National Information Forum We Hate! Page

A series of recent articles by Derek Kinrade originally republished from the National Information Forum's magazine Innovations in Information between 2004 and 2007, but now continuing in Not the National Information Forum's regular, electronic - "Information Sheets".

Tradition • War • Parking Enforcement • Injustice • Hypocracy • Gutter Journalism • Poverty • Misogyny • Fanaticism • Superstition • Voting Rights • Tuition Fees • Class Distinction • Slaughterhouses • Tribal Politics • Sectarianism • Litter • Knife Crime • Welfare Reform • The Seventh Age

There are, of course, many other subjects that are politically ‘off-limits’. But there may, from time to time, be new thoughts that ought to be expressed here towards a healthy debate on social issues.

WE HATE NO. 46: THE SEVENTH AGE
Derek Kinrade
“Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.”
William Shakespeare: As You Like It

I like a bit of controversy, the odd polemic, but I realise that I am on difficult ground here. There are great sensitivities around the subject of old age, and as lawyers put it, circumstances alter cases. But my argument is simple: that the fact that we are living longer, though generally seen as a good thing, can be a very mixed blessing. Whereas leading batsmen move to their centuries as a high point of achievement, in ordinary living the last lap is often a process of degeneration. As we slide into senility, life can be perfectly miserable, a dotage of dismay, and for the more affluent a costly one to boot. As Benjamin Disraeli put it: “Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.”

I summon to my aid the recollections of Alan Bennett in his family memoir Untold Stories (thanks Tina). He recalls Kathleen, a warm hearted, garrulous aunt who over many years “kept up with a vast network of friends and correspondents, [and wrote] innumerable letters”. Belatedly she married, and took up globetrotting with her Australian husband. But after a time “something began to happen in her head”. Her address book went missing and the intensely sociable Kathleen began to drift aimlessly. She still indulged in “torrents of speech”, but without “sequence or sense”. Her discourse became “wayward … garbled and impossible to follow”. It was “futile to tell Aunty Kathleen anything and expect her to remember it for more than a moment”. Dementia was diagnosed and Kathleen [this being the early 70s] was soon committed to a mental hospital by her apparently less than devoted partner.

Bennett paints a bleak picture of the hospital and goes on to say something of Kathleen’s half-life in the “demented barracks”, surrounded by “the senile and by the wrecks of women as hopelessly, though differently demented”. Fate, however, shortened her incarceration. In late August 1974 she wandered off in her summer frock and could not be found. Six days later Bennett himself discovered her body in a field close by the M6. And here I come to the point, for Bennett writes of an unspoken recognition that if such pathetic creatures wander off “then the death that they die, of exposure, hypothermia or heart failure, is better than the one they would otherwise have died: sitting vacantly in a chair year after year, fed by hand, soiling themselves, waiting without thought or feeling until the decay of the body catches up with the decay of the mind and they can cross the finishing line together. No, to die at the foot of a wall by the verge of the motorway is a better death than that.”

A Commons debate called by Stephen Lloyd MP on 7 June focused on our current care services for older people. Stephen is on two all-party parliamentary groups: an officer on that for ageing and a member on that for dementia. And, significantly, he is the MP for Eastbourne and Willingdon. He spoke following a BBC Panorama programme (Undercover Care: the abuse exposed, 31 May 2011), and contended that “the current system of care for older people is in crisis.” He said that there are 291,000 people in residential and nursing homes in the UK, and some 6 million more cared for in their own homes. Stephen’s priority concern is for people with dementia. One in six over the age of 80 suffers from the illness, and according to the Alzheimer’s Society only 40% of people with dementia have been formally diagnosed. It is estimated that at present some 750,000 people in the UK suffer from the condition and the number is set to rise to over one million in the next 15 years. One in three of us will die with dementia, and at any one time up to a quarter of hospital beds are taken up by dementia sufferers. For tens of thousands there is no provision whatever.

This is both a national and global challenge. A report commissioned by Alzheimer’s Disease International said that the worldwide cost of dementia would total £388 billion in 2010 and commented that dementia will be “the most significant health and social crisis of the 21st century”. Another report for the Alzheimer’s Research Trust suggested that the cost to the UK economy was some £23 billion a year.

It may be argued that the government is now making strenuous efforts to improve matters, that hospitals, care homes and hospices are generally better, and that many seriously old people enjoy a good quality of life and happiness. I have nothing but respect for the work of Amanda Waring in seeking to ensure that elderly people are treated with respect and compassion. Of course; but a line has to be drawn. It seems to me that the scale of need is such that a perfect, affordable solution is unlikely. We have an escalating problem, but finite resources. And the fact will remain that for many poor souls meaningful and rewarding life is effectively over. And equally a fact is that many in such situations increasingly become a burden either on their own resources or the national economy as they peter out into the superannuated abyss of the ‘seventh age’. The population of over-90s is predicted to almost treble over the next 20 years, and the DWP predicts that a baby born in 2011 is nearly eight times more likely to reach 100 than one born in 1931. By the year 2066, according to the DWP’s own analysis, at least half a million UK citizens will be aged 100 years or over.

As well as the words he gave Jaques in ‘As You Like It’, Shakespeare had Hamlet muse on the sleep of death as “a consummation devoutly to be wish’d” were it not for “the dread of something after death – the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns”. Yet for me that is a fictional dread. I’m with Stephen Hawking, who in an exclusive interview with The Guardian was recently quoted as saying: “There is no heaven or afterlife … that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark”. If you think otherwise then why should you be so afraid of going?

Article 2 of the Human Rights Act 1998 quite properly confers a right to have one’s life protected by law. But I believe there should be an equal and opposite right, without stigma: a voluntary opt-out if and when people feel they have had enough and before what Richard Dorment has called “the indignity of decrepitude”. One correspondent to The Guardian (Richard Stainton, 25 August) has suggested that “when the struggle becomes too much to bear, a stigma-free word like dignicide would give recognition to the conscious and courageous decision being taken and would lessen for loved ones the sense of failure suicide often prompts.”

WE HATE NO. 45: WELFARE REFORM
Derek Kinrade

“…first, the treatment being meted out to thousands of people should be a moral offence to all of us; and second, our flexible labour market and increasingly brutal welfare system are now so constructed that even if you are doing well, it is perfectly possible that you could fall ill, and then find yourself just as terrified as the thousands who are currently being herded through the WCA [Work Capability Assessment] process.”
John Harris, The Guardian, 26 July 2011.

From time to time we have expressed hostility to some aspects of this legislation. Our primary disquiet has concerned the processes involved in applications for the new Employment and Support Allowance and the reassessment of people in receipt of Incapacity Benefit. It is perhaps time to reprise what began, I believe, as a heartfelt theory, but which in its practical application is now in grave danger of becoming an iniquitous scandal. The theory began under a Labour government, albeit inspired by the advice of David Freud, an investment banker who was recruited by Tony Blair in 2006, but who subsequently joined the opposition Conservative team in February 2009, received a life peerage and is now a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department of Work and Pensions. Unsurprisingly, the new coalition government embraced and has developed the reform programme with enthusiasm, sharing a view that welfare benefits tend to create dependency and that there is a moral imperative that anyone of working age found fit for work should, wherever possible, be helped to earn their living and not allowed (as it has been seen) to continue in perpetuity to receive a benefit based on incapacity: concepts encouraged by the popular media and readily accepted by many working taxpayers. Alongside this way of thinking has been the evidence of a steep rise in the overall burden upon the Exchequer arising from incapacity claims, a significant proportion of which were felt to be, if not fraudulent, at least undeserved. The original eligibility criteria for Incapacity Benefit were in theory very strict: embodied in a heavily criticised ‘all-work test’ designed to restrict benefit narrowly to people judged to be medically incapable of any kind of work, not merely their usual occupation. Nevertheless, over the years the numbers of beneficiaries remained remarkably high and continued to grow. Something, from Whitehall’s perspective, had to be done.

This perception is remarkably redolent of attitudes in the nineteenth century under the New Poor Law. Simon Fowler, in his authoritative study, Workhouse (National Archives 2007), points out that in the early 1870s, Albert Pell, Conservative MP for the Southern Division of Leicestershire, was convinced that so-called ‘out-relief’ (that is to say relief out of the workhouse) created a culture of welfare dependency. He had this to say:
“The administration of the Poor Laws is a matter of policy, not sentiment, and should be applied unswervingly in obedience to fixed principles, and not become the haphazard display of sentiment and counterfeit charity… [Otherwise] the incentives of industry are weakened; the fear of the consequences, such a cold, hunger and distress, is diminished or vanishes; and a distinct and pernicious inducement offered to the practice of deceit and fraud, and the total abandonment of conscientious, honest effort for self-maintenance unfolds.”

On 18 July 1876 this same Mr Pell moved:
“That it is desirable to take steps to check the irregular bestowal of out-door relief with a view to the gradual diminution of such an encouragement to pauperism and improvidence.”

So is history repeating itself?

We must start, I think, by accepting that a genuine effort to support disabled people into rewarding work is laudable, but only if and to the extent that it is practicable. Here the timing is awful, coinciding with a loss of jobs in both the public and private sectors, and high and rising levels of unemployment particularly among young, often disaffected, people, so that just now barriers to the employment of disabled people are greater than ever. A century and a half ago the solution was to offer impoverished people the ‘house’, there to exist on a meagre diet and obliged to work on domestic duties, picking oakum, or breaking stones for Britain’s roads. That option is no longer available, but the prospect for more attractive opportunities remains bleak.

However, our primary unease is centred on the arrangements for determining/reviewing fitness to work. This, as widely publicised, was contracted out to a French IT company, Atos Healthcare, for (we understand) £100 million a year. Criticism of the practical arrangements abounds. The work capability tests are said to have been narrow, simplistic, impersonal and insensitive. A recent report of a select committee on work and pensions accepts that the process has been flawed, prompting “fear and anxiety among vulnerable people”. The evidence for this is apparent in a high level of appeals, successful in around 40% of cases. The DWP says that it is now working closely with Professor Malcolm Harrington to make the medical test as fair and effective as possible, but this begs two questions: how will we know if and when fairness and effectiveness have been achieved, and what will happen to those found against under the previous testing, now admitted to have been poorly designed? It’s a mess and a scandalous one at that.

Conversely, of course, a sizeable proportion of people have either not appealed or have lost appeals. We think that a modern Portia would say that while it is legitimate to cut benefits where it is fairly found that the claimant’s only incapacity is laziness, beware that you do not harm those vulnerable people whose medical conditions are such that they have little, if any, prospect of securing gainful employment. Be merciful. This is morally dangerous territory and we think it may be better that the benefit of any doubt is given to the acceptance of borderline claims rather than taking an axe to thousands in genuine need. That conditions the political case.

The economic case is that the new arrangements are expected to save the government £1.1 billion by 2014/15. But savings on this scale are trifling when set against the outrageous waste of £6.4 billion already spent on the failed attempt to create a national electronic database of patient records and the massive outlay on a fortnight’s Olympic sport, not to mention the huge cost of Trident and the questionable campaign in Libya.

All in all, surely time for a rethink.

WE HATE NO. 44: KNIFE CRIME
Derek Kinrade
“Although we need to highlight the problem of knife crime in our society, we also need to give our young people better things to aspire to.”
Brooke Kinsella: Tackling Knife Crime Together (February 2011)

The recent crime survey for England and Wales indicates that in 2010-11 the police recorded 32,714 serious offences involving a knife or sharp instrument. This is 3% down on 2009-10, which showed a fall of 7% from 2008-9. The figures are consistent with recent trends from comparable NHS hospital statistics. But in the case of homicides involving a knife or sharp instrument, whereas there was a fall of 13% from 2008-9 to 2009-10 (231 to 201), the total for 2010-11 rose by over 6% on the previous year (201 to 214). More than half of knife crime occurs in London, Manchester and the West Midlands.

These statistics are disappointing, given the effort that has been made to combat knife crime since the murder of Philip Lawrence in December 1995. Action was stepped up in 2004-5 when the Metropolitan Police launched Operation Blunt, following concerns raised by the Damilola Taylor Trust. Across London boroughs educational programmes were introduced, along with selective use of metal detection devices and the deployment of intensive stop and search in certain areas. This was followed in 2006 by an amnesty programme, resulting in the surrender of nearly 90,000 knives: an initiative that may have been counted a success save for the fact that knives inevitably remained a readily available weapon of choice and continued to be seen as a symbol of dominance and prestige: offering reputation among the disreputable. On 14 May 2008, following continued killings of young people, the Met initiated a second Operation Blunt. Over 290,000 stop and searches were carried out, resulting in more than 10,000 arrests and the confiscation of 5,400 knives. And on 5 June of that year the Home Office began phase 1 of the national Tackling Knives Action Programme (TKAP), which ran until March 2009. Activities in selected areas again included intensive stop and search, work in schools, a range of local projects and media campaigning. But only 24 days after the launch, on the 29 June 2008, as though to deride the forces of law and order, the murder of 16-years-old Ben Kinsella raised public concern to new heights. Actress and author Brooke Kinsella, Ben’s sister, took up the cause, and her recent report is perhaps the latest significant contribution towards the steps needed to eradicate knife crime. A second phase of TKAP, this time tackling both knife crime and other serious youth violence, ran from April 2009 to March 2010. Home Office Research Report 53 subsequently found “encouraging evidence” that serious youth violence had declined from 2007-8 to the end of March 2010, but this analysis was tempered by the fact that improvements in the non-TKAP areas were generally similar or greater in magnitude than those recorded in the 16 TKAP Phase II areas.

All of these initiatives have clearly had some impact in raising public consciousness, understanding of how interventions can best get across to vulnerable young people, and - along with more severe prison sentences - keeping a lid on villainy. But, as the crime survey statistics show, improvement has been limited and the mindset of violence among those who are prepared to settle scores, often petty, at the point of a knife remains a persistent cancer in our society.

Despite having been brought up in Toxteth during the Great Depression, I cannot say that I am close to understanding the vagaries of dissonant human nature, but I believe in frank and open discussion. Figures recently released by the Metropolitan Police in response to a Freedom of Information request (www.met.police.uk/foi/pdfs/disclosure_2011/july/2011050004143.pdf) suggest that in London black men are responsible for a high proportion of knife crime. They show that of people proceeded against in the year ended 31 March 2011 (whether or not convicted and leaving aside those of mixed ethnicity and ‘not stated’), approximately 42% were black (more than three times the proportion of black people in London’s population), 34% white, 11% Asian, Bangladeshi, Indian or Pakistani, and 3% Chinese.

Of course, these findings, based on self-definition, have to be approached with reserve, since they may reflect a bias in the racial groups targeted and apprehended. But there is enough to prompt some preliminary thoughts. While the evidence points to a particular problem in the black community, it dispels any notion that knife crime is exclusively black on black. The malaise clearly runs across racial groups. A repeated assertion is that the common link is poverty, and it is evident that such offences, as part of the drug scene and gang rites, are largely concentrated in disadvantaged localities. But this too is an over-simplification. Even in areas of extreme deprivation relatively few people go in for stabbing their fellow citizens. To be poor is not necessarily to be depraved and vicious. I am drawn to the thinking of Dr Richard Price (1723-91) who contended that intelligence is one of the requisites of practical morality, necessary to the perception of moral good and evil. Following this reasoning, the heart of the matter may be that the violence of gang mentality is primarily a product of immaturity, over reaction to perceived slights, boredom, macho conceit and stupidity. What I find truly amazing is that those who commit the most horrendous knife attacks do so despite the high probability of detection and a long prison sentence: they come across as their own worst enemies. If there is a cultural dimension it is one of youth rather than race. Unable to make a mark in the world by legitimate endeavour, educationally and socially disaffected, some young men sadly aspire to win kudos and ‘street cred’ by excelling in delinquency. If young black males are over represented in this chamber of horrors it is perhaps because we have so far all too often failed to engage their minds and inspire their ambition.

But I would like to end on an encouraging note: from my home town of Liverpool. There, The Guardian reports, Rob Jackson, a nurse clinician from one of the city’s A&E departments, is bringing home to young people the realities of knife-related wounds. In the 18 months that he has been doing this work such injuries have decreased by 28 per cent. His chilling presentations are gruesome and his message is blunt: “If you carry knives or hang around with those who do, believe me, your luck will run out.”

WE HATE NO. 43: LITTER
Derek Kinrade
“It’s 56 years since the foundation of the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, and if you want to see how successful this well-meaning yet feeble organisation has been, take a look around us at the trash on our streets.”
Jeremy Paxman, launching the Clean Up Britain (CLUB) campaign, 23 June 2011.

Litter is an age-old problem, but modern consumer patterns are such that it is getting much worse. There are two drivers: those who discard the litter and those who provide it. And Paxman is right; Keep Britain Tidy (KBT) has been ineffective and the evidence is to be seen in the garbage deposited on our roadsides. But he is uncharacteristically gentle in saying that those who create offensive litter don’t do so deliberately. Well, that may not be their primary intention, but they are at the very least perverse, socially inept and irresponsible. I see it as only one step below vandalism. Their attitudes might be compared to those who play loud music late at night to the distress of their neighbours: a contemporary anti-social malaise characterised by a ‘couldn’t care less’ mentality. It isn’t confined to young people, but owes a great deal to a generation that doesn’t treasure fine food and eats on the hoof.

The other villains of this problem are those companies who over-package goods, not least by marketing food on plastic trays and wrappers, helping to create identifiable and enduring refuse on our streets, in our gardens and over our countryside. One can understand that they want to be household names, but it is sad that they should be content to be familiar as part of the proliferation of rubbish.

Litter and waste generally is an immense problem; witness the outcome of the government review of waste management reported in Parliament on 16 June. Discarded waste is unattractive, provides a breeding ground for disease-carrying insects and rodents, endangers animals who ingest plastic or cut themselves on broken glass and tins, and is very expensive to clean up. KBT reports a four-fold increase in litter in the last five years with over 30 millions tons collected every year. It costs £858 million annually to clean the streets of England, while the rat population of Greater London is now estimated at seven million: 12,500 per square mile. Legislation – the Environment Protection Act 1990 and the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005 – appears to be ineffective, and KBT’s ‘softly, softly’ approach (less about blame and more about the personal responsibility of individuals) has yet to yield results. While not wishing to be drawn into the criticism of KBT, I cannot resist observing that ‘Tidy’ sounds coy and genteel, and ‘Keep’ is entirely inappropriate. The KBT website is a mine of information, but its multi-layered seams and verbosity distract from genuine confrontation. The organisation launched an anti-litter campaign on 28 June called ‘Love Where You Live’. I see what they mean, but alas it ignores the fact that many neighbourhoods are anything but loveable.

Websites for information (if not necessarily solutions):
• www.cleanupbritain.org
• www.keepbritaintidy.org
• www.cpre.org.uk
• www.cleanupuk.org.uk
• www.litteraction.org.uk (run jointly by CPRE and CleanupUK)

WE HATE NO.42: SECTARIANISM
Derek Kinrade
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.
John Keats: The Fall of Hyperion
The sectarian thinks that he has the sea ladled into his private pond.
Rabindranath Tagore: Fireflies

Soon after my teens I acquired Heresies Ancient and Modern, a book, as I recall, that poured scorn on a number of deviant religious sects, seen as heretical because they had strayed from Christian orthodoxy. My feeling, then as now, was to wonder whether the orthodoxy itself could be trusted; whether the parent and its hereticaloffsprings were in fact all fanciful, and that the make-believe of their various aberrations was simply a matter of degree.

Diversity, of course, is entirely natural and healthy. There will always be differences of culture, taste, political opinion and so on. What is at issue here is the formation of groupings around religious beliefs for which there is no real evidence, indeed in the face of such inconsistencies as do exist, commonly based on the writings of people who had not yet grasped that the earth moved around the sun. There is, we accept, a treasury (though far from unique and somewhat flawed) of moral philosophy in such writings, but they are palpably short on informed scientific analysis and historical accuracy. Unfortunately, however, believers who regard these fables and imaginings as divinely inspired often fiercely accept them as an irrefutable basis for their faiths.

So we have a multiplicity of world religions, according to differing prime sources. On top of this diversity there has also been a good deal of elbow room for differences of interpretation, emphasis, doctrine and practice, most strikingly in relation to women and homosexuals. Tensions have arisen between those who attempt to reconcile traditional teaching with the modern world and those who promote a strict, fundamentalist – and sometimes extreme – approach. Thus many faiths, already disparate, have become sub-divided. A lot of this fundamental divergence has been the outcome of dissent. An obvious example, within the Christian persuasion, is the non-conformist movement; yet even within this broad grouping an astonishing number of denominations have emerged, each with its own distinct message. Alongside these deviations, notoriously, many unconventional cults have sprung up under the spell of charismatic leaders, all too often with their own agenda and motivation. Followers tend to be infinitely credulous, and each grouping is relentlessly and passionately attached to a belief that its particular ideology is the way to salvation, commonly combined with an excess of zeal in seeking to win over converts.

This patchwork, though quaint, would be relatively harmless was it not for the fact that throughout history, into our own times, discord has been marked by extremes of enmity, erupting from time to time in horrific bloodlettings. It can be argued that such violent schisms, driven by fundamentalist fanatics, are primarily motivated by political ends, but we think that religious intolerance is seldom far below the surface. Historically, we recall the Crusades, the Inquisition, repeated massacres of Jews, the persecution of the Huguenots, and in our own country the suppression of Catholicism under Henry VIII. Bitter divisions persist into our own times: the Balkans conflicts; persistent hostility between Palestine and Israel; the remnant of Catholic/Protestant violence in Northern Ireland (and, though on a lesser scale, more recently in Glasgow); Shias versus Sunnis in Iraq; the Taliban; Muslims versus Christians in Sudan; Al-Qu’ida and the atrocities of other extreme Islamic sects. Just now the general Western rejoicing over the so-called Arab Spring may overlook the possibility that it could simply give rise to yet more underlying sectarianism. On such evidence, religion has a terrible track record. How odd that Cardinal Keith O’Brien should warn of the threat from “aggressive secularism”!

Of course, this is not the whole story. Different churches generally live in peace and harmony, seeking out ecumenical accord. Some extremist groups appear not to have any religious affiliation and in the case of those that have a nominal connection it would be unfair to ascribe the worst excesses, with its suicide bombers and explosive devices, to genuine religious belief. For in the depravity of terrorism we are afflicted by tutors whose perverted thinking is the antithesis of religion, prepared as they are to indoctrinate simple minds to sacrifice their own lives to slaughter innocent people in pursuit of dark, satanic goals. Those of us, religious or not, who regard the idea of a holy war as an oxymoron unite in abhorring such violence.

Yet we take the view that sectarian divides - characterised by closed minds, fixed creeds and limited reading – can be a rich breeding ground for extremism and conflict. In this context we cannot resist repeating the joke from an unknown source that appeared in issue no 6 (December 2008):

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. I immediately ran over and said "Stop! Don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said.
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
"Like what?"
"Well ... are you religious or atheist?"
"Religious."
"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"
"Christian."
"Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
"Protestant."
"Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"
"Baptist."
"Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"
"Baptist Church of God."
"Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"
"Reformed Baptist Church of God."
"Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?"
"Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!"
To which I said, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed him off.

WE HATE NO. 40: TRIBAL POLITICS
“to get along in the world, it was necessary to support a ticket, whether Left, Right or Centre.”
Malcolm Muggeridge: Chronicles of Wasted Time (v.2, 1973)

If you watch the BBC’s Question Time, you cannot fail to have noticed that contributors with political affiliations generally follow their party line and seek to discredit the views of their political opponents, all to the detriment of open debate and reasoned argument. The same tribalism dominates Prime Minister’s Questions (and answers); such that political thinking is fettered by the bonds of ideological dogma. In such contexts the progress of government is often reduced to a game of defending the indefensible and scoring points between the narrow beliefs of opposing sides. Surely we can do better than this.

Seasoned parliamentarians will point out that the real thinking gets done in committee and by the Whitehall mandarins, but that is rarely what the general public sees. Therefore there is a widespread and growing disaffection with politics. Some people may, nevertheless, be influenced by charismatic and articulate tribal leaders; of whom there have been, of course, many striking, if misguided, examples. They can also be swayed by the forthright expression of tribal prejudice: such as the idea that many of those claiming benefits are work-shy spongers. Here history provides an interesting precedent. Back in the 1830s the cost of providing relief to the poor was causing concern. The administration and practical operation of the Poor Law was being called into question, so that in 1832 a Royal Commission was appointed. It has been alleged that basic hostility to ‘outdoor relief’ was a given even before the evidence had been examined. It is certainly clear that a primary concern was to reduce expenditure. The thrust of the enquiry was directed, almost exclusively, at questioning the merits of providing relief to the able-bodied poor, and its conclusions were emphatic that such relief was morally destructive. In its report of 1834, the Commissioners took the view that able-bodied paupers had everywhere demonstrated 'idleness and vice' and that in most cases pauperism could have been averted by ordinary care and industry. The poor were thus regarded as being largely to blame for their own condition, and it was concluded that the provision of relief merely tended to encourage their feckless mode of living. The Commissioners therefore felt that the moral (as well as the economic) argument must therefore lie with the utmost restriction of relief. On 14 August1834, an Act for the Amendment and Better Administration of the Laws Relating to the Poor in England and Wales set the pattern for social security for the next 75 years. In addition to centralising the administration of the Poor Law, a key strategy was that relief should, wherever possible, be provided by admission into a network of local workhouses. Here was a system of relief which could be made so irksome and disagreeable that no-one would consent to receive it who could possibly do without it.

Today we don’t have workhouses, but readers may be forgiven if they nevertheless see parallels with current welfare reform proposals. The political dogma that work – any kind of work – is a pathway to a better life, especially when very little work is available, may perhaps be seen as little more than rhetoric to disguise an overwhelming desire to reduce expenditure.

Yet this is but one example. All too often the policy and practice of successive governments has been determined by perceived financial advantage. We can see this particularly in the sale of arms to repressive regimes and in the shameful cosying up to despotic leaders. No amount of impressive rhetoric can mask this subordination of moral principle.

Irrespective of the electoral system in place, we have in this country a parliamentary disposition in which, apart from a few independents, those elected or chosen are expected to follow the agreed policies of the party (tribe) to which they belong. A few radicals will occasionally rebel, but by and large our ‘democratic’ decisions follow the predictable political paradigms of the party for the time being in power. Thus politicians will be pressured to choose pragmatism over principle, be torn between sincerity and what is required to attract votes, gather around their tribe’s totem and withal sometimes have an eye open to advancement. Our politics, like our legal system, are predominantly adversarial rather than consensual. Hence we resort, for the most part, to tribalism with its attendant deconstructive bickering. As Henry Brooks Adams put it: “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” Small wonder that politicians have a bad name and are commonly despised.

WE HATE NO. 39: SLAUGHTERHOUSES
“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
Samuel Butler
“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone in the world would be a vegetarian.”
Sir Paul McCartney, PETA video (also credited to Linda McCartney)

The fact that abattoirs are openly known as slaughterhouses is indicative of a common perception that their function is acceptable in a civilised society and nothing of which to feel ashamed. Moral reservations are mostly confined to a hope (not necessarily an informed hope) that the slaughter will be humane. The industry is embedded in human history and generally seen, at worst, as a necessary evil. Yet is this tolerance reasonable? Is it not perverse that our children tend to be brought up to be fond of farm animals, yet kept in ignorance of the contradiction of their eventual fate? Can we reconcile our approval of the distress involved in the transportation of and slaughter of animals when should similar treatment be meted out to humans (as it has been) it would be seen as an unmitigated evil?

We think that there is a collective myopia and hypocrisy about the systematic slaughter of animals for food. So let us start unequivocally by saying that we hate the whole sorry business. The fact that the circumstances of killing in some slaughterhouses is less than humane merely makes our abhorrence more acute.

The animal rights charity PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Foundation) has long campaigned against the meat industry’s “rampant abuse” of animals, attacking not only the manner of their slaughter, but conditions on today’s factory farms. They say that the “green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories”. In the present day, “billions of individual animals are violently killed for their flesh every year – whilst others spend almost their entire lives confined to filthy cramped conditions.” To back up their condemnation, they have produced a short video, fronted by Sir Paul McCartney, showing something of “the horrific abuse that the meat and dairy industries inflicts on animals”.

We echo these views, but our concern is here focused on the killing industry. When we say that this is embedded, it is to suggest that there never has been anything idyllic about animal slaughter. It has simply been accepted and sustained by a widespread belief that humankind has a pre-eminent place in the world and that eating flesh to sustain our well-being is somehow mysteriously sanctified. Thus our approach to animal slaughter belongs to a long, we are tempted to say holy, tradition. To quote the anonymous author of Cursory Remarks on the Evil Tendency of Unrestrained Cruelty, Particularly on That Practised at Smithfield Market (1823):

“Man has the vanity, the preposterous arrogance, to fancy himself the only worthy object of divine regard; and in proportion as he fancies himself such, considers himself authorised to despise, oppress, and torment all the creatures which he regards as his inferiors…”

We found this quotation in Sarah Wise’s The Italian Boy, an account of murder and grave-robbery in 1830s London (Cape, 2004). She devotes a whole chapter to Meat, which she describes as “an interlude”. It is indeed a diversion from the main subject, but a valuable one. Drawing on evidence heard by the 1828 Select Committee on Smithfield she recounts the horrors of the meat trade in nineteenth century London. How animals were driven to London for sale or slaughter from all over Great Britain, covering 15 to 20 miles a day; those from the north parked up in grazing counties before the final march to the capital, then assembled at Islington from where City of London drovers took over the difficult task of negotiating London’s busy streets, “often with calamitous consequences”. Beatings with vicious goads, for all to see, were routine. Those beasts consigned to slaughter met their fate in primitive slaughterhouses, usually in Smithfield, Whitechapel, Shoreditch or Leadenhall Market, and frequently in cellars or back yards of private houses. Smithfield was one of the worst places, stinking and ankle deep in offal, faeces, urine and filth. Sarah Wise quotes Dickens’s description of “filth and fat and blood and foam” in his Great Expectations. The Select Committee was told of commonplace brutality of the most horrific kind that had been tolerated for years. Yet in the early part of the nineteenth century attempts to legislate were regularly defeated in Parliament. It was only in 1822 that a Bill to prevent cruelty, moved by Richard Martin, MP for Galway, finally succeeded. Given the nickname ‘Humanity Dick’, Martin was also zealous in his efforts to bring abusers to justice. A Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was established in 1824 (gaining its ‘Royal’ prefix in 1840). But attempts to extend Martin’s Act, failed on nine occasions between 1823 and 1826, and it was not until 1835 that wider legislation was finally accepted. We have a copy of the final Bill before us. It recognised that accidents frequently arose from improperly driving cattle and that “many and great cruelties” were occasioned by driving cattle, in their slaughter and in keeping them without food and nourishment. And the Act, while not questioning the need for slaughter, marked a genuine attempt to regulate the trade and improve the welfare of animals.

Such is something of the historical background. It may reasonably be thought that in Britain today protection for animals has greatly improved. We now have relatively new welfare legislation, and specific regulations relating to killing and slaughter were introduced in 1995 (The Welfare of Animals (Slaughter and Killing) Regulations 1995, as subsequently amended). These make it an offence to cause avoidable excitement, pain or suffering, and lay down rules on handling, stunning and slaughtering animals. All abattoirs are currently supervised by official veterinarians and inspectors employed by the Food Standards Agency Operations Group. So, apart from the sensitivities of those of us who unreservedly hate animal slaughter, what is there to worry about? Well first of all are the legal provisions that continue to allow the ritual slaughter of animals without stunning in order to accommodate Jewish and Muslim codes. Thus, specifically, cruelty is permitted in the name of religion to provide kosher meat (Jewish) and halal meat (Muslim). Evidence, we feel, that not everyone is equal before the law. Followers of this tradition argue that such killing is quick and humane, but as Johann Hari comments in a perceptive article in The Independent (The Religious Excuse for Barbarity, 19 November 2010) the scientific consensus is that it causes “very significant pain and distress”.

As to the rest of the meat trade – about three quarters of it - the fact of the matter is that there are new imperatives which in practice can give rise to abuse and which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to entirely control. We understand that there are some well-run slaughterhouses, but in others economic pressures and the level of demand have given rise to animals being ‘processed’ at relentless, and unacceptable, line speeds. Regulation is not easy, since neither vets nor inspectors can be everywhere all the time, and when abuse is spotted in requires immense courage to halt production. There have been relatively few prosecutions, and although the regulations provide for custodial sentences, none has been imposed on the actual abusers. Between 2002 and 2010 there were only 31 convictions, and fines averaged out at a derisory £1,100.

It could be argued that this is because abuse is uncommon. But the reality has been vividly exposed in a recent report by the charity Animal Aid. Behind Closed Doors, researched and written by Kate Fowler and published in November 2010, reveals the findings of an investigation, using hidden cameras. Between January 2009 and April 2010 Animal Aid secretly filmed inside seven English red meat slaughterhouses, providing reliable evidence of what has truly taken place in six of them (identified in the report). The many distressing scenes filmed included:
• animals being kicked in the face, slapped, stamped on, picked up by fleeces and ears, and forcibly thrown across or into stunning pens
• animals screaming and struggling to escape
• animals going to the knife without adequate stunning
• animals stunned and then allowed to recover consciousness
• electric tongs used maliciously on the snouts, ears, tails, bodies and open mouths of pigs, resulting in the animals being given painful electric shocks
• pigs being jabbed viciously in the face with electric tongs
• ewes being stunned while a lamb suckled them
• a sheep too sick to stand – or possibly already dead – being brought to slaughter in a wheelbarrow
• a pig bleeding after being deliberately hit in the face with a shackle hook
• improperly stunned animals being stood on to keep them still while shackles were attached
• pigs falling from the shackle line into the blood pit and then being dragged through groups of live pigs
• animals being decapitated before the appropriate statutory time had elapsed, and while the animals may still have been alive
• long periods elapsing between electrical stunning and ‘sticking’ (throat cutting), increasing the likelihood that animals regain consciousness
• cows being stunned in a pen that was missing its head shelf. This allowed animals to move around, making an accurate head shot more difficult to achieve and increasing the risk of blotched stuns.

The evidence is clear. The footage from one slaughterhouse shocked Steve McGrath, CEO of the former Meat Hygiene Service. He said: “I have watched the film and have seen abject cruelty by the slaughtermen to the animals being killed, ineffective stunning, animals having the necks dislocated and heads decapitated before being fully bled, pigs being kicked, shackled before stunning. These are not technicalities”. Tim Smith, CEO of the Food Standards Agency, wrote of the footage taken at another slaughterhouse: “The cruelty on show is the worst I’ve seen.”

The Guardian picked up on the scandal on 4 February (while we were writing this article). It provided an expert view by Felicity Lawrence, author of the bestselling exposes Not on the label and Eat your heart out. Her comment made no bones about the fact that meat processing “has traditionally been a dirty industry” and that “a culture of macho bullying persists in many parts of it”. She noticed that Tim Smith has frequently spoken about what he calls the “disgraceful” intimidation faced by meat inspectors in UK factory abattoirs. He had also “forcefully and publicly told the British red meat industry, in which breaches of hygiene and BSE regulations are frequent, that it needs to clean up its act generally”. Lawrence went on to identify the roots of the problem, pointing out that: “Abattoirs today are noisy, relentless places in which animals are processed at speed and workers have no control over how fast the carcasses come at them over long, tiring shifts”. She argued that: “Killing animals day in, day out for hours at a time leaves no room for sentimentality”. It also inevitably desensitises some of those employed to carry out the mass slaughter.

Animal Aid is campaigning for CCTV to be installed in all slaughterhouses. They have the support of the RSPCA, Compassion in World Farming, the Soil Association and the Food Standards Agency. The union that represents slaughtermen and meat inspectors is not opposing the proposal and a number of leading supermarkets are demanding that CCTV be installed in the abattoirs that supply them with meat.

Our view is that while universal CCTV surveillance in stunning and killing areas would indeed mark a significant step forward, neither legislation, regulation, inspection nor the sentences handed down by our judiciary are likely to suffice to curb abuse in this distressing trade. The only realistic hope for change lies with consumers, simply to forego the pleasure of eating meat (which may actually damage their health), facing up to fact that being a carnivore inevitably requires killing and involves their complicity in a hateful process.

WE HATE NO. 38: CLASS DISTINCTION
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of the class struggle.”
Karl Marx, opening words of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848)

“Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes! Bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow ye masses.”
W.S.Gilbert ‘Iolanthe’ (1882)

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”
Victor Hugo, quoted in the ‘Illawarra Mercury’ and repeated in ‘The Week’.

In a recent service to mark the 40th anniversary of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act the Archbishop of Westminster reminded the congregation that all people are of equal worth in the sight of God (so why was the prelate wearing fancy dress?). We cannot vouch for God’s eyesight, but here in Britain, as it were on the ground, it is painfully apparent that there is an enormous gulf between the esteem accorded to the lower orders and to toffs (we would say proletariat and aristocracy, but that would itself imply a class bias); between beggars and the landed ‘gentry’; between those who endure a half-life on benefits and those who annually parade their affluence at Ascot racecourse; between those who struggle alone and those who can afford to employ hundreds of servants; between servile subjects and rulers; between commoners and royalty; between the masses and their masters; between the uncouth and the elegant (we could go on). With, of course, a great swathe of people in an extensive and variously valued middle ground.

Despite the growth of an amorphous middle class, social barriers are still very much alive and kicking. Even our sports, as Barney Ronay recently put it, “are still horribly divided along class lines – from darts to skiing”. In the simplest terms we generally recognise four broad class divisions: under, lower, middle and upper. But in our complex society it is possible to identify other distinct classifications, such as professional, military, artistic, chattering, political and above all (literally) ruling. In a memorable article in The Guardian (22 December) John Harris observed that “In the Dickensian season a Victorian clique still rules”. “Now surely,” he wrote, “we can confidently scoff at the coalition’s claims to being somehow ‘progressive’, and feel a shiver at so many of the Victorian fundamentals of Con-Dem politics – noblesse oblige, an updated notion of the undeserving poor and, naturally enough, fiscal exactitude…we now find ourselves governed by people from a narrower social category than has been seen in years, and one of their motivations becomes clearer by the day – to somehow recast the country according to the ancient mores of the English upper class.”

Divergence by class, of course, is not purely economic; worth can also be measured in terms of respect, prestige, authority, power, deference and honour. There are certain clear variations at the extremes: thus the poor are more numerous but tend to die younger, while the ‘upper’ classes generally remain distinct, tightly grouped and exclusive, mostly born into wealth and privilege, but not necessarily therefore intelligent, cultured or imbued with energy or moral sensibilities. The hereditary system, despite its defects, survives. In France and Russia an inclination to aristocratic decadence in contrast to the abject poverty of the peasantry was at the root of bloody revolutions. Here in Britain, despite some eminent supporters of the need for change (if not for blood-letting), we have shown greater acceptance and tolerance. Indeed it is a peculiarity of British society that the supreme anomaly of monarchy appears most popular among the underprivileged, marked by a distinct absence of animosity. Give the masses a royal wedding and joy abounds.

We believe that class differences and the unfairness that goes with them are endemic and bound to persist. So what do we really hate? By now that is probably obvious, but let us try to be more specific. We hate pretension: ascribed social standing not based on achievement, the display of medals awarded for lord knows what, luxurious lifestyles and extravagant travel at taxpayers’ expense. At the other end of the spectrum we hate policies which make the poor even poorer. We need to mitigate class distinction and move towards, not away from, social equality, encouraging a meritocracy and governance that rewards aspiration and promotes social mobility, but also gives help to the helpless. But as a recent Steve Bell cartoon puts it what we now appear to have is a doctrine of “From each according to their vulnerability, to each according to their greed”.

WE HATE NO. 37: TUITION FEES
“Studenti! Udite…Là la vittoria o il Nulla!...Ah, comincia l’Epopea! L’Università! “
“Students! Hear me…There is victory or nothing…Ah, the epic story is beginning! The University!”
Luigi Illica: ‘Germania’, 1902 (libretto to Franchetti’s opera).

So we hate tuition fees? Well not altogether. Rather the mess that has been made of the way that the coalition government has gone about increasing the contribution to be expected from students in England from 2012. A university education is not a universal benefit. It confers advantage upon those who end up with a degree and as such it is not unreasonable that students should pay (should have paid) something for the privilege. But the state too benefits from raising the standards of the potential workforce and the intellectual strength of our meritocracy. The trick is to strike the right balance, avoiding the kind of precipitous change that has brought students on to the streets. The Labour government introduced modest tuition fees, a measure which, if not popular, did not threaten revolution. But that fees should, at a stroke, be almost doubled or even trebled in “exceptional” circumstances could be predicted to upset even our normally tranquil student population.

Our first objection is that the increases are an affront to fairness (which the coalition claims to espouse). What would we think if the price of biscuits suddenly went up by approaching 100% (or 150% in the case of Duchy originals)? Particularly if biscuits were free in other parts of the United Kingdom. The scale of the increase is Draconian, the consequence of a cut too far in the support provided by the state. And what do we think of such increases being proposed and supported by parliamentarians who themselves have enjoyed a university education free of charge? How “together” is that? Then, to aggravate the situation, what if some of those parliamentarians have been elected on a solemn pledge not to increase tuition fees? It is as though those who had committed to abstain from and not provide alcohol then took jobs in a public house.

It is pointed out that nothing needs to be paid ‘up front’; that the charge is by way of a loan, repayable only if and when the graduate’s individual’s salary reaches £21,000. But the effect of this provision is cumulative. It forces repayment of a substantial debt upon all those who make a reasonable (even modest) success of their careers. And although the starting gate will be the same for everybody, the background economic circumstances of some and therefore their ability to pay will be quite different from others. Many from poor backgrounds have no wealthy parents to whom they can turn for help. Such aspiring students realise this, and will face an enormous disincentive to embarking on a university course.

Our second, and profound, objection is the haste with which these measures have been brought forward. Consultation with student bodies might have avoided the reaction that has been provoked. If some reasonable increase was necessary to help reduce the national deficit it might have been discussed and staged.

On the whole, if administratively it could be put in place, we think a graduate tax related to income would be a fairer option; and why not make it apply not only to new but also to former graduates who are still in work. Could not this information be brought within the existing tax return?

We do not condone the rioting that has occurred, but we understand it.

WE HATE NO.36:
BLANKET DENIAL OF VOTING RIGHTS TO THOSE BEHIND BARS
“Imprisonment is by the deprivation of liberty a punishment in itself. The conditions of imprisonment and the prison regimes shall not, therefore, except as incidental to justifiable segregation or the maintenance of discipline, aggravate the suffering inherent in this.”
Rule 64, Recommended European Prison Rules.

Perhaps no subject is more likely to prompt a knee-jerk reaction than that of the human rights of prisoners. It brings into play the different perspectives of politicians and the judiciary, hatred of criminals, media prejudice and the barely concealed resentment of taking orders from European authorities. Hence the rumpus over the franchise having to be extended to prisoners.

Britain has for many years relied on Section 3 (1) of the Representation of the People Act 1983: “A convicted person during the time that he [or she] is detained in a penal institution in pursuance of his [or her] sentence or unlawfully at large when he [or she] would otherwise be so detained is legally incapable of voting at any parliamentary or local government election.” Apart from specified marginal exceptions this is a blanket ban, and Section 3A extends the disfranchisement to offenders detained in mental hospitals.

The (Labour) Government’s position was made clear in 2001 when John Hirst, while still incarcerated, first brought proceedings. He argued that the UK legislation was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Essentially the government’s position then was that by committing offences which were found to require a custodial sentence prisoners “forfeited the right to have a say in the way the country is governed for that period”. It was further contended on the government’s behalf that “There is more than one element to punishment than forcible detention. Removal from society means removal from the privileges of society, amongst which is the right to vote for one’s representative.” Many people will agree with that view. We do not.

The main facts of the particular case are that Hirst killed his 69-year-old landlady with several blows of an axe. On 11 February 1980 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. The plea was accepted on the basis of medical evidence that he had a gross personality disorder to such an extent that he was amoral. He was sentenced to a term of discretionary life imprisonment. That part of the sentence relating to retribution and deterrence expired on 25 June 1994, but his detention continued based on the view of the Parole Board that he continued to present a risk of serious harm to the public, and he was not finally released (on licence) until 25 May 2004.

Eventually, on 30 March 2004, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) held unanimously (our italics) that there had been a violation of Article 3 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights (hence also defining voting as a human rather than a civil right). Nevertheless, at the request of the UK government, the case was referred on to the Grand Chamber of the ECHR, which delivered its judgment on 6 October 2005. It found that the exclusion from voting imposed on convicted prisoners in detention was disproportionate in that it applied automatically irrespective of length of sentence or the gravity of the offence; and that the results were arbitrary and anomalous, depending on the timing of elections. In the particular case of Hirst it further observed that in so far as the disfranchisement was seen as part of a prisoner’s punishment, there was no logical justification for his disqualification to continue since that part of his sentence related to punishment and deterrence had been completed. Since then a judgment in the case of Helmut Froidl has reinforced the finding of the Grand Chamber, confirming that its decision made it unlawful simply to disfranchise all prisoners serving more than one year in jail.

This conclusion, in our view, is entirely correct. The idea that prisoners should automatically be stripped of their basic rights ought to be an anathema in a democratic society. We cannot fail to observe that it follows an historical pattern which has in earlier times deemed people low in the social and economic scale and women as unworthy to vote. There was in the government’s case in 2001 an implied recognition that parliamentary and local government representation extends to prisoners. The right to have a say in who that representative should be is potentially more important to those behind bars than to free citizens. This raises a further anomaly in that there is an increasing tendency towards non-custodial sentences. Are such offenders more worthy of rights than those who are locked up? Politicians may find it inconvenient and exasperating, even abhorrent, to extend the vote to prisoners, but the grounds for that view are mistaken.

There was, however, some elbow-room in the Strasbourg ruling. The finding was that a blanket ban was “disproportionate”. The judgment nevertheless went on to accept that “a wide margin of appreciation should be granted to the national legislature in determining whether restrictions on prisoners’ right to vote can still be justified in modern times and if so how a fair balance is to be struck.” Thus a restriction might be tailored to particular offences, such as those of particular gravity. This again is surely correct. What is reasonable is to consider individual fitness to vote, as (though not in the same way) we assess fitness to become British citizens. What we hate is a legal bar on a prisoners’ right to vote in any circumstances. The denial of rights as a punishment is no more sustainable than the torture of people we don’t like.

For fuller details search for GRAND CHAMBER CASE OF HIRST v THE UNITED KINGDOM (NO.2).

WE HATE NO. 35: SUPERSTITION
“The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.”
Francis Bacon: The Works of Francis Bacon (1819), vol.2

Christopher Hitchins, writing in Vanity Fair, recalled that when Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, hung a horseshoe over his door, some of his friends were appalled. Surely, they said, you don’t put any trust in such superstition. “No, Bohr replied, “but apparently it works whether you believe it or not.” This is amusing, but conceals a greater truth. The fact is that fortune or misfortune are entirely random, whatever you believe. It would be enlightening if we could know how many crashed cars had been ‘protected’ by a Saint Christopher medallion, what proportion of batsmen were dismissed on 111, or the incidence of misfortune suffered on Friday the 13th relative to other days.

The credulousness associated with the number 13 is particularly interesting. A number of clubs based on this common superstition have been established, in some cases simply to poke fun at the myth. One such was set up by William Harnett Blanch (1836-1900), a Victorian gunsmith turned writer. He might have been expected to have had some sympathy with ‘providence’ in that as an infant he had been taken out in his pram when both his parents were killed by an accidental explosion in their gun shop. On the contrary, he grew up to be deeply antagonistic to superstition. So much so that he promoted an organised protest against such beliefs and, with other journalists and writers, founded London’s ‘Thirteen Club’. For some years, they held an annual dinner at which traditional taboos were flouted. Details of one such, held in room 13 of the Holborn Restaurant on 13 January 1894 (unfortunately not a Friday), survive. Blanch, who had been elected President for the year, saw the occasion as an opportunity for something rather more vigorous and aggressive than previous celebrations. There were 13 tables, each with 13 diners. The members, wearing green ties and buttonholes of coffins with a skeleton and peacock’s feathers, walked under a club ladder when summoned to dinner by the smashing of a large mirror, and sat down in front of crossed knives; they spilt salt from coffin-shaped salt-cellars, and were served by cross-eyed waiters. The famous artist Harry Furniss, who chaired the proceedings and left a detailed, illustrated account of them, clearly had misgivings about this bizarre jamboree, concerned that beliefs which in some places could have such cruel and brutal effects should be the subject of so jovial a charade.

Perhaps he had in mind such sinister (and common) beliefs as the ‘evil eye’, the notion that a targeted look can visit injury or misfortune upon those on whom it is directed; or sticking pins in dolls to curse an individual; or the casting of spells and other devices to bring harm to one’s enemies. Today, there is even a website (www.pinstuck.com) that allows anyone so minded to send an anonymous curse by e.mail. Maxim Magazine thought that this “combines third-world vengeance with no-fuss high-tec communication”.

But, on the whole, superstitious practices – too numerous to relate and already the subject of a vast bibliography - are just silly. Nor do they take us to the heart of the matter. Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), put down superstition as “the religion of feeble minds”, carrying the implication that an authentic kind of religion can be espoused by more elevated minds. And, in one of his famous essays, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), by no means an atheist, wrote of “the similitude of superstition to religion”. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined superstition as “false devotion, or religion”, without attempting to distinguish false from true. Certainly there is a clear connection: even the apostle Paul (Acts 17.22) cautioned against superstition within religion, telling the Athenians (or at least the men folk) that they were “too superstitious”. This strikes us as a harsh verdict. The Athenians might be thought to have been scientifically open-minded rather than ignorant when they inscribed an altar: ‘To the Unknown God’. Later abhorrence of the superstitious practices of the Catholic church lay at the roots of the Protestant Reformation, while, in regarding atheism as preferable to superstition, Bacon (ibid) specifically deplored “pleasing and sensual rites and ceremonies; excess of outward and pharisaical holiness; overgreat reverence of traditions”, and other things that had attached themselves to religious worship. Similar strictures have continued over time, but have generally stopped short of regarding religion itself – God worship - as superstitious. Yet religious faith relies on belief, sometimes irrational and against such evidence as we have, even contradicting the accepted laws of nature. One dictionary definition of faith is that of a “spiritual apprehension of divine truth apart from proof” (our italics). Perhaps the supremely irrational contortion is that of attempting to reconcile the concept of an omnipotent God with the fact of natural disasters. Believers can go to extraordinary lengths to square this particular circle. Thus William Hone (1780-1842), struck down by a paralytic stroke in church during worship, attributed his misfortune to the Almighty having suddenly suspended his mental and bodily functions. His statement went on: “Every infliction from His hand has driven me closer to Him, and been sanctified by His holy spirit to enlarge my views of His abundant mercies, and ne’er-failing Providence”. No less fanciful are those survivors of a conflict who attribute their good fortune to the protection of God, unconscious of the implication that the same God allowed their colleagues to be annihilated.

We will admit, nevertheless, that religious faith deserves a place above other forms of superstition in that, even if erroneous, it may be a force for good and give consolation. And at least the philosophy may be rational. We hope that this has not been too aggressive. Here in Peckham some religious believers proclaim their message through megaphones. We think it only fair that two atheists should have their say.

WE HATE NO.34: FANATICISM
“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”
George Santayana, quoted in ‘Esquire’.

“There is no place in a fanatic’s head where reason can enter.”
Napoleon I, ‘Maxims’ (1804-15)

We must first distinguish between fanaticism and enthusiasm, for the latter is a life force that can be both measured and rational. As Emerson, in an essay of 1841, remarked, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm”. Fanaticism, by contrast, is always both irrational and excessive; but even then we must make a distinction between its harmless and dangerous manifestations. Examples of the latter – persecutions and massacres – stretch back through history, usually attributable to religious fundamentalism, or racial/political enmity. Anti-Semitism is one of the most persistent ingredients, providing in our own time a particularly monstrous example of the extremities that can derive from wrong-headed fixations. The Holocaust, as we all know, was largely rooted in a concept of Aryan purity in sharp contrast to perceived Semite decadence. What is less well known is that one of the sources of such thinking began life in Britain, in Southsea to be precise. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), regarded by some Nazis as the spiritual founder of the Third Reich, was the son of a rear-admiral and became a man of high scholarship and deep culture. He rallied to the cause of Germany during the First World War, venerating first Kaiser Wilhelm II and later Adolf Hitler. He was also a great admirer of Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, and married their daughter Eva in 1908. William Shirer, in his History of the Third Reich argues that much of the philosophical basis of Nazi anti-Semitism stems from a single chapter of Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the 19th Century), published in 1899. Shirer recounts that Chamberlain was one of the first intellectuals in Germany to see a great future for Hitler. He met him first in Bayreuth in 1923 and was “swept off his feet by the eloquent young Austrian”. “You have mighty things to do,” he wrote to Hitler on the following day. The point here is that the most appalling consequences can stem from regressive ideas, with small beginnings, and continue to do so. Today, terrorism has become a global plague, and enormous power to wreak havoc is now available to idiot minorities. In hating these poisonous cults and their bizarre beliefs we may be accused of contributing to the odour of animosity; our view rests upon a concurring hypothesis that responding with active hostility (as in Iraq and Afghanistan) merely compounds the problem. Defence may be justified; offence is not.

We should also say something of (relatively) harmless fanaticism. The recent football world cup is a good example. We love our country, but flying the flag of St George on one’s car or house is surely over the top. The more so in that anyone of even average sagacity should have been aware that the England squad had neither the personnel nor the strategy to do well in the competition. Yet thousands of good people travelled an enormous distance at extraordinary expense to see our team and its manager humiliated. That, in our book, is fanaticism (though one of us watched it on television).

Another fertile field (sometimes literally so) for an excess of over-zealous adoration is that of popular music. Now at least one of us knows next to nothing of the genre, beyond hearing some of it in charity shops, where its purpose seems to be that of keeping the volunteers awake. He thinks that much of such music has been given over to the barbarians, but is aware that there are favoured performers and prestigious awards, and is content to say ‘each to his own’. But what is more difficult to accept is the mass hysteria with which cacophonies are greeted. Is this not a form of collective madness?

We began by quoting Napoleon Bonaparte. He is one who knew something of extremists. On Christmas Eve, 1800, en route to the Paris Opéra to hear Haydn’s Creation for the first time, a contrivance, ostensibly a water cart, was exploded between the carriage of the Consul and his lady. The attempt on his life failed, and as Napoleon calmly took his seat he is famously said to have remarked: “The rascals wanted to blow me up, bring me a book of the oratorio”. Let us try to be similarly calm in the face of terrorism, and avoid matching hatred with more of the same. Declaring and waging war on terror simply extends the carnage. Better that politicians lose face than that our soldiers should continue to lose limbs.

WE HATE NO. 33: MISOGYNY
“La donna è mobile,
qual piuma al vento,
muta d’accento
e di pensiero.”
Piave/Verdi: ‘Rigoletto’

Misogyny goes back a long way. A contributor to Radio 5 Live recently explained that the reason women should not be ordained as Anglican bishops can be found in “the inspired word of God”. The first book ascribed to Moses, called Genesis, tells the familiar story. How, having formed a man from the dust of the ground, God planted a garden eastward in Eden and put the man (Adam) there to look after it. God then decided that it was not good that the man should be alone and that he would make a “help meet” for him. Thus, having caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep, he took one of his ribs and made a woman (Eve) and brought her to Adam. After Eve’s deception by a serpent, and both having eaten forbidden fruit, we come to the reckoning: God tells the woman “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Ch.3/16).

Surah IV/34 of the Koran, similarly inspired, asserts that “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other” (Pickthall’s translation, 1977). It may be that such reasoning is nowadays restricted to religious fundamentalists, but it has shaped attitudes to women for centuries and is by no means dead.

In our own country, through history, there has been a wide acceptance that the role of women is subservient to that of men, tied up with childbirth, mothering and domesticity, with an implication of inferiority. They have commonly been seen to excel – and that only in youth – in being more decorative and in a capacity to attract. We chose the opening quotation because it captures part of the problem. The libidinous Duke of Mantua (in Victor Hugo’s book on which the opera is based it was King Francis I of France), having had his way with Rigoletto’s daughter, reflects that woman is fickle, blown in any direction, simple in speech and simpler in mind. And this notwithstanding his own admitted inconstancy. To the misogynist male there is often a dichotomy between desiring women as sexual objects, while lacking respect for their wider endowments, and not otherwise enjoying their company or discourse. Perhaps uncertain of their own masculinity, or fearful that the patriarchal society is under threat, they seek reinforcement in being with other men.

The word ‘misogyny’ derives from Grecian sources, and Wikipedia is strong on literary and philosophical allusions to misogynistic characteristics. Euripides (480-406 BC) is among those so identified, but Sophocles is quoted as saying: “He may be so in his tragedies, but in his bed he is very fond of women.” There is no such reservation about Menander (342-291 BC), who asserted: “there are many wild beasts on land and in the sea, but the beastliest of all is woman”. Similarly, the dissolute Roman Petronius (27- 66AD) saw women as “one and all a set of vultures”.

Absolution from the paradox of desiring women while hating them is not uncommonly sought by casting females as temptresses. Do they not go out of the way to exhibit and enhance their charms? Can men then be blamed for succumbing to their irresistible allure? Are women then, at heart, merely harlots, impure and defiled? Is it not, therefore, understandable that men should hate them? In this construct men are seen as hapless and innocent victims, open to the wiles and manipulation of feminine seduction. An unfaithful wife is a whore; the unfaithful husband merely a philanderer. The frequently quoted Otto Weininger, in his Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) argued: “No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them”. Somewhat, we suggest, a sweeping statement. By the same measure we might think deeply about men and conclude that they are shallow and so obsessed with football as to be seen, even when full grown, in replica shirts bearing the names and numbers of their heroes, displaying beer-bellies and emitting primordial cries. Nevertheless, even in relatively enlightened countries, there is a persistent view that women as a group are intellectually inferior to men. Photographs of ‘summit’ meetings of world leaders show almost wall-to-wall men. Angela Merkel is usually the exception that proves who rules. In Britain it required a monumental struggle to secure votes and educational opportunities for women, and even today they are underrepresented in business and politics. There are some cracks in the glass ceiling, but by and large it remains intact.

Yet the climate is changing. Until recently, there has been little opportunity for women to step outside their role as procreators and mothers. But now they are increasingly able to take control of their lives and to limit their families. Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife epitomises the new woman. Forced by circumstances out of a conventional role as a wife and mother she takes a position in a high-powered law firm, emerging as a powerful, yet entirely feminine, litigator. The transformation has high profile parallels in the real world. Our present Home Secretary, Theresa May, and the current leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, exude authority without the usual macho overtones. Even Australia, famous by reputation for misogyny, now has a woman, Julia Gillard, as prime minister (at least at the time of writing). And one, according to the Daily Mail, who is proudly feminist, agnostic, unmarried and childless. Misogyny is now inextricably linked to equality issues and, in England and Wales, we have an Equality Act that outlaws discrimination, harassment and victimisation. To redress long-standing political imbalance it is here now legally acceptable to have all-women short lists. And the visible evidence of brilliant young women from South Korea in the British Open Golf Championship shows that even that bastion of male domination is yielding to the reality of female emancipation. The pin-striped Taliban of the City and Westminster had better watch out

WE HATE NO. 32: POVERTY
“Wherever there is excessive wealth, there is also in the train of it excessive poverty; as, where the sun is brightest, the shade is deepest.”
Walter Savage Landor, ‘Aristoteles and Callisthenes’, Imaginary Conversations (1824-53).

Some years ago (it may be better now) Ann invited me to join her in a visit to India. She had previously been involved in a number of projects there and was fascinated by the country. I hated it. I hated the heat, the squalor, the crowds, but above all the poverty. I couldn’t cope with the beggars: men who solicited sympathy by flaunting open wounds; a child led on a chain to exhibit his penury; another infant on whom flies were settling. In parts of Mumbai crude tents lined the pavements, and in the early morning the concourse of the railway station was virtually taken over by the sleeping bodies of the destitute. We were told (but did not see) that there was one place where prostitutes, some of them children, were kept in cages. We visited a leper colony and were told that not all of the residents had leprosy: some people chose to live there because conditions were better ordered than on the outside. From the roof of a local health centre, as far as the eye could see and in every direction, the land was occupied by rough wooden shacks, home to thousands of the city’s slightly better-off masses.

There was also wealth in plenty, but not much of it appeared to ‘trickle down’. My impression was that the sheer scale of abject poverty, fuelled by unconfined population growth, was such that very few affluent people, if they cared at all, saw any practical hope of addressing it. Yet I was conscious that it was not so long ago that similar conditions – and similar resigned indifference – existed in the major cities of Britain; that cesspits of fetid degradation were everyday features of the industrial landscape under Queen Victoria, alongside an elite blessed with rank and privilege. Recently, my younger brother had occasion to examine the records of Liverpool’s Toxteth Park Cemetery, searching for the grave of a Confederate agent of the American Civil War. He was shocked to find that then most adult men in the area died in their 40s, and that their most common address was the local workhouse. And, of course, hundreds failed to make it beyond infancy. In my own childhood (which coincided with the Depression of the 1930s), I made my daily way to school from my home in Liverpool 8 through the slums of Windsor Street where ragged children played barefoot. My family was one or two points above this rock-bottom poverty line, but I recall that I was among those who qualified for free school dinners (such as they were during the second world war) and that my parents could not afford to provide me with a school tie.

Beveridge (much assisted by Lord Longford, Alf Morris tells me) changed all that. Despite its imperfections, the welfare state has brought about a state of affairs in which absolute, fundamental destitution is now unusual; instead attention is now focused on the concept of relative poverty. But, as everyone knows, that relativity is growing ever wider. Another Queen, born with and sustained in enormous privilege and able to spend £125,000 on a holiday, reigns over a divided nation. The top hats and finery of Royal Ascot contrast starkly with the hopeless homelessness of our most distressed citizens. And with this increasing social divide we are in danger of seeing a return to the philosophy of Samuel Smiles, with its implication that the poor are to blame for their own condition and that we should rely on our own efforts in life, rather than depend on the help or patronage of others: that the path of virtue demands a dedication to work, service and the acceptance of responsibility; and that conversely idleness leads to ruin. There is no place for scroungers in this ideology. Yet a defect in such thinking is the fact that scrounging, idleness and financial manipulation are by no means confined to the poor. Moreover, it is surely unrealistic to urge welfare to work reform in the midst of a recession, when well-paid work is so scarce.

A recent National Audit Office report highlights the plight of the poor, reflected in a widening gap in life expectancy. Despite the fact that we are generally living longer, the gap in life expectancy between the national average and those ‘spearhead’ areas with the worst health and deprivation has continued to widen. It is evident that the Labour government’s aspirational targets to narrow the gap, set for 2010, will not be met. Indeed the new Coalition is already planning to abandon targets that have no clinical justification. The reasons for this fundamental inequality are complex, but the fact that the lower figures are based on areas of deprivation makes it obvious that socio-economic factors play a major part, reflected in The Guardian headline ‘Poor in the UK dying 10 years earlier than rich’.

Child poverty is a major sorrow. Nearly four million children are living in poverty in the UK, a higher proportion than in other rich countries. The Labour government had some success in reducing numbers, but failed to meet its targets. Now, while you can find detailed statistics at www. poverty.org.uk, you will be hard put to discover any agreed government policy to address the problem. It does not feature as a subject on the Coalition’s ‘Programme for Government’. The DWP website on policy in this area is under review and Frank Field (see earlier in this Briefing) is not expected to report until the end of the year. We accept that the problems cannot be solved simply by throwing more money at them, even if this was possible. There is a growing recognition that to alleviate poverty one must find a way to address its many causes. Equally, however, we would argue that poverty should not be made worse by making those reliant on benefits even poorer, and the genuinely vulnerable made to suffer because there is a rash of spongers. While there is general agreement on the need to reduce the national financial deficit, there is widespread concern that this should not be at the expense of those most disadvantaged in our society.

Disabled people are at particular risk. The Disability Alliance points out that they are twice as likely to live in poverty, with a third living below the poverty line across their life course. Currently, 53% of working age disabled adults are not in work. The Alliance says that the budget and previous announcements from the Coalition “have sparked fears over the future of some support and raise the spectre of grinding poverty and increased social isolation for disabled people and their families…These measures together risk a significant assault on support for disabled people who are being hit fastest, hardest and will suffer longest from the impact of the new Government’s reaction to the nation’s finances.”

But poverty is not limited to economic deprivation. There can be poverty of spirit, of ambition, of skills, of drive and of hope. This is sometimes compounded by the lack of a fundamental foundation of ethical values. We do well to fear the polarisation of a burgeoning underclass which feels put down, mistrusts authority and positively detests the police. We are seeing an inversion of moral values which finds heroic qualities in the behaviour of Raoul Moat and casts him as a hero. Perhaps before we struggle to impose democracy in Afghanistan we should ensure that it finds proper expression in our own country. Let us be blunt in fearing that Liberal Democrats may come to regret compromise in this key area of social justice.

WE HATE NO. 31: GUTTER JOURNALISM
Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths, secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.
William Shakespeare: ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, Act V, scene 1.

In approaching this subject, we are acutely aware of the need to avoid intellectual snobbery. If we should speak of ‘quality’ newspapers, there is an implication that there are others that lack quality. This may not be so. They may simply be different as ‘pop’ differs from ‘classical’ music. A range of publications cater for a disparate audience of varying literary abilities.

Nor should ‘tabloid’ necessarily be seen as a pejorative term. There is no good reason why fine journalism should not appear in tabloid format. Equally it is apparent that extreme views are by no means confined to the tabloid press. They commonly feature in the broadsheets, as for example Simon Jenkins’ recent article in The Guardian in which he argued that the entire defence budget should be cut. “We are safer,” he said, “than at any time since the Norman conquest. Yet £45bn is spent defending Britain against fantasy enemies.” There is nothing wrong with honestly and rationally opposing the status quo. As will be apparent to readers of our News Briefings, we personally are antagonistic to all religious institutions, would like to see the dismantling of the monarchy, and favour assisted dying.

By ‘gutter journalism’ we mean rather those elements of the popular press which, instead of reporting fairly on the broad highway of news and arguing from a rational base, have their nose in the detritus of human activity. Their focus is on gossip and scandal. It is not that journalists who follow this path cannot write well (though they may be locked in their own ethos), rather that they choose to appeal to the baser instincts of society. In taking this direction, in pursuing an intrusive and prurient interest in the transgressions of celebrities and human fallibility, sometimes dishonestly, they know that they are in tune with an unhealthy appetite for sensation among large swathes of the British public. They are prepared to be casual with the truth or manipulate it selectively so as to suggest culpability. They also, from time to time, demonstrate a partiality for a range of prevailing prejudices. As such they have a disproportionate and dangerous capacity to influence political opinion.

What is really troubling in gutter journalism is a tendency to demonise minorities. We recall that when we published our guide for refugees and asylum seekers, How to Make a New Life in the UK, one daily newspaper criticised it for referring immigrants to sources of advice on their legal rights!

Back in 1957, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy explored a fear that the growth of mass communications could be exploited to debase standards and bring about a greater trivialisation in productions for a majority readership. Even at that time a massive increase in, and the extraordinarily low level of, new-style popular papers was seen by Hoggart as posing an ominous threat of cultural debasement and vulgarity, stimulated by the need for papers to achieve a viable circulation. Recent developments suggest that his concerns were well-founded. Self regulation has had limited success. The Press Council, founded in 1953, was widely seen as ineffective, and in 1991, following the Calcutt inquiry, was replaced by the Press Complaints Commission, reinforced by a code of practice. Despite this, the number of complaints received has steadily increased, raising concerns around declining ethical standards of sections of the press. In a YouGov poll in 2008, journalists were rated the least trusted of 23 professions, the overall level of trust having fallen most of all groups. Similarly, in research commissioned by the Media Standards Trust, 70 per cent of all respondents disagreed with the statement ‘We can trust newspaper editors to ensure that their journalists act in the public interest’.

It was the sometimes reckless reporting surrounding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann that finally brought matters to a head, prompting a House of Commons inquiry on press standards, privacy and libel, under the auspices of a committee of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The second DCMS report, published on 24 February 2010, makes disturbing reading. While recognising the importance of the freedom of the press to report and comment on events, public figures and institutions, to be critical of them and provide a platform for dissenting views, it notices that “there have been times when events have led the public and politicians to question the integrity of the methods used by the press, and the competence of the PCC as an industry regulator”. It notices that, like its predecessor, this body has been seen as lacking teeth, too closely allied to the press industry and insufficiently proactive in upholding standards.

The report’s consideration of press standards was mainly based on the McCann case and The Guardian’s revelations regarding phone-hacking and blagging – the practice of obtaining information through deception. It presents a dismal picture. In respect of the McCanns it speaks of “an inexcusable lowering of standards” and “inaccurate, defamatory reporting”, concluding that self-regulation had signally failed. The verdict on illegal phone-hacking at the News of the World is even more disturbing. The committee reports: “Throughout we have repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information that we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall, and deliberate obfuscation”. This behaviour, the report concludes, reinforces the widely held impression that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable and that News International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what really occurred.

And so, we contend, our hatred of gutter journalism is well made. There is much more that could have been said in relation to individual cases: those of Michael Todd and Stephen Gately for instance. This is not the place to comment on the DCMS’s recommendations for reform, beyond noticing that there continues to be no enthusiasm for statutory regulation. Rather we prefer to go back to Richard Hoggart, who observed that the freedom from official interference that we enjoy, coupled with the tolerance we are happy to show, seem to allow “cultural developments as dangerous in their own way as those we are shocked at in totalitarian societies.

WE HATE NO.30: HYPOCRISY
“Be as you would seem to be”
Thomas Fuller: ‘Gnomologia (1732)

Double-speaking has been a favourite convention in the theatre for many years, much exploited by Shakespeare as when in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ the money-lender Shylock, being introduced to Antonio, says in an aside to the audience: “How like a fawning publican he looks! I hate him for he is a Christian…” But to Antonio’s face he says “Rest you fair, good signior; your worship was the last man in our mouths.” In this way characters in life, as on the stage, will say one thing, but carry another in their minds. To be hypocritical, in its literal meaning and in practice, is to play a part.

When Gordon Brown was heard to refer to Gillian Duffy as “a bigoted woman”, the media seized on that comment, accidentally picked up on air. Yet the essential point, surely, was that it exposed the insincerity of the blandishments previously heaped on the unfortunate woman. To be fair, Brown’s lapse, which has cost him dear, was made in the heat of the moment, under pressure. Sadly, even in less stressful circumstances, it is part of many politicians’ stock in trade to flatter people and say what they are thought to want to hear, rather than telling them the unvarnished truth. The received wisdom is that this is the way to win votes, and that the Prime Minister’s fatal error was only to leave his microphone switched on.

But this view could be mistaken. The electorate is cannier than politicians think. A classic example of this arose during the 1966 general election. Alf Morris, who first took his seat in the House of Commons in 1964, had supported Sidney Silverman by agreeing to act as a teller for his successful bill to abolish the death penalty. Friends and colleagues told Alf that by supporting Silverman he had committed political suicide, given the fierce opposition to the measure in Manchester. His Wythenshawe constituency was home to both parents of Leslie Ann Downey, one of the child victims of the Moors murderers. Thus when the 1966 election was called, Alf was told by even his closest friends that he had no chance at all of being re-elected. Canvassers reported that the only issue being raised on doorsteps was Alf’s involvement in the campaign to end the death penalty. In practice, however, Alf stood by his controversial stance yet doubled his majority over his Conservative opponent. He drew the moral that most voters are concerned more about trust and a readiness to stand by firmly-held convictions. Whereas, voters generally are able to sniff out hypocrisy and self-interest.

Yet it can be argued that hypocrisy is part of the human condition: that even our acts of kindness and goodness have an element of self-interest. Alain de Botton in Citizen Ethics in a Time of Crisis argues “What looks like goodness must involve either obedience or perverted forms of egoism (the biographers can be expected to unearth the details in due course). Self-interested motives are glued to the underside of every apparently benevolent act.” In political leaders it may be difficult to distinguish between the national interest and self interest – the quest for power.

Certainly there is a hierarchy of seriousness in the hypocrisy stakes. Most of us, from time to time, have been guilty of what Dean Inge called ‘innocent hypocrisy’. As when we give effusive thanks for a gift that we detest. The motive here is not to hurt the giver’s feelings rather than a desire to deceive.

Somewhat more dubious are those who lead a double life: allowing themselves to be seen as pillars of society when secretly having some very questionable habits. Dr. Johnson made the point – you may think oddly - that there was nothing more unjust than to accuse someone of hypocrisy because they failed to live up to the values they professed and to which they aspired. In particular, of course, sexual infidelity is ordinarily a prime, though commonplace, source of hypocrisy. One that is certainly hated by its victims.

But it is religion that is the happiest hunting ground of hypocrisy, all too often blurring the line between genuine sanctity and the pretence of sanctimony, (companions these two in the Concise Oxford Dictionary). In hating hypocrisy in this context we even have the support of the 1662 Prayer Book, which asks the “Good Lord” to deliver us, among other things, “from hypocrisy”. Most sinister of all are those priests who, having been ordained into holy orders, purporting to be ‘God’s representatives on earth’ and seen as occupying the moral high ground, have systematically and persistently sexually abused young children. For them there is really no excuse, and we concur, at least metaphorically, with Matthew 18:6. And those who suppose that by protecting them they are preserving the reputation of their church are not only hypocritical but misguided

WE HATE NO. 29: INJUSTICE
I’m a happy person. But injustice I loathe. Loathe it.
Joanna Lumley, interview in Guardian Weekend, 3 April 2010.

We must begin by conceding that injustice is not necessarily illegal. We admit further that much of what we select to feature in our news briefings relates to injustices of one kind or another. Moreover, that information plays a key role in revealing injustice, just as the suppression of information is designed to hide it.

The poverty/affluence ratio
As Plato recognised, the imbalance between the rich and the poor is a prime source of injustice. We have noticed on several occasions that left unchecked the imbalance escalates, impervious to equality law. Its impact is clear in the disparities of life expectation across different sections of society. The rich, on the whole, will counter the charge of injustice by alleging that the poor get what they deserve, that poverty is a by-product of fecklessness. Sadly, there is some truth in the tendency of what was originally intended as a welfare stopgap to instead foster a culture of dependency, so that state provision can come to be seen as a highway rather than a bridge. The consequences can be dire. It may be negative to suggest that society is broken, but it undoubtedly has cancerous cells, evidenced by our burgeoning prison population and thuggery on our streets. Equally, however, those who have inherited wealth or who have done well in life often fail to acknowledge their luck, or to recognise that life at the subsistence level of welfare benefits isn’t much of a life at all. Anyway, it seems to us that fairness (the bedrock of justice) dictates that taxation should at all times seek to redress the disparity.

Privilege
Closely allied to inequalities of wealth, we believe, is deference to privilege. A cardinal principle of justice is that no-one should be above the law, neither the Pope, nor the monarchy, nor anyone else in a position of power and authority. We have previously inveighed against the plans to give the royals a blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act and are dismayed to see that this gagging legislation has been enacted (royal assent 8 April). We should not forget that it was the hedonism of the Bourbon court in contrast to the penury of the masses that triggered the French Revolution, and while the bloodletting that followed was no model for republicanism, the whole episode should serve as a cautionary retrospective. Some of the recent election propaganda has focused on the so-called ‘middle class’, sometimes defined as the bourgeoisie. Justice – or to put it another way, the avoidance of injustice – demands fairness for all. A great pity therefore that these amendments to the Freedom of Information Act should receive royal approval on the same day as the Equality Act!

First past the post (from the perspective of the also rans)
Then there is our voting system. We have commented on this before, for it provides a striking example of blatant injustice. Firstly, that the ‘first past the post’ arrangements can be seen to produce overall results in which the proportions of seats won bears little relation to that of the total votes cast for each party. Secondly, that the great majority of seats are seen as virtually ‘safe’ for candidates of a particular party. The effect of this is that contrary votes in such constituencies are futile and those who do not support the ‘safe’ candidate are effectively disenfranchised – and unrepresented. In determining which party comes out on top only the ‘marginals’ count. Thirdly, ‘first past the post’ makes it possible for a candidate to be elected despite only limited support. We repeat that in 2005 only three MPs secured the votes of more than 40% of their constituents. The Electoral Reform Society thinks that, on balance, the massive failings of ‘first past the post’ severely outweigh the advantage of its incumbency. So do we. Indeed we see it as profoundly undemocratic.

Redressing injury
Next, we regard the Government’s inadequate (ungenerous) response to the needs of people infected by contaminated NHS blood, and the fate of troops with health problems arising from the first Gulf War, as injustice by indifference. It suggests that the slogan ‘A future fair for all’ is simply empty rhetoric.

Prurience
Finally, we think that the pillorying of Tiger Woods is unjust. You may think that this is relatively unimportant, but the episode is instructive in shining a light on our media’s preoccupations. Given means and opportunity, Woods has simply succumbed to a temptation that is instinctive within the human condition, especially in males. It has nothing to do with love and he should not beat himself up about it. No doubt his partner is devastated and feels betrayed. But her grief, which will not go away, is a private matter. It has nothing to do with golf and is not our business. The kind of prurient press intrusion that Woods’ indiscretions have generated is something we do not need and which we hate.

There are countless other examples of injustice in the UK, and yet more in the wider world. But to parody W.S.Gilbert ‘the task of filling up the list we would rather leave to you’.

WE HATE NO.28: PARKING ENFORCEMENT
“Injustice, swift, erect and unconfined. Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o’er mankind.”
Homer: Iliad

We will admit that this series is frequently controversial. Just as some will hate ballet as pretentious, others will see it as sublime art. To be honest, in fact, Ann doubts if hating things is a noble sentiment. But then we hate nobility. Our hatred, on the whole, is akin to wearing a car coat at the Cenotaph. On this latest subject, however, we think that we may be approaching consensus. And we say ‘approaching’ only because traffic wardens and their puppeteers may not agree.

Some years ago we were on holiday in the United States of America (it is remarkable that they are called United: perhaps simply to distinguish the USA from South Africa). We found ourselves in Georgetown, the posh part of Washington, where, curiously, parking was permitted until 4pm. As the appointed hour approached a phalanx of pick-up trucks was assembled in readiness, and on the dot of the legal time limit they moved in, removing the previously innocent vehicles with ruthless efficiency. In the supposed ‘land of the free’ it struck us as hideously tyrannical.

We accept that there is a need for traffic control. Otherwise, in some places, cars would clog up roads like cockroaches in the malt room of a brewery of distant memory. But sensible control is one thing; rigid, targeted enforcement is another. The very word ‘enforcement’ is redolent of harshness and intolerance: it conjures up an invasion of our freedom and liberty. Even the Inland Revenue (to use the old term) had the sensitivity to call it compliance. And in the case of the Revenue there is no pretence that its objective is anything other than to raise money; even then it gives some of it away as tax credits. Another interesting comparison is with the police. Unquestionably police forces exist to enforce the law. But because they have a very wide, multi-functional remit, they must, perforce, have a sense of proportion, recognising a hierarchy in the seriousness of offences. They can, and do, respond to some contraventions with a caution. They are there to protect the public and, at least by law-abiding citizens, are seen as a resource of help.

This strikes us as very different from single-minded, over-zealous parking enforcement where the impression that frequently comes across is one of maximising ‘hits’ and corresponding fines: rigid adherence to permitted time and penalties where drivers can scarcely avoid minor, temporary transgressions (e.g. lorries in tight situations required to stop temporarily to make their deliveries). Our feeling is that the remit of traffic wardens is too narrow and that communities would benefit from a service that was committed to support as well as control. Strangely, in a country which is generally disposed towards tolerance we have allowed the pursuit of parking offences to become an industry. We think that it is one that itself should be controlled.

WE HATE NO.27: WAR
“War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.
Thomas Paine: Prospects on the Rubicon (1787)

We approach this particular animosity with some circumspection. Most people are against war and will concede that, at best, it is a strategy of last resort. But when our armed forces are in current combat it simply isn’t done to criticise. On the contrary, our troops are hailed as heroes and their actions as courageous. The good people of Wootton Bassett turn out in all weathers to honour the dead, and the military – even royalty – encourage and support this sincere demonstration of sorrow and respect, draping the coffins in the Union Jack. This is an expression of solidarity and patriotism, reinforced, as individual soldiers are killed, by all-party condolences at Prime Minister’s Question Time. We are thus politically assured that the courage and sacrifice of those who have given their lives (of which there is no doubt) have contributed to making Britain a safer place by fighting terrorism in its heartlands.

But what if this view is entirely mistaken; if the war in Afghanistan actually has an opposite effect of stoking up animosity towards the West and increasing the threat of terrorist attacks? If not developed in Pakistan or Afghanistan then from other sympathetic countries? Might the show of allegiance then be seen as a veneer to vindicate a misconceived approach to ideological differences?

And can an offensive war ever really be justified? Is it desirable that young men and women should indulge in licensed killing and perhaps come to enjoy it? Shelley, in his poem Queen Mab, called war “the statesman’s game” and in a note, drawing on one of William Godwin’s essays, argued that whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seemed impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural being. He wrote of the ridiculousness of the military character, whose “first constituent is obedience”. Of course, in Shelley’s day soldiers were “trepanned” into service, whereas they now volunteer. They are brave certainly, but it remains true that it is not the soldier’s business to consider the justice or the wisdom of military action. We find it odd that there is such enthusiasm to serve, to risk death, severe disablement, or lingering traumatic stress disorder. And we certainly believe that the courage of our troops in action needs to be separated from the merits of them being required to be courageous.

Successive wars have taken a heavy toll and a temporary sense that they are best avoided. But politicians fail to learn from experience. Some conflicts are eventually settled by negotiation, a strategy that should, perhaps, have been the first resort. Some are unwinnable, some end in failure, having made a bad situation worse. And there are some people, of course, whose business is war and the provision and development of weapons of destruction, dressed up as defence. It is, we believe, a hateful rather than a glorious business.

WE HATE NO.26: TRADITION
Derek Kinrade
“Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words.”
Thomas Carlyle: ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History’ (1841)

Traditions have been defined as the handing down of opinion, belief or custom from one generation to another. They come with no guarantee of being true, right or valuable. Much less whether they are appropriate in changed circumstances; on the contrary it may sometimes be thought that failure to move on is to regress. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it “To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.”

Yet many people are hostile to change, save for reversion that restores the old order. In particular, there can be a desire to cling on to or bring back particular values that enshrine and protect privilege. In this construct, tradition is perceived as the conservation of certain inviolate principles, the sacrifice of which is to debase the social order. To this way of thinking, tradition is to be revered; respected as the benchmark of pedigree in which subordinate and ruling classes have their proper place.

Adherence to tradition is always tenacious; nowhere more so than in organised religions, where fundamental belief in supernatural events and primitive explanations remains unshakeable even in the face of indisputable scientific evidence (and the essentially random, indiscriminate horror of natural disasters). I will not spell out these traditional totems, for to do so is bound to give offence. Yet such commonplace reticence allows excesses of absurdity, arcane practices and discrimination to pass unchallenged through successive generations, reinforced by persuasive exponents, particularly in faith schools. As an antidote I do most heartily recommend Baron Paul Tiry D’Holbach’s Ecce homo! An eighteenth century life of Jesus, published anonymously in 1770 and now available in English in a splendid critical edition edited by Andrew Hunwick. Of the original publication, Diderot observed that it was “raining bombs within the House of the Lord”. And when the first English translation by George Houston appeared in 1813 he was committed to Newgate for two years and fined £200! Traditional recourse to the miraculous still plays a major part in cementing the beliefs of a variety of faiths that share different but equally dubious foundations. But because the texts that advance these superstitions are said to have been divinely inspired they remain immutable in the minds of believers. These are the ultimate traditions, inhibiting, as one Guardian correspondent put it, the ability of young minds “to think clearly about social and ethical problems, and to reach reasoned judgments about the natural world”.

There are similar totems in our political arrangements. Policies may change, but there is a marked reluctance to reform constitutional practice. In particular, tradition rules in our electoral procedures, the two major parties having clung stubbornly to the ‘first past the post’ system, despite the fact that, among other things, successful candidates seldom command whole-hearted support. In 2005, only three of the MPs elected gained the votes of more than 40 per cent of their constituents. Thus the considerable number of votes cast for losing candidates counted for absolutely nothing, and the opinions of a large proportion of voters went unrepresented. There are signs now of the possibility of change. It cannot come too soon.

Then there is our traditional loyalty to an unelected monarchy, despite its chequered history. Strangely, the majority of our people acquiesce to the status of subjects, rather than citizens, and accept the enormous privilege accorded to the ‘royal’ family and the inherent class and financial inequality it enjoys. The debateable excuse is that governance lies with Parliament and that the head of state’s role, thought to be merely ceremonial, provides stability. Thus, again among other things, we sustain the tradition of the monarch’s speech (Her Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech) at the beginning of each session of Parliament, knowing that it imparts at second-hand the prepared priority intentions of the government of the day. On the one hand, among the ermine, crimson and gold of the House of Lords, it is the quintessential expression of tradition; but by a more rational judgement is an elaborate feudal charade, more of shadow than substance.

Another sad tradition is the advocacy of cruel sports. Just now there is pressure to repeal the Hunting Act, to overturn legislation that took eight decades to achieve, so that a minority of humankind can enjoy chasing other animals to a gruesome death. Traditional views may not always be entirely false, but as T.S.Eliot observed “a tradition without intelligence is not worth having”. Much less, a tradition without compassion.

But I will not be trashing my historical 78s. Let us continue to cherish what is estimable in our cultural heritage and in our national pride: free speech, magnificent cathedrals and churches (whether or not ‘God’ is a reality), Morris dancers, village greens, test matches (especially last wicket batsmen who know their onions), Britten and Elgar, Betjeman and Bennett, the Cup Final, the last night of the proms. Let us respect that which is good from the past; but also ruthless in committing to the scrapheap traditions that perpetuate irrationality, political manipulation, inequality, class elitism and bloodlust. Remember that inscribed beneath the bust of Mark Twain in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans are the words: “Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul”.

(The quotations have been drawn from the superb The Oxford Book of Work (ed. Keith Thomas, 1999), which seems to bring out almost everything that could be said on the subject).

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UPDATED October 2011

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