There will be two very sad boys next summer at their mother’s 50th birthday…for she will not be there. She was murdered three years ago. When she was their age she wanted to be a librarian…so she could read books all day. But her life changed dramatically in 1969 when at the age of 12 she wrote to the Uppsala MP Birgitta Dahl…chair of Olof Palme’s Vietnam Committee…telling her of the Vietnam War Display she was planning for her Local School.

Her sons’ interests might have been better served if Birgitta Dahl had advised their mother to work hard, play hard…and take to heart John Keats’ Ode on Indolence. Had Anna Lindh received and heeded this advice her grandchildren might be celebrating Farmor’s 80th birthday on 19th June 2037 by which time she would have become a Local Hero idolised by several generations of local children who had loved her and been loved by her.

At the first Radical Consultation five years ago I convened the Work and Human Fulfilment Workshop. In the first session we recorded each key point made in the course of the discussion. After two hours the number of key points had reached one hundred so we adjourned for lunch. After lunch a rating of 1 (irrelevant) to 5 (crucial) was attributed to them. Our workshop’s presentation to the Full Plenary Session is in the Conference Proceedings.

On the issue of Vocation and Toil we took the view that one of the aims of society should be to liberate people from toil. But the purpose of doing so was not to turn them into Leisure Consumers but to direct their attention towards Good Work…by which we meant work that was socially useful, ecologically acceptable and humanly fulfilling.

In our summary of the discussion we remarked that Schooling was indoctrinating young people with the Career Mentality rather than instilling in them the idea of Good Work; that School Career Fairs were dominated by Big Business…Price Waterhouse instead of Purton Farm…and that Big Problems were perceived as requiring Global Organisations…which is where all the really Big Jobs were to be found. We believed this was wrong.

Instead we suggested the encouragement of the idea that a myriad of little local personal responses might be a better approach; that Food Work should be an integral part of everyone’s Annual Round and that work needed to become Personal and Proximate...rather than Impersonal and serving Distant Needs. We recommended more Own Work and wider circulation of books like Future Work and Future Wealth by James Robertson.

I do not intend to speculate about Anna Lindh’s killers. I have no Insider Knowledge, no Deep Throat to point me in the right direction and no Investigative Resources to call upon. But it is quite wrong to dismiss people as Assassination Freaks…arguing the improbable complexity of any Conspiracy Theory…just because they believe there was a reason for getting rid of Anna Lindh. I accept the argument. But the Random Lone Assassin Scenario shares this complexity. On the face of it both explanations are wildly improbable. Yet one of them is correct.

My own position is that the more you weigh the improbabilities the more implausible suicides…Petra and David Kelly…become and the more a pattern seems to be emerging where turbulent priests whatever their persuasion are removed by Lone Assassins and Violent Accidental Death…John Lennon, Princess Diana, Olof Palme.

Killing the killers is no longer necessary…Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan…it is enough to effect the assassin’s escape and delay his capture until the Men In White Coats get to work to wipe clean the mental slate…or neuro-linguistically cover up previous traces. At John Grinder’s NLP and Hypnosis seminar in Provincetown in 1982 he mentioned sitting in on Therapy Sessions and counting the number of times therapists unwittingly implanted NLP triggers…and then removed them a little while later. Then you must avoid cross-examination and control the enquiry.

And just how difficult is it to plant a sleeper at a hospital or gain access to the patient during the chaos of an emergency? If the blood sample from Princess Diana’s chauffeur can be replaced…and this appears increasingly likely…then how improbable is it that blood for transfusions can be poisoned and switched? Hospitals are Dangerous Places at the best of time…and security is never at the top of their agenda. Even in Sweden the precaution of a Castro Strategy would seem now to make sense. Why make it possible to predict the destination hospital for high ARIs?