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The matinee idols of Fleet Street
The better journalists' parties are a delight to the female eye
The well-known journalist Paul Johnson made a most interesting attack on journalists last week, in a defence of his friend Jonathan Aitken. He wrote in the Spectator that among their many other failings, such as envy and alcoholism, journalists "tend to be ugly, stunted - or, if tall, uncouth, and poor". We journalists are used to attacks of every kind, and personally I rather enjoy the reputation, which we are said to have, of being only slightly less contemptible than politicians. But I wonder whether it is really fair to accuse us all of being ugly and stunted. My mind races at once to thoughts of the impossibly beautiful Charles Glass, the desperately handsome William Shawcross, and the patrician features of Charles Moore. Max Hastings and Auberon Waugh, though not conventionally lovely, are neither ugly nor short nor, as far as I know, poor. Andrew Roberts, though not tall, is classically good-looking, like a First World War hero. John Preston, the arts editor of this newspaper, is positively a teenage heartthrob, and a successful novelist as well. Jon Connell, youthful founder of The Week, is both tall and good-looking, in a ravaged sort of way, and Chris Hitchens is generally considered to be rather gorgeous, as is Tony Elliott, the youthful founder of Time Out; certainly one is tall while the other is rich. These are just some of the journalists I have come across, and I can think of many more; the better journalists' parties are a delight to the female eye. There are lots of pretty, well-developed women journalists, too - Fiammetta Rocco, Zoe Heller, Susie McKenzie, Christa D'Souza, Helena de Bertodano, Sarah Sands, Nigella Lawson and Petronella Wyatt, to name but an exotic few. Yet the idea that we are all a plain and surly lot dies hard. I suppose it depends on whom you compare us with. However wrong Paul Johnson may be about journalists, he is right in that looks do divide into groups. The very best-looking of all ages are to be found in contemporary art circles and at the sharp end of the aristocracy: the successful upper classes and the cognoscenti have always traded in beauty, in every sense. Most of us hacks cannot compete with them. With the advent of meritocracy and serious money, there are many seriously good-looking men and women in the City. The best-looking women tend to be Right-wing, and the plainest academic. One might prefer not to inspect the reasons, but beauty does tend to gravitate towards money, celebrity and influence. These days journalism can offer to the hard-working or the lucky modest amounts of all three. That is why when Paul Johnson, a famously generous host, has his next party, there will be standing on his pretty lawn some of the most glamorous people in London, and quite a few of them will be journalists.
ANY proposal to improve things, or to stop us doing things, seems to involve spending money. I have a proposal which is at once improving, free and reasonable. It is that people in stationary vehicles should turn their engines off, to reduce pollution. It is a constant source of astonishment that motorists - bus drivers, ice-cream van drivers, chauffeurs and drivers stuck on the M2 or in tunnels - do not think of turning off the ignition but sit in clouds of poison of their own making. Outside my daughter's school - I mention this because it gives added Blairite authenticity to my argument to refer, self-righteously, to my eldest child, and quells in advance any childless quibbling - there is an ice-cream van which for 40 minutes every day belches out upon several hundred loitering girls its noxious diesel emissions. Presumably the driver has to keep the motor on to power his ghastly refrigerator, just as thousands of tourist coaches all over London stand motionless for hours with exhaust fumes rising, just so that the waiting drivers can enjoy air conditioning and Capital Radio while their trippers trip. Outside our house one day a builder's van sat with the motor idling for half an hour, waiting for other builders to turn up, until I asked the driver to turn the engine off. He refused, in the most eloquent terms. "Get an effing life," he screamed, when I asked him if he would like me to spray poison gas on his children. It seems obvious that every driver should be obliged, if likely to be stationary for more than a minute, to turn off the engine. Policemen and traffic wardens, and citizens, should be able to insist on it. It would make an astonishing difference to us all, and would be as free as air.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, June 29, 1997 | Comments (0)
Look out, here come the bores and bullies
My heart almost stopped at the thought of the brothers returning
JUST as I was beginning to be lulled into believing that we are enjoying the benefits of a new, improved Conservative Government, whatever it may call itself, just as I was counting up to myself all the things that New Labour has got right, a terrible letter landed on my doormat, a monstrous blast from the bad old Labour past.
"The new Labour Government is good news for you," it said, brightly inviting me to join a journalists' union. My heart almost stopped. I once belonged, much against my will, to the National Union of Journalists, and the very letters NUJ still make me feel almost faint with fury. The NUJ was the union which, when I was looking for work, dictated that you could not have a job without a union card, but that you couldn't have a union card without a job. The brothers insisted that journalists must work at least three years "in the provinces" before they would be considered for a ticket to Fleet Street.
The NUJ was the union which, when I was at the BBC, insisted on industrial action not just against management but against the Government of the day. We were forced to observe a "day of action" against Thatcher, and those of us who dared say that we were not willing to donate a day's pay to the Labour Party were told that a day's pay would be expected nonetheless, but put in escrow. I wonder what happened to it.
The NUJ was the union which presumed to send, on behalf of Britain's journalists but without consulting us, a telegram of condolence to Colonel Gaddafi after the American bombing raid on his headquarters; my own preference would have been for a telegram of condolence to the Americans, for having failed to hit him.
At the same time as being an NUJ member I belonged, resentfully, to another union, called the ACTT, whose precise name I forget but without whose permission you could not work in independent television. However, by the early Eighties the cavalry had already appeared over the hill, in the form of Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher, and thanks to them it is a long time since I have had to sit fearfully in union meetings of aggressive Leftists or to pay union dues. But now, suddenly, a union calling itself the British Association of Journalists has intruded itself, inviting me to take advantage of Labour's promise to make employers recognise for collective bargaining any union to which more than half the workforce belongs.
Include me out. I thought we had said goodbye to all that - restrictive practices, closed shop, political bullying. I certainly hope New Labour has, no matter what it said in the election campaign, left all that behind. After all, it has sensibly dumped all sorts of other election attitudes, such as its indignant opposition to Peter Lilley's pensions proposals or to the expulsion of illegal immigrants. Before any more Tory rats give in to the temptation to jump ship, I think Tony should tell us.
HOWEVER, I don't think we should always be told. There is a great deal too much telling going on these days. Dr Miriam Stoppard, very much of the telling tendency, caused a lot of fuss last week by telling young people all sorts of things about drugs that may be true but are much better left unsaid. I suppose this has all come up as pre-publicity for her forthcoming book, The Drug Users' Guide.
Many true things about drugs, or sex or adultery, are best left unsaid, or said only discreetly among consenting adults. It is true that drugs are fun, and sometimes inspiring. It is true that lots of young people, and lots of middle-aged people of my generation too, take drugs, soft and hard, without ill effects. It is true that for many people hard drugs are not addictive. Children escape unharmed, on millions of occasions, from taking Ecstasy. We also know that deliberate scaremongering disinformation has been put out about drugs, such as the untrue rumours circulated by the US Government in the Sixties that LSD could alter your DNA (which, incidentally, stopped me taking it).
In practice, though, it is irresponsible for adults to say anything much. If they say all drugs are harmful, they will be accused of ignorance or hypocrisy. If they say not all drugs are harmful, they will effectively up the ante and tempt their children to "go farther" than their parents. If the old intrude far enough on to the misdemeanours of the young, and start advising them how best to go about being bad, the young will feel compelled to be much worse. But that is the kind of thing that, in their ludicrous attempts to cling to youth, the old forget.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, June 22, 1997 | Comments (0)
Our real colonial guilt
Hong Kong provided an extraordinary illustration of the Western ideal of freedom. It was living there that
turned me into a future Thatcherite
IF HISTORICAL apologies are in order these days, so are historical thanks. If the American President and our Prime Minister can express their sorrow at various historical wrongs their countries may have done to others, why, on the same principle, should not the Americans also expect thanks for their generosity of all kinds, or at the very least allow themselves to express some pride in it? And why should not the British feel due some thanks for their amazing achievements at Hong Kong, which before their coming had been nothing but a barren, uninhabitable rock? It is true that the British owe the Hong Kong Chinese an abject apology for handing them over, without any pressing political or legal need, to the totalitarian regime from which at least half of them had fled in fear. This unnecessary betrayal makes it much more difficult to remember with admiration the great British achievements in Hong Kong. So too does the 19th-century imperial history which led to the founding of a British colony there, a spoil of the First and Second Opium Wars. It was clearly wrong, even in some opinions at the time, to fight and kill Chinese simply for the commercial right to impose a dangerous drug on them. Opium was known not only as "foreign mud" but also, in a very telling pidgin English phrase, as "Jesus opium" - opium and missionaries arrived on the China coast in the same clippers, and the horrifically poor Chinese coolies struck some desperate deals with salvation. Yet what a dazzling triumph of European liberal ideals Hong Kong has proved to be. When I went to live there in 1973, I used to read every week in the newspapers stories of mainland Chinese - the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these miserable coolies - who could not even swim, who had tied themselves to rubber tyres or Lilos and set themselves adrift in the shark-infested waters of the South China Sea, hoping to come to shore in British waters. Many of them arrived dead or mutilated, but so passionate was their desire to escape that they risked these horrors to put themselves at the mercy of smelly, red-haired foreign devils, in the hope of a better life. Life was truly better, in every way, though often extremely hard. There was some public housing 25 years ago, though I calculated then that the allocation for each person was no more than the size of a grave. Yet out of those crowded tenements, loud with the sounds of quarrelling and mah jong tiles, young men and women rose to extraordinary success. I know many people who did so. There was one boy I knew, for example, with illiterate peasant parents without a word of English, who taught himself accountancy and English at night school, became a gofer in the accounts department of a merchant bank, and is now a self-employed millionaire. When I first moved to Hong Kong, I was troubled by the conspicuous poverty, especially as there was almost no social security and effectively no union power. The average industrial wage was very much lower than Britain's. Now it is very much higher. Hong Kong provided a most extraordinary illustration of the Western ideal of personal freedom. It was an object lesson in Thatcherism before Margaret Thatcher, and it was living there that turned me into a libertarian and a future Thatcherite. Millions of people were left more or less alone, apart from free education and a certain minimum of hospital care, to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Hong Kong may have been a shocking example of laisser-faire capitalism, modified by a few cartels and monopolies, yet there was almost no resentment or unrest. There was certainly almost no political sentiment at that time, beyond a pained contempt for the foreign devils who ensured this freedom to prosper, and provided efficient public works, the rule of law and determined control of corruption for only 15 per cent tax. Many Hong Kong Chinese were entitled to a limited vote in local elections; very few bothered to use it. The spirit of optimism was not just tangible, it was thrilling. Only a couple of miles away across the border, the reverse was true. Yet received opinion in the West passionately admired China and despised Hong Kong, without knowing much about either. Received opinion was wrong then, and it is wrong now, in its insistence on guilt about the colonial past. Britain has a great deal to be proud of. I come from a colonial and Service family, and I often feel proud of some of my forebears. Their sense of public duty, of personal decency and of social order were often an example to those they ruled, however much one might now think it was not their business to rule at all. One of my great-grandfathers, for instance, was in charge as a young man of the encampment at the mouth of the Tientsin river during the Second Opium War, left there while his comrades went up river to take Beijing (and incidentally to loot the Summer Palace). Despite his natural disappointment, it was clearly a point of honour to him none the less to run an honest and well-ordered camp. His diary records that some local Chinese suffered from an eye disease which his British army doctors offered to treat, free of course. He described with sympathy the stoicism with which the Chinese endured the painful treatment: this was hardly the response of unfeeling exploitation. It must have struck the Chinese there that the foreign barbarians were somewhat different from their own officials, who, brutal and corrupt, had actually (according to the diary) tied men to their gun emplacements to face the British offensive. Now, in a reversal of our honourable traditions, we have tied the Hong Kong Chinese to their barren rock to face the arrival of their own people in 12 days' time. Perhaps, on second thoughts, instead of expecting thanks in this case, we ought to apologise for having become rather more like them.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, June 19, 1997 | Comments (0)
Don't lump us in with the great unwashed
Some of my male friends seem positively autistic at times
IT may be hard to believe, but two ministers of the Crown solemnly proceeded last week to Covent Garden, usually the haunt of clowns, hucksters and mountebanks, to display to the public - carefully rolling up their sleeves for the purpose - the best method of washing one's hands.
Tessa Jowell, Minister for Public Health, and Jeff Rooker, Minister for Food Safety, appear genuinely to think - and presumably their superiors, right up to Tony himself, genuinely think - that we need this kind of public instruction to improve our standards of personal hygiene. Even Virginia Bottomley, in her most ambitious dreams, would not have dared to do anything quite so idiotically intrusive.
I wonder why it has never struck any of the bossy brigade that their attempts to bully us are almost always counter-productive. Years of state sex education have produced nothing but an increase in pre-teen sex, schoolgirl pregnancies and single mothers, and an exponential leap in sexually transmitted diseases. Years of doctrinaire attempts to impose equality on education have resulted in much greater educational inequality. Years of nagging health education initiatives, and EU directives on hygiene, have neatly coincided with an enormous growth of nasty bugs and food poisoning, not to mention much more obesity and poor nutrition. (Surely it must occasionally have occurred to the bossy brigade that we were much chaster and healthier before they started telling us what to do.)
It is true that many people don't wash their hands - or any part of themselves much -judging from the chemical analysis of our local swimming pool. But most people are good honest handwashers, toe-nail clippers and pickers-up of dog poo in horrible little plastic gloves, and it is an insult to all of us to lump us in with the unwashed, who pay not the slightest attention to idiotic Government initiatives in any case.
As far as I know, this is the first really silly thing the new Government has done. It may look trivial - but it expresses the patronising authoritarianism that many people expected New Labour to display once they were in office. I don't suppose it will be the last.
`MALES are socially inadequate - official." "Genes say boys will be boys and girls will be sensitive." That was pretty much the level of response last week to news of genetic findings published in the scientific journal Nature. A recent British study has discovered a complex genetic mechanism whereby boys are programmed to be less sociable and intuitive than girls, less able to read body language and the nuances of expression. The study sounds fascinating, but I found most of the comment intensely irritating. People seem to talk more nonsense about genes and gender than about anything else.
In this case reaction seems to have divided between feminist triumphalism and sensationalist overstatement. The drift has been that boys are not best after all, girls are; now for the first time geneticists have proved it. None of this is really true. It isn't the first time that science has offered genetic explanations for differences between male and female brains and behaviour, and indeed between homosexual and heterosexual brains. But a genetic predisposition, however powerful in general terms, can always be affected very much in any individual case by the environment. There is even some evidence that a person's experiences - which is to say environment - may physically alter the structure of his or her brain, particularly in early life.
Individuals vary enormously, for an enormous variety of reasons. Men do tend in general to be less intuitive, less sympathetic and less socially adept than women. Quite a few of my male friends seem positively autistic at times. But I can think of large numbers of unfeeling, tactless, maladroit women; curiously, the findings announced last week come from a study of women with Turner's syndrome, who are missing one X chromosome and have seriously impaired social skills. Turner's syndrome, supposedly very rare, must be more common than scientists think.
Other things being equal, for wit, charm, social skill and tact, give me a sophisticated man any day. As for intuition and a profound sense of other people's feelings and their social interaction, what woman writer has ever equalled Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or Chekhov or Mann, or Marquez? Let's not be beastly to the boys.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, June 15, 1997 | Comments (0)
People will always judge by appearances
After the surgery she is pretty, but still unmistakably a Down's person
Loving parents, if they can afford it, buy their daughters pretty clothes and get their teeth fixed. They take them to doctors for acne and to surgeons for birthmarks or squints, and for cleft palates, club feet or curved spines. If a boy messes up his face in a motorcycle accident, parents try to arrange cosmetic surgery. Often the hard-pressed NHS will provide it, so obvious is the desirability of such repairs to a child's wellbeing. And loving parents who are so protective of one of their children would not be any less protective of another.
My sister and I both damaged our front teeth in minor accidents when we were children. It would have been unthinkable in our family that my teeth should have been capped but not hers, just because she was mentally handicapped and I was supposedly normal. Yet this idea seems to lie behind the arguments last week, widely reported in the media, about a three-year-old girl with Down's syndrome, whose parents had arranged cosmetic surgery for her, and whose case was the subject of a television documentary. Many people expressed shock and disapproval.
I apologise for returning so soon to the subject of mental disability. Yet I feel that, as so often, this difficult subject is made more difficult by entrenched ideas, which are worth considering. There seems to be a widely held view, both among activists in the field and among those who know very little about it, that there is something wrong with interfering with the disability that is Down's syndrome. At its extreme - sometimes suggested by the most articulate Down's people themselves - this view holds that it is demeaning to people with Down's to suggest that their condition is in itself undesirable. To suggest that it should be eradicated, or at least modified, is to devalue them as individuals. Therefore it is impermissible. Society, not the individual, should change.
I sympathise with this feeling, but it is undisciplined sentimentality. The truth is, however much we may love an individual sufferer, that Down's syndrome is undesirable. So is spina bifida or Huntington's chorea. Which of us would not wave a wand, if we could, and magic it away? For one thing the life of a child who is peculiar is often harsh. Other children can be surprisingly cruel. Dudley Moore suffered terrible teasing as a boy about his club foot and his shortness. There are girls who to this day feel genuinely suicidal because of jokes about their big noses. My little sister's birthday parties were full of tiny girls in pretty party dresses, who before long would start taunting my sister for her oddities, and end up leaving her in tears.
If there had been any kind of scientific magic to change all that, or even to make it only slightly better, of course I would have been in favour of it. In the case of the Down's syndrome little girl today, there is - so far - no surgery that can alter her general condition, which involves complex problems of brain function, co-ordination, growth and ageing, But there is surgery that can subtly alter her appearance, relieve some physical difficulties and make her look less odd.
Her oversized tongue, which used to stick out and make her dribble, has been reduced. She will now find eating and speaking easier. Her malformed teeth and bite can be made to look better and to work better. Who could deny such improvements to any child?
I don't think it was so obviously desirable to make subtle adjustments to her eyes, or pin back her ears, but anyone looking at her must be touched by her new prettiness, and her confidence, while still unmistakably a Down's person. If there is one thing I have become convinced of, in wondering for years about these things, it is that it is essential to think pragmatically, and always about the individual case. Philosophical principles about the meaning of handicap in general are irrelevant to the question of what was best for this little girl. Her photographs show that her appearance is now enormously more attractive and acceptable.
A young Down's syndrome man said on the same documentary last week: "I wish people wouldn't judge by appearances." But they do and they always will, for deep-seated reasons, and not always bad ones. Appearances work both ways. The appearance of Down's is, to anyone capable of kindness, a sign to be gentle: stigmata have their gentler uses. Curiously enough, one of my sister's problems was that her quite normal appearance worked against her; there weren't any disarming signs in her appearance.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, June 08, 1997 | Comments (1)
Let's live with the poor
The only way to break the cycle of deprivation is to break up these sink estates, and distribute the residents all around the good ghettos and middle-class communal gardens.
Community is a nice word. It is something nearly all of us approve of. Communitarianism is not such a nice word; with that awkward "ism" at the end, it hints at socialism or authoritarianism. Perhaps that is why it has, apparently, been dropped by New Labour. But we all seem to agree that more community, more community spirit and more responsibility for others, is what we need to put things right, to break up the ghettos, rescue the underclass and protect ourselves from the causes of crime and the envy of the poor. I wonder whether we really mean it.
Community means proximity. It means proximity not just to nice neighbours, but to the poor man at your gate, the drunk, the thief and the guy with the ghetto-blaster; in a real community, the ghetto he would be blasting is yours. In practice, nobody likes it much. In a case which makes these choices painfully clear, Birmingham City Council has recently insisted to a consortium of private builders that a quarter of the houses on a new, private suburban estate being planned for a 40-acre site at Sutton Coldfield must be set aside for "social housing" - for ethnic minorities and the poor. Of 500 new homes, 120 must be made available to the low-paid and unemployed, and must be spread throughout the estate to encourage the development of a mixed community.
Entirely predictably, local people are outraged. Middle-class residents speak with horror of social blight and a fall in property prices, and with reason. The local residents' association says that it accepts the need for social housing, but thinks 25 per cent is too much. The developers are trying to persuade the council to reduce the proportion of social housing to 12.5 per cent. It is easy to sympathise with them all. Nobody wants howling rottweilers and 24-hour rap music next door, or foul-mouthed toddlers in the freshly landscaped sandpit, or glue-sniffing truants hustling at the school bus-stop. Besides, the imposition of social housing on the private housing market is, surely, social engineering of the most blatant sort; it is not so much social housing as socialist housing.
However, this is not some loony Left initiative. Until May 1, it was Conservative policy: Birmingham City Council is acting on the former Government's directive to ensure the provision of social housing as an element of private housing, requiring developers to enter into agreements with local planning authorities. And for all its appearance of dirigisme, it is surely part of traditional Conservative thinking - One-Nation Conservatism - that all classes of society should mix together and take responsibility for each other.
The obvious need for this was made clear by Tony Blair's visit on Monday to a sink council estate in London. His theme was "Welfare to Work", but much more striking than what he said was the profound misery and despair of the place. On the Aylesbury estate in Southwark, 8,000 people are squeezed into dismal 1970s council blocks. More than half the residents are on housing benefit, a high proportion of them single mothers. More than 400 households have no wage earner, and nearly three quarters of all 17-year-olds are neither in work nor in full-time education. As everyone now agrees, people on these estates drift into hopelessness, illness and crime; their children continue the cycle of deprivation.
If the idea of community means anything, it entails breaking up such harmful conglomerations and reintegrating their inhabitants into communities which actually work. It means breaking up the ghettos - both the bad ghettos and the good ghettos. What we need, to use a notorious phrase, is "swamping", only swamping in reverse. When the unmotivated and the uneducated are concentrated in miserable surroundings, their difficulties compound each other. This is negative reinforcement. In middle-class ghettos, such as the large communal gardens on which I live, the reverse applies.
Parents tend to reinforce each others' values; children are expected to do homework, and to try to be polite to grown-ups. Adults are expected to contribute something to the community, however intangible, and mostly do. People watch out for each other. Making a noise or spoiling the garden for others is efficiently suppressed, though compromises are reached on football and dogs. Enormous peer pressure is exerted on everybody; anyone moving in is obliged by social coercion to conform on things that matter. And we have quite a few social housing residents, in council or housing association properties, some of them single mothers. We have an inner-city community that works.
I feel it is very vulnerable. It would take very little in the way of loud music or bullying or seething to destroy this peaceful bourgeois idyll, where children play safely and backdoors are sometimes left open. Some teenagers from a local estate use the garage next door to me for rehearsing their band: I loathe it. There is a communal garden in the next street which is terrorised by a group of teenagers from a block of council flats; the police have little authority to intervene. The nearest park is a sink estate hell, full of shaven-headed juvenile delinquents; one child who beat up my small son hit me, and told me not to effing touch him or he'd have the effing law on me.
Yet I do feel convinced - or at least there is a powerful argument - that the only way to break the cycle of deprivation is to break up these sink estates and distribute the residents all around the good ghettos and middle-class communal gardens, or in the green-field suburbs, in numbers small enough not to threaten the prevailing community culture - reverse-swamping, as I suggested.
The question is, are the middle classes really prepared to make this sacrifice, in the name of community? It is bound to be painful. It might not work. I do not know how many undesirable social housing residents would constitute a critical mass, but I feel confident that it must be less than 25 per cent. In my experience, just one violent "social housing" boy can wreck a community such as ours; this child was repeatedly menaced by respectable fathers. One even, quite against the law, took a swipe at him, risking his brilliant career in the process, yet the bully was undeterred. The problem was solved only when the boy was re-housed.
To give up the benefits of a successful community, in the name of the wider community, would be to make an enormous and risky sacrifice. Yet if we do not intend to do that, we will all - old Conservatives and New Labour - have to stop mouthing sentimental platitudes about community which we do not mean or understand. Community may be a nice word, but the reality of community is harsh.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, June 05, 1997 | Comments (0)
A step too far for the handicapped
The mentally handicapped should not be encouraged to vote
A number of new and rather unusual voters appeared at the polling booths at the last election. I do not know how large the number was; in theory it could have been as much as a million, but I know of only a few cases of this particular group voting and I cannot guess how many others there were. These new, first-time voters were not 18-year-olds. They were mentally handicapped adults, who have never thought of voting before, but who this time were very much encouraged to do so, and bussed to polling booths for the purpose.
This is yet another striking sign of a profound change in attitudes towards the mentally handicapped, and also a sign of the dangers of such attitudes. Many professional carers and some very active campaigning groups are now beginning to press all sorts of rights upon the mentally handicapped. Traditionally, for obvious reasons, mentally handicapped people were not encouraged to vote, nor to marry, nor to have children. The question of whether or not, legally, they had the right to do any of these things - they do - was almost never asked. Conventional wisdom assumed - however harshly - that it was not desirable for people with obvious handicaps to take on rights which involved duties they could not possibly fulfil.
Conventional wisdom is often right. I once sat in the Tube opposite a mentally handicapped woman with a small boy, evidently her son. He appeared to be of normal intelligence, rather active and bright, and what horrified me about their relationship, as I watched them, was the look of miserable confusion and anger on the child's face.
It was hardly surprising. His mother kept nagging at him, as mothers do, but in a particularly erratic and contradictory way, waving her hands and wagging her head slightly oddly. What she was telling him made very little sense. He felt it, and he showed that he felt it, and that made her angry and frustrated, whereupon she became more incoherent, and he more wretched. He was probably then too young to feel ashamed of his mother, but no doubt he has since, with all the inevitable guilt and self-hatred that this will entail.
It is hard to imagine the pain of growing up as the normal child of parents of extremely low intelligence, to say nothing of the extreme practical difficulties. I cannot imagine why civil rights campaigners and many care professionals are so eager to promote this kind of misery, in the name of civil rights. Nor can I understand why they are so anxious to press people to vote who cannot possibly understand what they are doing: it doesn't show much respect for the workings of democracy.
I admit that there appear to be large numbers of people in the general populace who also seem to have no idea what they are voting for or why, and in this respect are no different from those considered mentally handicapped - perhaps one should take the view that it doesn't matter much if a few more incompetent voters are added to the rolls. However, according to a report in Time Out last week, the charity Mencap identified 37 marginal seats that could have been won simply by the swing votes of people with "learning disabilities".
I feel sceptical about this, but I have heard of a few cases where very suggestible adults have been gently pushed in one political direction, and then taken to the polling station. And this in the name of civil rights and greater respect for those with "learning difficulties".
I believe I do myself have proper respect for people with these disabilities. And I certainly would not want actually to stop anyone voting. My own sister, who is mentally handicapped, tells me she voted, and I would not dream of suggesting to her, now that she's become interested, that she should not do so. What astonishes me is that activists should want to encourage the exercise of such rights.
I have spent a lot of time wondering why well-intentioned progressives refuse to confront the harsh facts of mental handicap - indeed they refuse to use the harsh term "handicap" and prefer the gentler but misleading expression "learning difficulty" - and insist on "normal" lives for people who cannot possibly hope to lead them. Even with support, people with seriously impaired brain function cannot make enough sense of the world to take a normal adult role in it. That is what is so sad. That is precisely the tragedy of mental handicap. Wishful thinking will not change it. And when wishful thinking turns into making handicapped people play at being adults, then I think there is something profoundly disrespectful about it.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, June 01, 1997 | Comments (1)
