done to him would continue to be done to others, year on relentless year.
This is what is behind this case. It is important we all feel, to put the flesh on the bones of this case and its hurting pain-ridden flesh and blood child pinnacle who has elected to stick his young head above the establishment parapet to benefit you all.
Background
When The One Click Group website and its health advocacy activities were launched and built by Ben in 2004, its roots began in the field of ME/CFS advocacy with the overarching future objective of covering the fascinating and much documented subject of patients in conflict.
One Click became a raw news hub that told the world the evidenced truth of political and medical malfeasance. To the extent that the raw information news provided by One Click was subsequently manipulated by the terrestrial media a few days thereafter, consistently. Talk about time lag.
As the pressure group grew we began to cover a range of subjects, all interlinked and radiating out from our ME/CFS hub such as: Lyme Disease Borreliosis, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, the secrecy of the UK Family Courts, vaccine damage, medical and political corruption, pharmaceutical industry activities and the exposure of self-selected UK charities malfeasance. See the One Click Bio for further information. One Click developed to not only break the news, but to make it too.
Opinion Formers from all around the world began to receive the One Click News Alerts directly to their inboxes including hundreds of British Members of Parliament.
These people's *representatives* now have absolutely no excuse for feigning any semblance of ignorance over what is happening and being done to ME/CFS labelled patients. It is rapidly becoming impossible for these men and women so subscribed to One Click to do a 'not us guv' sliding away from their elected by us responsibility. They and their assistants receive the One Click material most days of the week as do thousands of equally well placed organisations and individuals right around the globe, including the lagging behind, promoter of pharmaceutical industry revenue vested interests terrestrial media.
Those who have tried so hard to destabilise the One Click Judicial Review - some associated with the psychiatric lobby by default and deed and others to protect their vested interests that frankly now amount to the same thing - would do well to remember this at this critical One Click NICE Judicial Review time.
Case Funding - The Legal Services Commission
Just because we have made our thousands upon thousand of pounds contribution for this case as targeted and requested by the Legal Services Commission does not axiomatically mean that they will fulfil their legal part of this bargain, proposed by them.
The LSC has been very good to us indeed in that it has provided the funds for One Click (your Ben) to appoint our barrister, Kate Marcus from Doughty Street Chambers and to lodge formal application with the High Court for Judicial Review of the CFS/ME NICE Guidelines on 21 November 2007. See Press Release, Health Advocacy Pressure Group Launches NICE High Court Action Today.
Which brings us most appropriately on to the pledgers - the people whose goodwill and support is making all this possible today.
The Pledgers
It has taken the 24/7 round the clock grinding hard work of four solid months, day after day and often night after night too, to raise the requested Legal Services Commission funds of £10,250 as our contribution to challenge the appalling CFS/ME NICE Guidelines by Judicial Review in the High Court.
This has been no Elton John White Tie and Diamond Tiara Ball with celebrities invited to attend and charity donate, only on the understanding that the resulting paparazzi will further their publicity seeking careers, their fat bank accounts and those of the designer labels that they sport on their groomed and surgically enhanced torsos at vast expense. Peace, Elton. All fundraising activities have their place. We seek merely to illustrate vivid contrast.
This case has been about the poor, the ill and infirm, the dispossessed, the ruined, the dying and the organisations, academics and doctors that support them banding together from around the world to try to legally and democratically overturn medical and political injustice.
As we have said on One Click many times, we will not publish the names of the pledgers for many reasons. This is the right thing to do, particularly for those good doctors and academics who have become so honourably involved in this campaign to benefit patients.
if I were to write down the page the shape of all the extraordinary people events that have transpired during the One Click NICE campaign, it would take me all day and be too long for publication on the Home Page of the website. This material would be more appropriately placed in a book and given time, this will most certainly happen.
It is a testament to the power of this campaign and all the hard work involved that it is only one of the major pledgers that has failed to honour their pledge commitment. Just one major pledger alone has failed us. Please note that these major pledgers who can be counted on the fingers of less one hand are not in a position to donate any more funds. These people and organisations are not rich. Far from it. These so few just have more disposable income at their command than you and I. And bearing in mind the penury that that is the lot of the vast majority of ME/CFS labelled patients, these are not difficult sums to conjure with.
The One Click NICE campaign would like to convey particular tribute to a Mother and her very many-years-ill ME/CFS labelled son. Our thanks to this family. Respect. The very kind emails of support that you sent and the funds that you have provided helped our community enormously.
We would also like to convey particular thanks to a retired pensioner, not directly connected with ME/CFS but who has, with the assistance of the evidence base medical/political education provided by One Click, developed his acute civil liberties conscience to the full. Thank you for putting up with the 'will we do it' wobbles; for metaphorically drying the tears; for being so pragmatic and above all for being so very kind.
The engine (the vast majority) of the One Click NICE campaign has consisted of those donating £10, £12 or £20 and a little bit more sometimes. The sum that so many struggle to afford. One little boy pledged $5.00 of his pocket money from the United States. An entire UK church congregation raised funds for the One Click NICE Judicial Review. The litany of good deeds resonates around the world to collective enormous credit.
Independent Action
What has been so great about this campaign is the way that people from all over the world have picked up the One Click Judicial Review baton and run with it entirely independently because this initiative has meant so much to them. Without consulting One Click at all, they have taken the information provided by this campaign and blasted it to the four corners of the earth.
The man responsible for putting the Australian bush-telegraph on to red support alert is to be very much commended and thanked by you all forever. As is the work of the woman who - despite selected of the ‘larger’ minuscule membership ME/CFS charities' pretence to be completely against the NICE Guidelines, whilst in practice working to subvert and entirely destroy the One Click Judicial Review - independently and without any prompting from One Click, decided that these charity members should be given the right to obtain the knowledge as to what was going down over this legal action and to be allowed to make up their own minds and make any decisions for themselves.
What this campaign has so starkly illustrated is that it is entirely possible for patients and their extensive friends around the world to band together and fight back to correct injustice. The days of the Expert Patient and their associates making their voices formally and legally felt have now arrived at last thanks to you all.
Ben has set up for you all something he calls the Pledgers List. Similar in construct but set to be far more personal and detailed in content than the One Click News Alerts that are delivered to the inboxes of thousands of opinion formers around the world, often on a daily basis, the Pledgers List will in the future try to provide you, the pledgers, with the inside track of this court case. You have all together so honourably earned this right.
Conclusion
Many have written and asked for a schedule indication of next legal steps with our case. Remember that I have written to you constantly quoting the words of Sir Winston Churchill (British politician 1874 -1965) who said, ‘The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time’. The next link in our destiny chain is the response by the Legal Services Commission (LSC) to our pain-soaked thousands of pounds contribution to this case.
What the LSC has given, it can take away. This would obviously be a catastrophic democratic failure and injustice. As one of the most globally influential international health advocates wrote to One Click: "In some ways this whole exercise seems so reasonable and 'straightforward'. But the idea of having to raise so much money to challenge the government makes me feel totally sick because it conflicts so fundamentally with the idea of political democracy."
So true.
I close my words for you today simply worn out by our mutual endeavour. Hang on tight to that destiny chain my dear friends. Our work has just begun.
Thank you. Thank you all. Everybody. From around the world.
Jane Bryant
Director
The One Click Group
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