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Want to be a good parent? Put your children to work
In every mother's life there comes a moment when she starts to be a little vague about her children's ages. That moment has come for me; my youngest child celebrated his birthday last week and he is now - well, too old for Easter egg hunts any more.
It is sad to see your children moving out of childhood, quite apart from the depressing effect of their ages on your own. However, there is one consolation, at least. It won't be long before my children are too old for me to run the risk of being sent to compulsory parenting classes, as advocated by the People's Premier.
What a relief.
It always used to be said that a mother's place is in the wrong. In these gender-non-specific times, it is now a parent whose place is in the wrong. Not only Tony Blair but also his education secretary, Estelle Morris, believe that parents have got a lot to answer for - a People's Platitude, presumably - and they have both said in the past few days that they intend to do something about it.
This idea is not new, of course; the government announced a brave new parenting order some time ago - but that plan went rather quiet after Euan Blair was discovered lying in his own vomit in Leicester Square. I rather liked the idea of Tony and Cherie attending compulsory parenting classes, but somehow it didn't happen. Now, however, the idea is back once again and improved.
Blair said in Manchester that he was very cross about truancy and vandalism and youth crime - and that parents shouldn't allow them. He believed local authorities ought to make more use of enforcement orders, meaning those same so-called parenting orders and compulsory parenting classes. And Morris actually announced last week at a teachers' conference that a lot of parents are feckless.
I wondered at first whether I was dreaming. Feckless is not a very caring, new Labour sort of word, surely. It's the kind of word that even right-wing Conservatives dare not use.
Still, nobody could argue with the need for parents to be more feckful. The only question is what the feckful parenting classes should involve.
I could not confidently describe myself as particularly feckful. On the other hand, I am not entirely without parental feck, and I have had plenty of time to see how things go wrong.
The most important point is that feckless parents vary. Statists like to lump us all together. But, as Tolstoy said, unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way; so too are bad parents bad in different ways.
The worst aspect of all feckless parenting - neglect - comes in different varieties. There is affluent neglect, average neglect and aggravated neglect, which is wilful neglect with violence.
Clearly, different curriculums will be needed for these different forms of fecklessness. And there will certainly have to be streaming and setting.
Still, there is some common ground. Lesson one would begin for everybody with the question: "What are children for?" It is a reasonable bet that nobody would have the slightest idea, apart perhaps from a few of the affluent, who see them as fashion accessories or as signs of superior wealth and fertility, as with Cherie Blair.
Most people in this country don't seem to like children much and even those who do like them have to admit they can be horribly boring. I believe that because parents can't see that their children have any function beyond nipping out to the chippie, they think they have no real value and treat them accordingly.
In fact, in these harsh times and as in harsher cultures, children can have real value. This should be the central message of feckful parenting classes. Your children could be your best investment and best insurance. They could perform all sorts of useful tasks, earn money and, best of all, grow up to support you in your old age. They will need to be able to do this too, with the collapse of our pension schemes and the disappearance of old people's homes.
However, they are only likely to do so if you have taken the time to instil in them a sense of affection, duty or guilt. This is all very time-consuming and involves turning off the television for hours at a time in order to indoctrinate your children. For one thing you don't get very much duty or guilt on television these days. For another, they're hardly likely to develop much affection for you if they're more involved with the people on telly than they are with you.
Lesson one, therefore, should involve the idea that parents who are not prepared to switch off the television are consigning themselves to a wretched old age. Perhaps this would not work so well with affluent parents, but the rich should be warned that even they might make duff investments and find themselves penniless. Turn off the television or stay poor!
Lesson two should cover anger. Anger management classes, like psychoanalysis, take far too long, if they work at all. The most feckful parenting educators would appeal to simple self-interest.
There seems to be a lot of anger about. The prime minister and others are very worried because so many enraged parents hit teachers. I must admit I have a lot of sympathy with these parents. Nonetheless, you must not assault your child's teacher, no matter what the provocation, because he is the man who will mark your child's course work. He will also be the person who tries to get your child excluded if you do strike him. To get on in life and pay for your old age, your child needs qualifications and that means sucking up to teachers, as all pushy middle-class parents do. Kick a teacher and stay poor!
For the aggravated neglect streams, lessons three to 17 would probably have to cover anger as well; there seems to be so much of it about. If you feel an urgent desire to hit your child, rush instead to the telephone, ring up the BBC or BT or some other complaints department and start shouting at them - they expect it.
This will enable you to offload your rage and impress your child with your awful righteous anger, without hurting or terrifying him.
If you feel fed up with your partner or spouse, avoid a violent quarrel by attacking someone else; go at once to the nearest supermarket, stand behind anyone in the checkout queue who is smacking her toddler and slag her off ferociously for bad parenting; if it is after children's bedtime, so much the better. This will relieve your anger, protect both her child and your partner and set everyone a heartwarming communitarian example. You might even feel a rush of self-esteem. Righteousness feels great!
The possibilities are endless. Useful chores keep children off the streets: the average streams could be encouraged to teach their children how to sew and cook and mend; they'd probably have to begin with teaching them to read and add, assuming they can do so themselves.
The point of commercial thinking should be stressed. Children could be encouraged to trade in the playground, not in drugs but in used computer games or second-hand trainers and street gear, thereby making money and getting high-fashion kit without having to steal it. Parenting classes could even be quite lucrative. But fortunately, with any luck, I shall never find out.
Happy Easter.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 31, 2002 | Comments (0)
Releasing prisoners early is a crime waiting to happen
Taking away a person's liberty is one of the worst things you can do to him. So although I believe there is a case for building more prisons, given the great increase in violent crime, I have tried to keep an open mind about the use of electronic tags to keep people out of jail. Tagging - officially, home detention curfews - might well be an excellent idea.
Britain's prisons are disgracefully overcrowded, jail is a humiliating and brutalising experience and there's a general public consensus that prison doesn't really work: the rate of recidivism is approaching 60%.
David Blunkett, the home secretary, seems to be very keen on tagging, or perhaps it's just that he is desperate to empty some people out of our bulging jails so that he can stuff some more in. Either way, he announced last week that hundreds of prisoners convicted of non-violent crimes will be released early and tagged, unless there is compelling reason not to.
To the open-minded that might sound like sense. For one thing, this scheme isn't new. It has already been tried, and according to Blunkett more than 44,000 prisoners have been released with these tags since 1999. Only 2% of them committed crimes while under curfew. It's true that had they still been in jail the figure would have been 0%, but never mind. Keep a close eye on the minor offenders, keep them out of the universities of crime and maybe they'll decide to go straight.
So what is one to make of newspaper reports that, according to unpublished Home Office statistics, prisoners freed early under the tagging scheme have committed 1,456 new offences, including four rapes, three kidnappings, 38 serious woundings and 82 serious assaults?
Looking at it another way, since tagging was started three convicted killers, 228 people jailed for wounding, 366 burglars, 138 muggers and eight arsonists have committed crimes while tagged. Another 78 cut off their tags and "went missing". This does not sound quite so good.
The Home Office says these figures are wrong. However, they were supplied by Dominic Grieve, a Tory MP, who got them from the Home Office in response to a Commons question. The 1,456 crimes include the 1,235 admitted by the Home Office in its statement, plus those who broke their curfew - which quite rightly is a criminal offence in itself. Why were they left out?
The Home Office claims that only a tiny proportion of the offences committed during this three-year curfew period were serious. Well, counting only those I mentioned above, I make the proportion 10%.
Is this tiny? Does Blunkett think so? Admittedly, the figures for reconviction after the tagging scheme sound good; according to the Home Office only 9% have reoffended, against nearly 60% of people who completed jail sentences. But my confidence in political openness about such matters is flagging.
If you take electronic surveillance - tagging - you might assume that this is done 24 hours a day. Not so. The criminals are monitored for a maximum of 12 hours a day, typically from 7pm to 7am. That leaves them free for the other 12 hours - and it would be a mistake to assume that criminals commit crimes only at night.
Given that the detection rate for crime is only 5.5%, if a great many people commit crimes in daytime - especially violent crimes in cities - without getting caught, it follows that if offenders under curfew did commit crimes during the day it is unlikely that anyone would ever find out about them.
So it is optimistic to call the curfew scheme successful when for half the time the offenders are what you might call self-monitoring. I don't like this idea much. My son has been mugged with menaces several times and we live just down the road from where Liza Minnelli so nearly lost her diamond necklace to aggressive thieves on Thursday night. My jewellery, such as it was, was taken years ago by thieves during our second burglary of four - all of them "undetected".
Blunkett may be insisting on home detention curfews as a matter of political expediency. For plenty of others, particularly in the world of probation and social services, it is an article of faith that curfews work, as do all kinds of community penalties, such as probation and community service, while jail does not.
It's heresy to deny this - and heresy is not good for the career, least of all in the ideologically driven state sector.
Of course it's true that the rate of reconviction of criminals released from jail is abysmal. Of course it's true that jail achieves little or nothing in the way of rehabilitation. But in fact there is good evidence that jail does, in an important sense, work - and that community penalties don't.
Peter Coad, a former probation officer and now a director of the Criminal Justice Association, has amassed plenty of evidence; his problem is that almost nobody wants to consider it.
One of his central arguments is that probation is no better - and in some cases is worse - in preventing reconviction than prison. No doubt his figures will be pronounced wrong. But they do come from Home Office prison statistics (published in July 2000). According to these, 57% of all discharged prisoners were reconvicted within two years, while 60% of people discharged from probation were convicted again - ie, more. If prison doesn't work, probation doesn't either.
The difference - the greater effectiveness of prison - is even more striking with first-time offenders (both men and women). Of all these, only 18% of people released from prison were reconvicted of a crime within two years, while the figure for people released from probation is 31% - hugely greater.
This suggests that prison is not a bad deterrent for first-timers. Among all male first offenders, the equivalent figures for reconviction are 19% for former prisoners compared with 34% for people released from probation. Not a lot of people know that.
The other important but unmentioned difference is that people on probation, or undergoing other community penalties, are at liberty to commit crimes that go unreported or are unsolved. This cannot be true of prisoners. And since the huge majority of crime is unsolved - well, you can work it out for yourself. Ask a policeman.
Despite all this, probation experts and senior probation officers have laid claim to immense success. Others, like the former lord chief justice, Lord Bingham, go along with the view that prison doesn't work. Lord Woolf, the present lord chief justice, has said community-based sentences give better protection to the public than prison sentences.
Coad has challenged him, the home secretary and Beverley Hughes, the minister for prisons and community programmes, to give an instance of one such tough and effective programme. But answer has come there none.
Meanwhile, the fact remains that from 1993 to 1998 the prison population rose by 51% while crime rates fell by 21% - that's to say, about 1m fewer crimes. As the prison population rises, the overall crime rate falls: the sudden rise in crime that frightens everyone is largely the rise in violent street crime.
I repeat Coad's challenge to Blunkett, Woolf and Hughes.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 24, 2002 | Comments (0)
Diary
Suspended high above the snow in the Swiss Alps, on a ski-lift that had mysteriously stopped, I was reminded of that famous phrase in a Times editorial of long ago - 'picnicking on Vesuvius'. I can't remember what the Thunderer was holding forth about, exactly. It might have been the awfulness of having Mick Jagger in our midst, or it might have been the IMF inspectors, but the general drift was the end of civilisation as we know it. Perhaps it was the mountains that made me think of it, although as far as I know the Alps are not likely to burst into flame. On the other hand, the snow was melting, very visibly, and unseasonally, as I sat swinging in the intense heat, with scary ultra-something rays burning through my Factor 30 Ecran Total. Each year there is less and less snow, and this probably is the beginning of the end of skiing in the Alps.
What really made me have apocalyptic thoughts, though, was the CNN news every morning. We watched it, miserably, on television each day, before setting out, and for the first time I felt that the extraordinary peace and solitude of the mountains - this is term time, so no shrieking snowboarders - are under threat. Or rather, that this entire way of life, with its feeling of peace and security, its confidence and commerce, is an illusion - it is picnicking on Vesuvius.
It's true that my anxiety may have been heightened by the experience of dangling alone for several minutes at several thousand feet, without a soul in earshot. But there can be very few people who don't feel the same, at moments, every day. Fortunately, these moments are rare; human nature seems to be so organised that the far-off sorrows of the world do not often interfere with the pleasures of large amounts of foie gras or some serious shopping. And there was a great deal of luxe and calme in the smartish resort where I was staying, if not exactly of volupte - it is soothingly middle-aged, I'm glad to say. It has almost no celebs either, which was nice.
The best (or worst) they can do is Roger Moore, who has a chalet there, and if he doesn't exactly raise the tone, he can hardly be said to lower it much either, which is more than you can usually say of the British in ski resorts. Fortunately, they hardly have any brutish British where I was staying; I hardly heard any English at all.
I can never decide why it is that the Europeans are so smart and well-behaved compared with the British. And so confident, apparently. While the British, even the very rich, go around looking as if they had little money and less taste, the French, the Italians, the Germans and the Swiss look as if they owe it to themselves to look kempt and expensive - what the great boutiquier Joseph Ettedgui once described to me in an interview as 'very Madame'. Or very Monsieur, of course. They seem to love it. In the little resort where I've often stayed, they go about in fiendishly expensive designer fur, with elegant, brand-new shoes and colour co-ordinated clothes that appear to have come straight from the drycleaner. This isn't true of everyone, of course. There are some, and I suspect they may be the socially smarter ones, who dress more quietly. But even those who go in for casual chic still wear supple, immaculate suede jeans, serious jewellery and impeccable boots 'cowboy' behind the wheels of radiantly shiny Lexus four-wheel drives.
You can see at a glance that they're not of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion.
To someone coming from Britain the obsessive cleanliness is a bit of a shock. The town itself is dazzlingly neat and hygienic - not a piece of litter or chewing-gum in sight, and every shop and restaurant spotless. Every lobby, every lavatory smells strongly of concentrated 'Flowers of the Alps' or 'Matterhorn Mist'. Meanwhile, an English newspaper that I bought announced that London is now filthier than Dakar. Oddly enough, my close friend and next-door neighbour, who is German, says that's what she loves about Britain, and especially London - all the filth and disorder. It's Ordnung of every kind she and her husband fled from; she finds it horribly repressive. She believes that the price of freedom, up to a point, is a little filth; our local public pool may be quite foul, but at least you can dive in without a regulation rubber hat. The waves of rubble in the Portobello Road and the rancid smells of street food are a constant, life-enhancing delight to her.
This opinion had always seemed completely daft to me, until these few days in Switzerland. There is perhaps something repressive about all that tidying away of all life's dark and dirty debris; it's a kind of pretence that it doesn't exist. And leading such a squeakyclean life is a kind of picnicking not on Vesuvius but on a hidden rubbish dump.
Some French friends of my skiing friends invited me to an informal supper, which I enjoyed very much. I loved hearing their fulminations against their short working week, and how impossible it is to run a farm with no flexibility at harvest time. They hate all the Brussels red tape and corruption, too, not to mention French corruption, and they hate Jospin. Not all the French are terribly French about the EU. Sadly, though, the evening was ruined for one man, whose mother in France had just been burgled. She and her maid had been tricked by two conmen pretending to be from the gas board or something. There were commiserations all round the table, and finally someone asked whether anything of particular value had been taken. The poor man replied that, apart from things of sentimental value, perhaps the worst was the loss of the collection of - well, I'd better not say which painters, but substitute others of equal standing - Matisse and Magritte. What can one say? I immediately realised, as we used to say at home in schoolboy Franglais, that I was dining rather au dessus de ma gare. The world divides into those who love ridiculous phrases like that, and those who hate them. I'm very fond of them; I think they're part of family solidarity, because they come to have a semi-private meaning. One of my favourites, which my younger brother and I imagined we had invented to cover the many and various kinds of panic associated with travel, is folie de gare - train fever. Others are from the diplomatic or army past; there is HdeC for hors de combat; it means something slightly crueller than out of the running; my mother, whose judgments were strict, used to use it with great abandon to mean absolutely useless.
English expressions, in her view, like FHB or PLU were quite unacceptable. Only French or franglais, or at least some sort of foreign language, would do, to dissociate one's English self, no doubt, from anything quite so silly. Vivent les differences.
The Spectator | Saturday, March 23, 2002 | Comments (0)
Let's applaud the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie
It used to be said in America that the only ethnic group you could insult with impunity was the Wasps, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants; strangely enough, they hardly protested. The same has been true for a long time in Britain of the middle classes. They too have hardly protested, at least not until very recently.
But there are signs that the bourgeois worm is turning. When last week Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC, denounced the corporation's many critics as mainly white, well-educated, southern, middle-aged and - worse and worse - middle-class, there was a furious public reaction. It came from well-known figures on left and right, quite apart from the response of people like me, choking with rage on their bourgeois breakfast toast. Presumably Davies had no idea what a can of irate middle-class worms he was opening.
To be fair - though fairness does not come easily under such provocation - Davies was talking much more broadly, to the Westminster Media Forum, about what public service broadcasting should be doing and who it should serve. There are some difficult arguments in all that. But there can be absolutely no doubt that the BBC has been dumbing down; to dismiss those who say so as a white middle-class elite that wants to hijack the BBC for its own benefit is inexcusable. It is argument by insult.
There is nothing new about using the words middle class as an insult: the wretched bourgeoisie has been the butt both of snobs and of radicals, themselves often middle-class, for generations. But it is completely unjust.
It is the middle class that has created wealth and opportunity, both here and elsewhere. It is the middle class that produced doctors, teachers, inventors, intellectuals and men and women of high ideals who have struggled for social reform and laboured for charity. Members of the upper class and the working class may have overcome their advantages and disadvantages and done so too, but these aspirations are, or were, absolutely characteristic of the middle class.
In the 1960s the spoilt children of the middle classes used to enjoy a lot of righteous indignation, pretending to be working-class and denouncing their parents for their oppressive bourgeois hegemony; strangely, somehow, their parents didn't protest. But that was a long time ago; you might have thought most of them had grown out of it, rather as Jack Straw dropped his student radicalism. And besides, according to the prime minister we are all supposed to be middle-class now; Davies is a little off-message here, surely.
Yet somehow the inexplicable abuse of the middle classes persists. What is new, perhaps, and rather sinister, is the conflation in this abuse of middle class with white. What on earth is going on? Does Davies assume that black and brown people cannot be middle-class or educated or elitist? Or wouldn't want to be?
If so, his social life must be remarkably limited. Does he assume that people of different colours must necessarily like different programmes? Or that working-class people on sink estates are fit only for televisual pap and can never aspire to high culture?
Perhaps it is unfair to infer so much from his speech and in any case he has apologised for it. Nonetheless, he has touched a very exposed nerve; the white middle classes have every reason to feel proud of their achievements and are tired of being denounced, usually by members of the white middle classes - class traitors, as we student radicals used to say. Don't those white middle class people count, as Sir John Mortimer, the Rumpole author, asked last week? The novelist JGBallard has actually said that he believes "the middle class is the new proletariat", abused and exploited. "We are the new victims," he declared. "We believe in virtues, charity and elitist culture and it's an all out attack on our kind."
This overstates it, but there is some sort of attack on our kind, which is to say - oddly enough - the great majority of people in this country. About 94% of people here are white and at least 80% of them would probably consider themselves middle-class. Yet there seems to be something unacceptable about this.
Think of the lazy, destructive thinking of the academics who denounce the intellectual achievements of Dead White Males and their much-despised "canon" of texts. Think of the mindless struggle everywhere against "elitism" - the very word is pejorative now. Think of the airbrushing of history from schools.
Think of the BBC. My own experience of working there was that this attitude was already completely entrenched at least 15 years ago. Recently, Greg Dyke, the director-general, made the astonishing and revealing comment that the BBC's management is "horribly white".
You find the same attitude in the strangest places; for example, I've been assured that it's now almost impossible as a white, middle-aged, middle-class, educated man or (even) woman to be considered as a potential magistrate in London, even though such people have traditionally given excellent service on the bench and there is a great shortage of other applicants. Justice is supposed to be blind and therefore colour-blind. Yet the white middle classes need not apply.
What strikes me in all this is not the unfairness to the white middle classes.
It is the extraordinary folly of those who seriously imagine they are doing good and righting wrongs. Actually, in their zeal, they are guilty of the racism, classism and exclusivity they claim so much to despise in the bad old bourgeoisie. There is a strange paradox here: the good guys have adopted the bad habits of the bad guys, who have mostly dropped them. Racism, classism and sexism are mostly found among those claiming to fight them.
It is horribly racist to use the phrase "horribly white", and quite as bad as it would be to say "horribly black". It is wrong to applaud female networking (solidarity), yet condemn male networking (the old boy system).
It is extremely exclusive to assume, as Davies did, that an Asian on the streets of Leicester would want something different on television from someone in the House of Lords, Asian or not. It is deeply patronising to assume that a working-class child of any colour cannot and would not want to better himself with the help of television or radio. British history is full of people who ave. And yes, I know we aren't supposed to talk about bettering ourselves because it is elitist, so we shouldn't do it.
What is wrong with the middle classes? Why have they protested so little and so very late? Why have they produced so many self-hating critics? Why in the end do they like themselves so little when they have so much to be proud of? The usual explanation is that it has to do with the Achilles heel of bourgeois sensibility - a tendency to irrational guilt.
In any event, I don't share it and can't understand it; it is a mystery to me why a rich nobleman should feel at ease with himself while a modestly paid public servant should be racked with guilt about his privileges and our colonial past. But I do know it is a great mistake, as the Australians put it, to cry stinking fish in your own backyard.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 17, 2002 | Comments (0)
The ugly truth is that Britain must build a lot more jails
To a nation that prides itself on tolerance, the New York idea of zero tolerance is pretty much intolerable. The Californian idea of three strikes and you're out seems even worse and it does, indeed, have some perverse consequences. It doesn't really seem right to send a hopeless young man to jail for life simply for stealing a piece of pizza, as a Californian court was recently prepared to do because that was his third offence.
All the same we have become surprisingly tolerant of crime in this country. It is truly astonishing how many people here commit vicious crimes, spend little or no time in jail and are free to go and offend again.
The government's promise to be tough on crime and on the causes of crime has proved to be empty. It may be one of those things Tony Blair has found rather difficult to remember, like his political philosophy.
Violent crime has risen very rapidly in Britain since he came to office. In London it increased by 28% between 1998 and 2001, and the pattern is the same in other big cities. A new wave of drug-related gun crime is sweeping the ghettos. Teenagers in cities expect to be mugged, with menaces or worse. Householders in many areas expect to be burgled and don't expect the thieves to be caught. Crime is getting out of control.
Under these circumstances you might expect a backlash against the criminal. But a curious kind of tolerance seems to persist. The probation services and the judiciary seem strangely lenient. The rate at which juries acquit people in the dock is rising fast; of those who pleaded guilty in England and Wales in 2000, 68% were set free. Even the Tories, formerly the party of boot-faced Lawra Norder, are now, in the gentler person of Oliver Letwin, emphasising the need to understand the social causes of crime. Last week Lord Woolf, the lord chief justice, urged judges and magistrates to stop sending offenders to prison unless strictly necessary; there's no more room in the jails.
The only people who seem to get little tolerance are the police; the usual form these days is to blame them. This will prove to have been a dangerous mistake. The police have been libelled and demoralised in the most disgraceful fashion and in many ways have been prevented from doing their job; it is extremely unfair to blame them entirely or even largely for poor rates of detection and conviction. All kinds of things conspire against the thin blue line.
I'm not romantic about the police. I don't doubt that they have their share of incompetence and worse, and I am prepared to believe that they are riddled with Spanish practices here and there, if one is still allowed to use that phrase, and need reform.
But I do also have some personal experience of police at work and I've come to have a lot of respect for them. For a few years recently I was a police cell visitor in an inner-city London borough.
This was as part of a scheme set up after the Scarman report into the Brixton riots. In the hope of increasing public knowledge of and confidence in the police, it enabled members of the public to go into police cells unannounced, at any time of the day or night, and check that the Old Bill was abiding by the rules and not duffing up the inmates, especially if black. This scheme involved quite a lot of training about police procedures and detainees' rights, and regular formal meetings with other lay visitors to compare notes.
Two things struck me most. One was how very professional and courteous the police almost always are, even when dealing with some very nasty people and even when we busybodies arrived at difficult moments. The other was the astonishing burden of administration under which they labour. From Whitehall come ever more new forms, directives, data requirements, ethnic awareness guidelines and performance indicators. The cost in police time of arresting someone is grotesque, but that is by no means the only problem.
Then there are problems with computer communications and with transcribing interviews. There are severe staff shortages. There are long hours wasted standing by in court - only 10% to 15% of all trials go ahead on the day as expected, but police witnesses must be there anyway. Problems recruiting civilian staff mean trained police must be used, wastefully, for office work.
Where are the police, people ask? Why aren't they on the streets? The answer is that they are hanging about indoors wasting their time and our money, without the option, on pointless activities imposed on them by demented bureaucrats in Whitehall.
On top of all this has come the denunciation of the Macpherson report - how that monstrous injustice must rankle - and now the home secretary's attack of a few days ago. You really might think that this government had deliberately set out to demoralise the police.
It is hardly surprising that Sir John Stevens, commissioner of the Metropolitan police, made what sounded like an impassioned outburst in Sheffield last week. It is all the more forceful coming from him; he is a moderate, thoughtful person and proud of his public commitment to police reform.
He said that Britain's criminal justice system is "appalling" and is actually contributing to the rise in violent crime. The system treats the police with "utter contempt" and the courts all too often provide a shield for criminals and allow the guilty to go free and roam the streets. He pointed out that it is not uncommon for muggers to be released on bail eight times for separate offences, before facing trial for their first attack.
All this will confirm the suspicions of those who think that community sentences and probation and rehabilitation do not work. It confirms the suspicion that the courts are too indulgent if only, as Woolf reminds us, because the prisons are already more than full.
What, if anything, can be done? One doesn't have to be a woolly liberal to agree that a leading cause of crime is social deprivation; most thoughtful police officers would agree. The teenagers and men who turn to violent crimes have usually had terrible lives themselves; they arrive in the criminal justice system uncared for and uneducated and in need not of punishment but of help.
In an ideal world they would get it and it might work, sometimes, if an individual is not irretrievably damaged. In the real world it is too expensive and too late. The liberal criminal justice establishment will not like it, but I suspect the public is more than ready for the ugly American solution: lots more jails.
The only thing to recommend jail is that it keeps criminals out of action. If all violent offenders were sent to jail for every conviction for a long time, they would attack fewer people. In the end they would pass the usual age of crime. This is not deterrence, it is decommissioning. It cannot but work. And at Pounds 36,651 per person per year, jail is cheap at the price; just think of how much more it would cost to keep repeatedly arresting and processing and trying and monitoring him on probation or on community service, which don't work anyway.
Perhaps the time has come to tolerate the idea of zero tolerance and to build the jails to make it work.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 10, 2002 | Comments (0)
Embryo cell research is a triumph not a tragedy
There are few news announcements so shocking that they imprint themselves permanently on the memory. John FKennedy's death and the attack on the World Trade Center were two such moments. Another for me came in the summer of 1968, in a field near Wincanton, when someone told me of the announcement of the Pope's Humanae Vitae encyclical. Although I was only a teenager, I was outraged. I have never forgotten the wave of fury that came over me.
That may seem implausible now but teenagers in the late 1960s, as we know, were unusually interested in contraception and this was the notorious encyclical that forbade it. It wasn't for myself that I was so shocked, though; I was not religious. I felt it was clearly wicked that the Pope should knowingly condemn millions of wretched Catholics, particularly in the hungry Third World, to unwanted children, illness and enduring poverty. It struck me that although Christianity no longer actually imposed suffering in the name of God, through crusades, inquisitors and missionaries, it was still doing so indirectly by opposing the relief of suffering.
It has seemed to me more and more, since then, that a great deal of evil is done in the pursuit of the sanctity of life. The anti-abortion lobby, in the name of life, opposes the relief of a great deal of suffering and is sometimes shockingly anti-life in spirit - in America some campaigners even fight and kill in the cause of the sanctity of life. And last week all the usual groups came out to denounce embryonic stem cell research, following the publication of a House of Lords select committee report that supports it.
Professor Jack Scarisbrick, the chairman of Life, the anti-abortion group, said: "We are going to allow the creation of human beings with the direct intention of mutilating and then destroying them." The truth, though, is that what really mutilates and destroys human beings (as opposed to tiny blobs of cells) is the dreadful variety of diseases that flesh is heir to.
The new techniques of embryonic stem cell research offer an extraordinary and awe-inspiring hope of the relief of suffering - from genetic disorders, from illness and maybe even from injury. The paralysed Superman actor Christopher Reeve hopes that his damaged spine will one day be repaired - and that is not an impossibility. Some scientists believe it may eventually be possible to grow entire organs.
I find it amazing that these wonderful possibilities should be viewed with fear and moral disapproval. Of course there is something theoretically alarming about research into embryos, however minuscule. Of course it is theoretically even more alarming if some embryos are to be cloned specially for the purpose, as they now can be. And of course there is the possibility of abuse - with knowledge, there always is. But early embryo stem cell research is very strictly controlled in this country; clearly drafted legislation was passed a year ago and the Lords select committee has now very carefully reviewed it, and approved it.
There must be no human cloning for reproduction - no cloned people. Any cloning for early embryonic research must be kept to a minimum. Certain cloning techniques should be used only if there is "demonstrable and exceptional need".
Early means very early: embryonic cells can only be used before they are 14 days old.
And so on. Only somebody with the most absolute belief in the sanctity of all living human tissue could oppose the near-miraculous ingenuity of this kind of science, with its almost miraculous benefits. Jesus was rather keen on miraculous healing himself, according to the gospels.
Glum though we may sometimes feel about Britain today, there is still something admirable about the combination here of scientific invention and commonsense moderation. This is one of the finest expressions of Britain's great empirical tradition; it is, or was, a culture neither tempted to, nor frightened by extremes.
Even among religious people in Britain scientific research that might be seen to be morally alarming receives widespread acceptance. For instance, a survey by the National Centre for Social Research in 2000 into attitudes towards genetic manipulation found that religious people felt only slightly less inclined than others to support genetic manipulation for therapeutic reasons.
Only about a third of the population overall was opposed to the idea.
Attitudes in America are very different. The Bush administration, no doubt under intense pressure from the religious right, has just announced that it will press for a global ban on all human cloning. This prospect seems to me more shocking than Humanae Vitae.
It may be useless to argue with religious fundamentalists or with Scarisbrick.
But I think that it is possible to argue with other people, religious or not, that the sanctity of life is not absolute. In moral arguments there are very rarely any absolutes and trying to establish them often compounds the problem rather than resolving it. Moral arguments are very often not between right and wrong, but between conflicting rights.
Absolutes aside, in moral terms a five-day-old conceptus on a laboratory dish is obviously in no way remotely equivalent to a five-year-old girl, even though they might in theory be sisters. And if the little clump of cells could save the living child from a hideous and crippling disease, how could anyone seriously say that the one should not be sacrificed, if it can even be called a sacrifice, to the other? The sanctity of the little girl's life, if one must use the word, would obviously be greater than the sanctity of the cells in the Petri dish.
Most arguments in this area are tainted by over-reaction, often to history.
That is one of Hitler's legacies. Questions of genetics, of experimentation on human tissue, of selective abortion and of euthanasia have become too terrible to think about. Yet memories of evil should not prevent us from considering freely what is right or wrong in matters of life, death and suffering - quite the contrary.
One of the most powerful arguments in favour of stem cell research has to do with another word to which people regularly over-react, particularly Americans: evolution. Humans have evolved to be extraordinarily ingenious and the result is that we are interrupting evolution.
People no longer die, childless, of serious genetic disorders - modern medicine enables them to live, to reproduce and to pass the disorders on; evolution is no longer ending the diseases through natural selection. But precisely because we have evolved to become ingenious problem solvers, humans are discovering a way of bypassing evolution, through genetic research and genetic manipulation.
I can hardly think of anything more exhilarating. Evolution is harsh. Nature is harsh. But harsh necessity is the mother of invention, and invention is the mother of compassion. Stem cell research is a triumph of human invention and compassion; it would be a great loss to humanity if anyone succeeded in stopping it.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 03, 2002 | Comments (0)
