tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7641887211807686532024-03-06T02:10:48.146+00:00Heresy CornerCountering complacency, received opinions and incoherent thoughtHeresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.comBlogger1354125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-6515332713993441802014-08-20T13:56:00.001+01:002017-08-22T07:56:47.095+01:00The Jihadist<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br></div>(</span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">With apologies to Rupert Brooke</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">)</span></div><div><br></div><div>If I should die, think only this of me</div><div>That there's some corner of a foreign field</div><div>That is forever ISIS. There shall be</div><div>In oil-rich earth a thicker dust concealed</div><div>A dust whom England bore, taught, made aware</div><div>Gave, once, her music to hate, her ways bemoan,</div><div>A body of England's, breathing English air,</div><div>Bored by the telly, hooked on a mobile phone.</div><div><br></div><div>And think, this heart, all evil given sway</div><div>A holy warrior on beheading bent,</div><div>Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given,</div><div>Of Western crimes, and Islam's coming day,</div><div>And hatred, learnt online, and discontent,</div><div>And doe-eyed houris waiting me in heaven</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-9822710519250097112013-12-03T18:04:00.002+00:002013-12-03T18:28:28.800+00:00"Forced Caesarian": the Mother's story, and the Judge'sThis is about the superficially shocking story, brought to the world by Christopher Booker of the <i>Sunday Telegraph</i>, of the Italian woman subjected to a forced Caesarian section by order of a secret court, who then had the child put up for adoption despite making a good recovery. Working closely with campaigning family lawyer Brandan Fleming and maverick MP John Hemming, Booker told such a horrifying story that Shami Chakrabarti was moved to comment that it sounded like "dystopian science fiction unworthy of a democracy like ours."<br />
<br />
The following, from a follow-up Mail article, is vintage Booker:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
Throughout all my years reporting on scores of chilling examples of what social workers are allowed to do behind the closed doors of our secret family courts, the case reported yesterday... is not just the most disturbing of all. It also illustrates how far our ‘child protection’ system has now gone horrendously off the rails. The facts are so shocking they beggar belief.</blockquote><br />
But are they? <br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
As a result of the storm of publicity, the courts have now released the text of the <a href="http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/Misc/2013/20.html" target="_blank">initial pre-adoption placement ruling by Judge Newton at Chelmsford County Court</a>, which originally had gone unreported as it raised no major legal issues. As yet, the other significant ruling, by the Court of Protection on the "forced" Caesarian that gave the story its gothic appeal to headline writers, has not been released though there are plans to do so. <br />
<br />
The adoption judgement clears up some points, especially concerning the seriousness of the woman's underlying medical condition, while dispelling the wilder suspicions occasioned by Booker's purple prose. It becomes clear, for example, that the court looked in some detail into the woman's family circumstances before concluding (though not with much supporting evidence) that no-one in the extended family was able to care for the child. It also sheds some light on what had been the mystery of the child's father. He turns out to be a Senegalese national who apparently offered to take care of the child. The judge decided that this was a "non-starter", however, partly it seems because of his unclear immigration status.<br />
<br />
The ruling contains some rather puzzling elements. There is severe criticism of doctors who approved her transfer to Italy, on the grounds that the judge thought she didn't appear mentally competent, yet an acknowledgement that soon after her return to her home country the woman's condition improved markedly. The judge appears to accept that the mother has made a good recovery, that her condition is manageable so long as she continues to take her medication, and that she has strong family support. Nevertheless, he decides in favour of adoption, partly it seems because the year needed for assessing the mother's capability would be too long. <br />
<br />
This aspect may well provide the focus for an appeal, which is now to be heard personally by the President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby - a judge who has a strong track record, both of encouraging greater openness in the family courts and of requiring higher evidential standards from social work teams requesting adoption and placement orders. In any case, it's difficult to read the judge's summary of the evidence before him as leading inevitably to the conclusion that the mother, with family support, was incapable of providing a reasonably stable environment for the child, at least in the forseeable future. On the face of it Judge Newton's assessment of the evidence would seem to fall short of that now required, following the important recent decision in <a href="http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2013/1146.html" target="_blank">Re B-S</a>, when a court wishes to deprive a parent of his or her familial rights under Article 8 of the European Convention. But we shall see.<br />
<br />
What has been lacking so far is the mother's own voice. It is of course against British law to name her, or to identify her in any way. Italian law is less strict, and her story has been told already in the Italian press, though without naming the child. The main account, based on an interview with the woman's lawyers, provides important context and some hitherto unavailable details, though with the caveat that it is is course told exclusively from her point of view. I therefore offer this redacted translation.<br />
<br />
<i><b>The whole truth about the London baby (and her "mad" mother)</b></i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>This is the story (with original documents) of A, the woman forced to undergo a Caesarian section in London and whose baby was taken by the state</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>She has not seen her baby daughter, who we will call Rose, for five months. The English social services, she says, have forbidden her from seeing the baby since then. They told her that she had already been adopted. The truth, however, is that in England, in the county of Essex, the first meetings have only just begun between the baby, now sixteen months old, and her prospective adoptive parents.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>Her name A and is 35 years old. The UK authorites considered her "mad" and was she subjected to a forced Caesarian section, while her baby was given to the custody of social services on the order of Chelmsford county court. Despite this, she has consistently expressed a desire to regain custody of her daughter and to return with her to Italy. A is not crazy; she suffers from bipolar disorder, an extremely variable depressive condition that manifests itself in an alternation of depressive and euphoric phases but which can be kept under control by medication.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>The woman... today lives in Chiusi where, having failed to become a Ryanair hostess (at the relevant time she was in England for a training course) she earns a living as a carer for an elderly couple. She returned to Italy towards the end of 2012, having become convinced the British authorities were deaf to her concerns and that she would have a better chance of winning her legal battle from Italy. Also living with her in Chiusi are her two older daughers, aged 11 and 4, who have different American fathers. Italian social services have placed them in the custody of her mother because of A's bipolar disorder. </i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>A is the victim of what Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, after the case exploded in the British press, called an "abuse of human rights". "It's like something from the Hitler regime", says her Italian lawyer, Stephano Oliva, upping the rhetorical ante. Oliva, along with his colleauge Luana Izzo has represented A since the beginning of 2013. He's equally scathing of the response of the Italian authorities: the foreign ministry, the London embassy and the consulate, all of whom were alerted by the lawyers back in May. "Only the Ministry of Justice has responded. They told us that they had no jurisdiction and told us to pursue legal action in the UK."</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>A has a complex personal history. "We were initially brought into the case in early 2013 after the aunt of her second daughter, who lives in Los Angeles and had already offered to take over custody of the two elder girls, alerted us to the existence of a third child," says Oliva. "With the consent of the American aunt, of the mother and of the grandmother we asked the Court of First Instance in Florence to seek the custody of the three children, including the baby that was in the care of British social services." A, who with her two ex-husbands had lived both in Italy and the United States, where she managed her partner's restaurant, was enthusiastic about the scheme. Her idea in fact was to go and live in Los Angeles, close to her three children and her American in-laws. The Florence court however decided that it had no jurisdiction over the third child, remitting the question to the British court. The British court rejected the request for custody because the baby had no blood tie with her American aunt.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In this tragic case, which reads like a movie script, Rose is in fact the daughter of a third father, a Senegalese immigrant resident in Italy. She was born in August 2012: A found herself in England for a few months to take a training course for potential Ryanair cabin crew at Stanstead Airport. At her hostel in July, when she was eight months pregnant, she had a panic attack probably caused by failing to take her medication. She was upset because she couldn't find the passports of her two children, who were in Italy with their grandmother. She called the police. The police, alarmed by her agitated state, telephoned her mother who informed them of her bipolar condition. A was sedated and woke up in a psychiatric hospital, effectively in a state of detention.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>She remembers saying, "But I'm fine, there's no need to take me to hospital," Oliva recalls. But the situation becase more tragic in August when A was taken to an operating theatre for a C-section ordered by the court. Notwithstanding this, she continued to protest, "Where are you taking me? I want to give birth in Italy." "Apart from anything else A speaks very good English, so it can't have been a problem of communication," observes the lawyer. Anyway. The child was born and in February 2013 was put up for adoption, despite the opposition of the mother (she appealed in June, without a final decision so far) and despite medical advice that mother and child should not be separated. There was also a bureaucratic mix-up: in court papers the child was given the surname of the mother's first husband, and not that of her actual father, a Senegalese national who has also offered to take care of Rose, a request rejected by the court. "It is an inconceivable decision," says Oliva, "beccause all the European directives guarantee the integrity of the nuclear family. The only exception is where there is abandonment, which is not the case here."</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>Following the birth A was moved to another hospital, still detained under the Mental Health Act, and was allowed to see her daughter once a week. In October 2012 she returned to Italy, partly to gain better legal support (the court-appointed lawyer who had represented her had failed even to give her notice of hearings). From then on until five months ago she was allowed to see her daughter on a daily basis.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>Two sets of legal proceedings began in Italy this March. The first to give a negative outcome was the Florence tribunal, which declared it had no jurisdiction since baby Rose was not born in Italy. It made submissions to the high court in Rome. The Rome court offered a small chink of light. While declaring that it had no jurisdiction, because A should have appealed to it immediately after the birth, it declared on October 31st that "it could not recognise the decision of the English court because it was contrary to both Italian and international public law."</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>The foreign minister, contacted by the lawyers, has made no comment; likewise the Italian embassy and consulate in London, which according to Oliva "has never responded to our request in May." The consul, Massimiliano Mazzanti, has instead declared that he was told of the incident by social services in England.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>To resolve this nightmare A now has two options: the pending appeal in England and the Florence tribunal which, her lawyers hope, will add the name of little Rose to the instrument of custody drawn up for her two sisters by her American aunt.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Observations</b><br />
<br />
While the general thrust of the Italian account agrees with the facts put forward by Booker, there are a number of points of divergence. There is also the claim, not found in Booker, that the social services lied to the mother about the progress of the adoption: a serious allegation. Booker claimed that the mother was in the UK for only two weeks; the Italian version states that it was in fact for some months. Booker claimed that social services allowed no contact between mother and child, whereas this account makes clear that there was regular contact until five months ago. Indeed, it states that the decision to separate the two and to take "Rose" (given the initial P in the released judgement) into foster care was made against medical advice. <br />
<br />
Judge Newton alludes to this, and indeed makes his opinion of the doctors' advice quite plain in paragraph 8:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">The District Judge at the early stage gave permission for the Local Authority to withhold contact and I raise that because the doctors appeared to be saying at an early stage in the proceedings that the plan ought to be for P to be placed with the mother potentially in hospital. I was and remain deeply concerned about that. It might have been in the mother's interests but I think the mother, today, would understand that it would not have been in P's interests for that to have occurred. It has been of course of some concern to me because having made the order I did on 12th October concerning the instruction of Dr Winton, a consultant psychiatrist. </blockquote><br />
A further disagreement between Judge Newton and the doctors treating A is set out in Paragraph 9:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
By that stage it was being asserted by the treating doctors that the mother had regained capacity under the relevant test. I have to say that when the mother appeared before me at that time she did not appear to be at all well, and I am surprised that it was being claimed that she had legal capacity . I am critical of the doctors because it appears to me that she was despatched (in deed escorted ) from the UK with undue haste simply because she wished to go back to Italy. I was led to believe that the mother was in a good state and a good frame of mind but frankly nothing could have been further from the truth, because if one looks at the reports of the admitting Doctors in italy , it is clear that the mother when she arrived in Italy was in a very poor state. She should in my view have been assisted here to participate in these proceedings. I know she wanted to go to Italy but by going to Italy any realistic prospect of P returning to her care was diminished substantially. It is for that reason it seems to me that it was a most ill-advised thing to have occurred. I was critical at the time and I remain critical to this day. </blockquote><br />
The judge here seems oddly confused. The "capacity" in question was not the capacity to care for her child, but the capacity to make decisions regarding her treatment. She was not being discharged willy-nilly into the community, but rather being "escorted" (presumably by medical staff) to Italy where she was admitted, presumably (though the judgement does not specify) to hospital. The treatment she received in Italy, moreover, between October 2012 and February of this year when the adoption hearing took place, had a salutary effect, as the judge acknowledged in paragraph 10:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
The good news is that as a result of the mother eventually complying with her medication which she did for some considerable time whilst out there, it is very evident that she is actually extremely well and has given evidence before me. As I said to her during the course of her evidence it seemed to me that she was as clear and articulate, indeed more so than most people I hear from the witness box where English is their first language, and English is not the mother's first language.</blockquote><br />
This contrasts with the three to four months she spent as a detained patient at psychiatric hospitals in England, at the end of which, by the judge's impression of her and the assessment of the Italian doctors, she was in a "very poor state". Perhaps her return to Italy merely coincided with the improvement in her health rather than directly produced it; but in any event it doesn't appear to have done her any harm.<br />
<br />
One thing that the released judgement doesn't address is the plan for the family to move to the United States, with the children placed under the guardianship of A's former sister-in-law, though this would appear to have been considered, only to be rejected, at a subsequent hearing. Booker's account of this was garbled: he implied that the plan was to send the child to live with the American aunt, whereas it now seems that the suggestion is that the whole family should move there. Whether this scheme has met with the approval of the US immigration authorities is uncertain. While the two elder children of American fathers both qualify for US citizenship and A probably has residency at least, Rose's position is likely to be more complicated. But whether that played any part in the court's rejection of the scheme isn't clear.<br />
<br />
The question of the child's father is raised, but scarcely considered, both in the released judgement and in the Italian press. The Italian report offers the bizarre detail that his name was left off the court papers because of a bureaucratic error. Although this doesn't seem to have excluded him from proceedings, it's strangely fitting, given that so little thought seems to have been given either to his rights or to his responsibilities as a parent. His offer to assume responsibility for the baby was dismissed as "not, if I may say so, a starter" by a judge who also sniffily notes that "he has failed to take any part except for the fact that he saw both the social worker and the Guardian when they visited Italy, and has written to the court today indicating that he opposes the application of the Local Authority". Newton concludes, again baldly, that there is "no-one within the wider family who today can look after P even though the father attempts to put himself forward." Beyond his unclear immigration status, no evidence is offered in the judgement as to why the judge considers the proposal a non-starter, or what is lacking in his "attempts to put himself forward" as a carer for the child. He is an inconvenient detail to be swatted aside. <br />
<br />
The criticism of Booker's one-sided and significantly distorted presentation of the facts is largely justified, but that doesn't mean that the case of Signora A doesn't raise significant issues. Judge Newton's ruling is a model neither of clarity nor of judicial reasoning; he contradicts himself at various points and his decision seems unsupported by any compelling weight of evidence. These will doubtless be issues for the appeal. Perhaps good reasons can be found as to why it was impossible to transfer her to Italy, despite her express desire, prior to the birth. But it seems on the face of it difficult to see any, given that she seems to have been kept heavily sedated. That would have solved most of the problems that subsequently arose.<br />
<br />
One thing the case does clearly demonstrate is the dangers posed by secrecy in the family courts and in the Court of Protection, not just to the administration of justice but to the reputation of the legal system. Where little is known about what actually takes place behind closed courtroom doors horror stories are apt to spread and to be believed. <br />
<br />
Nor are the problems imaginary. President Munby has repeatedly acknowledged the inadequacies of the family courts system and in particular the attitude of some social workers. In <a href="http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed113230" target="_blank">one case</a> he noted "the slapdash, lackadaisical and on occasions almost contumelious attitude which still far too frequently characterises the response [by social workers] to orders made by family courts" and complained of "a deeply rooted culture in the family courts which, however long established, will no longer be tolerated". These are strong words indeed: so strong that, had they been voiced by Booker or Hemming a large section of respectable legal opinion would immediately have cried foul. Indeed, an official of the British Association of Social Workers has <a href="http://www.communitycare.co.uk/blogs/childrens-services-blog/2013/09/munby-judgement-fuels-the-idea-that-social-workers-are-simply-child-snatchers/" target="_blank">accused</a> Munby of, among other things, giving encouragement to the Daily Mail. "Lord Justice Munby’s pledge to ensure greater transparency in the family courts has been heralded as a triumph by those opposed to the current restrictions in reporting on care proceedings, but I was left horrified," she complains. One might almost think she had something to hide.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-43344527440498859332013-11-18T18:50:00.005+00:002013-11-19T13:16:57.156+00:00What David Cameron can learn from schoolgirls and soccer momsDavid Cameron comes in for a lot of criticism from libertarian and sex-positive types for his morally conservative attitude to internet porn, as shown in his determination to force IP companies to introduce opt-in smut filters. But perhaps he just doesn't have either the time or the inclination to do his own research, and is reliant on what campaigners tell him, or what he reads in the Daily Mail. If so, then he can scarcely be blamed for assuming that the entirety of "mainstream porn" is violent and misogynistic, encourages adolescent boys to hate women and abuse their girlfriends and irreperably corrupts the minds of young children who innocently go looking for pictures of kittens.<br>
<br>
After all, it's common knowledge that in the age of the internet porn is pretty grim stuff. Even self-declared feminist pornographers proclaim as much, even while selling their own dream of a sex-positive, eco-friendly, non-exploitative alternative. Indeed, the essential violence and misogyny of the "mainstream" is as much an item of faith among "alternative" pornographers as it is for anti-porn campaigners such as Gail Dines, who has described online erotica as "a never-ending universe of ravaged anuses, distended vaginas and semen-smeared faces". <br>
<span id="fullpost"><br>
Not only does the alternative producers' business model depend upon the existence of an unspeakable mainstream (rather as the censors' does also) so does their self-identity - now buttressed by a global network of arty porn festivals and feminist award ceremonies. The existence of easy-access, free and often pirated porn is the common enemy of both professional porn producers and moralists, it must be said, so the confluence of interest in damning "mainstream porn" isn't surprising. <br>
<br>
It's also common knowledge that only boys and men want to watch porn anyway. Even in households without children, Our Dave <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2509393/Husbands-conversations-porn-home-Cameron-warns.html" target="_blank">promises</a>, "husbands will have to have a difficult conversation with their wives about accessing porn at home". Because all women everywhere are horrified by the very idea of sexually explicit material - and men, meanwhile, are so ashamed by it they will acquiesce in default filters that in the way of things will end up blocking a great many sites that aren't remotely pornographic anyway. So that's OK then.<br>
<br>
Is there any actual research, as opposed to anecdote, about what "mainstream porn" really looks like? It's not difficult to do, after all - at least, not until the Cameron Cordon arrives some time next year. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24228745?dopt=Abstract" target="_blank"> Here's some</a>, conducted by three women at New Brunswick University in Canada, led by graduate student Sarah Vannier and her supervisor Professor Lucia O’Sullivan. Recently unveiled by Vannier at a science and sexuality conference in San Diego, it has a catchy title - <i>Schoolgirls and Soccer Moms: A Content Analysis of Free "Teen" and "MILF" Online Pornography</i>. Ironically, the content of this content analysis is not free, but if the abstract is accurate it does what it says on the tin. <br>
<br>
Vannier's research interests include oral sex among teenagers and sexual compliance in committed relationships ("I’m pretty sure I picked one of the most interesting careers out there", she says.) She has also written a sex advice column for her student newspaper - in which she <a href="http://thebruns.ca/new-year-new-position/" target="_blank">notes</a> that "although watching porn for research sounds like a ton of fun, it does get boring after a while". Concentrating on free sites not only makes for low research costs (though was the research possible on the university's own computers, I wonder?) it's also the most useful place to start, given that they account for the vast majority of porn consumption. <br>
<br>
And as the abstract says in somewhat self-contradictory terms, "viewing free online pornographic videos has increasingly become a common behavior among young people, although little is known about the content of these videos." Presumably the content of the videos is not little known to the many who view them. But you get the point - little is known officially and publicly (or in academic journals) about the content of the videos. <br>
<br>
And perhaps (though perhaps not) little is known to the politicians making decisions about internet filtering about the content of these videos. It's an area where admitting ignorance is a positive asset to a politician or a pundit, where claiming to know what you're talking about might be held against you. "I've never seen the stuff myself, but I've heard it's revolting" is the safest line to take publicly. I suspect that several politicians who may find themselves having "difficult conversations" at home next year know more than they will ever say. But since coming out in opposition to the porn filter is as much as admission of guilt, that will have to remain in the realm of conjecture.<br>
<br>
So short of informing yourself by actually visiting these sites, which no-one in their right mind would ever do, you'll have to rely on Sarah Vannier's research. And so, without further ado:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">The current study analyzed the content of two popular female-age-based types of free, online pornography (teen and MILF) and examined nuances in the portrayal of gender and access to power in relation to the age of the female actor. A total of 100 videos were selected from 10 popular Web sites, and their content was coded using independent raters.</blockquote><br>
The focus of the research, then, was not only on the content of the videos but on the underlying socio-political message. Were these "popular" genres characterised principally by violence and perversion? Were the women involved portrayed as the degraded playthings of insatiable male lust? Not entirely:<br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br>
Vaginal intercourse and fellatio were the most frequently depicted sexual acts. The use of sex toys, paraphilias, cuddling, and condom use were rare, <i>as were depictions of coercion</i>.<br>
<br>
Control of the pace and direction of sexual activity was typically shared by the male and female actors. Moreover, there were <i>no gender differences</i> in initiation of sexual activity, use of persuasion, portrayals of sexual experience, or in professional status. However, female actors in MILF videos were portrayed as more agentic and were more likely to initiate sexual activity, control the pace of sexual activity, and have a higher professional status. </blockquote><br>
(My italics)<br>
<br>
So there you have it. Older female performers were "more likely to initiate sexual activity" but even in "teen" videos the women aren't entirely or even predominantly passive. There were "no gender differences". This is of course strikingly at variance with the almost universal assumptions about the content of mainstream porn, even those articulated by alternative and feminist pornographers. So contrary are these findings to the accepted wisdom I'd be amazed if they were taken seriously or used to inform the public debate. Nevertheless, I suspect the research will come as little surprise to the majority of people who actually watch the stuff.<br>
<br>
Truly, online porn exists in a parallel universe</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-50684448151397724332013-11-18T11:09:00.001+00:002013-11-18T18:16:54.685+00:00In the modern schoolyard, being an Evangelical Christian is just so gay<i>This is a guest post by Rev Julian Mann</i><br />
<br />
British secondary schools are now much tougher places for Christian teenagers than they were when I was at school in the 1970s.<br />
<br />
Political correctness was an incipient ideology in that decade but it was not being enforced. Now it is and teenage disciples of Jesus Christ who articulate certain Bible-based ethical views, for example against abortion and same-sex marriage, face flak not only from their peers but also from their school authorities when, as is inevitable, such opinions generate complaints. <br />
<br />
Ironically, the ideological atmosphere in British state schools is such that you are almost more likely to be abused as 'gay' for being an orthodox Christian than for being a homosexual. <br />
<br />
Anyone conversant with teenage parlance knows that 'gay' is the new 'naff'. No amount of Stonewall enforcement is going to stop teenagers from using the term about anything from an uncharismatic police horse to a peer's new quiff. It is in widespread usage in schools and teachers cannot monitor every conversation. But any student concerned about their school record will be deterred by an accusation of homophobic bullying, so will think twice about using the term perjoratively against a peer who comes out as a homosexual.<br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
However, they well know that no such sanction will result if they use the term against a Christian peer. There is no equivalent of a Stonewall award for a school for tackling 'Christianophobic' bullying - not that Christians should want to generate witchhunts for 'Christianophobes'. That kind of atmosphere is not good for the gospel, which relies for its progress not on coercion or a climate of fear but on genuine persuasion.<br />
<br />
In the current ideological climate, teachers are under little pressure to clamp down on verbal abuse against Bible-believing Christians. Furthermore, reflecting social attitudes among university-educated people most teachers would think anyway that in normal cases abortion and sex outside heterosexual marriage are morally right. They would regard any deviation from such ethical norms as extremely bigoted.<br />
<br />
Therefore the following taunt within earshot of a teacher in a British secondary school is well possible:<br />
<br />
"Hey you Bible-basher, I hear you're against gay marriage because you're a Jesus freak. You're so gay!" <br />
<br />
<i>Julian Mann is vicar of the <a href="http://www.oughtibridgechurch.org.uk/our_prayers.html">Parish Church of the Ascension</a>, Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire.</i><br />
</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-19599716663303916412013-10-14T16:05:00.002+01:002013-10-14T16:06:06.996+01:00Selling Downton to the Chinese<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnic3Q2mVInk2Alk48eEWtayO2Lt_WhwkUFIws2XRvqkRgHzFplM3QZw-eUpR9_teiTQxDxHNqcB9bJVjMtRcH6KY5PeKY0Zx-wdNixfDxtXD6goA-KcH9oNsAQEVRZuTmX3qbLxbZMn0/s1600/downton_abbey_1724595c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnic3Q2mVInk2Alk48eEWtayO2Lt_WhwkUFIws2XRvqkRgHzFplM3QZw-eUpR9_teiTQxDxHNqcB9bJVjMtRcH6KY5PeKY0Zx-wdNixfDxtXD6goA-KcH9oNsAQEVRZuTmX3qbLxbZMn0/s400/downton_abbey_1724595c.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Are 160 million people really watching Downton Abbey in China, as George Osborne claimed on the Today programme this morning? Probably not. As <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100241196/george-osborne-thinks-160m-chinese-watch-downton-shouldnt-the-chancellor-have-a-good-head-for-figures/" target="_blank">Tom Chivers</a> points out, the figure was a projection based on current trends. The show only started airing in China this year. But Chinese thirst for British costume drama seems real enough. A <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/07/03/chinese-video-sites-embrace-british-invasion/" target="_blank">recent survey</a> found that 9% of the discussion of foreign TV on Chinese social media sites concerned British dramas like Downton, while the proportion was significantly higher among graduates and white collar workers. British costume drama has the same snob appeal in China as it does in the United States, it would seem. In what is described as a "disdain chain", "British drama fans look down on fans of American shows, who look down on Korean soap fans, who in turn look down on fans of domestic dramas."<br />
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Two or three centuries ago, a rising British middle class went crazy for Chinese tea and porcelain. Now wealthy Chinese are returning the compliment: <a href="http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/one-four-bentleys-sold-china" target="_blank">one in four Bentleys</a> sold, for example, is now sold in China, while English public schools are setting up Chinese subsidiaries. Britain seems insular in comparison. It's hard to imagine sizeable chunk of the British public enjoying a weekly drama in Mandarin exploring the private lives of Chinese aristocrats during the dying days of the Ching dynasty. And if Osborne's 160 million figure remains aspirational, it does at least give a hint as to the sheer vastness of the potential gains to be made in the world's largest market. <br />
<br />
There's no doubt that Downton Abbey is a phenomenon. Julian Fellowes' period soap <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/arts/television/downton-abbey-reaches-around-the-world.html?_r=0" target="_blank">continues to hook viewers worldwide</a> despite its wooden scripts, its psychological superficiality and the contrived plots (including the recent attempt to liven things up a bit by having one of the best-loved characters gratuitously raped). It may not actually be a quality period drama: the show is, for all its leaden forays into attempted social realism, simply honest escapism. But it looks like one, and it capitalises on a well-established British niche. Last year, for example, it was among the most-watched TV shows in Denmark, the Netherlands, Singapore and Brazil, where it runs in a "slot dedicated to contemporary fiction", according to an executive at the network that broadcasts it. The global audience was estimated at 120 million even before transmission began in China.<br />
<br />
British TV may have struggled in recent years to come up with anything capable of comparison (even unfavourable comparison) with The Sopranos or Mad Men, or with the slew of lugubrious Scandinavian cop shows, but slightly cheesy costume drama is the field in which this country remains the gold standard, even if Downton is no Brideshead Revisited. <br />
<br />
So should we celebrate a great British success story, a stellar example of cultural soft power and an export triumph to boot? To some it may be a matter of regret that the world has yet to acquire a ravenous appetite for our more contemporary products - The Office was probably the last modern-set British TV show to strike a global chord, and that largely through national re-imaginings with local casts, languages and situations. But since the UK has cornered the market in nostalgia porn it would be foolish not to exploit it. The world clearly wants our frocks and boaters, our class system and our stiff upper-lips. "Theme park Britain" it may be, but at least it gives the country a strong and attractive international brand. If nothing else, it's good for tourism, even if the Home Office seems determined to drive potential tourists away with a a visa system that is expensive, bureaucratic and off-putting. And today's tourists might even become tomorrow's investors.<br />
<br />
There are obvious dangers if the nation's image abroad (and perhaps its self-image too) is based on the past rather than the present or the future. The danger of looking irrelevant. The danger of not being taken seriously. Downton Britain is charming and traditional, but fatally unrealistic. In the series itself, Lord Grantham's essential appeal as an aristocratic paragon is bound up with his failing struggle to adapt to a changing world. He is romantically doomed, as is his miniature kingdom, to obsolescence. Is this the image of the UK that millions of international viewers are imbibing? Or is it the other way around, and Downton is successful precisely because it embodies and reflects an image that Britain has so far failed to shake off? Boris Johnson's Woosterish public persona also goes down very well abroad.<br />
<br />
By contrast, attempts by the last government to rebrand the UK as "cool Britannia" largely flopped. National clichés die so hard that many visitors still expect to find London's streets clouded with fog and its countryside peopled with fox-hunting aristos. And for all the lip service paid to British pop culture as an antidote to the Brideshead/Downton effect our most popular and influential musical export is still the Beatles. Other British cultural exports with global appeal are of a similar vintage: think James Bond or Doctor Who.<br />
<br />
So perhaps this country, despite all our vaunted hi-tech start-ups and cutting-edge research, is destined to be the world's leading purveyor of cosy nostalgia. There are worse fates. The 21st century belongs to China, and if Western countries are to have an economic future it will be through selling what China, and other rising nations, want to buy. And if that something turns out to be Downton Abbey it may be unfortunate for them but is great news for us.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-68868461633826684292013-10-03T14:26:00.002+01:002013-10-03T17:11:35.743+01:00So what is Paul Dacre playing at?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr609VOg1c9erWghAId8z4YSv5c7CuTZQdvkZJlRrwcK_7at9TBiCrxu79xOGN5KCm9qmUQ4MbA5fvkwmcvwV4HQIuVZNTON_P4eNjk1K1LgjFZdr-T02pFxLL_czGcXfv_uRlMHChaTM/s1600/dacre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr609VOg1c9erWghAId8z4YSv5c7CuTZQdvkZJlRrwcK_7at9TBiCrxu79xOGN5KCm9qmUQ4MbA5fvkwmcvwV4HQIuVZNTON_P4eNjk1K1LgjFZdr-T02pFxLL_czGcXfv_uRlMHChaTM/s320/dacre.jpg" width="245"></a></div>This week's Private Eye has an interesting (should you care about such things) item about the future of legendary Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre. It reports that Dacre's incentive package was amended in 2010 from a five-yearly bonus to one in which he was to be paid "an additional £500,000 for each full year that he continutes working until he is 65". We also learn that "his contract was also amended last year from a rolling one to 'the residual term until his 65th birthday on 14th November 2013'."<br>
<br>
A big hint there that Dacre is being eased out. The 65th birthday looks like an excuse, or a face-saving formula. There's no reason why he shouldn't continue as editor after then, should he wish to and should his employers want him to stay on. On the other hand, were he really ready to quit, why would he want to cling on until a symbolic retirement age? <br>
<br>
Assuming this account is accurate (and the evidence for the Eye's story seems quite clear), it provides some context, at least, to Dacre's kamikaze-like behaviour in recent days. It's not clear whether or not he personally decided to run the now-notorious article about Ralph Miliband, which might otherwise have passed without much fuss, under the headline "The Man Who Hated Britain". But there's little doubt that it was he who responded to the criticism from Ed Miliband with a trenchant refusal to apologise, indeed a determination to repeat and underscore the allegations about the Labour leader's Marxist father. And the Mail's attempt to link the story with its campaign against press regulation certainly has Dacre's fingerprints all over it. So what is he playing at?<br>
<span id="fullpost"><br>
It could well be a case of the devil coming in great fury because he knows his time is short. Nothing to lose, now, after all. Better to go down all guns blazing in a fight to the death with Ed Miliband than to just slink off to his retirement home. His departure, even if postponed until November, will (at least in his own eyes) take on the lineaments of a martyrdom. Perhaps he believes that he can bring Miliband, or the whole regulatory process, down with him. Or perhaps it's simply his last hurrah for the Blackshirts. Either way, he will be enjoying his final battle.<br>
<br>
There's a risk here, of course, which is that Dacre's behaviour will hasten the dawn of Leveson-style regulation, by increasing Miliband's determination to accept nothing less (feelings of outraged filial piety now joining his longstanding desire to muzzle newspapers like the Mail). Already, pro-regulation campaigners scent blood: the fury with which the Mail is now being pursued is somewhat opportunistic, however genuine the anger behind it. They will not be appeased by securing Dacre's scalp (as it will inevitably appear); the removal of their most rabid opponent will be no more than a first step.<br>
<br>
As <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/oct/03/pauldacre-edmiliband" target="_blank">Roy Greenslade</a> has it:<br>
<br>
<blockquote>In truth, the whole affair has blown up in Dacre's face because of his intransigence. The Mail editor has become the centre of a story that has legs.</blockquote><blockquote><br>
In the process, he has achieved the reverse of his intentions. A dignified Ed Miliband has emerged with an enhanced image. As for press regulation, he has made it infinitely more difficult for the matter to be resolved in favour of the system he favours.</blockquote><br>
But perhaps Dacre doesn't really care, and this last campaign is part of a scorched-earth policy. There's said to be little love lost between Dacre and the man often touted as his successor, Mail on Sunday editor Geordie Greig. Greig himself today issued an abject apology for one of his reporters gatecrashing a memorial service for Ed Miliband's uncle. He was insistent that he had nothing to do with it (but then who did dispatch the reporter without his permission? One of Dacre's minions?). The subtext to Greig's grovelling is presumably to signal that the Mail under his control will be softer, gentler affair, a labrador puppy to Dacre's pitbull; and no doubt there's also a hint of panic that the scandal might cost him his long dreamed-of prize. <br>
<br></span><span>
Ed Miliband, meanwhile, has gone over Dacre's head to the present Lord Rothermere, demanding a thorough enquiry into the ethics of the Mail. Such an enquiry could only satisfy by presenting the Labour leader with Dacre's head on a platter. But if Dacre is leaving anyway, the sacrifice can only be a symbolic one. Unless, of course, it gives Rothermere a most convenient opportunity to remake the Mail's image by loading all of its sins onto a scapegoat, who will then be cast out into the wilderness with only a vast pension to sustain him. Or unless Dacre has raised the stakes so high that his departure now would look too much like a victory for the supposed enemies of a free press. In which case the plans for his retirement might have to be revisited, and Rothermere (and the whole country) might be stuck with him for logner than originally expected. Who knows?</span><div><br></div><div>UPDATE: The Press Gazette is reporting that Dacre is staying on for another twelve months at least, having agreed a new contract. It's not clear when he negotiated this. In any case, it puts paid to any "scorched earth" theory, but I doubt the timing is entirely coincidental. Perhaps his new lease of professional life has gone to his head.<br><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-5506076516380758652013-09-26T17:51:00.001+01:002013-09-26T17:51:14.033+01:00Why a decline in smoking led to the smoking banHere's an interesting graph published today <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/sep/26/unemployed-single-britain-smokers-uk-cigarette-statistics" target="_blank">by the Guardian</a>, based on evidence provided by the Office of National statistics.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHya5HSTPVu_P1DarZrnUCnsuQ52R-nKdeoWvKDfU9TYr1a2VR-bz2tcRdk6EadhTURaVYKjY0LOhx8PPT747W2fb6SHalQuV2AbLZRGfyf2RrAewkOKspzdL2oM4lEetPqZY6l5C8g-U/s1600/smoking.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="351" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHya5HSTPVu_P1DarZrnUCnsuQ52R-nKdeoWvKDfU9TYr1a2VR-bz2tcRdk6EadhTURaVYKjY0LOhx8PPT747W2fb6SHalQuV2AbLZRGfyf2RrAewkOKspzdL2oM4lEetPqZY6l5C8g-U/s400/smoking.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
It shows the steady decline in smoking over the past forty years. Though there have been occasional blips (the most noticeable, in 1998, is apparently due to a change in the way the statistics were calculated) the direction of travel should be no surprise: from 45% of the population in the early seventies to around 20% today.<br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
Smokers are smoking much less, too. I was also interested to discover that the threshold definition for a "heavy smoker" is twenty a day, and that only 5% of men and 3% of women come into that category. The figures for 1974 aren't offered, so I'm not sure if the official definition of "heavy smoker" has changed, but 20 a day was most people's idea of average back in the 70s. It wasn't unusual to come across chain smokers getting through as many as a hundred a day.<br />
<br />
This is, of course, excellent news, unless you're in the life insurance business or are at all worried about the implications for pensions and social care of so many more people not dying of lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases.<br />
<br />
You'll notice that the big decline took place in the seventies and eighties, long before the ban on tobacco advertising which was introduced in 2002, let alone the ban on smoking in public places (2006) or the introduction of graphic "warning" images on all packs in 2008. It would be hard indeed to spot any effect from any of these measures from the graph alone. It also suggests that the pearl-clutching reaction from the health lobby when the government recently <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jul/12/plans-plain-cigarette-packaging-shelved" target="_blank">shelved plans</a> to introduce "plain packaging" for cigarettes (ie to replace branded designs with horror-movie stills showing the effect of smoking) was overdone. The likelihood is that smoking rates will continue to tail off - although, as the end of the graph shows (the part that coincides with all the recent anti-smoking measures) the decline won't be nearly as steep as it was in the 70s or 80s, or even the early years of this century. That's because the practice is now largely confined to a hard core of addicts and contrarians.<br />
<br />
The graph neatly illustrates <a href="http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2011/12/david-camerons-fatal-addiction.html" target="_blank">my longstanding principle</a> that in public health policy the sledgehammer is only brought out once the nut has already been largely cracked. It's only when the number of smokers was reduced to a small, and increasingly unpopular, minority that it became politically advantageous to clobber them. Prior to that, the law was based on gentle persuasion (such as small-scale warnings on packets that merely informed purchasers that "smoking can seriously damage your health") along with the general background noise of official disapproval, public education and well-publicised "quit smoking" campaigns. <br />
<br />
All this worked - or at least it coincided with a long and sustained fall in smoking. The above graph, on the other hand, shows a very slight tick upwards at the end (representing the last couple of years) among male smokers at least. Could it be that the increased intolerance of the law and the ever shriller and more apocalyptic language employed by anti-smoking campaigners is actually counterproductive? It's at least plausible that the type of person still determinedly smoking after all these years of health scares (as opposed to those who have simply failed to give up) reacts badly to the authoritarianism of bans.<br />
<br />
The pattern revealed by the graph does, however, show something significant about anti-smoking laws. They aren't really aimed at discouraging smoking, or protecting the health of non-smokers, or even at punishing smokers (as some pro-smoking dissidents like to think). Rather, they are a form of bandwagon-jumping. Measures such as "plain packaging" are seized upon by politicians seeking to prove themselves "relevant" and up-to-date, in much the same way that they pounce upon passing moral panics or promote ideas that seem popular with focus groups. The long-term decline in smoking is a social trend for which politicians would like to claim credit. Introducing "tough" measures that can scarcely fail - because their aim has already been achieved - and which can claim to be both morally virtuous and medically justified is almost too tempting.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-50149715752562455732013-09-20T18:15:00.003+01:002013-09-20T18:19:33.104+01:00Springtime for GodfreyIn honour of Nigel Farage's reputed youthful enthusiasm for Nazi marching songs (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/20/nigel-farage-denies-singing-hitler-songs" target="_blank">which he of course denies</a>) I've composed this little ditty about his outspoken colleague Godfrey Bloom, who got into trouble today for hitting the terrier-like journalist Michael Crick and naïvely using the word "slut" in its old-fashioned sense of "slovenly". It should be sung to the tune of the <i>Horst Wessel Lied</i>. I believe it's traditional to raise the right arm during the final verse.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>I'm Godfrey Bloom, I fly the flag for UKIP,</i><br />
<i>I'm never short of a well-chosen phrase,</i><br />
<i>The po-faced critics scorn me but I love a good quip</i><br />
<i>To wind up women, foreigners and gays</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>As MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber</i><br />
<i>Against the bureaucrats I'll bravely take a stand</i><br />
<i>In Brussels you might find me drunk inside the Chamber</i><br />
<i>But never sending aid to Bongo Bongo Land</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>A woman's place is cleaning out the kitchen</i><br />
<i>Or failing that, a brothel in Hong Kong;</i><br />
<i>I'll have no truck with greens and their absurd religion</i><br />
<i>I'm Godfrey Bloom, so join in with my song</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>My forthright style and views on every issue</i><br />
<i>Embody all that's great about UKIP</i><br />
<i>I always speak my mind, and sometimes speak my fist too,</i><br />
<i>Or did till Nigel took away the whip</i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-43992246768289153182013-09-18T19:52:00.001+01:002013-09-18T19:54:35.765+01:00David Attenborough's Population Problem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRuPoAgHWOlW1kSpIyqcdfUclwA4ViYiirGkoHOHh6WnZJYZnpreLFlleuzQUbojKRz2pht8tWNbK7w_U_6NZcGNmhyXVaQ3nA8v1ske0T-7u-Ubgi5AOG2g7etupGDw08r9ur4EunEps/s1600/david-attenborough.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRuPoAgHWOlW1kSpIyqcdfUclwA4ViYiirGkoHOHh6WnZJYZnpreLFlleuzQUbojKRz2pht8tWNbK7w_U_6NZcGNmhyXVaQ3nA8v1ske0T-7u-Ubgi5AOG2g7etupGDw08r9ur4EunEps/s320/david-attenborough.jpg" width="191" /></a></div>National Treasure he may be - and pillar of the liberal establishment - but twinkly, avuncular old David Attenborough has long been a Malthusian population bore. So it's not really surprising to find him sounding like a stuck record in the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10316271/Sir-David-Attenborough-If-we-do-not-control-population-the-natural-world-will.html" target="_blank">Telegraph this morning</a>, warning that nature will take revenge on our pullulating species unless people stop having children. Especially in the third world. He was defending his comments from earlier this year about human beings being "a plague", saying that this was "blindingly obvious" and that the planet was "heading for disaster unless we do something." <br />
<br />
As for Nature's revenge - he managed to make it almost purposeful:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
They've been having... what are all these famines in Ethiopia, what are they about? They're about too many people for too little piece of land. That's what it's about. And we are blinding ourselves. We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That's barmy.</blockquote><br />
Actually, it's Attenborough who's barmy. Ethiopia is five times the size of Great Britain but has a roughly comparable population: there's plenty of room for more people. The famine of the 1980s, which indelibly fixed the world's perception of that country, was caused - and certainly prolonged - by a civil war as much as by rain failures. The country's chronic poverty and underdevelopment didn't help much either. Temporary famine relief is no substitute for economic development, of course, but it's more humane than sitting back and watching people die, and does at least preserve a country's human resources without which no development would be possible. The productive parts of Ethiopia can be lush and bountiful: to suggest that it can't support a sizeable, and even growing, human population is to mistake circumstance for destiny. <br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
Which is what Malthusians tend to do. Ever since Thomas Malthus proposed, in 1798, that famine and pestilence would intervene to check the increase in human population, doom merchants (and their modern descendents in the green movement) have been predicting demographic disaster. Malthus was wrong, of course, and not for a forgiveable reason: he somehow failed to notice that he was living through the agricultural and industrial revolutions that were as he wrote transforming the world's (or in those early days, Britain's) ability to sustain a steadily growing population. <br />
<br />
A similar mistake was made a few decades ago by American professor Paul Ehrlich in his bestselling - but laughably wrong - The Population Bomb (1968). Ehrlich forecast that the final decades of the 20th century would be characterised by devastating famines and the collapse of food production, to be followed by mass death. "Hundreds of millions" would starve to death during the 1970s. And the problems wouldn't be confined to the third world, either: by 2000, he predicted, the UK would be "a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people". He thought that there was an evens chance that England would have ceased to exist by the turn of the century.<br />
<br />
Trapped as he was in Malthusian circular reasoning Ehrlich didn't factor in the new agrarian revolution that was about to transform global agriculture. One would imagine that having been so embarrassingly mistaken he would have recanted and retired into obscurity: but no, he's still actively promoting his misanthropic message even today. The Guardian seems to give him a regular platform, often billing him as "the world's most renowned population analyst". <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-population-resources-paul-ehrlich" target="_blank">From last year, for example</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
The optimum population of Earth – enough to guarantee the minimal physical ingredients of a decent life to everyone – was 1.5 to 2 billion people rather than the 7 billion who are alive today or the 9 billion expected in 2050, said Ehrlich in an interview with the Guardian.<br />
<br />
"How many you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with 1.5 to 2 billion because you can have big active cities and wilderness. If you want a battery chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food and everyone is kept just about alive you might be able to support in the long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion. So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage."<br />
<br />
"The question is: can you go over the top without a disaster, like a worldwide plague or a nuclear war between India and Pakistan? If we go on at the pace we are there's going to be various forms of disaster. Some maybe slow motion disasters like people getting more and more hungry, or catastrophic disasters because the more people you have the greater the chance of some weird virus transferring from animal to human populations, there could be a vast die-off."</blockquote><br />
Quite mad. <br />
<br />
Like Attenborough, Ehrlich is one of the patrons of the pressure-group <a href="http://www.populationmatters.org/" target="_blank">Population Matters</a>, formerly the sinister-sounding Optimum Population Trust. Since rebranding themselves, they've stopped publicising their preferred population levels, so it's not clear if they still advocate reducing the population of the UK to a "sustainable" twenty million. Ehrlich's comments would however suggest that they do. It would be unfair to describe the group or its supporters (who also include James Lovelock and Jonathon Porritt) as eugenicists or misanthropes, but as<a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/6421#." target="_blank"> Brendan O'Neill once wrote</a>, after attending one of their conferences, "there is something unavoidably spooky about people who spend their waking hours fretting about overpopulation, and who hand out leaflets saying ‘How many is too many?’ illustrated with a picture of an innocent-looking schoolgirl (white, of course) doing population sums on a blackboard".<br />
<br />
Contrary to Malthusian assumptions, the population does not expand inexorably until it reaches natural resource limits. It is quite capable of regulating itself. Human beings aren't breeding machines but intelligent and rational creatures. The most recent UN population estimates foresee the total human population expanding from its current 7 billion to around 9 billion by the middle of this century and then, or a little later, to stabilise or even slightly decline. It won't be pestilence and famine that halt the growth of population: the rate of growth has been slowing for decades and in most advanced industrial countries has already gone into reverse (the increase in population in the UK is largely a product of immigration). <br />
<br />
In country after country the pattern is the same. As people live longer, as child mortality declines - factors that ought to spark a population boom - the birthrate goes down. What intervenes to reduce the increase in population. Three things, mainly: prosperity, the emancipation of women and birth control. They tend to go together, and they happen without much prompting from Attenborough and his well-heeled friends at Population Matters. Nor is there any need for an equivalent of China's draconian and cruel One Child policy. The "something" that needs to be done to halt ever-rising population turns out to be a by-product of economic progress.<br />
<br />
Nor is there any reason to suppose that scientific and technological progress will not come to the aid of a growing population, even one that as it becomes more prosperous demands a higher standard of living. It always has in the past. A gloomy Malthusian hunter-gatherer living at the end of the last ice age, when he wasn't warning about the looming threat of climate change (which was killing off all the mammoths and seemed likely to do the same for human beings too) would no doubt have been fretting about the capacity of the environment to support ever growing numbers of people and prophesying imminent disaster. He wouldn't have foreseen the Neolithic revolution, still less the technological advances of the Bronze Age, to say nothing of the astounding industrial leaps of the past two centuries, all of which resulted in a more efficient use of available resources and thus enabled more people to be supported. He would have made the mistake common to all Malthusians of imagining the natural environment as something to which human beings are subject rather than something that is made and remade by human beings.<br />
<br />
Attenborough claimed in a <a href="http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2011/rsa-presidents-lecture-2011" target="_blank">lecture</a> at the RSA in 2011 that "there is no major problem facing our planet that would not be easier to solve if there were fewer people, and no problem that does not become harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more." But the truth is almost the opposite: the more people there are in the world, the more creativity and innovation tends to occur. The industrial revolution was not wrought by hermits living in mud huts: it arose from the meeting of people and ideas in cities that were already expanding. And the rate of progress has only speeded up since then. <br />
<br />
Attenborough's gloomy prognostications will be proved wrong - but unlike Ehrlich, he won't be around to see it.<br />
</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-26548303809429299012013-09-17T14:03:00.003+01:002013-09-17T14:03:50.048+01:00Web filtering - making the best of a bad jobI've had an idea. It probably isn't a very good one, but I offer it as a provisional solution to the looming problem of overblocking by internet filters that are supposed to protect children from porn but invariably end up by annoying everyone, children and adults alike.<br />
<br />
It came to me while watching a debate on "protecting children from harm on the internet" at the Lib Dem conference on Sunday. The motion being debated was proposed by the former <i>Play School</i> presenter Floella Benjamin, now apparently a baroness. It was a strongly worded, Mumsnet-friendly motion, proclaiming inter alia that "the long term effects on young minds of early exposure to often violent and abusive sexual material is hightly damaging to impressionable young people and may significantly alter their attitudes to sex and violence." It called, not merely for opt-in filters as the government wants and as the ISP industry has agreed to deliver, but for mandatory age-verification for sites offering explicit material. <br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
There was also an amendment tabled by Julia Cambridge, which offered slightly different proposals. It demanded that filters should be offered to all new broadband customers and on an annual basis to existing customers. But it also - and here's the interesting bit - demanded that:<br />
"...when a customer who does not have a filter installed or who has a filter switched off starts loading a website which would have been filtered out that customer is made aware they have not got a filter installed/switched on and is provided with the the opportunity to install/swtich on a filter."<br />
<br />
Neither the motion nor the amendment found much favour with the hall. Most who took the floor spoke out against it, many making the point that filters are notoriously unreliable and catch material that is far from pornographic, including sites that are important educational resources for enquiring teenagers. Cambridge councillor Sarah Brown complained that <a href="http://auntysarah.livejournal.com/" target="_blank">her own blog</a> was banned from filtered public wifi. Jess Palmer, a possible Lib Dem star of the future (assuming the party <i>has</i> a future, of course) spoke passionately and movingly about growing up as a lesbian and finding on the internet resources denied to her either at school or at home, as well as of the joys of fanfic that would undoubtedly be banned by the web filters that will some be the default setting for UK households.<br />
<br />
Sarah Brown compared web filters to her inaccurate SatNav that apparently confused Plymouth with Warsaw.: "Automatic systems behave like this because they don’t know enough to realise when they’re doing something obviously ridiculous. They just do it anyway."<br />
<br />
But such concerns, though true, don't seem to have deflected the government from its determination to be seen to be doing something to protect children from the big, bad internet, and now that the larger ISPs are on board it seems inevitable that the majority of the population - those who "simply click through", as David Cameron put it, or who are too embarrassed to demand adult content, or fearful of being put on some GCHQ list of porn-addicts - will soon be consigned to the "family-friendly" web. Others, perhaps including major news sites and many independent writers and bloggers, will censor themselves rather than run the risk of being mislabelled as "adult" or "explicit". Discussions will be circumscribed, language will be censored, creativity will be stifled. Caution will run riot. Most people's online experience will be of an internet designed for children and for corporate giants.<br />
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How to prevent that scenario, which even politicians acknowledge is undesirable but which seems inevitable given the fallible and play-safe set-up of algorithmic filters?<br />
<br />
I suggest crowdsourcing. The way to do it is hinted at in the aforementioned amendment. <br />
<br />
If you're a customer of TalkTalk, the one major ISP that currently offers default filtering at source, all your traffic is <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23452097" target="_blank">routed through servers run by the Chinese company Huawei</a>. Even customers who do not want filtering still have their traffic routed through the system, although matches to Huawei's database of blockable sites are in that case disregarded. It seems likely that other filter systems will work the same way - opening up the possibility of customers who haven't opted for blocking nevertheless being informed that they are about to visit a contentious site. <br />
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The conference amendment suggested that customers would then be offered the chance to change their minds about filtering, a proposal that seems frankly bizarre. Perhaps, though, they could be given a different choice - a button to report the block as inappropriate. Sites reported by users as having been improperly flagged could then be reviewed by human beings and, if found to be educational, or literary, or simply not pornographic, then placed on a safe list. Thus customers who choose not to have their web experience mediated by cyber-nannies could help improve the service for those who do, mitigating the worst aspects of default filters.<br />
<br />
I don't pretend that this is a perfect solution, or even a workable one. But default ISP-level filtering is now an inevitability in the UK, whether we like it or not. The question is how to make the best of a bad job.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-9460773032546611312013-09-16T16:37:00.000+01:002013-09-16T16:53:06.944+01:00Yes but... the Niqab debateHere we go again<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTY1waz-y-NAhEp5f97EdrUHHk64D4ElquglGu7HB0Ju67W6058X4Hr3iLMOw7AxNq7yn1rtn1ZcMtnLHUjnO9lSd0P8cLAickEsD4yvicF86amhvU4_Ljp6I-aqjq2qO298lA7BikZAU0/s1600-h/saudi-woman-7-3-2005.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5239269523239835378" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTY1waz-y-NAhEp5f97EdrUHHk64D4ElquglGu7HB0Ju67W6058X4Hr3iLMOw7AxNq7yn1rtn1ZcMtnLHUjnO9lSd0P8cLAickEsD4yvicF86amhvU4_Ljp6I-aqjq2qO298lA7BikZAU0/s400/saudi-woman-7-3-2005.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
The niqab is an anachronistic garment that oppresses women. It embodies the idea that women are the property of men, have a lesser status and are repositories of sexual temptation. It's also a security risk. It should be banned, at least in public spaces such as schools or courtrooms. We should lay down a clear principle that in our society men and women are equal.<br />
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Yes but, in our society, no-one is forced to wear it. Women who wear the niqab are exercising a free choice. It is illiberal to forbid them from manifesting their religious beliefs in the way that they choose. It also amounts to discrimination against women, because no-one is seeking to ban religious attire worn by men, such as Sikh turbans. <br />
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Yes but, what of other women and girls who might not be exercising a free choice, but whose "choice" is being foisted on them by husbands or fathers? Banning the face veil allows them to discard it without being seen as "bad" Muslims or "bad" women. Should not society be promoting these women's freedom?<br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
Yes but, as far as we can tell, such women are in the minority. Most women who choose to wear the niqab do so entirely voluntarily, sometimes over the objection of their (male) family members. For some young women, it is almost an act of rebellion, like dressing as a goth or wearing a very short skirt might be.<br />
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Yes but, no young women are being pressured by relatives to become goths or to wear overtly sexualised clothing. And even if girls choosing the niqab are going against the wishes of their parents, they may well have fallen prey to extremists. Have you ever noticed how terrorist suspects in court are invariably accompanied by heavily-veiled wives? The spread of the niqab is a sign of growing separatism and extremism in parts of the Muslim community, and if we don't act to discourage it as a society, more young women will feel pressure to conform. We owe it to those potential victims to take a stand. Instead, naive and well-intentioned liberals fight for the rights of extremists.<br />
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Yes but, the niqab hurts no-one except (arguably) the wearer, and then only because other people discriminate against niqab-wearers. The proper course of action is to educate the rest of society to not be prejudiced against women who choose to manifest their religion in this way. There's no reason why niqab-wearers shouldn't play a full and active part in our modern, multi-faith and tolerant society.<br />
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Yes but, that's probably asking too much of other people. The human face is a highly-evolved mechanism for communication. Psychologists tell us that a high proportion of communication - perhaps as much as 90% in some estimates - is non-verbal. The ability to read in someone's face their emotions, their intentions, even their honesty is a fundamental human skill, without which social interaction would be far more difficult. It's natural to want to see someone's face; it's not some giant conspiracy against Islam. It's also natural to distrust people who decline to share their faces with other people, as if they have something to hide.<br />
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Yes but, that's still the problem of the person who objects to the niqab. It's not the niqab-wearer's problem. Not everyone relies on non-verbal communication, anyway. Some people are blind. Even sighted people in this socially networked age can have meaningful exchanges with people they have never met or even spoken to.<br />
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Yes but, why should anti-social behaviour be encouraged, or at any rate condoned, just because it is done in the name of religion? If someone wanted to go to school wearing a V for Vendetta mask, perhaps to make some political point, would that be allowed? Why give special privileges to religion? Niqab-wearers may say that they are acting out of severe religious commitment, but the niqab is not compulsory in Islam. It's the choice of an eccentric minority, which is what it should stay.<br />
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Yes but, it's not just a matter of religious choice, or personal conviction. Many niqab-wearers say they feel more comfortable wearing it. They are not sexually objectified, reduced to their outward appearance, or subjected to sexual harassment or the stares of men. The veil protects them against the misogyny of wider society. It is above all an expression of sexual modesty, an outward sign of the conviction that they do not exist purely to gratify men.<br />
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Yes but, there is no more objectifying garment. It strips away a person's individuality, reducing her to a formless, shapeless mass. Besides, it is quite false to suggest that a woman wearing a niqab is not judged on her appearance. Assumptions will readily be made about her, true or otherwise: that she is an oppressed woman, that she is a religious extremist, or that she does not want to interact socially with other people. This will necessarily reduce her engagement in society. It is also dangerous to argue that for a woman to cover her entire body, and even her face, is an expression of "modesty": it's essentially the same argument as that which tells sees short skirts as an invitation to rape. It is insulting to both men and women. It also ignores the truth that some men find veiled women sexually attractive. And have you ever read the Arabian Nights?<br />
<br />
Yes but, the niqab still represents a powerful rejection of a sexually objectifying, superficial and decadent western culture that judges women on their personal grooming and encourages a shallow, hedonistic approach to life. <br />
<br />
Yes but really? Among those who choose to wear it, the niqab is a demonstration of narcissistic self-absorption. It's a demand for attention, attracting the stares that it is allegedly designed to deflect. Nothing says "look at me!" quite as assertively as a niqab in a society in which it is abnormal. It's an act of cultural aggression, not of submission.<br />
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Yes but, that's not the intention. The niqab wearer doesn't want to blend in but she does want to blend out. The niqab is liberating because it allows its wearer to ignore all that and concentrate on what really matters, which might well include education itself. To restrict the niqab would therefore be to force women to conform to an oppressive social standard.<br />
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Yes but, historically the emancipation of women has always been as much sartorial as political. In Victorian times, women were dressed up like dolls and barred from most areas of public life. Demands for freedom from imprisonment in corsets and long skirts went along with campaigns for the right to vote, to attend university and to join the professions. In the 1970s, feminists burned their bras as symbols of patriarchal oppression. But the bra itself was invented to free women, who were moving into the workplace and for the first time in modern history taking their full place in society, from the restrictiveness of the corset. Feminists today decry the "objectification" of lads' mags and internet porn, but these developments take place in the context of a society that offers unprecedented and growing opportunities and freedoms for women. <br />
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Yes but, it's historically inaccurate to suggest that the niqab is associated with oppression. The only reference to veiling in the Quran involves the wives of the Prophet: their concealment was a demonstration not of their subjugation but of their high status. The burqa and similar garments were originally the preserve of the upper classes, whose women never worked and often lived in purdah, only occasionally venturing out or receiving unrelated male visitors. The veil was an expression of their superiority over women who toiled in the fields or laboured as servants. Prostitutes, too, might often be veiled, and for an ironically similar reason: as proof of their exclusivity, their unavailability even to be gazed upon by any except those who could afford to pay.<br />
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Yes but, that makes the point, surely. The concept of a woman being both veiled and playing a full part in society makes no sense. The niqab was always a symbol of separation and segregation, of demarcation: of women from men, of Muslims from non-Muslims, of the leisured classes from those who had to work for a living. Historically, veiled women may have been privileged, living in a gilded cage, but they were always essentially the property of the husbands or fathers who could afford to subsidise their enforced idleness.<br />
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Yes but, the niqab today facilitates social engagement, rather than preventing it, because it allows women who would otherwise be kept at home to go out, to study, even to work without her modesty being compromised. Surely it's better for her to be free to leave the house, even veiled, than to remain indoors? That's far more "oppressive".<br />
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Yes but, at least if the niqab-wearer remains at home she isn't contributing to the normalisation of an inherently sexist and oppressive custom. It's a counsel of despair to suggest that society's response to a manifestly regressive and discriminatory custom is to accept it because the alternative might be even worse. Banning the niqab, at least in public spaces, isn't about telling people how they should dress. Rather, it's about sending a message about what kind of society we want to see. One in which men and women are equal citizens.<br />
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Yes but, suppose it was men who were required to wear veils. People wouldn't complain then that it was a signifier of oppression. Instead, women would be demanding the right to wear veils too.<br />
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Yes but, men aren't required to wear veils, are they? That's the whole point!<br />
<br />
And so on. For what it's worth, I instinctively dislike the niqab and find the arguments of its proponents entirely specious. I'm naturally opposed to banning things, and I don't think that French-style criminalisation of the niqab is a realistic proposition here in any case. But I do think that the French commitment to secularism embodies an important principle that is all too easily lost in the laissez-faire liberalism of the UK, which slides too easily and too often into indifference. The French authorities, it's worth noting, take a much firmer line against female genital mutilation than do their British counterparts, who have somehow managed to bring not a single prosecution. <br />
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I would also argue that the social trends associated with the niqab - political extremism, extreme social conservatism and gender apartheid - are both regrettable and potentially dangerous. I think we should take more seriously the arguments of Muslim liberals, such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who see in the spread of the niqab the growing power of narrow and regressive forms of Islam such as that associated with Wahhabist Saudi Arabia. It's worth remembering (but usually forgotten) that the campaign in France to ban the burqa was vocally supported and to some extent led by Muslim feminists - the very people whose voices are squeezed out of the British debate.<br />
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This isn't a simplistic question of freedom of expression versus secularism or social conformism. Personal freedom is an important principle but isn't the only thing that matters, nor is it a trump card. Nor is religion.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-89331540914394332492013-09-06T19:03:00.003+01:002013-09-06T20:57:12.836+01:00Coming out in BarnsleySixteen year olds registering at a sixth-form college in Barnsley, fabled home of Ian McMillan and Arthur Scargill, were <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2413621/Barnsley-College-students-asked-declare-gay-transsexual-enrolment-form.html" target="_blank">told</a> to fill out a form giving their details to the school authorities. The first question, coming after the section requesting contact details, asked their gender, the second (which may have been incomprehensible to some) enquired whether their gender had changed since birth. The third invited them to "please indicate your sexual orientation." The options given were, in alphabetical order, Bisexual, Gay man, Gay woman/lesbian, Heterosexual, Transsexual or "Prefer not to say."<br>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI5Kx4KTB-gxsy7-zJM_z6JA7h7JF6L6GxNqJwN0nWsyPR-FjbCi_riJj63k9XOsNduLj4XX_5K4UcIJmdeRO76kGfTtHLPrEo2tPGd32HXVGcm_da3ricxSUWiouuAyUl5LVauQP5ARs/s1600/barnsley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI5Kx4KTB-gxsy7-zJM_z6JA7h7JF6L6GxNqJwN0nWsyPR-FjbCi_riJj63k9XOsNduLj4XX_5K4UcIJmdeRO76kGfTtHLPrEo2tPGd32HXVGcm_da3ricxSUWiouuAyUl5LVauQP5ARs/s320/barnsley.jpg" width="320"></a>It is reported that some students were reduced to tears at being asked to disclose such personal information, not as part of an anonymous survey but on the front of a form that was designed to gather data about them <i>as individuals</i>. I'm not surprised. It could be argued that the question was optional, in that a "prefer not to say" box was provided. But as one student was quoted as saying , she "did feel under pressure to tick a box and then if you ticked 'prefer not to say' it might make people question why you have done that." Not all students would have felt such pressure, the breezily heterosexual ones least of all. But it was wholly predictable that some would.<br>
<span id="fullpost"><br>
What does surprise me is that anyone imagined that putting such a form in front of sixth formers, some of whom might be vulnerable and confused about their sexuality, others of whom might be fearful of bullying and discrimination, was in any way appropriate, even in a town as blessedly free from homophobia as Barnsley. Whoever devised and whoever approved the form should have no place in the education system, as they clearly have little understanding of sexual development or of the adolescent mind.<br>
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In what fantasy land is every 16 year-old secure and confident enough in their sexuality to be able to declare publicly - or at least to their teachers - which of those essentialist boxes they fit into? Some will be. But at that age, most are either at the beginning, or have not yet begun, their sexual lives. They will have wildly differing levels of maturity. Yet the bureaucratic mindset, which is interested merely in the assemblage of data, shows no understanding of the psychological impact that such intrusive questioning might have - if not on the majority, then on many of those whom equality laws are supposedly designed to protect. For some of those youngsters confronted, quite unexpectedly, with a bluntly-worded request about their sexual orientation, it may have been the first time they had been expected to think in such terms. It would have been a question better explored in a counselling session than on an official form.<br>
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When it comes to sexual orientation, the official dogma imagines a society that does not yet (and may well never) exist, one in which everyone is certain of their erotic identity and secure and confident enough openly to declare it. Where there is no embarrassment surrounding sexuality, not even among 16 year olds, and where no-one minds intimate details about themselves being placed on a database accessible to school staff and, if the occasion arose, other professionals (and no guarantee that it would not be disclosed to their parents). Where no prejudiced or ill-intentioned person would ever come across it, because prejudiced or ill-intentioned people are nowhere to be found in the ranks of public employees.<br>
<br>
Barnsley College was, to begin with, predictably defensive, citing its duty under the 2010 Equality Act to collect statistical information about sexual orientation, as about gender, disability and ethnicity. The initial statement noted merely that it was "a method of monitoring the success of protected characteristic groups." Such weasel words, of course, reveal the true focus of their priorities: not the welfare of their students, but their data-gathering responsibilities under equality law. But they were forced to change their tune after Wes Streeting of Stonewall, among others, criticised the form, saying that it was "not acceptable that students were asked to disclose their sexual orientation in a way that failed to respect their privacy" and that they "should have done their homework." Stonewall's own expert guide, aimed at companies employing adults, recommends that such questions be asked on detachable forms that can be separated and anonymised. <br>
<br>
The college has now apologised and promised a review, "taking into account feedback from our students." Yet this apparent change of mind only underlines the manifest incompetence of the school authorities, seemingly reliant on "student feedback" to educate them that a teenager's sexuality ought not to be a matter of public record, and that they should not feel under any pressure, however slight, to disclose it. <br>
<br>
Even as a means of evidence-gathering, the form is basically useless. It is likely to under-count gay and lesbian students, and those least likely to respond accurately are going to be those who might be in most need of protection. Indeed, there is a huge incentive for those in the closet to lie because, in a society in which homophobia remains an issue, where there is even the slightest fear that the information might be misused, the only safe answer is "heterosexual": anything else, even "prefer not to say" is potentially compromising <i>or may be felt to be so</i>. Is a teenager who has been bullied on account of (real or supposed) orientation then to be told that their bullying or underperformance is of no consequence because they don't form part of the school's official LGBT statistics? Or if that isn't the intention (presumably it isn't) is that teenager, or even a teacher, nevertheless likely to think that their officially-designated status will make a difference?<br>
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Since the introduction of the public sector equality duty, there have been regular stories of bone-headed councils, quite unnecessarily, asking direct questions about the sexuality of tenants or of residents joining the local library, or even of companies asking job applicants to specify their orientation on recruitment forms. It is unnecessary, even if the duty to collect data exists, because such information can be ascertained more accurately and with less possibility of causing offence through anonymous surveys. I sometimes wonder if the aim isn't merely to collect information (with the laudable aim of targeting discrimination) but also to create a society in which no-one is allowed to be either private or in doubt about their sexual orientation and in which we all fit neatly into predefined boxes. <br>
<br>
It's certainly the case that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has regularly expressed the view that some people's reticence about sexual orientation is an obstacle in the pursuit of their utopia. The quango has laid down making sexual orientation "a public matter" as central to its policy in the area. It has also publicly lamented the exclusion of a sexual orientation question from the 2011 census. ECHR advice and codes of conduct stress the importance of canvassing information from employees and service users, and it suggests re-framing monitoring as "personal information sharing" as a way of persuading the reluctant to talk. <br>
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<a href="http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/uploaded_files/research/beyond_tolerance.pdf" target="_blank">One EHCR report</a> acknowledges that "data collection is not about intruding into the private lives of individuals," but then goes on to claim that the fact that some people continue to regard their sexual orientation as private holds back progress. Openness is key. "People should be able to have the right and choice to be open about their sexual orientation," it says - which is, of course, true. But the EHCR seems unwilling to accept an equivalent right <i>not</i> to be open, partly because it seems to believe that such a desire for privacy would not exist in a truly tolerant society. It's a form of victim-blaming that underestimates the courage that coming out still involves.<br>
<br>
It is true that sexuality is nothing to be ashamed of and that many gay people, happily, are now proud and open about their orientation. But you don't produce a tolerant society by causing vulnerable people shame and embarrassment or by imposing the cult of openness on people who consider their sexuality to be an essentially private matter. That such a question should have been posed to teenagers, and with such disregard to its likely effect, is gobsmacking. A moment's reflection should have been enough to decide that this was not appropriate. It suggests school leaders whose brains have been reduced to mush by the bureaucratic tasks placed upon them in the sacred name of equality and diversity.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-90248647749971092652013-09-02T16:54:00.002+01:002013-09-02T21:24:13.954+01:00Armchair generals underestimate Britain's influenceHere's the strangest revelation to follow from Thursday night's Commons vote, a decision that was both farcical (in the manner it came about) and magnificent (in the way it seems to have reinvigorated both the "Parliamentary" and "democracy" parts of what is mostly inaccurately called our Parliamentary democracy). It turns out that the believers in Britain's continuing role as a leading voice in world affairs, who often seem so delusional (never more so than when bemoaning the catastrophic consequences for our national credibility of not bombing Syria on this particular occasion) were right after all. The UK does still pack some sort of punch on the world stage. Just not in the way they assumed.<br>
<br>
Large parts of the commentariat and the political leadership assumed that not joining in Obama's planned tweaking of Bashar Assad's moustache meant that the UK would never be taken seriously again. Many are still wedded to that dismal belief today. Take, for example, <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidblair/100233766/parliaments-craven-failure-to-support-a-syria-strike-has-lessened-britain/" target="_blank">David Blair</a> in the Telegraph, who seems to want to outdo his namesake in enthusiasm for war-related brown-nosing of Uncle Sam. In a hysterical piece, he writes that "by casting a grotesquely irresponsible vote, our MPs have downgraded our Prime Minister in the eyes of the world’s superpower." Hitherto, he thinks, the American president, whoever he happened to be, could rely on Britain providing "serious military capability" whenever there was somewhere that both countries agreed needed bombing. This gives the British "credibility" in Washington, he believes. <br>
<br>
Such credibility is now at an end, thinks Blair, because of the "strange new doctrine that Parliament must approve any military action" (I think the word he's looking for is "democracy") and because of what he sees as the pacifist/isolationist tone of some of the speeches in the Commons, many of which stressed the importance of the UN. What he doesn't tell us is what such supposed "credibility" actually brings the UK, beyond patronising pats on the head at the White House (much talk of "our closest ally" and "special relationship", a phrase rational people cannot hear without wincing) and the ill-disguised contempt of the rest of the world.<br>
<span id="fullpost"><br>
A country is not strong and respected as an independent voice if its only international role is to fire missiles and drop bombs in pursuance of another country's foreign policy. Nothing proclaims weakness so much as pearl-clutching prophecies of doom from people who think that the nation is just one bombing raid away from global irrelevance. In their way, voices of the Blair (Tony as well as David) or Paddy Ashdown persuasion are just as pessimistic, just as defeatist, as those who urge Britain to give up its "post-imperial pretensions" and settle for for an international influence on a par with, say, Swaziland. They don't want this country to have actual influence either in Washington or the wider world - or, at any rate, they don't believe that such influence is possible. What they want is the <i>appearance</i> of influence, an illusion bought at great expense in wasted military hardware and often lives and which in any case fools no-one. <br>
<br>
These people's greatest ambition is for the UK to be the monkey to America's organ-grinder. But who ever took the monkey seriously? The audience respects the organ-grinder while the monkey, if he's lucky, gets tossed a few peanuts. What kind of ambition is that?<br>
<br>
Assuming you believe that Britain ought to have some sort of influence in the world, it can only exercise it by being true to its own principles or by acting in its own interests - as, for example, the French invariably do. Parliament rightly rejected the opportunity to join in with Obama's ill thought-through gesture bombing, recognising that there was nothing in it either for Britain or, more importantly, for the people of Syria. Syria isn't merely "not our war"; bombing military targets as punishment or as an expression of moral indignation isn't even our solution. ("Our solution", championed by William Hague, which strikes me as even more bonkers than the proposed bombing campaign, has long been to "arm the rebels.") It's not our responsibility as a nation, even a nation that has a few dozen Tomahawk Cruise missiles to its name, to dig President Obama out of the hole into which he dug himself by declaring his foolish "red line" last year. Even if you believe, as I do, that the Assad regime was guilty of using chemical weapons and deserves to be punished for it, there's simply no evidence that this proposed response will do anything to alleviate the suffering of the people of Syria, which is after all the only thing that really matters.<br>
<br>
David Blair, incidentally, passes over Syria entirely, beyond the merest of nods: "let’s leave aside the case for and against the proposed strike on Syria and focus on the diplomatic consequences for Britain." A remarkable example of tunnel vision, if all-too-representative of the general tone of the commentary. This isn't about us, and it isn't about the frustrations and hurt feelings of armchair generals not being allowed to join in the fun.<br>
<br>
But we now know the actual impact, at least in the short term, of last week's Parliamentary vote. It was to bounce a panicked (or perhaps secretly relieved) Obama into putting the matter before Congress, not in emergency session, but <i>next week</i>, by which time both the case for military strikes and the likely consequences will be clearer. The Francophile John Kerry might have taken the opportunity to snub Britain and wax lyrical about an "oldest ally" that was last of serious military assistance to the United States in 1782, but Obama (despite his oft-alleged Anglophobia) appears to have more sense. He realises, as many in the US do, that the UK is a serious ally and thus should be taken seriously. He appreciates, better than many on this side of the Atlantic, that when the House of Commons, despite a tradition of bi-partisanship on questions of national security and defence, declines to support a particular military course urged by the government, that this is unlikely to be a petulant whim. <br>
<br>
Far from destroying British credibility - even in Washington - Parliament's decision to apply the brakes on the rush towards a futile bombing raid has done much to restore it. Last Thursday, largely as a result of actions by Ed Miliband that were either fiendishly Machiavellian or just plain indecisive, and a response by David Cameron that was almost an object lesson in how not to do politics, Parliament reflected the will of the nation. It taught the American president a lesson in the value of reflection and the importance of democratic debate that he has shown himself perhaps surprisingly willing to learn. It showed the world that, whatever the desire of political leaders, leader-writers and BBC war-junkies to get involved in something - anything - that the Americans want to do the UK isn't quite a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Pentagon. It began to undo some of the damage caused by Tony Blair. It reasserted the national interest.<br>
<br>
And the world took note. It made a difference. Who would have predicted that?</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-11187084675696995632013-08-28T17:53:00.001+01:002013-08-28T17:53:59.046+01:00In Syria, the right thing to do may be the wrong thing to doThe real test for our political leaders pondering Syria, and one which the evidence of their public utterance would suggest that they're failing, is to separate the principled moral case for punishing the Assad regime from a pragmatic analysis of what the proposed bombing campaign will actually do.<br />
<br />
The first is easy, which is why it is so appealing to practitioners of the politics of emotion. Hit the bad guys who did the bad thing. Chemical weapons are barbarous and their use is contrary to international law. The Ghouta massacre was a monstrosity and deserves to be punished. By resorting to such means the Syrian rulers have put themselves beyond the pale of the world community: politics is a cynical game, and international politics most cynical of all, but it's hard to see Assad and his lovely wife ever being welcomed to cosy summits with other leaders. The new Cameron doctrine of "not standing idly by" is certainly in play.<br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
I'm incidentally unconvinced by assertions that the Syrian power structure is not ultimately responsible for the chemical attack, or that there's insufficient evidence that they are behind it. There's ample evidence. They alone had the motive and the opportunity. As to why they would have done something so seemingly irrational as to have perpetrated a chemical massacre under the noses of UN weapons inspectors, and in defiance of Obama's well-publicised red lines, especially at a time when according to the consensus of news reports they are making major gains against rebel forces, there are a number of possible explanations. It may have been a rogue commander (this would be the natural explanation for an <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2403778/Syria-crisis-U-S-spies-certain-Assad-used-nerve-gas-intercepting-defence-chief.html" target="_blank">intercepted phone call</a> from a senior Defence Ministry official demanding to know what had happened). It may have been Bashar Assad's <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2403312/Ruthless-brother-President-Assad-accused-chemical-weapons-attack-killed-1-200-Syrians.html" target="_blank">hothead younger brother Maher</a>, out for revenge after a failed assassination attempt on the president.<br />
<br />
Or it may have been more calculated. Der Spiegel, quoting a defecting Syrian general, <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/syrian-chemical-weapons-attack-western-intervention-draws-nearer-a-918667.html" target="_blank">reports</a> that recent rebel inroads into the Alawite heartland of Latakia have drained irregular forces from Damascus, where they had been supporting the depleted national army. According to the defector, the regime solved two problems with the gas attack, "holding the thinned out front around Damascus and strengthening the morale of the fanatics in their ranks." Lack of response to earlier small-scale gas incidents (the responsibility for which remains controversial) and Obama's evident desire not to get ensnared in another drawn-out conflict, may have led the Syrian leadership to underestimate the international reaction.<br />
<br />
We don't really know. But any of these theories makes more sense than the suggestion that rebel forces killed hundreds of their own fighters, along with many women and children, just to attract international sympathy. Doubts about regime responsibility are so far-fetched that they make opponents of military intervention look ridiculous. Leave them to the likes of Galloway.<br />
<br />
But even to ask "is Assad guilty?" or "how should he be punished?" is to seek to answer the wrong question. For many opponents of Western intervention, our leaders must have a dark hidden motivation, whether it's to increase American power or just to test some shiny new weapons in the field. Or they're merely indulging their narcissistic desire to play a leading role in events. On the contrary, I think the problem is that our leaders aren't cynical enough. They're motivated by the desire to do "the right thing"; and while the proposed action is morally justified it's strategically highly dangerous.<br />
<br />
The intention seems to be "surgical" strikes, serious enough to serve as an effective deterrent, not devastating enough to hand Syria to Al Qaeda and its affiliates. How can such an outcome be guaranteed? It can't be. Too much depends on subtle balances of which even the best intelligence can't be fully aware. The planned missile strikes will certainly tilt the military balance away from Assad and, therefore, towards the rebels (both the "good" rebels, who want a constitutional democracy, and the currently much stronger Saudi-backed jihadists). But that won't necessarily hasten the end of the war. It may prolong it further. <br />
<br />
While it's impossible to be sure what's really going on (I certainly don't know), if the balance of recent reports is anywhere near accurate the civil war has been heading towards a de facto partition of the country, with the regime solid in some areas and the rebels in effective control of other - and with Assad strengthening and extending his control over key strategic areas while being impotent to take back the whole country. It is possible to see a settlement emerging based on these facts on the ground. If so - and it would depend on a perhaps implausible realism on both sides - then striking at Assad's military infrastructure may wreck the best hope for short-term peace. It would strengthen both the morale and the capability of the rebels vis-a-vis Assad, but still leave the regime with enough fighting strength to dig in. The result could be the intensification of the fighting and yet more destruction of life and property.<br />
<br />
This isn't inevitable. If reports of Assad's military recovery have been overdone (and they may well have been - there have been recent, underreported rebel gains) it's just possible that targeted airstrikes will tip the balance decisively in the rebels' favour, dooming the regime. But it's a huge gamble to take. The balance of probability at the moment must be that Western intervention will make the situation worse.<br />
<br />
But perhaps it matters little either way. It is already too late to save Syria. The Assad regime was always brutal and undemocratic, yet the country over which it presided was a precious thing, a place where Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Christian, secular and religious lived side-by-side in greater harmony than anywhere else in the middle east. That has been utterly destroyed, along with Syria's infrastructure and economy. Returning the country to anything like normality will be the work of decades, and even then its tolerant, mixed society is almost certainly gone forever. Neither the improbable restoration to supreme power of a morally bankrupt and illegitimate regime, nor the more likely triumph of Saudi-backed extremists, nor even an Iraqi-style attempt at democracy can alter that. Of all the tragedies that have followed the misnamed and misguided "Arab Spring", that of Syria is perhaps the worst. Even the outrageous deployment of chemical weapons is of small account set against the wider context of a wrecked nation.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-87513267481361580692013-08-26T18:28:00.002+01:002013-08-26T21:00:40.472+01:00Compulsory voting, or why teenagers can't be trusted to abstainA left-leaning think-tank, the IPPR, has a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/aug/26/young-people-compulsory-voting-pay-fine-ippr" target="_blank">hare-brained scheme</a> to fix (sorry, ambiguous: <i>mend</i>) British politics: compulsory voting for teenagers. It wants first-time voters (but only first-time voters, apparently) to face a fine if they decline to turn up to the polling booth. In a concession to liberalism, however, the newly enfranchised will be allowed to put their cross next to a "none of the above" box. Thus will young citizens learn their civic duty. "It could well help to reinvigorate democracy," suggested one of the report's authors (the report hasn't actually been published yet, but they're hoping for some advance publicity), Sarah Birch. <br>
<br>
One can think of less coercive possibilities for attracting young voters. Perhaps - I don't know - the Telegraph might be prevailed upon to print large photos of attractive teenage girls clutching their first ballot papers and jumping for joy. It worked for exam results.<br>
<br>
Compulsory voting has long been canvassed by people worried about declining turnout in elections. The disengagement of citizens from the electoral process is widely held to be bad for democracy. It certainly suggests that something is wrong somewhere; but to demand compulsory voting as a fix is implicitly to blame the people, who tend to be derided as apathetic or cynical. That they might have a good deal to be apathetic or cynical about seems scarcely to register with proponents of compulsory voting, who are apt to trot out misty-eyed tales of Chartists and suffragettes - or, worse still, the dead of two world wars who "fought for your freedom". Thus a disinclination to endorse one or other lookalike PPE graduate is less evidence of an unappealing choice as a rank betrayal of one's ancestors. Restricting compulsion to first-timers does at least introduce an element of novelty to the latest proposal.<br>
<span id="fullpost"><br>
It's hard to see the IPPR proposal working in practice. Imagine two twenty-three year olds, neither of whom has voted before, but only one of whom was eligible at the time of the previous general election. Should only one face a fine when the law comes in. Hardly fair. Nor is it fair (and can it even be legal?) to make compulsory for one section of the adult population something that is voluntary for everyone else. Implicit in the suggestion, indeed, is almost a contempt for young adults. A contempt that it entirely misplaced.<br>
<br>
While it's true that in previous elections under-25s have proved less enthusiastic voters than other sections of society, especially pensioners, this isn't necessarily the result of apathy. It may be a rejection of the model of politics currently practised. Or it may be a perfectly valid recognition that for the majority of younger people party politics, with its overriding attunement to the priorities of "hard-working families", is simply less cogent than it will be later on in their lives. Conventional voting is something they will eventually grow into, like Radio 4. In the meantime, they're more likely to channel what political energy they have into single-issue campaigns - signing an online petition against Page 3, for example.<br>
<br>
The IPPR's proposal seems to be linked to the growing push (which may even find its way into Labour's manifesto) for 16 and 17 year olds to be given the vote. This has also been seen, this time by shadow justice secretary <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10250506/Labours-pledge-to-lower-voting-age-makes-coalition-more-likely-Lib-Dems-say.html" target="_blank">Sadiq Khan</a>, as "a really good way of reinvigorating politics". There's probably an underlying assumption that young people would be more more likely to back Labour, despite their generally hardline attitudes towards welfare. Khan was also reported to be backing the compulsory first-time voting idea last week.<br>
<br>
The two ideas fit together neatly. 16 and 17 year-olds aren't legally adults, after all. Indeed, the age of functional adulthood is ever-longer postponed. A few decades ago, when most 16 year olds worked and most under 25-year olds had started families, a lower voting age would have made more rational sense than it does in an era when half of all 20 year olds are still in full-time education. Allowing - or forcing - teenagers to vote years before most of them have taken on adult responsibilities suggests an undervaluing of the franchise itself. So I was struck by Sarah Birch's rationale: <br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br>
First-time compulsory voting could well be very effective in engaging young people in politics. There are many other things that young people are required to do, not the least of which is go to school.</blockquote><br>
This wouldn't apply to those at the older end of the age spectrum, of course, but it does link up logically with the extension of compulsory education to 18. Once the system were up and running, voting would in effect be compulsory between the ages of 16 and 21, years which were once the first stage of adulthood but have become (given the increasing circumscription of the lives of under 16s) the new adolescence. So the obligatory franchise will be not a badge of citizenship but rather a marker of continuing dependence on adult supervision.<br>
<br>
The other justification for the IPPR proposal is that it would somehow correct an imbalance in the political process. As lead author Guy Lodge explains, <br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br>
Unequal turnout matters because it gives older and more affluent voters disproportionate influence at the ballot box. Turnout rates among the young have fallen significantly which means there is less incentive for politicians to pay attention to them.</blockquote><br>
The idea, of course, is that the high turnout of older people means that politicians target their policies disproportionately towards their interests, protecting pensioners' "perks" such as free bus-passes while hiking up student tuition fees. This is less convincing than it at first appears. For one thing, pensioners' perks are small change when set against the brute facts of demography and an ageing population, which are steadily eroding the income levels from pension funds. Pensioners may be protected at the moment, but all the parties are now suggesting that many of the perks will be scaled back. No amount of enthusiastic voting is effective against a strong political consensus. <br>
<br>
More profoundly, while politicians of all the main parties make a big show of pandering to pensioners, politics these days is a young person's game. The main players tend to be in their forties, with ambitious MPs and junior ministers in their thirties or even twenties. Behind them stand legions of special advisers, think tankers and PR gurus, many of whom are fresh out of Oxbridge or the LSE. The object of the game is to escape as soon as possible to a feather-bedded "retirement" of directorships and consultancies.<br>
<br>
But hang on a minute. The problem that has been identified is one of young people's reluctance to involve themselves in mainstream democratic politics, even in the minimalist way that is expected of them. The suggestion is that if more young people voted, politicians would be more responsive to young people. Yet there are ever fewer front-rank politicians over the age of fifty. All those elderly voters haven't produced a government in their image. Quite the reverse: the ageism in politics can be ferocious, as Ming Campbell discovered during his brief stint as Lib Dem leader. If a generation of youngish politicians and genuinely young people behind-the-scenes doing much of the political work hasn't done anything to increase voter turnout among the young, one may well wonder why.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-37798144521949262532013-08-14T16:13:00.000+01:002013-08-14T18:21:34.783+01:00Joan Edwards' intentionsThe now notorious will of the late Miss Joan Edwards of Bristol can scarcely be described as a masterpiece of clear drafting. It directed that the proceeds of her estate be given to "whichever government is in office at the time of my death for the government in their absolute discretion to use as they think fit." This could, on the face of it, mean several things, but it does not unambiguously or uncomplicatedly mean any of them. If she had intended the money simply to go into state coffers, why use such a complicated formulation? If she intended it to be used for the party political purposes of the governing party (or parties), this could easily have been specified. She might have been hoping that wise ministers would designate a particular charity or public purpose to receive the money in her memory: but again, this would not be difficult to spell out.<br>
<br>
The executors, who are also the solicitors who helped Miss Edwards draw up this will, state that they received clarification from her about her true purposes and that she confirmed that she intended the money to go to the political party of government itself. This seems fairly eccentric, but it is not completely implausible; perhaps she trusted in the good sense of the British people to decide for her which set of politicians was worthy of her cash. If that was indeed the case - and good professional practice would of course require that this be noted down in writing - then the panicked decision by the Coalition partners to give the money to the Treasury (where it will make no discernible difference to the national debt) frustrates her intentions. <br>
<span id="fullpost"><br>
Whatever view one takes of the drafting, there's clearly a difference between "the government" and "whichever government is in office at the time of my death". The former may be said to be synonymous with the state: "I give my money to the government" means effectively the same thing as "I give my money to the Exchequer". But Miss Edwards' formulation takes implicit account of the political situation. Goverments change: "whichever government is in office on the day of my death" most naturally means "whichever bunch of politicians happen to have their feets under ministerial desks when I pop my clogs." <br>
<br>
Imagine Miss Edwards had died on the eve of an election. In that case, the govenment in power at the time of her death would not be the same as the government in power when her will was executed and the estate distributed. In that case, on a strict view, the money could not be given to anyone, since "the government in office at the date of my death" no longer existed. Had she died in 2009 and the estate only finally wound up now (such delays are not unusual) the money could scarcely have gone to the Coalition, a government that was not "in office" at the requisite time. Perhaps it would have gone to the Labour party. But the Labour party led by Ed Miliband is not the same as the Labour government led by Gordon Brown, though it shares many of the same members.<br>
<br>
Morally, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems would have had every right to keep the money, given the solicitors' insistence that Miss Edwards intended to make a political donation, however awkward the wording. In the first instance it is for the executors to interpret the will; only if it is contested does ithe meaning of a will become a matter for the courts. The solicitors are in a better position to know her intentions than the Daily Mail, which <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2392343/Grasping-politicians-pocket-Joan-Edwardss-500-000-legacy-bequeathed-government.html" target="_blank">complained</a> that "grasping politicians" had misappropriated the money, or than <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/tories-lib-dem-joan-edwards-cash" target="_blank">Polly Toynbee</a>, who imagines (quite without evidence) that she "left her money to the people of the country" and that the two governing parties took "a chance to seize the money for themselves, carving it up between narrow party political interests." Politically, however, this soon became impossible, because the Mail decided that it knew Miss Edwards had meant better than her solicitors did. So the money has been sunk into general Treasury funds, where it will scarcely be noticed: the national debt grows every day by several times more than the £520,000 Miss Edwards left. What a waste. If the parties had to give up the money, it would have been better for David Cameron and Nick Clegg both to nominate a cause or purpose to receive their share of the money. That might just have been what Miss Edwards wanted all along.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-42341610813404957322013-08-09T14:05:00.002+01:002013-08-09T14:41:21.720+01:00The Gospel According to David Cameron<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgArsxhKcr2qJTtH6A11p7AKCattJI0X2HRe8fqUOwhleo9zOmgPyRhpt1X0ATgS6kAzZoF1vr4hV0KT5VxhKrx0WnSnKOmS95e9XQqB-0Bb1o7cgnUUuV8dGQVA20z_xqdSrlMvZfUxI4/s1600/cameron+church.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgArsxhKcr2qJTtH6A11p7AKCattJI0X2HRe8fqUOwhleo9zOmgPyRhpt1X0ATgS6kAzZoF1vr4hV0KT5VxhKrx0WnSnKOmS95e9XQqB-0Bb1o7cgnUUuV8dGQVA20z_xqdSrlMvZfUxI4/s320/cameron+church.jpg" width="232"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The unauthorised version</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Dave has been talking about religion. Speaking during a question-and-answer session in Darwen near Blackburn, the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/10232054/David-Cameron-on-Jesus-pancakes-and-Sunday-mornings.html" target="_blank">Telegraph reports</a>, he described the Bible as "not a bad handbook", but admitted struggling with some of the sayings contained therein, such as Jesus' instruction to the rich man to sell all he possessed and give the proceeds to the poor.<br>
<br>
"But what I think is so good about Jesus’ teachings," he added, "is there are lots of things that he said that you can still apply very directly to daily life and to bringing up your children."<br>
<br>
So I thought I'd help the prime minister out by offering him an edited version of the Gospels which might be of more use to him.<br>
<span id="fullpost"><br>
1. And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Gideon, that all the world should be taxed. Because it was necessary to sort out the mess left by the last government, and all were in it together.<br>
<br>
2. And Mary brought forth her firstborn son, and laid him in a manger, because she and Joseph were unable to afford the bedroom tax.<br>
<br>
3. And wise men from the East brought him costly gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. But the gifts were seized and the wise men deported, because it turned out they were in the country illegally.<br>
<br>
4. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. But it was discovered that Jesus had remained in the temple sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions, and all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers. And lo there was an Investigation, and social services were called, and Mary and Joseph were reprimanded for child neglect, and the doctors of the temple were placed under suspicion of abuse.<br>
<br>
5. There was a righteous man named John, who came into all the country about Jordan, denouncing the wickedness of profligates and bankers. And this John wore a shirt of camel's hair, and a leather girdle about his loins; he had an unkempt beard and there were holes in his sandals. And Dave said, For God's sake, do we really have to be in coalition with these people? <br>
<br>
6. There was a wedding at Cana. And the hosts had no wine to serve, for Gideon the chancellor had raised alcohol duty to deter binge drinking. So Jesus turned water into wine, and lo he was arrested for supplying alcohol without a licence. And that was the end of Jesus' political career.<br>
<br>
7. Dave saw a man who was stricken with palsy. And he said unto him, take up your bed, and walk, for ATOS has declared you fit for work. And the crippled man did as he was told, and all hailed it as an example of a successful welfare policy promoting the interests of hard-working families. And the crippled man collapsed, but no-one noticed because his apparent recovery had already been entered in the statistics.<br>
<br>
8. And Dave went up into the mountain, and taught the multitudes, saying, Blessed are the geeks, for we wish to encourage successful tech start-ups in this country.<br>
<br>
9. For whosoever hath, to him more shall be given, and he shall have more in abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath. And I'm not ashamed of that. Rewarding success is the foundation of a successful economic policy.<br>
<br>
10. Consider the birds of the air. They sow not, neither do they reap. Yet they expect their heavenly father to feed them. Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin. Yet they expect hard working families to pay for them to be arrayed like Solomon in all his glory. Well not any more. Under this government, the lilies of the field are going to have to pull their weight. And the birds of the air will have to work for their breadcrumbs.<br>
<br>
11. My message to these layabouts is simple. Don't come to the taxpayer, saying, "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we drink?" or "What shall we wear?" Get a fucking job. <br>
<br>
12. But I say unto you, whoever watcheth porn on the internet will be presumed to be a sex offender in his heart. <br>
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13. Every hair on your head is numbered, and that number will from now on be held in a secure database run by G4S, so you can rely on us to keep you safe.<br>
<br>
14. Many are called, but few are chosen. But you can increase your chances considerably if you went to Eton.<br>
<br>
15. Beware of false profits. I have ordered HMRC to institute a crackdown.<br>
<br>
16. You have heard it said, "Love your neighbour and hate your enemy." But I say unto you, Beware! For your neighbour might well be an illegal immigrant or a benefit cheat. You have a duty to report them.<br>
<br>
17. And Dave came down from the mountain, and lo, there were five thousand gathered. And the people grumbled because there was no food for them to eat. And Samantha said, there is a lad here, who hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many? But Dave said, Fear not, it will make a very pleasant lunch for me. <br>
<br>
18. And a rich man came unto him and said, Master, what must I do to get into the House of the Lords? And Dave asked him, saying: Do you do good works, and obey the law, and give to the poor? And the rich man confessed that he did not. But Dave told him not to be afeared, but that he should go and make a large donation to Conservative funds. And behold it came to pass according to Dave's saying.<br>
<br>
19. For is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a child from a working class background to join the Bullingdon club.<br>
<br>
20. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, they said unto him, Master, this woman was taken in the very act. And Dave said, Not another one of Boris's? And they replied unto him, No. For lo she is a scarlet woman, and Boris prefers brunettes. But Dave was astonished, and sore afraid, for the woman knew many secrets. But verily it was all sub judice, and nothing could be reported. Which caused Dave to heave a sigh of relief.<br>
<br>
21. And Dave went into the temple, and saw all them that sold and bought in the temple, and the tables of the moneychangers, and he went up to them, saying, Congratulations, this is a fine example of a successful finance industry and a vital contribution to the economy.<br>
<br>
Amen<br>
<br>
(Any additions will of course be gratefully received)</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-47748903368001101142013-08-08T19:18:00.001+01:002013-08-11T13:34:29.408+01:00Why do so many Nobel laureates look like Richard Dawkins?There's a great parody in the current issue of Private Eye in which Craig Brown pretends to be Richard Dawkins on Twitter. It captures perfectly, with almost documentary verisimilitude, in fact, the blend of irascibility, conceit and high-handed disdain for religion that shines through Dawkins' online persona. A few examples:<br>
<br>
<blockquote>Somebody tell the old ladies in the local church that arranging the flowers won't get them a place in heaven. Such stupidity.<br>
<br>
"You can't prove God doesn't exist." Er, no you can't. But is anyone REALLY stupid enough to think that is a good point? Apparently yes.<br>
<br>
Listening to St Matthew Passion. Very beautiful in parts but why couldn't Bach try harder to keep God out of it?<br>
<br>
Hard to overstate how deeply I despise St Augustine.</blockquote><br>
The only trouble with Brown's send-up is that it can't quite match the original for sheer obtuseness. But perhaps Dawkins is merely trolling. His usual technique is to say something pointlessly provocative, wait for the inevitable backlash (the traditional response, playing on his well-known love of grammar, is "Your a dick") and then express innocent bafflement that anyone could possibly object. As often as not these days, his target is Islam and/or Muslims; a predeliction that seems close enough to an obsession to have attracted accusations of racism. I don't believe that myself, but I do suspect that being accused of race-baiting has only increased his determination to push things.<br>
<span id="fullpost"><br>
Today's was a classic:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.<br>
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) <a href="https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/statuses/365473573768400896">August 8, 2013</a></blockquote><br>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br>
<br>
For an Oxford man, that's some admission. It's also true, as it happens: the 32 Nobels Prizes awarded to people with a connection to Cambridge's largest college far outweigh the number given to persons of Muslim background or faith. It's dramatically true if you exclude the Peace Prize (and Dawkins was really making a point about science) and the prize for literature. Only two Muslim scientists have won the Prize: the Pakistani Abdus Salam for Physics and the Egyptian-American Ahmed Zewail for Chemistry. It's also true that (again excluding the peace and literature prizes) Trinity boasts more Nobel laureates than the entire female gender. Only 17 women have ever been awarded one of the scientific prizes.<br>
<br>
Clearly this signifies something. But what?<br>
<br>
Looking at the l<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country" target="_blank">ist of Nobel laureates</a> since the prizes were first awarded in 1901, the most striking thing is the overwhelming predominance of Western countries, in particular the United States, and of a handful of institutions. Of 863 individual winners, 338 have been American or based in the United States. A further 119 have been British. Germany is in third place with 101 winners, and France a distant fourth with 65 (which is more than Trinity, but less than Cambridge as a whole). Most of the remainder come from other Western nations. Again, the effect is even greater if Peace and Literature are omitted. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation" target="_blank">university affiliations</a> tell a similar story, with the top US institutions (Harvard alone has 147 affiliated winners) and Oxbridge dominating the lists.<br>
<br>
The reason for this isn't an international conspiracy. Rather, it shows that modern science (by which I mean academic, research-driven, resource-intensive science) has been and remains an overwhelmingly Western phenomenon. To ask "where are all the Muslims?" as Dawkins does is to miss the point. One might as well ask, Where are all the Chinese? China has just 8 native-born Nobel winners, and all but two of them are affiliated with Western universities, mostly in the United States. There are approximately the same number of Chinese nationals in the world as there are Muslims, and China, like Islam, had its golden age (in China's case, several of them) when it led the world in technology and science. Japan does rather better, with 20 winners; but then Japan adopted the Western model of university-based scientific research in the late 19th century, and even so only won its first Nobel Prize in 1949.<br>
<br>
Given the type of work that wins a Nobel Prize for science, it's still remarkable that Trinity College has so many more winners than other Cambridge Colleges, but it's not all that remarkable that it has more winners than most non-Western countries put together. It says something about the way modern science developed, and about the continuing place of Anglo-American institutions within modern scientific research, but it says no more about Islam than it says about China (or about women). Which is to say, not much. After all, the country that boasts almost half the world's Nobel prize winners is also home to millions of creationists.<br>
<br>
I suspect that what Dawkins wanted to suggest, if he wasn't being simply dickish, was that something in Islam is indeed responsible for the decline of Arab science, that was once so promising. Here's another of his Tweets:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Why mention Muslim Nobels rather than any other group? Because we so often hear boasts about (a) their total numbers and (b) their science.<br>
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) <a href="https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/statuses/365492811216334848">August 8, 2013</a></blockquote><br>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br>
<br>
Do we hear boasts about their science? Jim Al-Khalili has written an excellent book, Pathfinders, about the medieval Arab pioneers of such fields as optics and medicine (has Dawkins read it? It would be rather surprising if he hadn't). Al-Khalili is President of the British Humanist Association, as it happens, so you won't find him "boasting" about the scientific superiority of Islam. But <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jan/30/religion.world" target="_blank">he has written</a> that,<br>
<br>
<blockquote>... the scientific revolution of the Abbasids would not have taken place if not for Islam - in contrast to the spread of Christianity over the preceding centuries, which had nothing like the same effect in stimulating and encouraging original scientific thinking. The brand of Islam between the beginning of the ninth and the end of the 11th century was one that promoted a spirit of free thinking, tolerance and rationalism. The comfortable compatibility between science and religion in medieval Baghdad contrasts starkly with the contradictions and conflict between rational science and many religious faiths in the world today.</blockquote><br>
You can in fact make a similar case for Christianity, despite what Galileo experienced at the hands of the Inquisition. Both Islam and Christianity, in their different ways, present a vision of the world that is ordered, that accords with natural law, and that as the product of an intelligent designer is inherently intelligible. If you say that Christianity held back science, you have to explain why the modern scientific revolution took off in a Europe that remained profoundly Christian. Newton, for one, believed that his scientific work was in large part a religious undertaking. If you say that Islam is anti-science, you have to explain why for many centuries it was anything but. It's probably true that the Muslim world became more religiously conservative, and thus more anti-science, just as Western Europe was becoming more religiously open. Likewise, China under the Ming dynasty largely withdrew from international trade just as Europeans began their great voyages of exploration. <br>
<br>
There are many reasons why modernity originated in Western Europe and its American offshoot, and why the West continued to be ecomonically and politically dominant for so long. Political, geological and geographic factors all played their part, as to a lesser extent did philosophy and theology. But the long list of Western Nobel laureates has a more proximate cause: the weight of economic and intellectual capital that has accumulated in a small number of leading institutions, among which Cambridge university is among the most significant. Religion has very little to do with this. I can't predict the future of the Nobel prizes, but I will say this: if you go to Cambridge today you won't have much difficulty finding Muslims doing science. Among then may be a future Nobel laureate. She may even be at Trinity.<br></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-56677720415904031892013-08-05T15:13:00.001+01:002013-08-08T19:23:03.073+01:00Peter Capaldi and Doctor Who's diversity problem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyOs5-KodV-R6oENjf9KDb1UvPcBg7okPyETJypwJ4ZwesXxbjAEZhDvnw4mUVFbsWl8UuXit43-vHP4trPnzxjJlCiwDY__SCa74DmKcJf0fe-MoqkVevm8Ozku1dUZUTwPyahq1h8gA/s1600/capaldi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyOs5-KodV-R6oENjf9KDb1UvPcBg7okPyETJypwJ4ZwesXxbjAEZhDvnw4mUVFbsWl8UuXit43-vHP4trPnzxjJlCiwDY__SCa74DmKcJf0fe-MoqkVevm8Ozku1dUZUTwPyahq1h8gA/s400/capaldi.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
Is the choice of a middle-aged, heterosexual white man as the new Doctor Who actor legal under the 2010 Equality Act?<br />
<br />
Peter Capaldi might be an excellent actor, he might be the best available actor for the job, and many might be pleased that the recent run of progressively younger Doctors has (for a while at least) been reversed. It would be fun to see him swearing, Malcolm Tucker-style, at a Dalek. But there are grounds for believing that his selection is a sin against diversity. Capaldi will be the 12th in the official sequence of Doctors, the 13th if one includes Peter Cushing's portrayal in two 1960s film versions. All have been male, white, British and, so far as one can tell, predominantly heterosexual. (Russell T Davies gave David Tennant's Doctor some bicurious moments, but that's about it; not much to set against the parade of attractive young women that all the Doc's incarnations have invited aboard the Tardis.) <br />
<br />
As a public body funded by the taxpayer (all right, the Licence Fee payer, if you're being pedantic, but the Licence Fee is legally classified as a tax) the BBC is subject to the <a href="http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/public-sector-equality-duty/guidance-on-the-equality-duty/" target="_blank">Public Sector Equality Duty</a>, which is set out in s149 of the 2010 Equality Act. This provides that public authorities must, in the exercise of their functions, have due regard to three issues: eliminating discrimination, harassment and victimisation; advancing equality of opportunity (mainly by meeting the special needs of people with "protected characteristics" including race, gender, sexuality, religion or disability; and fostering good relations in society generally.<br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
The choice of a specific actor in a long-running TV series probably doesn't, in itself, involve the PSED in all its box-ticking complexity. After all, the race, gender and sexuality of most fictional characters are pretty well established. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a male Sherlock Holmes, for example, so it would seem unreasonable to insist that women be considered for the part (although the updated American TV series Elementary introduced an interesting twist with a female Dr Watson). We expect TV to tackle issues of race, but casting can't always be colour-blind. As for disability, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore said it all in the One Legged Tarzan sketch.<br />
<br />
But Doctor Who is different, not least because the essence of the character is in its protean ability to regenerate. Potentially, the Doctor might be anything: male, female, black, white, old, young, even (I suppose) something other than humanoid (why ever not?) More to the point, whenever the role is up for renewal - at least in recent years - the possibility of a female Time Lord is canvassed and speculated on, not just be fans but by the writers and producers. Current supremo Steven Moffat fuelled speculation at last year's Edinburgh Television Festival by saying that "It is a part of Time Lord lore that it can happen - a Time Lord could potentially turn into a woman. The more often it's talked about, the more likely it is to happen someday." Nor is there any mythological objection to a black actor playing the role. Indeed, Luther star Idris Elba was one of the most widely-tipped names this time around.<br />
<br />
The fact that the Doctor might potentially be female or non-white could well be enough to give rise to Equality and Diversity issues. Fulfilling the PSED, moreover, wouldn't simply be a matter of establishing that women and ethnic minority actors were given equal consideration in casting: the wider need to advance equality and "foster good relations" might be held to take precedence over the naive search for the best available actor or Moffat's ideas about story arcs. At least since its reinvention in 2005 Doctor Who has come to have a remarkable (non-fans would say inexplicable) profile in modern British culture. What is basically a light-hearted piece of family entertainment has come to be discussed and intensively analysed in terms of politics (including sexual politics), morality, social dynamics, even religion. It's a medium with (many observers are convinced) a message. The Doctor himself (for now) is a role model and a touchstone of decency; when he does something ethically dubious, or even debatable, the shock can be palpable. Playing the Doctor is much more than just an acting job.<br />
<br />
This being the case, is it acceptable for another white male actor to take the role? Did the BBC even consider all these issues and carry out a full PSED assessment before deciding on Capaldi? <br />
<br />
If the notion that the BBC might be legally obliged to choose a female Doctor (or at least be able to demonstrate that they considered the equality impact of their choice in rigorous detail) sounds a bit far-fetched, consider the recent fuss over the Winston Churchill fiver. As everyone knows, campaigners led by Caroline Criado-Perez brought a heavy weight of public opinion to bear and eventually managed to embarrass the Bank of England into a rushed announcement that Jane Austen would feature on the next £10 note. Less well known, but according to Criado-Perez crucial, was her invocation of the 2010 Equality Act. <br />
<br />
In a series of letters to the Bank, Criado-Perez demanded to know whether the committee charged with banknote design had fulfilled the PSED when considering its choice of Churchill. Her case was that the loss of a woman on the £5 note (the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry) would have a negative impact on equality. In a piece <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2013/jul/04/women-bank-notes-bank-england" target="_blank">written for the Guardian last month</a> she accuses the bank of being "dismissive, patronising, and vague to the point of wilful obtuseness" and of failing to engage with her legal points. Prior to the climbdown, she says, she was fully prepared to go to court over the issue. Had she done so, and had the court judged that the PSED was engaged, the Bank would have been obliged to prove that it had undertaken a "rigorous" equality assessment before making its decision. <br />
<br />
It's entirely possible that it never occurred to those responsible for banknote design that they might have duties under the Equality Act; that might explain the Bank's caginess. After all, the design of a note doesn't directly affect anyone. It's not as if only white men are allowed to spend money. There's no evidence (that I'm aware of) that whether or not there is a woman on reverse side of the money causes any woman to do less well at school, earn less at work or lose self esteem. Nor would a selection procedure based purely on historical merit feature more than a small minority of women. For reasons of historic discrimination which saw women excluded from most professions and largely confined to the home, our culture and history has been made predominantly by men. Male soldiers and politicians, male inventors and scientists, male philosophers and entrepreneurs. White males, at that. A smattering of women, yes (more as the 20th century got underway) but not enough to guarantee that one in four banknotes would always feature a woman. Not if historical significance was the only criterion.<br />
<br />
So if the PSED is to be applied to banknote design as well as to more obvious things such as recruitment or the offering of services to the public, the conclusion must be that public bodies have a duty to advance gender (and other forms of) equality in purely cultural or symbolic ways. And the Bank of England appears to accept this. Note the language of their <a href="http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/news/2013/093.aspx" target="_blank">official statement</a> on July 24th:<br />
<blockquote><br />
In the light of recent concerns, and in order to ensure that our notes represent the full diversity of British people, the Bank has decided to review the approach to, and criteria for, selecting characters to appear on banknotes. The Bank’s Court of Directors discussed this at its meeting on 17 July, and agreed to the Bank’s plans to undertake a review. The purpose of the review, which will be overseen by Chris Salmon, the Bank’s Executive Director for Banking Services and Chief Cashier, is to refine the criteria for character selection, and establish a process to ensure that potential candidates are consistently judged against those criteria. In particular we will review:<br />
<br />
a. The principles that guide the choice of historical characters, given the need for the choices to command respect and legitimacy.<br />
b. How the process for choosing characters could ensure, and be seen to ensure, the delivery of those principles.<br />
<br />
<i>The Bank will also review whether it can take further steps to operate within the spirit of the Public Sector Equality Duty when deciding on future characters</i>. </blockquote><br />
Is Doctor Who, perhaps the most talked-about British produced TV series and (16 year hiatus notwithstanding) the longest running, not a cultural product at least as significant as the design on banknotes - notes that, like the Doctor, are subject to periodic regeneration? If the changing face of our money provides opportunities to make statements about the importance of fostering a diverse society, surely the changing body of Doctor Who does as well. Not just an opportunity, indeed, but after the passage of the 2010 Equality Act, a positive duty. Acting ability can no more be the only measure of suitability for the role of than Doctor than pure historical greatness can be be measure of worth to appear on banknotes. Not any longer. Having a white man continue to play the role in the future may not be legally an option. <br />
<br />
Anyone want to try a judicial review?</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-62393465245741679832013-07-30T17:48:00.003+01:002013-07-30T17:56:48.542+01:00What the Bedroom Tax case reveals about Equality lawThe much-despised "bedroom tax" (actually an under-occupancy penalty, which is the accurate as well as the official description of a reduction in benefit occasioned by the presence of what are deemed to be spare bedrooms) does have a reasonable purpose. By forcing social tenants on Housing Benefit to pay rent for bedrooms they don't need, it discourages people from clinging on to large houses once their children, whose existence was the reason they were awarded the properties in the first place, have grown up and moved out. Social housing is in short supply. In many areas there's a huge backlog of families needing to be housed. Encouraging people to downsize once they no longer need so much space, freeing accommodation for families who really do need it, is no bad thing.<br />
<br />
The rationale of the policy is rather undermined by the fact that it doesn't apply to pensioners, when it is often pensioners who are over-occupying social housing. There are other practical problems with it. For one thing, there are often no suitable smaller properties for tenants to move into. Many councils (for example Cambridge) have been bulldozing perfectly viable smaller properties claiming that there is insufficient demand for them. But the bedroom penalty, as I'm going to call it, will inevitably increase the demand for smaller properties. Which is a good thing. It becomes oppressive and counterproductive when tenants who can't afford to pay the penalty are unable to move - or if they do move, can only be housed by private landlords at a higher rent than the social rents that they are already paying. The basic problem, the shortage of affordable housing, is in no way addressed by the vindictive hammering of some of the poorest people in society if they have no alternative but to live in the properties they already occupy. Nor is it likely to save much money.<br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
The penalty can be rather harsh when applied to disabled people, or to the parents of disabled children, who may live in homes that have been specially adapted to their needs (often at considerable public cost) or who can't share bedrooms without the lives of other family members being unacceptably disrupted. It was the situation of such claimants that led a number of them, together with their supporters, to bring a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jul/30/bedroom-tax-legal-high-court" target="_blank">case at the High Court</a>, judgement in which was delivered this morning. <br />
<br />
On the face of it, they had a reasonable case that the rules was discriminatory, since the impact of the bedroom penalty might often fall more harshly on them than on most able-bodied people. The government has established a discretionary fund to alleviate hard cases; but a discretionary fund is by definition discretionary, and it is also limited. Campaigners want the right to receive full housing benefit, and they want the court to agree that failing to grant that right amounts to unlawful discrimination. The court didn't oblige. It held that the existence of a discretionary fund (which the government has now generously doubled) was sufficient to address any issues with the policy. In particular, the court decided that government policy in a democratic system was not really any of its business. <br />
<br />
The <a href="http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2013/2213.html" target="_blank">judgement</a>, delivered by Lord Justice Laws, is significant for several reasons. Much initial comment has picked out paragraph 74, in which Laws clearly signposts the limits of judicial activism. It will be music to the ears of many worried about interference by the courts in the nitty-gritty of political decision-making, and will be much quoted by government lawyers in the years to come:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
Much of our modern law, judge-made and statutory, makes increasing demands on public decision-makers in the name of liberal values: the protection of minorities, equality of treatment, non-discrimination, and the quietus of old prejudices. The law has been enriched accordingly. But it is not generally for the courts to resolve the controversies which this insistence involves. That is for elected government. The cause of constitutional rights is not best served by an ambitious expansion of judicial territory, for the courts are not the proper arbiters of political controversy. In this sense judicial restraint is an ally of the s.149 duty, for it keeps it in its proper place, which is the process and not the outcome of public decisions. </blockquote><br />
It's not the purpose of the court to decide whether or not a policy is right, he declares, merely that it has been rightly arrived at. At issue is the Public Sector Equality Duty (s.149 of the Equality Act 2010, Harriet Harman's poisoned legacy), which requires public authorities to carry out impact assessments before policies are implemented. The purpose of such exercises, in theory, is to ensure that minority or vulnerable groups (or women) will not be adversely affected, or (more pointedly) that any such adverse effect can be justified. Laws LJ explained his thinking very clearly immediately before the paragraph just quoted:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
It is plain that the PSED sets an important standard for public decision-making. Where the protected characteristics specified in s.149 of the 2010 Act are potentially affected by a forthcoming public measure, the decision-maker is obliged to conduct a rigorous examination of the measure's effects, including due enquiry where that is necessary. He does not, however, have to undertake a minute examination of every possible impact and ramification... <br />
<br />
... As I have indicated the duty of due regard is not a duty to achieve a particular result. The courts will not administer s.149 so as in effect to steer the outcome which ought in any particular case to be arrived at. The evaluation of the impact on equality considerations of a particular decision clearly remains the responsibility of the primary decision-maker... So, as I have said, the discipline of the PSED lies in the required quality, not the outcome, of the decision-making process. This is well borne out by the learning; but in my judgment it reflects a more general constitutional balance. </blockquote><br />
The only question then became whether the assessment process was "sufficiently rigorous"; in other words, whether the civil servants had gone through the motions convincingly enough. If they have, then the PSED is fulfilled and the government's decision can only then be overturned by the court if it is "manifestly unreasonable". <br />
<br />
The effect of Laws' decision, it seems to me, is to make the assessment process under the PSED even more of a bureaucratic dance than it is already. It denudes it of any real significance beyond the opportunity it gives to civil servants to exercise their ingenuity (for which they are rightly famed). It doesn't prevent policies harmful to particular groups from emerging, but it does require ministers to marshall convincing-sounding arguments to defend them. Which is rarely a problem. The PSED was always liable to be a box-ticking exercise; requiring it to be done "rigorously" makes little difference if the ultimate result isn't open to challenge. Indeed, going through the motions with apparent rigour makes the ultimate result <i>less</i> open to challenge. A point Laws LJ hammered home. To repeat: "In this sense <i>judicial restraint is an ally of the s.149 duty</i>, for it keeps it in its proper place, which is the process and not the outcome of public decisions."<br />
<br />
So PSED does little to help members of minority groups who will be adversely affected by government decisions, beyond making them a judicial review less likely to succeed. It rather secures government decisions against challenge, by providing convenient insulation. That's the true purpose of box-ticking exercises: not to help members of vulnerable or minority groups but to help bureaucrats shore up their decisions by setting out procedures for them to follow. Achieving equality means, in a bureaucratic context, achieving adherence to procedural norms, established in the name of equality but which are in most respects neutral administrative tools. Boxes must be ticked; it doesn't really matter which boxes get ticked as long as you tick some boxes. Like other parts of the Equality and Diversity culture, for example many of the obligations laid on employers, the chief beneficiaries of PSED are not people with "protected characteristics" but the cadre of Equality and Diversity professionals who form one of this country's few remaining growth industries.<br />
<br />
It's nice to have the true position set out so clearly by a judge, especially one as perceptive and distinguished as Lord Justice Laws.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-20997850866655514592013-07-29T19:07:00.000+01:002013-07-29T19:14:01.601+01:00Kate, William and the royal baby conspiracyKate's had a baby. You may have heard. Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge has been safely delivered of a prince, an eight pound six ounce bundle of royal boyhood, a George no less: and what better name to continue the line of the Hanoverian usurpers? A few grouchy feminists may be disappointed that biology failed to keep up with the times, rendering purely symbolic the efforts of forward-thinking politicians who have exercised such constitutional ingenuity to alter the law of succession so as to cope with a potential daughter. But everyone else has been going positively gooey. Britain's miserable handful of remaining republicans are about as popular now as that women's magazine that helpfully offered Kate tips to lose her baby weight, a suggestion <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/28/duchess-baby-weight-coverage-media">swiftly condemned</a> by Jo "ban airbrushing" Swinson to general applause. Because Kate's had a baby. Hasn't she?<br />
<br />
Suckers.<br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />
True, it has been announced that Kate has had a baby. But it was also claimed that Mary of Modena gave birth to a son by James II in 1688. Many at the time were convinced that she did no such thing: the child was stillborn, and the offspring of a serving woman was smuggled into the birthing chamber in a warming pan. It was to prevent such rumours that subsequent royal births were attended by the Home Secretary until well into the 20th century. But that custom has long since been abolished (Princess Margaret's was the last birth to be so witnessed) leaving the royal succession wide open to gerrymandering.<br />
<br />
Those redoubtable sceptics over at the <a href="http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=252024" target="_blank">David Icke forum</a> have been busy pointing out the holes in the official narrative fed to the the gullible masses. Serious questions, it turns out, surround every aspect of the royal pregnancy and birth. Was the Duchess ever pregnant? Did she lose the baby? Was the child in fact carried by a surrogate and then smuggled in to the Lindo Wing in front of the world's encircling press?<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVy0CDN2IKbwbBkJVSgmq1E2nniiu3WfrjCziVDbEM_KPuZthFMqGzoK9bJ50eaQBx0RE5mR-xpHufZ9fs39K9OE9AAUUgufDBJ3Hz-45zVieLS9DKWK0CBS6R0OzGyNl69r1ApJMHOHg/s1600/kate-will-baby-bump.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVy0CDN2IKbwbBkJVSgmq1E2nniiu3WfrjCziVDbEM_KPuZthFMqGzoK9bJ50eaQBx0RE5mR-xpHufZ9fs39K9OE9AAUUgufDBJ3Hz-45zVieLS9DKWK0CBS6R0OzGyNl69r1ApJMHOHg/s400/kate-will-baby-bump.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Highly suspicious</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
1. Was Kate pregnant?<br />
<br />
The apparent ease with which Kate carried her child, even into the third trimester, raised eyebrows among even mainstream commentators. Sure, she looked pregnant: but she didn't look pregnant enough. "All these women were blooming at six months," <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2313262/Why-Kate-Middletons-baby-bump-tiny-All-women-blooming-6-months-.html">declared the Daily Mail</a> on 23rd April, showing readers a SEO-friendly quota of heavily-laden celebs: Denise Van Outen, Holly Willoughby, Dannii Minogue and Heidi Klum. "So why is Kate's bump so tiny?" Indeed, she did look particularly svelte in her stylist mint-green Mulberry coat. Perhaps it was the camera angle. <br />
<br />
Ironically, coming out of the hospital Kate looked more pregnant than she ever did when she was pregnant. To many observers (though not OK! magazine) the Duchess' unembarrassment about her visible post-partum bump sent a positive message to women struggling with body image issues and social or media pressure to lose their "baby weight". But to conspiracy theorists it was grist to the mill. As "actionplan" observed,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
She kept purposely pulling the dress down tight around the bump, and you could see it was rock hard, totally unlike a normal post-partum "jelly-belly". It didn't move at all, jiggle when she walked, etc etc. It was so obviously fake. It was absolutely obvious she had not just given birth, confirmed by their uncomfortable, unconvincing show for the paparazzi where they fluffed their lines and looked shifty as hell. Good actors they ain't - should have hired more talented body doubles.</blockquote><br />
Silkie concurred:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br />
That's what I've been saying - its like jelly after the birth - you still look pregnant but smaller about 7 months for a few days blobbier - not hard and firm and upright - more to the sides than the middle after the birth.</blockquote><br />
While "elshaper" declared that "Kate's tummy looked stiff like she was wearing a sillicon fake padding." Her chest looked padded, too, some thought. Add the fact that, for many sceptics, the duchess looked uncommonly fresh after an eleven hour labour - she even wore high-heeled shoes, showing off her implausibly slim ankles - and the case against her having undergone a natural childbirth seemed compelling. And then consider... <br />
<br />
2. Where did that huge baby come from?<br />
<br />
A weight of 8 1/2 pounds isn't exceptional these days, though it's still well above average. And Kate was widely believed to be several days past her due date when the baby finally made his entrance. But the mother's slimness during pregnancy seemed even more puzzling given such a big bairn. How did it fit inside her? <br />
<br />
"I saw a baby yesterday while I was shopping yesterday," wrote elshaper, "and I could tell this one was probably about 1 week old or very newborn, still quite wrinkly and red, nothing like Kate's baby which looked like it's been feeding on milk for sometime."<br />
<br />
Kiwimaj added: "If you check out the way Kate interacts and looks at the baby you can tell and sense that this is not hers and it is all fake. It's a bit like someone holding a doll and pretending it's a real baby!"<br />
<br />
William's behaviour attracted suspiction, too, particularly his words addressed to journalists wanting a clue as to the name: "Well, it's the first time we've seen him really so we need to catch up." Just the sort of thing that might slip out if an unknown child had been slipped into your arms in the hospital lobby. <br />
<br />
But does all this mean that Kate can't have been pregnant? As Yass, pointed out, "if the Royals are really reptilians then it all might be a different ball game when it comes to birth."<br />
<br />
3. So what happened?<br />
<br />
Perhaps there never was a pregnancy. The US gossip magazine In Touch ran a splash in 2011 titled "Will and Kate's baby heartbreak", citing mysterious "health complications from Kate's adolescence" that might affect her ability to conceive. The <a href="http://entertainment.msn.co.nz/blog.aspx?blogentryid=827202&showcomments=true" target="_blank">speculation</a>, supposedly, came straight from the horse's mouth, as it were: step mother-in-law Camilla had "blabbed to friends" about the problem. Then late last year another US tabloid, Globe, <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/kate-middleton-s-secret-family-planning-strategy-allegedly-revealed" target="_blank">claimed</a> that Kate was undergoing fertility treatment and was "determined to be a mom by next year". The story appeared on November 23rd, by which time she Kate was already at least a month with child. At least, so we have been led to believe. <br />
<br />
Less than a fortnight later, in fact, Kate was rushed to hospital suffering from severe morning sickness, the intensity of which led to a bout of excited speculation that she might be expecting twins (remember that?) But was this just a cover story? Elshaper's theory is that Kate had miscarried "due to vigorous physical activity" and that as the doctors hadn't been able to save the baby, a "substitute had to be brought in" - in other words, a surrogate. Perhaps, adds actionplan, the real baby hasn't actually been born yet, the surrogate is still pregnant, and Kate is going to her parents for six weeks to keep her cover. The baby we saw on the steps of the hospital was merely a stand-in, a baby procured at short notice (after all, it is a maternity hospital) to satisfy an expectant world. Support for this theory comes from the apparent suicide of nurse Jacintha Saldanha, supposedly upset after taking a call from a couple of Aussie DJs. We all know that the secret services can fake a death. Perhaps, thinks actionplan, Saldanha "saw something she shouldn't" and had to be silenced.<br />
<br />
Perhaps a surrogate delivery had been planned all the time, and Kate's supposed morning sickness was a cover for what was actually going on: her eggs being extracted for fertilisation and implantation in a surrogate. Or perhaps the royals were making the best of a bad job. Either way, the pretence of a pregnancy had to be (however unconvincingly) sustained for eight months while somewhere, far from prying eyes, a surrogate mother was, and possibly still is, carrying the penultimate heir to the throne. How she was recruited is unclear. One possibility is that she is herself a member of the Illumanti bloodline to whose existence David Icke has spent so much effort alerting the world over the past twenty years. No doubt her silence has been bought; though one does worry what will happen to her after she has fulfilled her purpose. They're a ruthless lot, these reptilian shapeshifters.<br />
<br />
To be fair, some people on that thread pointed out the absurdity of the conspiracy theories being offered. One offered her own experience of motherhood to show that Kate's appearance during and after her pregnancy was far from abnormal: "I don't see anything unusual about her belly and I've been there so I should know." There's sense to be found even on the David Icke Forum, even if those contributors putting forward the conspiracy theories were determined that nothing would make them take the world at face value like the general run of sheeple. But suspicion of the royal birth may be more widespread than you think. I managed to spark off a conversation of Twitter this morning on the subject. As one person sympathetic to the conspiracy theory commented, "it's almost too bizarre to get your head around! But I KNOW life can be weirder than fiction..."<br />
<br />
If you think all this is mad, remember that in 1688 the circulation of a no less crazy conspiracy theory led to a revolution, ousted a dynasty and changed the course of British, and world, history.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-85507650023854965462013-07-05T20:43:00.000+01:002013-07-05T23:38:41.101+01:00Pope Francis - making saints up as he goes alongOne of the major perks of becoming Pope is a much increased chance of being made a saint after your death. As of this morning, 78 of the 266 officially recognised Roman pontiffs had been canonised, and we now learn that both John Paul II and John XXIII are to be added to that select company of Heaven. So well done to both of them. No doubt the news will come as some encouragement to the shade of Benedict IX, who died as long ago as 1304 and has been waiting for sainthood for almost three hundred years now, having been declared "Blessed" in 1736.<br>
<br>
The problem for Benedict IX (who, if he finally makes it, ought to be declared patron saint of queuers) would seem to be the rules. Because just being pope isn't enough, nor even being an especially holy pope. You also need to have performed at least two verified miracles since your death. One for a beatification, two for full sainthood. And that's a big hurdle, because the Vatican employs a crack team of investigators whose job it is to subject claims of the miraculous to the strictest scientific scrutiny. <br>
<span id="fullpost"><br>
They won't accept just any old miracle. The 19th century theologian John Henry Newman, for example, had to wait several decades after his cause was opened until a suitable miracle was discovered. Happily, just in time for Pope Benedict's visit to Britain in 2010 the Vatican <a href="http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2010/09/pope-in-britain-to-plug-new-cure-for.html" target="_blank">confirmed</a> that a man had been miraculously cured of backache through Newman's intercession. Even more happily, the recipient of the miracle, Jack Sullivan, was able to be present at the beatification ceremony. He was even able to hobble painfully to the lectern and read a lesson. A very impressive miracle, you'll agree, especially considering that Mr Sullivan had also endured a back operation. According to Michael Powell, a consultant neurosurgeon at London's University College Hospital, a procedure like Sullivan's typically took "about 40 minutes, and most patients... walk out happy at two days". But of course most patients don't have a would-be saint on their side.<br>
<br>
Anyway, the good news is that a <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/05/after-second-approved-miracle-pope-john-paul-ii-likely-to-become-a-saint.html" target="_blank">second miracle</a> has now been confirmed for John Paul II: a Costa Rican woman was cured of an aneurysm on the very day the late Pope was beatified two years ago. This means that JPII gets to become a saint in near record time, a mere eight years after his death and within the lifetime of some of the serial child-abusers he protected from the authorities. But let no-one say he didn't abide by the rules.<br>
<br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzmzENHKZMTdjLJ4JpHgyVSq7N5R5joT6s6IWttZdZDYpNFk4dxEMf_aBUJcQ6uF3Qu5htzCf6EluMj7yc3tHjy4xSiDLhTicvHfgxBaS6FI-VRHiDxEqPCRrJgs2Ffaurrsi9d3o-i3w/s1600/JohnXXIII.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzmzENHKZMTdjLJ4JpHgyVSq7N5R5joT6s6IWttZdZDYpNFk4dxEMf_aBUJcQ6uF3Qu5htzCf6EluMj7yc3tHjy4xSiDLhTicvHfgxBaS6FI-VRHiDxEqPCRrJgs2Ffaurrsi9d3o-i3w/s320/JohnXXIII.jpg" width="284"></a></div>But what of John XXIII, the popular pope who died fifty years ago and who will be canonised at the same time as his successor-but-two? He was beatified on the strength of a miracle that took place in 1965, but it would seem that his posthumous powers must have waned somewhat. No new miracle has been confirmed. But never mind: Pope Francis, who as Pope can do pretty much whatever he likes, has waived the requirement for a second miracle.<br>
<br>
No-one, of course, would deny that John XXIII thoroughly deserves to be made a saint. He's known as "the good pope", after all. That epithet can't mean that all the other popes were bad, given how many of them have been made saints already. It can only mean that even by the exalted standards of the papacy John XXIII was remarkable for his goodness. Despite looking more like a mafia don than any pope since Rodrigo Borgia. And he has had a rather longer wait than John Paul II, even if it's nothing compared with the delay poor old Benedict IX has had to endure. (And no special dispensation for him.) But just what is the point of having a rule if the pope can just arbitrarily dispense with it whenever it proves inconvenient? I'm almost tempted to agree with Richard Dawkins, who complained in The God Delusion that <br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br>
What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.</blockquote><br>
Predictably, Pope Francis's decision to canonise John XXIII despite only having one miracle to his name is already being spun as yet more evidence for his refreshing disregard for the niceties of Vatican protocol. As top Vatican watcher <a href="http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/three-things-learn-about-francis-his-sainthood-surprise" target="_blank">John Allen puts it</a>, <br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><br>
In multiple ways, Francis has already demonstrated his willingness to break with convention – not living in the papal apartment, not heading off to the summer residence at Castel Gandolfo for his vacation, even pulling out of a Vatican concert at the last minute because he felt he had better uses of his time. Today’s announcement is thus another indication that for Francis, tradition is more a guide than a master.</blockquote><br>
I'm sorry, but the procedure for determining whether an individual is, or is not, a saint is a rather more serious matter than where the pope chooses to spend the evenings. It is one of the most solemn acts that the Catholic Church can perform. It's no mere badge of merit, like giving someone an honorary knighthood. Theologically, indeed, the Church doesn't "make saints" at all. Only God can make saints. The miracle requirement exists to provide tangible evidence that the candidate for sainthood has reached heaven and enjoys the especial favour of God. Not only must the miracle be scientifically validated, in other words, but the requirement is itself akin to a scientific proof. It exists to provide experimental confirmation of the hypothesis that X is a saint. And God, the theory goes, will always provide the proof. So to say, "Oh well, never mind, let's just ask the Pope" is to cast aside the whole basis of the canonisation procedure. It's the Pope literally playing God.<br>
<br>
Which is a bit much, even for a Pope.<br>
<br>
And the "two miracles" rule does make a kind of sense, even if you don't happen to believe in miracles. It offers a fairly good indication of whether a candidate for sainthood attracts sufficient devotion - real heartfelt devotion, that is, as opposed to mere willingness to sign petitions. If enough people are praying for a saint's intercession, after all, the chances increase that someone will have an apparent miracle. Medically unexpected recoveries do after all happen occasionally, whether or not the person is praying, and prayer may even promote healing through a version of the placebo effect. The lack of a recent miracle for John XXIII may indicate that he hasn't been as much at the forefront of Catholic consciousness in recent years as John Paul II has. But the answer to that would be to promote his cause more assiduously, and encourage would-be miracle recipients to get praying.<br>
<br>
Allen also thinks that to canonise two such different personalities as the same time "underscores the inclusive spirit of Francis’ papacy" and even a "gesture in the direction of collegiality". In other words, it <i>sends a message</i>. But ignoring the rules just because it's convenient to hold a two-for-the-price-of-one canonisation ceremony for the dead popes in fact smacks of arbitrary rule - of a pope who is, as Dawkins suggested, simply making it up as he goes along. That's no basis for a credible religion. In fact, now I come to think about it, quite a lot of this new pope's actions hint at a lofty disdain for the traditional way of doing things, almost indeed at a Blairite impatience with institutions and procedures. And we all know where that led.<br>
<br>
Francis, of course, can't put a foot wrong, just as Benedict XVI couldn't put a foot right. If he sat on a kitten he would be praised for his humility in choosing such an uncomfortable cushion. (If Ratzinger had sat on a kitten, by contrast, it would have been seen as an attempt to restore the ancient papal prerogative of cat-sitting, last invoked by Pius IX after an unusually opulent lunch.) So he can ostentatiously refuse to attend a concert put on in his honour or make snide remarks about people saying rosaries on his behalf, and the international press swoons at yet more evidence of his humility. Actually, though, such high-handed humility strikes me as rather arrogant - or at the very least, indicative of a taste for the exercise of arbitrary power, a characteristic of the papal monarchy at its most medieval.<br>
<br>
If in the modern day and age the concept of a scientifically validated miracle has become embarrassing (because almost any, no any, "miraculous" healing can be explained in natural terms, whatever the Vatican miracle-testers may claim), it might of course be amended. By papal decree, if need be. But that would mean dropping the requirement for all future would-be saints, not just for a particular dead pope whose canonisation happens to be convenient. Because consistency matters, especially one would hope in a religion that is meant to offer people certainty in their lives.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-33254874321276958062013-07-04T17:31:00.002+01:002013-07-04T19:17:50.841+01:00Breast is bestApparently - well, according to the <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1273980/shenzhen-wealthy-adults-feed-human-breast-milk" target="_blank">South China Morning Post</a>, as retailed in shocked tones to readers of Telegraph Online by <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100224845/chinas-new-fad-adults-drinking-breast-milk-fresh-from-the-source-this-is-capitalism-gone-mad/" target="_blank">Tim Stanley</a> - there's a trend among China's increasingly prosperous and fashion-conscious middle classes to hire wetnurses. Only not all the milk is intended for babes in arms. Confirming their national reputation for both omnivoracity and medical gullibility, some at least of the Chinese are convinced that human breast milk is good for them, and wetnursing agencies (which apparently exist over there) are expanding their business to cater to the new demand. <br />
<br />
The service is allegedly "popular among adults with high incomes and high-pressure jobs and who suffered from poor health," and the women "rarely raise objections as long as the price is right." This despite the fact that you have to suspect that in some cases there's a sexual thing going on, given that some clients elect to receive their dose of the white stuff direct from source, as it were. (A lawyer quoted in the SCMP, making a suitably fine legal distinction, noted that "there is an essential difference between sucking on a breast and drinking from a pump, as the former largely exceeds the necessity of diet." Indeed.)<br />
<br />
Stanley is scandalised by all this:<br />
<span id="fullpost"><blockquote><br />
On the one hand, it’s revolting. Everything about this scenario should appal the reader, from the very idea of an adult suckling from another adult to the possibility that someone should be so desperate for money that they have to sell their services in this manner. It’s every bit as wrong as prostitution.</blockquote><br />
But on the other hand, the story is good evidence of how China has become an unrestrained capitalist free-for-all:<br />
<blockquote><br />
When you take the profit motive and strip it of old-fashioned concepts like shame or natural law, it becomes rational in the minds of nihilists to treat the human body as yet another product to packaged, priced up and put on the market. If a society is prepared to employ people for a dollar a day, work them near to death and provide little in the way of health and safety regulation, why not exploit their human reproductive systems, too? If China's oligarchs treat their people like cattle, that’s exactly where capitalism without morality ends. Don’t be surprised if rich Chinese businessmen start wearing clothes taken from the hair of the poor, or jewelry made from fingers. Perhaps an amputated foot as a doorstop?</blockquote><br />
Actually, this is just the same point put differently. Tim Stanley sounds a bit like the fashionable Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, lamenting the contaminating effect of money on morality and human relationships - and seemingly unable to see in capitalism anything other than exploitation, a strange position for a conservative to occupy. "Why not exploit the human reproductive system too?" Well, commercial surrogacy is now an accepted practice in many parts of the world and has brought joy to countless childless couples. Donating a uterus for nine months is a much bigger ask than a cupful of milk. <br />
<br />
Stanley's argument is a good case study in the close relationship (often commented on by psychologists and anthropologists alike) <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/200912/disgust-and-morality" target="_blank">between physical disgust and moral disapproval</a>. He finds the concept "revolting" and "ultra-creepy"; from there it's no distance at all to finding it wrong. It's telling that he assumes only desperation for money could drive someone to sell her own breast-milk. Yet it's a renewable resource (just as hair is; and many people in the third world sell their hair), and the women providing it appear to be reasonably well-paid (up to 20,000 yuan a month, as compared with an average monthly wage in China of around 500). The figures would suggest that women with breast milk to spare are highly sought-after, and indeed highly valued. Wetnursing was once a respectable occupation in Europe, too, although as far as I'm aware their services were only provided to babies. [or perhaps not. Tim Stanley has now pointed me to <a href="http://http://www.strangehistory.net/2010/07/12/adult-breast-feeding-in-the-renaissance-and-early-modern-world/" target="_blank">this</a> very interesting account of adult breastfeeding during the renaissance.]<br />
<br />
What's the problem? ConsentingC adults providing a service to other adults, harming no-one and indeed providing them with a nutritious and possibly (I've never tried it, at least not since long before my gastronomic memory kicked in) delicious, 100% natural foodstuff. It's surely not on the same morally questionable level as, say, an unregulated trade in human organs. Yes, it's unconventional. But you may reasonably wonder why it's normal for people to consume milk intended by nature to feed baby cows, yet enjoying milk intended for human beings should be considered disgusting and wrong. <br />
<br />
Is it merely the strong hold of conventional thinking? It wasn't so many years ago, after all, that it was perfectly acceptable to make the same disgusted noises about consensual gay sex (and there are still plenty of people who think that way, even if it has become socially unacceptable to enunciate their revulsion). Or maybe there's something deeper going on - perhaps the intimacy of the mother-child bond in lactation sets up a taboo (adult milk-drinking as a boundary violation); or perhaps Freud would have had something to say about the milk-drinkers exhibiting an Oedipal craving to return to the maternal breast (in which case, the practice becomes taboo precisely because it is powerfully attractive). Alternatively, the thought of consuming breast-milk may stir up the same kind of emotions that the recent Western fad of placenta-eating does in some people: are objectors subliminally reminded of cannibalism? Maybe. But I'll go with the social convention hypothesis for now. I suspect Tim Stanley is just incapable of getting his head round the idea of something so (in our terms) unusual. Anglo-Saxon people tend to be fairly weird about breasts generally, after all.<br />
<br />
At the start of this post I noted Chinese medical gullibility. I was thinking of tiger-bones and the like, but when it comes to human breast-milk perhaps I'm being unfair. Nutritionists are, after all, very sure that it's good, even necessary, for babies, to the extent that women unwilling or unable to breastfeed are subject to near-bullying from dispensers of official health advice. <a href="http://americanpregnancy.org/firstyearoflife/whatsinbreastmilk.html" target="_blank">Breast-milk contains chemicals important to the development of human infants and to the development of their immune system</a>. It also helps protect nursing mothers from some cancer. So it's not wholly implausible that this miraculous substance would also provide health benefits to adults - more, indeed, than are provided by cow's milk, which as I noted earlier is intended for baby cows. <br />
<br />
Leaving aside the yuck factor, it is of course impractical (and morally unacceptable) to milk women in the same way that cows are milked commercially: human milk as such will only ever be a niche product. But that doesn't make it disgusting, or any less potentially beneficial. I can imagine, in the not too distant future, genetically engineering cows or goats to produce milk with the same nutritional composition as human milk. I can also imagine the Tim Stanleys of the world having a problem with the idea. But I'm not sure that it would be wrong.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, should you have access to a ready supply of human milk, you might like to check-out <a href="http://www.landmilkhoney.com/recipanr.htm" target="_blank">these delicious-sounding recipes</a>. Vanilla Breast Milk Cupcakes with Strawberry Frosting. Yum.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-66028824334378948142013-07-01T14:03:00.000+01:002013-07-01T14:03:08.555+01:00The pitfalls of being a pixie dream girlIn life, people aspire to be archetypes, but usually end up as stereotypes. Or indeed clichés.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwcrGKqSnrsBQjIcSjcaMVOky8lCZghPDIqhgvabrixwIAIQFttmOoK13BqLSy-bC1KLn_axa33QHmptIm6p50-LecJsXAXMYQaElL1z-7FzHEnuZHSj9-dsV7PUAaxxnPQTXtIrwOz9c/s1549/Zooey_Deschanel_at_NFF_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwcrGKqSnrsBQjIcSjcaMVOky8lCZghPDIqhgvabrixwIAIQFttmOoK13BqLSy-bC1KLn_axa33QHmptIm6p50-LecJsXAXMYQaElL1z-7FzHEnuZHSj9-dsV7PUAaxxnPQTXtIrwOz9c/s320/Zooey_Deschanel_at_NFF_1.jpg" width="220" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Zooey "Im such a manic pixie" Deschanel</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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I wasn't actually aware of the phrase "manic pixie dream girl" until I read Laurelia's <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2013/06/i-was-manic-pixie-dream-girl" target="_blank">broodingly soulful piece of self-diagnosis</a> yesterday, but of course I instantly recognised the type. As pinned down with lepidopteristic precision by Nathan Rabin in a film review, she's the young lady who "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." She's Zooey Deschanel, in other words, though Penny somehow manages to get through the entire article without dropping that name once.<br />
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I wonder if Nathan Rabin, like many analysts and indeed creators of Hollywood narratives, has been reading too much Joseph Campbell. His enumeration of the manic pixie dream girl's functions makes her sound like an avatar of Campbell's goddess:<br />
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Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters.</blockquote>
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Or, in Laurie's case (for she too was once a Magic Pixie Dream Goth) sets him up with contacts and talks into the night about the meaning of journalism. All while playing the ukelele.<br />
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Laurie's complaint about the archetype isn't just that in her younger years she wasted too much time on "sad, bright, bookish young men" impressed by the fact that she played the ukelele and resembled something left on the bottom of a pond (her words) but mainly that she (the manic pixie, that is, not Laurie) is a male fantasy in a "story that happens to somebody else" - to the male hero, that is. Like most women in fiction (and life) the dream girl isn't the main focus:</span><br /><span id="fullpost">
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<span id="fullpost">We expect to be forgettable supporting characters, or sometimes, if we're lucky, attainable objects to be slung over the hero's shoulder and carried off at the end of the final page. The only way we get to be in stories is to be stories hourselves. If we want anything interesting at all to happen to us we have to be a story that happens to somebody else, and when you're a young girl looking for a script, there are a limited selection of roles to choose from.</span></blockquote>
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<span id="fullpost">The manic pixie exists to "save" the brooding hero rather than being a person in her own right, Penny complains. Indeed, she has no interior life, being merely merely a collection of ditzy attributes, conventionally unconventional music tastes, and non-corporate hair styles. She's no role model for a successful modern woman (would Goldman Sachs employ her?). To become a serious writer - and a serious person - Laurie had to wash the dye out of her hair with the same grim fortitude Nellie Forbush displayed in attempting to shower away Emile in Act One of <i>South Pacific</i>. And it's a struggle, because her inner pixie keeps reasserting itself at inconvenient moments. If only she'd known at 21 that becoming a writer would also mean intimidating men she fancied - which is, I suppose, another way of saying that the men she fancied were such drips.<br />
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Because it takes two. It always takes two. If every soulful guitar-strumming post-adolescent male needs a manic pixie girl to teach him the meaning of life, so every manic pixie girl needs a soulful guitar-strumming geek to rescue. And then they both grow up. Usually, at any rate. Occasionally the soulful guitar-strummer fails to grow up and turns into Jeremy Forrest, which is even worse for him than it is for the women in his life. Movies, of course, are full of such cases of arrested adolescence, even if the objects of their crushes, for reasons of propriety, are invariably "legal". Hence, I suppose, the phenomenon of grown women acting inappropriately twee that so offend's Laurie's feminist sensibilities.<br />
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I do wonder how she can be so casually dismissive of the women her ex-crushes end up with. "My Facebook feed," she complains, "is full of young male writers who I have encouraged to believe in themselves, set up with contacts, taken on adventures and talked into the night about the meaning of journalism and who are now in long-term relationships with people who are content to be That Girl." Is this really true? Do these men's girlfriends not have careers and interior lives of their own? Are any young women, especially middle-class, educated young women who I assume are sharing their lives with (and may well be financially supporting) Laurie's male Facebook friends really content to be "That Girl" any more?<br />
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The lost boys need rescuing for the same reason that the manic pixies need to wear floaty clothes: because they're passing through that liminal life-stage in which adulthood has physically and legally arrived but hasn't yet been fully achieved. Both are stock characters; neither has any more or less interior life than the other. It depends on who's telling the story. And most of these stories - the indy rom-coms - are told for (and sometimes even by) women, or to be more accurate, teenage girls, for whom the guitar-strumming soul-owner is a more resonant fantasy object than he would be for a grown woman, in fiction as in life. The manic pixie is the object of fantastic yearnings mainly at a remove: she's the type of girl that the soulful guitar-strummer or depressive hero is supposed to want, or need, but she's a female ideal of a female ideal. Even soulful guitar-strumming men tend to find the type, and the films in which she looms large, profoundly annoying.<br />
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As for Laurie's claim that "men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story [while] women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's", that may have been largely true once, when the only long-term career open to most women was marriage and motherhood, but surely isn't any more. I suppose there <i>are</i> quite a few young women who dream of becoming WAGs, but even for them WAGdom is almost and end in itself: it's the lifestyle, the shoes, the foreign travel that appeals. The footballer appeals, too, but as much another designer accessory than as a flesh-and-blood human being: for the wannabe WAG he's a means to an end, rather than someone in possession of a rich interior life (which, in the case of footballers, may be largely true). <i>He</i> is the supporting character in <i>her story</i>, just as Mr Darcy was a supporting character in Lizzie Bennett's (<i>Pride and Prejudice</i> was never about <i>him</i>.) Whoever thought, "I want to marry a footballer just so I can support my husband's career"?</span><br />
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© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-764188721180768653.post-47646684729041991932013-06-28T20:04:00.000+01:002013-06-28T20:54:53.982+01:00Invisible GirlThe case of the Girl Who Ran Off With Her Teacher (and Who Cannot Be Named For Legal Reasons) isn't over yet, despite the fact that Jeremy Forrest has been put away for a wince-inducing five and a half years. It's <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23084114" target="_blank">now reported</a> that the police have arrested a woman (unnamed, but assumed to be related to the teacher) on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice by acting as an intermediary between teacher and pupil while he was on remand. <br />
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The suggestion is that the girl's oral evidence was influenced in some way. During sentencing, the judge pronounced that she "had clearly received assistance" - the evidence for which seems to be that her account under (unusually friendly) cross-examination was more helpful to the accused than the pre-recorded statements in the police interview that were played to the court.<br />
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But if the girl <i>did</i> change her story (in the direction of falsity) because she wanted to support her lover/abuser's version of events, then it's not only the woman who acted as go-between who's guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. So is the girl. She'd be guilty of perjury too. It's strongly rumoured, too, that the girl was herself threatened with arrest during the course of the trial because she was reluctant to testify. Whether or not her strong feelings for Forrest will survive his lengthy imprisonment, which will last at least until she's well over 18, no-one has tried to deny that today she still believes herself to be in love with him and that the trial was entirely against her personal wishes. She was no more coerced to say nice things about Forrest in court than she was coerced to go to France with him in the first place.<br />
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Does this matter? It's telling that there's no real public consensus surrounding this crime and its aftermath. There's an official view, of course, the police/Guardian/NSPCC view according to which Forrest is an abuser (even a "paedophile") and the girl is his victim; and there's an alternative view, to be found in comment sections on social media sites, which sees it as essentially a romantic tale of doomed love in which both the girl and her "abductor" appear as victims, the villains being the law, the child protection establishment and even the girl's own family. <br />
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I think both views are probably wrong, or at least one-dimensional, but before I try to offer a better one let me return to the matter of the latest arrest, which seems to me key. The official version, according to which the girl is the victim, implies that the main aim of the prosecution is to protect her by jailing the man who abused and abducted her. Thus even if she didn't desire the legal process, it was for her own good. On this view, it must also be for her own good that mortifying details of, and claims about, the sex-life of a 15 year old girl are relayed in open court and reported breathlessly in the media ("8 times a night"), even if her name remains taboo. But if the new police investigation were to lead to the girl herself being charged with perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, could this be said to be for her protection too? Clearly not. It would, though, show plainly that the case isn't, and never was, about her. <br />
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She's the invisible girl not just because she can't be named for legal reasons, but because her own wishes and personal narrative were either rejected or ignored by the justice system. The inevitable result was her objectification. Had she co-operated with the police, denounced her abuser and recognised (with a maturity perhaps beyond her years) the objectively abusive nature of the relationship, then she might have been the star witness. As it was, the evidence she gave was discounted (the judge referred to the teacher's "spurious defence" and called the girl's testimony "very different in content from her original account and designed to support it"). It's usual these days for the victim of a crime (or the family of a murder victim) to have a Victim Impact Statement read out in court before sentence is passed. There was no statement from the girl (how could there have been?) but there was one from her mother who was thereby cast into the role of "true" victim. Yet to configure the mother, from whom the girl "was taken" by Forrest, as the victim in the case is to redefine the girl, not as her own person, but as her mother's property.<br />
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The mother's statement was, indeed, all about her, and highly melodramatic: describing how she was grieving because "the daughter I knew is dead" (the two aren't on speaking terms); how she felt "like the worst mother in the world" and that she had "failed as a parent"; how she (not the girl) had been robbed of "part of her childhood" because she won't get the chance to "dress her up in a party dress for the school prom". The uncharitably inclined might notice a certain consonance between the personality thus revealed and the complaints the girl herself made in court that her mother had been preoccupied with a new pregnancy and hadn't been paying her much attention. And behind <i>that</i> one can detect signs of a family dynamic that was in trouble well before Jeremy Forrest turned up on the scene.<br />
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(Once we've agreed that Forrest's behaviour in having a sexual relationship with an underage pupil is completely unacceptable - I think we can agree on that at least - the matter of motive is still open. Did he - does he - have a thing about emotionally vulnerable teenage girls which led him to target her for his own selfish reasons, or was his folly (<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2346602/Jeremy-Forrests-sister-reveals-disturbing-plans-wed-pupil-snatched-leaves-prison.html" target="_blank">as his sister has maintained</a>) provoked by his own emotional immaturity and depression, which may have led him to feel a genuine emotional connection with a girl who was going through a rough time at home? I don't know; I suppose only time will tell.)<br />
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In passing sentence, <a href="http://www.crimeline.info/case/r-v-jeremy-forrest" target="_blank">Judge Lawson</a> was content to treat the girl with a mixture of condescension and annoyance, rejecting her account while portraying her as the passive object of Forrest's improper lusts, ignoring the possibility of her own agency in the events that unfolded. (This is a different question from that of consent, which legally she couldn't give.) While he expressed some sympathy for her predicament - having to give evidence in a high-profile court case, for example - he showed no comprehension of, or interest in, the obvious fact that seeing her (in her eyes) lover jailed for a long period for a relationship in which she considered herself a full and consensual participant was likely to be the cause for her of considerable misery, not to mention guilt. (That she was seen sobbing and mothing the words "I'm so sorry" when the jury returned its verdict is evidence enough of that.) But then, to reiterate, it's not about her.<br />
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Hadley Freeman had a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/25/jeremy-forrest-no-romeo-pervert" target="_blank">piece</a> in the Guardian that I almost agree with, and which comes close to getting the point. It's not a romantic love-story, she argues, but nor is Forrest another Jimmy Savile. Rather he's "an emotionally immature, selfish and foolish man who couldn't cope with the adult responsibilities of marriage and sought out a young girl with approximately the same level of maturity as him."<br />
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Language is important. Just as describing Forrest's tale as a love story is unhelpful, so is dismissing it as yet another Savile-esque shame. Both takes are extreme and possibly only harden his and the schoolgirl's resolve to be with one another in the face of incomprehension. This was an abuse of power, and I'd be willing to bet that similar versions happen more often than we know, in situations where men – some of whom will be weak and immature – work with emotionally vulnerable woman. Dismissing Forrest as an aberration and a monster is easy; acknowledging just how common he might be is far scarier.</blockquote><br />
Close, but it doesn't quite reconcile the conflict between the official narrative of abuse and (her) victimhood and the popular narratives of star cross'd lovers - which, as Freeman notes, some of the media coverage might almost be designed to reinforce. Both are in their way misleading attempts to shoehorn real-world events into a pre-packaged narrative, whether a legal/child protection account of predatory sexual behaviour or a Romeo and Juliet-style romance. (The girl herself made the smartest comment on this in a Tweet reported in the Mail: "Of course it's not Romeo and Juliet. That's a fucking tragedy. They both died".) But forcing facts to fit a stereotype isn't just misleading; it's also inevitable. It's how the law makes sense of the messiness of the world, and it's how people make sense of the messiness of their lives. Stereotypes are the lenses through which we view the world. And they construct society.<br />
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So to ask, "Is Jeremy Forrest a foolish lover or a dangerous abuser?" may be the wrong question, because he's both. Just as the girl is both the victim of a predatory older man and the victim of an oppressive and soulless legal process. Objectively, the official narrative is true: society needs to be protected from teachers who overstep the proper boundaries of a professional relationship with their charges. Objectively, the girl is a victim of abuse. Subjectively, it is a story of mutual attraction and support. Subjectively, the villains are the police, the judge and the girl's mother. <br />
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Subjectively, the sentence was far too harsh because Forrest lacked the malicious intention which would justify a long term of imprisonment; and because from the girl's point of view this "abusive" relationship was the most thrilling and emotionally enriching thing that ever happened to her. Subjectively, one might predict (and I very much hope I'm wrong about this) the severity of the sentence will have a more deleterious long-term effect on her than on him, especially if feelings of guilt and thwarted love lead her to waste years of her young life loyally waiting for him and for the resumption of a relationship whose long-term prognosis is not good (<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-491682/My-years-torment-says-girl-ran-away-maths-teacher.html" target="_blank">here's</a> what happened in an uncannily similar case ten years ago). Objectively, it was about right. He knew what he was doing was wrong, he knew that it was illegal, and a strong deterrent message must be sent out to others who might be tempted to overstep the boundaries.<br />
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The law is objective. The law, even in the era of victim impact statements and much rhetoric about putting victims first, must pursue the wider interests of society rather than those of either the victims or the perpetrators of crime. Protecting society ranks higher than doing justice, even, which is why people accidentally caught up in riots can be sent down for years for walking off with a bottle of fizz. Jeremy Forrest threatens the social order and the prevailing official consensus, based as it is on an expert (and objective) view of child protection. The girl in her passionate attachment to a teenage crush is no less of a threat, which is why she must be the Invisible Girl.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><br/><br/>
© 2013 Heresy Corner, all rights reserved.</div>Heresiarchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03515376670031027455noreply@blogger.com0