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Caring classes' crassness
STEMMING the tide of bien pensant prejudice is like swimming in treacle - certainly unpleasant and probably impossible. For all his fighting talk, that is, unfortunately, what Mr Jeffrey Greenwood will discover when he starts his new job as chairman of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW). Mrs Bottomley deserves congratulations for appointing, at long last, someone to shake the nonsense out of CCETSW - nonsense like its Humpty Dumpty pronouncement of 1989 that ' race is not a biological fact but a concept which has been socially constructed'. Mr Greenwood, on the other hand, deserves nothing but sympathy in his very sticky situation.
It is not just the ideology of professional social workers that he will have to deal with. He will also have to contend with a much more diffuse kind of silliness, which, by some perversity of nature, often seems to afflict the caring classes as a whole, including fellow-travelling journalists. Take for instance the village of Upton upon Severn, near Malvern. Recently a local journalist explained to a BBC radio interviewer that a home for convicted sex-offenders is to be set up in this village, despite local opposition, and the inmates, as part of their rehabilitation, are to take part in the life of the community. Local people were very upset and worried. 'What about?' asked the BBC woman, rather sharply.
The reporter repeated the story, imagining, possibly, that it speaks for itself, ending again with the community's anxiety. At this the BBC woman, even more aggressively, asked again: 'What about?' For a moment I wondered whether she could possibly be sincere. Villages are marvellous places for sex-offenders - I narrowly escaped a terrible fate as a child on the (admittedly rather inflammatory) Giant Hill at Cerne Abbas in Dorset. I don't know which is more infuriating in such a case - hypocrisy or such patronising silliness. And what about the sense or integrity of those who wish to give sex-offenders community care in a small village that expressly says it does not want to have them? And with reason - you do not have to be a Sun reader to know that sex offenders often re-offend.
In the same vein, the Guardian ran a piece on the recent DoH survey of attitudes to mental illness. The reporter made much of the fact that behind a 'surface' of 'enlightened tolerance' only 19 per cent of those interviewed said they would trust a former mental hospital patient to babysit.
How can this possibly be seen as unenlightened or intolerant? It is purely common sense. Finding a reliable babysitter is hard enough, scraping the barrel among one's few sensible friends and relations, without taking on the extra risk of someone wit h psychiatric problems. There is a treacly sentimentality in not facing up to this hard fact. It is the same sentimentality that wishes the right to marriage and parenthood upon the mentally handicapped. I feel passionately committed to the greater understanding of the mentally handicapped and the mentally ill, yet this silliness never ceases to amaze.
The sad truth is that common sense is not so very common. It is mistaken for heartlessness and it tends to fall victim to wishful thinking. But there is a terrible paradox in wishful thinking: it makes things worse than they are by believing that things are better than they are.
THERE will soon have to be a Society for the Preservation of Cockcrow. Not long ago I wrote about the suppression of Corky the Cockerel by some town-bred person intruding into what remains of our countryside. Now this suburban fastidiousness seems to have spread to the country-bred as well.
Mr and Mrs David Jones, dairy farmers of Llansanffraid in Wales, have set health officials on to a neighbouring bantam cock called Sidney, with a view to silencing him. It seems that their bed-and-breakfast guests object to being woken up at dawn.
Farmers are famous for their lack of sentimentality; as Mrs Jones says, perhaps not entirely disinterestedly: 'Cockerels crowing in the countryside are a thing of the past.' It is fortunate for her that Sidney's owner does not object to the smell of her cows' slurry wafting through his restaurant.
Personally I think the sound of cocks crowing at dawn is one of the greatest pleasures of staying in farming country. I like the smell of slurry, too.
That is another disappearing pleasure as well - the last small farmer in my mother's village is being bankrupted by EEC regulations on the proper disposal of farmyard waste, which exclude his current system of funnelling it straight into the village stream - but I do not know that I could really devote much quality time to a Society for the Preservation of Slurry.
I DO wish people would leave things alone as much as possible. This is the essence of conservatism, of course - judicious neglect, as practised by the best doctors - and something we seem to have forgotten. It was rather a surprise being reminded of it by none other than Gerald Kaufman, the former Labour Industry Minister, in a wonderful piece about the ancient and noble art of doing absolutely nothing. I know he meant it unkindly, but I found it rather rallying. When it comes to interference, less is better.
The Government has been embarrassing its supporters for too long with its targets for suicide rates by the year 2000, its dreams of educational videos for parenting and so on - with, in fact, its pussy-footing back-door dirigisme. But now, a clarion call] It may be out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, or former Labour ministers, but so be it.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, August 29, 1993
