The GRIFFIN HAS LANDED

After a great deal of somewhat scattergun controversy, BBC1’s Question Time was finally broadcast this evening. The programme usually manages to keep its nose clean but, on this occasion, it had extended an invitation to the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin. Called upon to justify the invitation, the BBC Director-General, Mark Thompson, wrote in the morning’s Guardian that “the BNP has demonstrated a level of support that would normally lead to an occasional invitation”.

An earlier leader in the paper disagreed. “The British National Party will be handed a gift … a specious legitimacy” it declared. Peter Hain, a veteran of the anti-apartheid movement as well as a British cabinet minister, went in for more overheated language: “The BBC will be showcasing the BNP”. Hardly, Peter. A letter-writer complained of the BBC giving the party “the oxygen of publicity”. Well, the company one keeps is instructive and quoting Thatcher suggests a wish to censor, ban and suppress unwelcome views (of any kind) rather than to confront perceived fascism.

I wholly support the BBC’s invitation to Griffin for one simple reason: I am a democrat. You can’t allow people to run for office and then deny them the access that such office ordinarily confers. Other minority parties have done their turn on Question Time once they have elected representatives. If you support democracy, you must accept the results it throws up. George W Bush had to face that, to his chagrin, when the Palestinians voted Hamas into power.

On this matter, then, I found myself in alarming agreement with Kelvin McKenzie who said on the news that the BBC could not be found to be at fault for inviting Griffin and that if you wanted to blame anyone, you had to blame the electorate.


Hain and – takes a nice picture, doesn't he – Griffin; from Guardian website

In his piece, Hain tried to absolve the electorate by implying they were ignorant. “At the European elections that triggered this BBC decision,” he wrote, “many voted for the BNP as a protest against the mainstream parties at the height of the MPs’ expenses scandal. Few of these voters would recognise, still less endorse, the BNP’s virulent racism”.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Whether you like it or not, there is still plenty of barely expressed racism around. When the MPs’ expenses are forgotten, there will still be people voting for the BNP and Hain will have to find another rationale. What Griffin aims to do is to harness that racism, make it seem respectable and hone it into a real political force.

Fortunately for us, Griffin is not an inspiring, charismatic, eloquent or even coherent leader. His positions are – on the evidence of this “showcase” – both confused and shifting. He is apt to pluck assertions out of the air that he cannot back up with evidence, rhetoric or homework. His attempts to be genial and apparently ready to laugh at himself are cheesy and unpersuasive. There is a natural constituency of Neanderthals who would happily back him if he couldn’t pronounce his own name – we glimpsed a selection of them playing at being his henchmen in news footage of his arrival at Television Centre – but, on the evidence of his performance on Question Time, it’s hard to imagine that a significant number would be moved to throw in their lot with him.

Mind you, if the impression of the entire establishment ganging up on him did him any favour, he could certainly look upon his appearance with considerable satisfaction. The mainstream politicos on the panel scrambled to get the most wounding pre-emptive strike in first. And, as it panned out, the programme’s focus was very heavily on Griffin, out of step on everything with everyone, not least on the only non-BNP-oriented question, which was about Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately. The BNP doesn’t do gay solidarity (though if Griffin cares to look at the history of the far right in Britain and elsewhere, he may find much that would not be to his taste in the sexual shenanigans department).

Amusingly, according to the OED, a griffin, as well as being a winged monster, is “a European newly arrived in India, and unaccustomed to Indian ways and peculiarities; a novice, new-comer, greenhorn” and also “a mulatto”. Perhaps Griffin was fated to spend his life struggling against what he sees as the diminution of the power of “indigenous people” of Britain. In allying that struggle to his denunciation of Islam as “wicked and vicious”, of the major parties for their policies on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, and of Hamas – he claims his is the only party unequivocally supportive of Israel – he may well have struck some chords. Wisely, the other panellists did not engage him very far on these issues.

In the event, the programme was fairly even-tempered. There had been dark anticipations of braying racists and anti-fascists in the studio but the Question Time audience is much more carefully vetted than its equivalent on Radio 4’s Any Questions? Indeed, only one (pretty innocuous) speaker from the floor appeared to be at all supportive of Griffin.

It was a different story at the gates of Television Centre where angry demonstrators breached the security cordon. This is not too difficult: David Cassidy fans managed it in the early 1970s. BBC News made great play of the build-up to the transmission, so much so that three (count ‘em) reporters were deployed to the TC gates for the 6.00 pm bulletin. Well, I suppose it was nice for them to get out of the office. I just hope they didn’t put in for excessive expenses.

O TEMPORA, O MOIRES

It’s pretty hard, I suggest, for any sentient being to hold back from weighing in against the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir and her drippingly poisonous piece about the death of Stephen Gately. For a gay man, it is impossible.

The column in question may be read at the following address:

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1220756/A-strange-lonely-troubling-death--.html

The title of the article has been changed; it was originally “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death”. The headline change does not remove the first version’s implication from the article itself. Moir – who is not, as far as I am aware, medically qualified, a coroner, a resident of Mallorca (where Gately’s death took place), an intimate of Gately’s circle or indeed an investigative journalist with particular contacts in, say, the police – is evidently just another homophobic bigot who has decided on a whim (or under deadline pressure) to air her prejudices to the naturally receptive Mail readership.

Unfortunately for her, there is a big online community with a fast response capability these days and if, in years gone by, one could let off a fart in a newspaper and not have it smelt, nowadays the public domain knows no limits. I have not had a copy of the Daily Mail in my hands since before David English’s time but I have read the column. One should declare one has read it because Moir’s first line of defence is as pathetic as her column is nasty: “I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read [my column]”. Well, dear, it’s not like the Christian lobby bleating about Jerry Springer – The Musical, the seeing of which would require effort and expenditure of time and money when obeying what the flock leader prescribes is so much easier. Reading an article as thin as yours takes two minutes and can be done online. We don’t need to leave ourselves open to being caught out in not having read it. We’ll leave unthinking bias to you.


Stephen Gately, a natural

Nor, also unlike those censorious delusionists, are we organising to bring you down. Moir complains of “what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign”. Who does she think organised it? The Stasi? Just because many people have a similar response to a piece of junk, it doesn’t render that response illegitimate. I have not discussed it with anyone else and I have read almost nothing of the complaints, over a thousand, made about the piece to the Press Complaints Commission. In that case, Moir will probably dismiss me as a lonely crank. So be it.

Moir’s defence concludes that “it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones’. I agree. Her homophobia and bigotry is far more than mere undertones. It is out front. Her central point is that “whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one”. You could argue that, not being privy to the coroner’s evidence, the events of the night when he died or any other germane material, Moir is simply in no position to pontificate on the nature of Gately’s demise. But that isn’t the fox she is after. The clue is in the word “natural”, the age-old complaint against homosexuality.

Moir says in her defence that she is “on the record in supporting” civil partnerships. In her article, though, she says that this event “strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships”. I know of no one in a civil partnership (I and my partner included) who subscribes to such a myth. It is one of Moir’s making. She goes on that “gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages”. No they aren’t. It is only heterosexuals and gay Christians who ever use the term “gay marriage”.


Gately: a nice cup of tea

My partner and I did not enter into a civil partnership because we wanted to ape straights, nor do we think of our arrangements as remotely like marriage. We did it so that, if I should die first, my estate will go to my partner rather than to my alcoholic cousin whom I haven’t seen for years, who has never been to the house and who would only drink away the money he made from its sale.

Moir links Gately’s death to the suicide of Kevin McGee, the former partner of Matt Lucas (she calls McGee “the former husband” of Matt Lucas, another term gay people don’t actually use; I am not my partner’s husband or his wife; we are not heterosexuals in drag). This is of course, in Moir’s own term, “mischievous” to say the least. Apart from sexual orientation, nothing links the two cases. But Moir wants to propose that Gately’s life was “shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice”. She has no evidence to describe Gately’s life in those terms – or, for that matter, to accuse him of “public” vice, which I guess she would find preferable. Unless, that is, being gay is to still to be considered a dark appetite or a private vice. To consider so would reasonably enough be dismissed as homophobic. If not, what could be termed homophobia?

In her completely speculative account of the night Gately died, he and his partner Andrew Cowles took another man back to their apartment. “It is not disrespectful” she essays “to assume that a game of canasta … was not what was on the cards”. It is certainly presumptuous. Moir assumes that her readers imagine, as she evidently does, that gay men go at it like knives and that no encounter with another man can possibly be with anything non-carnal in mind. Who knows? Maybe they did play canasta. People do and gays are people too. Maybe, as Boy George once put it, they’d “rather have a nice cup of tea”.

Moir says that Cowles and the guest went to the bedroom together. She has no basis for that assertion. Gately died asleep on the couch. He wasn’t conscious. I don’t know what makes his death “lonely”. Like most other people, he died alone because, save in war, large-scale accident or explosion, people are apt to die one at a time. She says that “it has just been revealed that [Gately] smoked cannabis on the night he died”. Big deal. But hardly a dark appetite or a fracturing shadow.


Frump and looker

Like so much journalism, Moir’s piece is full of innuendo – the “undertones” she affects to scorn – that doesn’t stand up and, because it’s not spelt out, doesn’t need to, she believes. Well, I don’t go in for innuendo, I call it as I see it. Jan Moir is a nasty old frump, no doubt jealous of Gately’s looks and charm. After all, as can be seen from the likeness here, her glamorous by-line shot is extremely flattering. If she thinks that’s what she looks like, she’s living in cloud cuckoo land. So, like frumpy high-horse merchants down the ages, she is terribly afraid that someone somewhere might be having fun. She wants the world to know that, if you have fun and follow your heart, you will be punished, even unto death. And she doesn’t care if what she sicks up in her column turns people’s stomachs and greatly distresses the bereaved. It’s easy for journalists to imagine that, because of the hallowed “freedom of the press", they can write what they affect to think without any consequence. So it’s bracing that so many companies have withdrawn their advertising from the Mail’s website, reluctant to be associated with such primitive views. Next time she airs her narrow little prejudices, perhaps she will think before committing herself.

A LEGG to STAMP ON

A few belated words on the recent developments over MPs’ expenses. Politicians get a bad press on the whole; as I have just indicated, I think the press deserves a bad press. But I do believe that members are justified in objecting to the rewriting of history that has been indulged by Sir Thomas Legg in his letters to MPs. Members who broke the law – and there clearly are some – should be prosecuted. But all those who put in claims that were accepted and ratified by the proper offices are justified in feeling aggrieved that they are being caned for it now. If the rules were bad, unclear or full of holes, someone – probably any one of decades’ worth of Leaders of the House – should have addressed them.


Not a pop star, just an old Legg

I had rather hoped that Jacqui Smith, in her formal apology to the house demanded by Legg, would get up on her hind legs and tell him to blow it out his backside. But she is an obedient soldier and she is quietly taking a peerage after the election. Others who are steaming about it, and steaming rather more because their leaders are telling them to pay up and shut up, ought to get together and act. Some of them are not standing for re-election, others know that their chances of re-election are slim. Those who believe they are hard done-by should jointly resign their seats forthwith, thereby forcing a fusillade of by-elections.

For Labour that would be disastrous. It might be less than good news for the opposition parties too. Those with the stomach for it could further stir the pot by putting in a last-minute candidature as an independent, thereby further damaging the chances of the defending party. The widely touted public outrage may be less deeply felt than the conventional wisdom has it. Had the evidently popular Ian Gibson, forced to stand down from his Norwich North seat by the Labour Party, stood as an independent at the by-election that his angry resignation precipitated, the result might have more interesting than the comfortable win for that nodding-donkey girl for the Tories.

POWER and CORRUPTION II: HOLD IT THERE, KITTYKAT

Apart from Vanessa George and her fellow abusers of toddlers, there have been two other stories touching on paedophilia in the last week. One concerns Roman Polanski, picked up in Zurich after being on the lam in Europe for more than thirty years. The movie director had at the time admitted to having sex in Los Angeles with a 13 year-old girl. He has lived safe from extradition in France but the Swiss authorities had no compunction about seizing him as soon as he arrived there to receive an award. An international warrant for his arrest was opened only as recently as 2005: I have been unable to discover why it took 27 years to issue this. Now Polanski awaits transfer to California and, presumably, a prison sentence that will see him out: he is 76.

An initial outpouring of scorn from the Hollywood establishment and the French community of cinéastes, aimed at the Swiss authorities, has been countered by a resurgence of outrage among American women, inside as well as outside the movie business. Both stances, it seems to me, have merit and mischief in equal measure.

To take the anti-Polanski case first: by all accounts, Polanski’s encounter with the 13 year-old – characterised by one of his few women supporters, Whoopi Goldberg, as “not rape-rape” – was very far from consensual. The girl repeatedly rebuffed the 44 year-old’s advances; he plied her with alcohol and Quaaludes; he sodomised as well as penetrating her in the regular manner and with his tongue. He admitted his guilt to the sex charges as part of a plea bargain to avoid being tried for rape, administering a drug to a minor and other serious offences. Polanski’s lawyers understood that he would receive a probationary sentence but a loose-tongued judge let it be known that both jail and deportation were on the cards. Having been granted a stay, Polanski fled and settled in France.

I don’t doubt that Polanski is and always has been pretty much of a sleazeball. From the outset (Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, Dance of the Vampires), his work has been characterised by, to put it kindly, moral ambiguity. Soon after he settled in Europe, Polanski took up with Nastassja, the daughter of the German movie actor Klaus Kinski, whom he cast in the name role in his Hardy-based movie Tess. When their relationship began, Kinski was 15.


Polanski's knifeguy (screen grab)

Polanski launched the Hollywood phase of his career with Rosemary’s Baby and crested the wave with his masterpiece, Chinatown. His capacity to behave inordinately has always led me to suspect that there was a particular reason why the director cast himself as one of the hoods that assault the private eye JJ Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson in that succulently dark movie. I fancy that when Polanski’s hood yanked his blade through the crease where Gittes’ nose meets his face, Polanski did it for real. The act is so convincingly violent that the scene was cut when the movie was screened on ITV, rendering Nicholson’s subsequent heavily bandaged appearance impenetrable. See what you reckon: the sequence is posted on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON6UWUN9Peo


Wounded Jack (still)

Nicholson is himself no slouch at diving into low-life behaviour and assuming that women are furnished for his pleasure, of course. It was in his house that the assault on the 13 year-old took place. Do you think Jack has two-way mirrors in his guest bedrooms?

Five years ago, Polanski sued Vanity Fair for publishing a claim that he publicly groped a young woman shortly after the funeral of his wife. The court found in his favour and awarded him £50,000. The case was heard in London rather than New York, with Polanski giving his evidence by video link from Paris. I hope no one will accuse me of libel if I describe the case as in every way a very rum affair.


Director and star (publicity shot)

What are the arguments in the director’s favour? I certainly do not hold that wealth or fame ought to render anybody above the law or beyond its reach. I do feel, however, that the passage of time changes the quality of the case. Towards the end of his life, I found myself having very mixed feelings about the dogged quest of Simon Wiesenthal to bring former concentration camp officers to justice. I do not propose that the crime lessens with time. But I would submit that the criminal lessens with time. I felt much queasiness at the spectacle of ancient relics dug out of their bunkers to be expected to defend their dimly recalled actions from forty or fifty years before. Something of the same qualm attaches itself to the dwindling figure of the one-time enfant terrible of cinematic psychodrama.

Of course, I know full well (not least from close acquaintance with personal experience) that the abuse meted out to children takes time – often decades – to be assimilated and processed into a cause upon which action may be based. Polanski’s victim – I think we may regard her as such – took time to bring pressure to bear on her abuser. Her suit against him was settled out of court in 1993 and she may or may not have received half a million dollars. Her position now is that she “forgives” him and would prefer to let the matter rest. If that is genuinely her view (even if succoured or tainted by cash), it is a consideration that ought to be part of the assessment of this case. What will the Californian judicial system do if she declines to testify against him in a new hearing?

What is more, Polanski’s life and career have certainly been hobbled to a degree by his situation as a fugitive from justice. After Tess, he wasn’t able to get a movie made for seven years and that was the lamentable Pirates. In the 31 years since he fled, he has only completed nine features, as many as he made in the previous 14. In itself, this is a form of punishment. The crime deserves much harsher punishment; or it would, had it been committed in the last decade.

The other recent matter concerns another outrage perpetrated more than thirty years ago. At age ten, Brooke Shields was photographed plastered with makeup and standing naked in a bathtub. The image played its part in winning her a role in Pretty Baby, an American movie made by another European film-maker much interested in precocious sexuality, Louis Malle. Some 13 years after it was taken, the photograph was re-photographed by Richard Prince, an artist whose shtik is to revisit the images of others, and included in a book called Spiritual America. This sparked an almighty row, not about the nature of the photograph itself but about the nature of copyright.

This autumn, Tate Modern has mounted a London exhibition of various kinds of pop art, including the Prince image of Shields. Before the show opened, the Metropolitan police, having got wind of what was afoot, visited the gallery to ensure, as a spokesman put it, that the curator didn’t “inadvertently break the law or cause any offence to their visitors”. The second half of this formulation would appear to be beyond the pay grade of even a high-ranking officer in the Public Taste Squad. As a result, the Prince photocopy was removed from display but many other exhibits of a tremendously explicit kind were permitted to remain.

The US courts have ruled that neither the original photograph nor Prince’s treatment of it is pornographic and it has hence been displayed several times publicly in America with impunity. In London, however, it is evidently deemed to be liable to attract and inflame paedophiles. This contrast with the stance in the States must be rather a disappointment to those who, in attacking Polanski, made the tart remark that in Europe “they” don’t bother over much about the rights of 13 year-old girls.

I have not visited the Tate Modern show. Frankly, I wouldn’t piss on a Jeff Koons if it caught fire. I find the Brooke Shields image rather repellent but my readers will judge for themselves. Shields herself tried to buy back the rights to the image but failed.


Brooke no interference

One intriguing element unites these two cases. The original shot of Shields was commissioned by Teri Schmonn. She is none other than Brooke’s mother. Mrs Shields commissioned the work from Garry Gross who has said that “the photo has been infamous from the day I took it and I intended it to be”. He was working for the Playboy group at the time. Polanski used photography as his pretext for getting his 13 year-old alone with him and then getting her to remove clothing. But he would never have got her into Nicholson’s house if he hadn’t first asked her mother, telling her that he wanted to shoot her for French Vogue. Given his history and reputation, you might think the mother would at least insist that the girl be chaperoned.

We can all climb onto very high horses when it comes to the thorny matter of paedophilia. But when it comes down to it, I blame the parents.

POWER and CORRUPTION

To all but a vanishingly small number of people, the notion of sexual activity between a pre-pubescent child and an adult is about as repellent as a notion could be. The Plymouth nursery teacher Vanessa George and her internet contacts, who have admitted guilt to up to 13 specimen charges of child abuse, will be reviled and shunned in jail and will no doubt need to be isolated for their own protection. They will receive long sentences: keeping them from harm will be a tough job, even if the warders in whose care they will reside do not collude with those who would mete out to them the kind of rough justice that is the norm in prison.

Paedophilia is widely seen as the most despicable crime of the age, quite as bad as murder for gain, worse perhaps than drug-dealing, worse certainly than adult-on-adult rape, than crimes passionnels, than embezzlement and fraud, even than fiddling parliamentary expenses. It was not always so. When I was a child, scoutmasters and vicars “diddling” boys were apt to be taken as a mild hazard, almost a rite of passage for well-adjusted lads. The benignity and lightness of the term “diddling” speaks volumes. And in an era when it was thought acceptable for a man to administer a playful smack to the backside of a woman or a girl who was not his social superior and when young men talked easily about underage girls being “jailbait”, presumptuous intimacy, even to an advanced degree, was not the “hang-up” it became later, even though it was not thought to be a fit topic for public remark or decent conversation.

Of course, beneath this paradoxical veneer of unmentionability and relaxation, a great deal of vile and damaging abuse took place, particularly under the cover of religious instruction. It was hard for children to testify that such abuse took place because they were liable to be disbelieved or even assumed to be in large degree themselves culpable. Much misery and trauma was buried in the recesses of young minds, only to emerge later in replicative behaviour, in mental and/or physical self-harm and, for the lucky ones, in healing therapy.

The George case has raised a curious amount of bewilderment that women should have indulged in a crime popularly thought to be a monopoly of men. But it is necessary to understand what lies at the base of child abuse to begin to comprehend both how such abuse comes to be indulged and why it is indulged by both sexes. The key to it – as to rape, spouse-beating and cruelty to animals – is power.

All of us, women and men and indeed children, desire to exert some kind of power over someone or something. At a very basic level, it is an assertion of our humanity, our personality, our individuality. So we create little worlds in which we are absolute monarch. That little world might be a family or a team of players or an office or a vast corporation. It might be a “pack” of one owner and just one cat or dog, the latter of whom is obliged to obey and take direction. It might be an aquarium of tropical fish or a display of fossils or a wardrobe of frocks or a library of books or an array of cheese labels or a collection of dolls or an action man toy with accessories. It may be perfectly inanimate but it is still a dominion. All of these are “worlds” over which we wield the more or less kindly power of the benevolent despots of 18th century Europe.

Vanessa George from Anorak.co.uk site

Adults abuse children because, in a formulation you have encountered, “they can”. That’s what abuse of power is. Simultaneously, there is an utterly different impulse that informs this issue. There are, always were, always will be kids who themselves want to investigate the enticing world of sexuality, who go out looking to initiate encounters with older people, indeed with adults. A number of gay men of my acquaintance sought encounters with older boys and yes, with grown men, before they were themselves pubescent. Innocent beyond my years, I never imagined such things occurred until I was an adult myself and saw that it was so. But some kids, one way or another, get sexualised and respond to the stimulus with excitement and bravado. I submit that there is a vast difference in the nature of the experience of a sexual encounter between a child and someone older where the child is desirous to explore and more than willing to initiate an exploration in which that child’s parameters are respected, and an uncomprehending child being coerced into a sexual encounter by an adult who, whatever her or his rationalisation, is imposing desires upon the child. Don’t misunderstand this distinction. I do not advocate paedophiliac gratification. I merely submit that not all experiences are commensurate.

Some 35 years ago, when I was reporting full-time on the affairs of television, I had occasion to meet, in his capacity as a press officer for the Open University, a man called Tom O’Carroll. At the time that I met him, O’Carroll already had a public profile that overwhelmed his promotional function. He was the most widely known officer of an outfit called the Paedophile Information Exchange. I found him charming and articulate, perhaps (I may be projecting, of course) somewhat intense and hunted-looking. He was sacked from his post shortly after our meeting.

These were the early days of gay liberation. O’Carroll’s particular interest was in boys so he was, properly termed, a pederast rather than a paedophile. In the intervening years (it seems; I have not been in touch with him), he has not moved on from this enthusiasm. Indeed, he has served some time in jail and he has published a book called Paedophilia: The Radical Case. I have not acquired a copy.

Initially the gay community was uncertain how to react to its pederast sub-culture. The age of consent – then 21 for gay male congress, since the 1967 act that decriminalised consensual acts between two adult men in private – was a major issue and a proper cause célèbre, given that the magic number for females remained 16. At the same time, gay men, grappling with all the ramifications of the new obligation to "come out", found themselves having to fend off a common misperception, that a gay man was necessarily also a pederast. As the perceived public revulsion for homosexuality began to erode, it still seemed that “violation” of teenaged males gave greater offence (to women as well as to men) than the comparable advantage taken of females who (by women as well as men) were still viewed in an objectifying fashion.

Paedophilia, insofar as it was contemplated at all in the 1970s and 1980s, referred almost exclusively to boys who, the prevailing wisdom had it, required far greater protection from “predatory” men than did girls. Girls were very widely seen, in crude terms, as “asking for it”. After all, didn’t they all dress in a manner designed to provoke men? If they didn’t, they were frigid or lesbian. Damned if they did, damned if they didn’t.

In recent years, the internet and, a long way afterwards, broadcast television have, between them, exposed children of even very young ages to the sort of sexual material that adults, let alone children, were denied last century. The onus to monitor this exposure has firmly been put upon parents, and parents have not notably accepted the onus. We have all learned a new term: “grooming”. This is the process by which paedophiles soften up children with whom they have made contact by email and webchat, frequently themselves posing as youngsters. There has been loud outrage, well fuelled by the tabloids, and people from estates who don’t even know what the word “paedophile” means – the office of a blameless paediatrician was attacked by one howling mob – have marched and yelled. Supposed sex offenders, named by the press, have their homes and persons attacked. At the same time, the children who are thought to be in danger frequently know – at a superficial level – more about sexual technique and specialised tastes than do their indignant parents.

Tom O'Carroll, a recent pciture from The Northern Echo

Then of course the health and safety movement has hung children about with so many supposedly protective restrictions that the streets, once the favoured playground of the urban young, are empty of anyone not in a gang. So the kids stay indoors, watch porn on their PCs, pass a sedentary childhood eating fast food instead of running around and are thought to be safe and … um … healthy. There’s a lot wrong here.

I return to the issue of power. Many pathetic but harmless individuals gaze longingly at children and images of children but will not impose themselves on some unwilling object of lust because the need to exert power doesn’t inform their inclinations. Looking at images of children, especially grossly pornographic images, is deemed to make an important contribution to the creation of such images because money changes hands, thereby giving the perpetrators of the photographed abuse the motivation to continue. There is clearly an argument for requiring that the customers for such material account for their patronage. But I maintain that the coercion of children, the use of subtle and not so subtle power over the vulnerable is the true offence in these transactions. The internet is full of material uploaded by boys of all ages (girls too, for aught I know) displaying and abusing themselves and their fellows for their own gratification and the gratification of anyone who cares to look at it. Not all children are in any or in every sense wholly innocent.

WEAK in POLITICS

“The last throw of the dice” is the main headline on today’s Guardian front page over a report on the PM’s conference speech. I immediately banged off my letter to the paper: “I didn’t realize the general election was this week”. They won’t run it, though. They don’t much care for my letters haranguing them for their coverage.

The continuing assumption in the media that the election is already lost is seriously damaging the credibility of the media itself as well as undermining the Prime Minister. That the Tories will win is entrenched as a foregone conclusion so that it gradually transforms into a self-fulfilling prophesy: there will come a point when so many natural and potential Labour voters take as read, consciously or subconsciously, that it’s all over bar the shouting that they won’t bother to go out to vote; the no-shows will mount into such numbers that the more motivated Tory vote must prevail.

The standfirst on Polly Toynbee’s column yesterday said it all: “The election may be lost, but an inspired fightback could give its bright young candidates the chance to rebuild the party”. That isn’t actually what she wrote in her piece – standfirsts, like extracted quotes, frequently rewrite or paraphrase the source and then the meaning changes – but it fairly summarises the stance that she and every other Guardian columnist has taken for a year and more.

You might expect them to remember their electoral history. We’ve all seen the famous wire photograph of President Harry S Truman holding aloft like a victory emblem the premature front page story “Dewey Wins”, another result that was a foregone conclusion. I vividly recall a double-page spread in The Observer (not then The Guardian’s stable-mate) the Sunday before the election of 1970: it was headlined “The agony of Edward Heath”. The following Sunday, Heath was forming his government. That story was wrong five days before the election, not eight months. But, as I’ve noted here before, the BBC’s exit poll gave Labour the victory on the night of the 1992 election and Bob Worcester called the presidency for John Kerry on the night of the 2004 American elections. Angela Merkel was not expected to be comfortably re-elected last weekend in Germany, even after the polls closed. It ain’t over till it’s over.

Now admittedly all but the first of these failed predictions are over-estimations of the vote won by parties of the centre-left, whether in government or opposition. Electorates everywhere tend to the cautious and conservative and indeed Conservative. Parties of the right – including old Communist parties and other reactionary forces – tend to think of themselves and to be seen by their electorates as “the natural party of government”. Parties that are liberal in fact as well as in name – the Liberal Parties in Australia and Canada would not be deemed very liberal by most liberal-inclined people in Britain – tend to be elected only as brief respites from long-serving and/or corrupt right-wing regimes that have lost significant support in the largely apolitical middle ground.

Even after 13 years in power – its longest stint ever in Britain – Labour is objectively the alternative rather than the default ruling party. If the Tories don’t come back in 2010, that really will signal a seismic shift in Britain’s political landscape.

What we voters need to bear in mind – and the politicians even more so – is that the election won’t be won and lost until election day itself. What happens then is what counts and nothing before then – no opinion poll, no columnist’s opinion, no conventional wisdom among the chattering classes – means diddly-shit. Until then, as William Goldman wrote repeatedly in his enthralling account of working in Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade: “NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING” [his caps]. The confident assumption of all the commentators is futile and pointless. If they turn out to be wrong, they look incredibly foolish (and I shall be writing another letter for The Guardian to decline to publish, urging the paper to sack its high-paid “experts”). If they turn out to be right, where’s the triumph in subscribing to so commonplace an opinion? Who will have the neck to crow “told you so”? Perhaps only me if Labour is returned.

To her credit (although, frankly, it’s not much credit, now, is it?), Toynbee did, in her piece today, address some of the policy both stated in and omitted from Brown’s conference speech yesterday. But she still described it, at the outset, as “not ‘the speech of a lifetime’ they said he must make. But it was probably the last prime ministerial conference speech of his lifetime”. Her paper’s coverage didn’t quote a key passage in Brown’s address – “ the election to come will not be about my future. It’s about your future: your job, your home, your children’s school, your hospital, your community. It’s about the future of your country” – because it doesn’t suit the media’s concentration on personalities, crises and party manoeuvres. If the media chose to concentrate on policy and ideology, it would have to forego the simpler fun of constructing the verbal equivalent of a Steve Bell cartoon version of politics.

The danger is that, in following broadcasting’s reduction of politics to a kind of game show for (political) celebrities, the written media changes the nature of the democratic process. If the election of 2010 becomes an X Factor final between Brown, Cameron and Clegg rather than a well-informed national reaction to the direction of national policy, a rather different question is being asked and answered even than was resolved by the American electorate as recently as last November.

At least one distraction has been laid to rest by the conference – temporarily, anyway. Last weekend, the media was again speculating about Brown’s chances of actually leading Labour into the next election. Already, that fox has been shot. It shows how a couple of days can rewrite the agenda. Now Labour needs to despatch another canard, the one that says that Labour “cannot” win the election. Actually, this is not so difficult. The media has long experience of striking a stance that is completely antithetical to the pose it adopted just last week and assuming that its audience will notice no discrepancy. “There is nothing in life that is inevitable” Gordon Brown concluded yesterday. “It is the change you choose”. He’s not wrong.

STANDS SCOTLAND WHERE SHE DID?

The case of Baroness Scotland and the Tongan housekeeper – one for Poirot, surely – is the absolute type of the pickles into which the government seems to find itself pitching almost on a daily basis. Whatever the eventual upshot, it looks like a lose-lose situation.

The bones of it are these: Lady Scotland is the Attorney General, the first woman ever to hold the office and only the second black woman (after Valerie Amos) to have a seat in the cabinet. She was a junior minister, though not in the Justice Department, when legislation was passed making employers liable for employing illegal immigrants. It emerged last week that she had hired a woman whose visa had long expired. A fine of £5,000 – half the maximum the law allows – has been imposed.

This is a sorry situation. Patricia Scotland is clearly a diligent and honourable minister and in every way an ornament to a government short on style and grace. But she is a law officer. Like Caesar’s wife, she must be above suspicion. The test of her probity is harsher than one imposed on you or me. Her somewhat callow dismissal of the offence as equivalent to neglecting to pay the congestion charge does not stand much scrutiny: for that offence, the standard penalty charge is £120. On the other hand, this remark, much quoted in the press, does not actually appear in the Sky News video of its interview with her, the alleged source of the comparison.

Scotch mist (from BBC News website)

No doubt guided from Number 10, Scotland has rolled with the punch and palmed off the inevitable opposition and press cries for her head. This has been the method adopted in just about every case where a minister’s judgment, honesty or loyalty has been called into question and in the majority of such cases the minister has after all gone, just later rather than sooner. It’s the least good option. Saying you’ll stay, along with Gordon Brown saying you have his complete confidence, only pays dividends if two things happen: the shemozzle completely dies away and is forgotten and no bad smell, however faint and indefinable, attaches to you. The best course, but the least often taken, is to resign at once and work diligently from the backbenches to restore your reputation. Peter Hain might have pulled that off if he hadn’t taken so long to resign but some taint still attached to him and, since he rejoined the cabinet, he has been put in to bat for the government far less frequently than heretofore. Charles Clarke might have been back in government by now (not that he deserved to be in office in the first place, in my view) if he could have kept his bloody trap shut.

Now Patricia Scotland has been put in a (surely) untenable position by the resignation of a parliamentary private secretary in her department. Stephen Hesford told the BBC that “you shouldn’t be in a position where the office that you hold could be called into account for something that you’ve done or that you could possibly embarrass the government”. He may not put it very cogently but he’s certainly right. There can be little doubt that he is not alone in his view on the Labour benches.

If Scotland clings on now, she will take a long time to rebuild her authority. If she resigns now, she will look indecisive and weak. Moreover, Number 10’s guidance once again proves to have jumped the wrong way. For here is the nub of this particular embarrassment: one of the senior law officers in the land has discovered to her heavy cost that a piece of legislation brought in by this government is extremely difficult to observe, even by one so close to the matter of legality.

The status, rights and obligations of economic migrants and other seekers of “a better life” in the UK remain unclear and impossible to police. That is precisely because the government – like all its predecessors – has failed to address the matter root and branch. New Labour has now had twelve years to put this right so the phrase “like its predecessors” excuses nothing. Nor indeed, for all its pious talk on the matter, has New Labour done anything meaningful to assist career women who also have families, which is why Patricia Scotland found herself employing a housekeeper in the first place and why such responsibilities always seem to devolve to working women rather than working men.

The ROAD to RECOVERY

The political parties are now competing to look for ways to render more palatable the raising of taxes and the lowering of public spending. Here are some suggestions.

1) Slap a considerable tax hike on alcohol and smoking materials but ring-fence it entirely for the NHS. The tax can be presented as a charge for the “nanny-state” treatment drinkers and smokers will need from the health service in the future. Such targeted taxation is both socially constructive and morally defensible – and rather more effective than the British Medical Association’s advocacy of a ban on advertising and sponsorship. It puts the onus back on the individual to take responsibility for his behaviour. A further range of surcharges might be imposed on fast foods, on food packaging and, eventually, on all processed and perhaps even non-organic foods. Food producers will have an incentive to put themselves in a position where they can demonstrate the healthy nature of their ingredients and processes. This is taxation as organic carrot rather than as resented stick.

2) The government should introduce punitive charges against those whose drunken behaviour necessitates the calling out of emergency services. Specific spot charges for the handling of incidents need not be the thin end of a wedge of general charging for police and/or paramedic services; indeed, voters generally would welcome knowing that they are not having to pay for the clearing up after anti-social indulgence in town centres. This would be a targeted surcharge that would also win a lot of votes.

3) If the courts stopped committing those convicted of non-violent crime to prison, there would be no need for capital expenditure on new gaols. Financial crimes could be countered with swingeing financial penalties over a commensurate number of years (those convicted would have their finances regularly audited by court-appointed accountants). Other white-collar crime, burglary and petty offences could be penalised by rigorous regimes of community service. Incarceration would be reserved for those who are found by the courts to constitute a danger to the public. This way society benefits from – rather than paying the keep of – the supervision of all but its most recalcitrant and antisocial transgressors.

4) Announce an imminent date for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. This would be a popular change of policy. That our occupation of parts of another sovereign state keeps our streets safe from terrorists is a theory, not a fact. Many of us argue that our presence in Islamic countries rather recruits terrorists with a grudge against Britain: “don’t mess with the Moslems” as last week’s convicted would-be airline bomber declared on his suicide video. Nations that do not take it upon themselves to police the world do not, by and large, have a problem with terrorists. But here’s the clincher: we simply can’t afford this monstrous expense. Let the UN take on the task of making the world safe. That’s what it’s for.

5) Then begin scaling down our entire military capacity, starting with Trident. Britain’s present status in the world does not require us to remain armed to the teeth. Maintaining nuclear capacity and a military strength that invites our presence in every international conflict is colossally expensive. We have far greater need for renewed infrastructure, libraries, schools and university places that do not impoverish those that win them. That is what the electorate wants.

6) Bring in a new top tax level of 100 percent for all those remunerated (including supposed bonuses and share options) to the tune of £1million or more per year. In a recession or even not in a recession, nobody has need of more than £1million per year. “Oh,” the city will squeal, “but there will be a haemorrhage of talent to other countries”. To which I have a one-word reply: “Goodbye”. There might be some departures among those who are more interested in raking in the shekels than finding job satisfaction. But frankly the rest of the world is not so short of talent of its own that it would come recruiting here in significant numbers. In any case, few of the city fat cats have demonstrated much in the way of talent in recent years. What the public justly resents is that these titans of business get paid bonuses that make you clench your arse-cheeks even when their businesses are tumbling down the lavatory pan. Had I been a government minister, I would have tendered my resignation because Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling did not make agreed levels of pay restraint a condition of the bank bail-outs that they offered on the tax payers’ behalf.

7) Scrapping the ID cards is a no-brainer and it seems certain to happen whichever party forms the next government. Dismantling much of the surveillance state ought to be on the agenda too. Britain’s infrastructure of surveillance is, as so often noted, the most extensive in the world, yet so many recent cases have shown that the surveillance simply doesn’t work. Whether it is Britain’s tradition of a chronic lack of maintenance skills or the public’s slyness in avoiding being seen while at nefarious activities, the investment is clearly not worth it.

8) I do not favour cutting into the culture of benefits. It always used to be that the left supported benefits even when some people received them who didn’t need them and the right supported cuts in benefits even for people who could not manage without them. But that distinction has become blurred in both directions. New Labour is more ready to let deprived people swing in the wind and the Tories are more anxious at least to give lip service to the welfare state. Better that we risk losing the supposed talent of asset strippers and financial speculators than that we starve a whole class of people that might generate all sorts of talent.

The Chancellor warns of hard choices. These are easy ones.

EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE

“Product placement” is to be allowed on evening programmes on ITV. Hurrah! It’s what I have been waiting for: the clinching factor that ensures that I will never ever watch an ITV programme again. After all, once The South Bank Show has finished its final run that began at the weekend, there will not even be a residual sense of regret at missing any of ITV’s naff programming.

It tells you a lot about broadcasters’ contempt for both the audience and, more bizarrely, its own output. What is “product placement” for? Why, to catch the attention of the audience and drop a cookie-like presence into its brain so that when, god help it, it next goes to buy, say, “oven chips”, it will be sure to buy the brand that was “placed” on the telly.

But if you’re looking at the product, you’re not looking at the programme. What is the point of poor, unregarded Piers Morgan struggling to wrest every nuance from his subtle but definitive appraisal of the caterwauling of some no-talent more than ready to be god’s next gift to the showbiz if the audience is transfixed by the can of cola that he is the while throwing down his neck in a wincingly reluctant attempt to fulfil his obligation to the sponsor? How can we be sure that we are keeping up with Miss Marple’s reasoning as she reaches for the conclusion of her analysis of the way the easily-overlooked facts point to the least likely person in the room as the murderess when our concentration has been shattered by our noticing that the livery of the carefully displayed packet of tea biscuits that the dear lady simultaneously reached for is not quite in period with the noticeably branded computer games console not so very idly discarded on the arm of her armchair?

It’s bad enough that in-programme advertising breaks destroy the rhythm and continuity of movies and other material that was not designed for interruptions and impose an infrastructure of such interruptions on made-for-television programmes that otherwise would lay out a seamless argument. Sport has become unwatchable on television (unless your brain is inured to tuning out visual interference) because the venues, the equipment and indeed the players are festooned with logos and slogans. There have been sporting events (and music gigs too) where bouncers have refused entrance to ticket-holders unless they surrender some item they are carrying that bears the brand name of a sponsor’s rival. Lately it seems – the only sport I see on television is in snatches on news bulletins so the developments that I notice may have been a long time coming – there are animated hoardings around the edges of football pitches, expressly designed to take the eye and so rob the play itself of attention. In other sports played on greensward (but not yet in football, I think), sponsors’ logos are painted in perspective on the grass so that they are readable from the master camera position but appear merely as weird shapes from any other angle. What would happen if, say, a sliding rugby player did such violence to the logo that it no longer performed its promotional function? Would the game have to be stopped so that a re-spray could be effected? Are there painters standing by against that very eventuality?

More seriously, why do clubs want to collaborate in such destructive exercises? Don’t they care that viewers are distracted from the play? Because believe me, if the advertising did not succeed in its aim to take the eye from the sport, the advertisers that pay big money to be allowed so to disfigure sporting venues would not go to the trouble.

Truly, the thick end of the wedge that came into British broadcasting with the setting up of ITV in 1955 has arrived. People still argue that the BBC should give up the licence fee and be made to take commercials. Do these people not recognise advertising for what it is: pollution and mendacity in neon?

You may guffaw at the ferocious speech made in 1952 in the Lords by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director-General, against the prospect of commercial television: “Somebody introduced dog-racing into England; we know who for he is proud of it, and proclaims it urbi et orbi in the columns of Who’s Who. And somebody introduced Christianity and printing and the uses of electricity. And somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored broadcasting into this country”. I find myself in Reith’s corner. In my view, television advertising has been the single most destructive, corrupting influence in Britain over the last fifty years. It has indeed been our Black Death.

Over the years, advertising has encroached more and more on the output. A so-called commercial hour – the amount of programme left in a one-hour slot after allowing for the advertising – has dropped and dropped. On ITV, twenty or so years ago, it was pretty rigidly set at 52 minutes. It now hovers just above the 45-minute mark, below which it fell some years back on American television. Half-hour programmes made for peak viewing routinely run to 23 minutes. In some slots, particularly those for American imports on Channel 4, the first ad break can intrude as early as before the first three minutes of the episode have wholly elapsed, even before the series title sequence. In the present advertising slump, late-night transmissions often carry nothing but programme trails during the commercial breaks; even so, the culture demands that the transmission must still be interrupted, even if for fewer than 90 seconds.

Advertising is a blight. It is a blanket of lies laid across the urban and rural landscape, a succession of promises that cannot be delivered and guarantees that will not be honoured. It undermines our self-image, promotes greed and acquisitiveness, proposes absurd ideals of how we should look and live and consume, distorts and undermines language and makes prostitutes of all those actors and others in the public eye foolish enough to be corrupted by its easy money. (“Oh but it’s far from easy. It’s really concentrated and very demanding” – “Selling dodgy financial services is harder than playing Lear? Then you’re not playing Lear right”).

Advertising insinuates itself into our most intimate places, our most domestic circumstances, undermining our assumptions that our surfaces are clean, that our bottoms are properly wiped, that our periods do not impede us, that our children are properly cared for, that our time is not wasted in preparing food that we can buy ready-made, that our teeth are sparkling and our breath sweet, that we have not missed the opportunity to sue for compensation or to compare prices on some website, that our homes smell of the most harmonious blend of chemicals, that we have full cover and have acquired every diversion that our children might fancy, that we conform. Adland rarely posits any world that is not spotless, flawless, whole, wholesome and antiseptic. On the rare occasions that it breaks out from the lovely home of Norman and Norma Normal, it courts danger and is usually slapped back by some busybody body or other. The centre of gravity of advertising has grown more down-market, vulgar and flash in recent years because that’s how society has leaned. But it remains quintessentially conventional. Try this simple test: when did you last see an ad that featured somebody Jewish but not funny?

Product placement is the second wave of the commercials marauding out of their designated “breaks”. The first was the sponsorship of programmes that allows a single brand’s brief promo to top and tail each fletch of each episode that falls within the deal. It’s noticeable that the programmes on ITV and Channel 4 (and, for aught I know, on Five if I ever watched it) that seal sponsorship deals are always proven successes – long-running regulars or US imports. (In the latter case, you wonder what the sponsor is financing. Do the acquisitions people make their bids for bought-in programmes in consultation with would-be sponsors? That would give advertisers an actual say in programme policy, something that is supposed to be a breach of the various channels’ respective charters).

Now we are to have brands and logos flourished within programmes, doing potentially fatal violence to the suspension of disbelief that drama requires and the trust in fair dealing that, for instance, competitive game and talent shows depend upon. Such product placement is already familiar in roadshow movies made in Hollywood and after the Hollywood model. The James Bond franchise, for instance, has long attempted to defray a portion of its eye-watering capital costs by embracing placements and even endorsements, but this element has grown more irksome of late. Notoriously, Daniel Craig’s Bond now sports a particular brand of wristwatch. I don’t wish to give it any more free publicity so let’s call it The Crapola. In Casino Royale (which, as it happens, has its terrestrial premiere on ITV this coming Saturday), Bond is asked if his “nice watch” is a Rolex and replies stiffly: “No. Crapola”. That this perfectly stilted exchange has been dragged in kicking and screaming merely to allow the production company to take the Crapola Corporation for hundreds of thousands of dollars is never going to be justification enough for a bad filmic moment.

What kind of numbskull invests in a watch purely because a fictional character is characterised as favouring it? It’s not as if Ian Fleming designated Crapola as the brand of watch that 007 would wear. This is not an artistic, character-driven choice, it’s a pragmatic, fund-raising imposition. Down and down go the standards and no one cares as long as someone makes considerably more moolah than is strictly necessary. So stand by for the inevitable arrival of this sort of inorganic intrusion in ITV’s regular programming next year: “It’s extraordinary that you should perceive that he did the murder, Miss Marple. Whatever is your secret?” “Lil-lets, of course”.

007 Omigod ...

CREATURES’ COMFORT

There was a spider in the bath this morning. I am no Annie Hall, so I did not summon assistance. It’s curious that people are so “afraid” of spiders. Like all such fears, there is no basis for it in rationality. Poisonous spiders are not apt to turn up in England. Arachnids have no designs on humans; indeed, like all creatures on the planet, they have far more reason to fear man than vice versa. I suppose it is that spiders scuttle that makes them unsettling. You can’t guess where they will get to next and, relative to their size, they make cheetahs look torpid. I used to be bothered by moths which, I guess, had to do with the combination of their fluttering (the airborne equivalent of scuttling) and their unpredictability. But I got over it.

Before I run the bath, I wipe it round with an old sponge topped with a splodge of Cif. Cif used to be called Jif, a much more apposite name. Now I can only think of cleaning the bath as The Revenge of the Cif. After I have splooshed water around, I also slosh some into the jacuzzi jets. I’m not swanking, just describing what sort of bath we inherited when we bought the house. Spiders that have found themselves marooned in the bath sometimes hide in the jets. I only found this out one morning soon after we moved in when I was enjoying a soak and a very large and very dead spider floated past my head.

Today’s spider was also a casualty. Despite The Revenge of the Cif, I was just lowering my foot into the water when a house spider, much the same size as its late predecessor, appeared on the water’s surface. I was dismayed. I fished it out on a sponge and lowered it onto the sloping roof below the bathroom window but there seemed no hope that it was alive. However, when I looked again after the bath there was no sign of the bedraggled creature. Had it recovered and staggered away or had a passing bird snapped it up? I shall never know.

I don’t take a Buddhist view of the sanctity of animal life, nor subscribe to the Blakean notion that “everything that lives is holy”. But I do not think that living creatures should lose that life merely for my convenience. I am not a vegetarian so of course animals, birds and fish do perish on a daily basis for my consumption. I think this is a necessary process and – I have argued elsewhere in this blog – a practical one. All the creatures that we humans would have eaten next week will not be free to relish long and productive lives if, tomorrow, the eating of flesh is declared unlawful.

Spiders, though, perform a function useful to humans. They kill and part-consume flies and other insects that do not benefit us. I have no quarrel with any spider and, if I find one in a situation that endangers it, I will endeavour to catch it alive and convey it to a safer place. We do the same all summer for bees, butterflies, moths and hornets that become trapped in our conservatory and soon succumb to dehydration. If a daddy-longlegs (that is, a harvestman or crane fly) put in an appearance, I would save that too but these benign, spindly oddities are becoming rare. I am not in the slightest aggravated by wasps, knowing full well that to demonstrate aggravation to a wasp is likely in turn to aggravate it. Those people who get stung are usually those who wave their arms about ineffectually when a wasp is present.

The other day, I found a wasp struggling in the kitchen sink. Its wings, having got wet, seemed to prevent it from righting itself. For fully ten minutes, I attempted to prize it onto a kitchen cloth but every time it seemed within a whisker of safety, it wriggled away. In the end, I gave it up and washed it down the plughole. Instantly I regretted it. What right did I have to seal its fate, even though, at this time of year, wasps are anyway doomed and dopey? I know that, in the objective order of things, a wasp is nowhere near as “important” as a human. And yet I cannot say that its life is any less dear to it than mine is to me. Indeed, wild creatures perform a daily drama of staying alive, surrounded as they are by predators or threatened with starvation. They must have a more vivid sense of danger than we humans ever have, unless we live in a war zone.

I have told this tale before but some years ago I came across an earwig in the house. I had a formative experience of these rather alarming-looking little blighters when, playing in a friend’s garden, I stuck the end of a bamboo cane in my mouth and then found myself spitting out a nest of earwigs. Not nice. In the grown-up experience, it was winter and so we had a log fire going. I gathered the intruder onto a sheet of paper and dropped it onto the fire, expecting it to be instantly consumed. Instead, it bounced on a log and secured a foothold, then ran about seeking means of escape. There was none. Nor could I help it. Now I felt bad. As I watched, it clearly became increasingly desperate and then hopelessly pressed itself into a crevice in the wood where no doubt it soon braised to death. I know that, while my memory lasts, I shall not forget that earwig whose drawn-out death I needlessly caused.

Why are we fearful of and cruel to insects? It is true that the creature that has killed more humans than any other is not the snake, crocodile, rhinoceros, lion, tiger or water buffalo but a tiny insect, the mosquito. I have no compunction whatever about squishing mosquitoes whenever I encounter one – and, as we have an ancient pond quite near the house, I do so rather often on summer nights.

Some years ago, in Kerala in southern India, I was just closing my book before bedding down in a circular hotel room when I spotted an unfamiliar insect on the wall six or eight feet from me behind a piece of furniture. It was a rather noticeable insect, highly coloured and on the large side – somewhere between the size of a dinner plate and a small family car. I regarded this beast quite evenly. I thought of my options: 1) run screaming from the room; 2) hit it with a chair; 3) smother it in an item of clothing and bundle it out of the door; 4) switch off the bedside light and go to sleep. It wasn’t very difficult to decide on option 4 and I drifted off in seconds. In the morning, the insect had gone without taking any of my limbs with it. I couldn’t guess how such a huge insect could have escaped the room. Had I swallowed it in the night? I think I would know if I had. Probably it was clinging to the underside of the bed. I didn’t bother to look.

Generally, I pursue a policy of live and let live with any living thing. Under the jetty that juts out over our ancient pond, a rat took up residence last summer, unperturbed by the scent of dogs. Our little dog, before he lost his sight, loved to chase him. But there has been no sign of him this year so he has perhaps moved on. I rather miss him. And I am not in the slightest alarmed by his recent proximity. The conventional wisdom has it that there is a rat within fifty feet of everyone on the planet (much closer in London). We are routinely warned about the danger of diseases carried by rats but did you ever hear of anyone being made ill by the proximity of a rat? I think people who drive too fast are a much greater danger.

But that, finally, is the important point about creatures. None is remotely such a danger to us, to their fellow creatures or to the very survival of life on earth as humanity. It is man who is the creepy-crawly, the bug, the vermin, the pest.

TEDDY BARED

Had I met any of the Kennedy boys, I suspect I would not have found them to my taste. Surpassingly arrogant – a self-confidence based upon eye-watering wealth, parental expectation, unrivalled connections, continuous celebrity, legendary sexual magnetism and a very useful lack of moral compass (useful in fixing day-to-day problems) – they would not, you would be bound to feel, be remotely interested in you, save insofar as you might be placed to do them some sort of favour.

I remember Jack Kennedy’s administration vividly. After the Eisenhower years – “cosy but crass” as Stephen Sondheim succinctly despatched them – JFK seemed almost superhumanly glamorous, young, creative and enlightened. His administration could be said to have been a triumph of style over substance even (perhaps especially) in the Bay of Pigs crisis during which the world really did appear for a few days to teeter on the brink of World War III.

Jack’s early and shattering death sealed his legend. It was simultaneously as public as any in the twentieth century and yet enduringly inexplicable. The theories will never die. My favourite – infrequently aired -– goes like this. Kennedy didn’t die but was left by the bullets in a vegetative state. This accounts for the succession of visits allegedly paid to the Parkland Hospital in Dallas by Jackie after the President was formally pronounced dead.

Meanwhile, Mama Rose, mindful of the need to avoid any repetition of the family’s disastrous attempt to bury the embarrassment of their lobotomised daughter Rosemary, determined that Jack would be officially dead, a much more manageable outcome. Once a weighted coffin had been laid to rest before the eyes of the world in Arlington, there was just the little matter of “burying” the uncomprehending Jack. They needed a secure refuge, somewhere like a well-fortified island. Now, who owned such an island? Well, Aristotle Onassis for one. The rest you know.

Of course, Jack’s reputation was bound to decline. Anyone so incapable of keeping his pants on (even, it was said, within the Oval Office) was bound to generate stories sooner or later. In the late 1970s, a feature of Bette Midler’s seductively raucous stage act was her claim to have “slept with Jack Kennedy. And you know what?” – and here she’d rake the audience with a blood-red fingernail – “They slept with Jack Kennedy”.

The instinct to fix things was deep-grained in the Kennedy clan long before Ted was born. Irish-American political chicanery in Boston is as endemic as the more widely known history of Irish-American political chicanery in Chicago (Mayor Daley and all that) and the Kennedys were up to their necks in it for decades before Joe covered up Teddy’s rustication from Harvard for cheating and then fixed it for him to take over Jack’s Senate seat when Jack became President. Political favours were called in repeatedly to smother Kennedy scandals, misdemeanours and crimes. The least controllable of Ted’s disasters was the Chappaquiddick affair, least controllable in the sense that even Kennedy money and influence couldn’t prevent it killing any expectation he still entertained of succeeding to the White House. But anyone other than a Kennedy would have gone to jail and, never formally required to explain his actions on the night a young woman died while in his company, he rode it out and the full truth of the matter dies with him.


caricature by Steve Nyman from aaacaricatures.com

It’s hard to imagine socialising with people who sincerely imagine that the law does not apply to them. I imagine the Kennedys must have been much like the Krays, only with ‘class’ in its American meaning. Add to this the Catholicism they inherited from Joe and Rose, a religious subject indeed for it was clearly an ingredient that would not brook mockery or even discussion. How devout Catholic men square their conviction with the addiction to adultery that ran rampant among all the Kennedy men in every generation is hard for rationalists to figure. Did they think they were redeemed every time they went to confession and hence were cleared to sin again just as soon as possible?

I don’t know how the women put up with it but the Kennedy girls seemed inured. In the English-born actor Peter Lawford, Pat Kennedy found a husband quite as devoted to booze, recreational drugs and sleeping around as any of her brothers. Kathleen Kennedy was never forgiven by Rose for marrying outside the faith, even though it was into the English aristocracy, but she had adulterous affairs of her own. Alone of the family, Joe attended her funeral after she and her lover perished in a plane crash, the same fate that befell Joe Jr (in World War II), Jack and Jackie’s only son John and indeed Teddy, who survived with a broken back and lumbar pain for the rest of his life. Only Eunice, who died a fortnight before Teddy, seems to have led a pretty blameless life (if you can forgive her being the mother-in-law of Arnold Schwarzenegger).

And yet … and yet … There is always an “and yet” with people of real talent. I was in the States one election year and turned on the C-Span channel in my hotel room just in time to watch from the start a speech by Ted Kennedy. It was no great occasion, just a routine stump speech in the marathon that is the American democratic process. The Democrats didn’t even win that year. But it was magnificent. I hung on his every word, because it was all so beautifully crafted, cogently argued, magically lacking in spin or patronising or political trimming. It was proper, old-fashioned oratory of the kind we used to get from Nye Bevan, Michael Foot, indeed Winston Churchill. It was just enthralling.

Kennedy was a politician to his fingertips if not in that part of the cerebrum that weighs appetite against consequence. I wouldn’t have trusted him with a boiled sweet – I certainly wouldn’t have left him alone for two minutes with either of my partner’s nieces – but I would have trusted him to know how the system works and to get things done. And getting things done, that’s what politicians are for, isn’t it? Kennedy got things done in Massachusetts, thereby ensuring that he had a thumping majority every time his senate seat was contested and becoming the third longest-serving senator in US history. And he got things done in the Senate, keeping the often flickering flame of liberalism alive there through screeds of legislation.

Of course, the Kennedys were progressive only as and when it suited. Like Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy spent part of his youth working for the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the most anti-progressive force in the most anti-progressive period of modern American history. Unlike Nixon, the Kennedy clan was real close to Joe McCarthy, who was godfather to Bobby’s eldest child. This was the Irish Catholic mafia taking precedence over fine judgments of politico-moral stances. Nonetheless, however much that kind of connection tarnishes the Kennedy legend, it is still the progressive liberal image that tops all others when we contemplate Teddy and Bobby and Jack.

In reality, Teddy achieved more in the public arena than Jack or Bobby ever did, not just by being granted comparative longevity but because he lived to attain the maturity to see that real legislation on the statute books achieves more than any amount of glamour, fame and snatched sexual gratification. For that alone, he deserves to be hailed as an American hero. I’m just grateful that I never had to meet him.

LIBYA, LOCKERBIE, LIBERTY

I listened to the extremely judicious and statesmanlike statement by the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Justice, Kenny MacAskill, this lunchtime. As he averred, the decision as to whether to release Ali al-Megrahi was his and his alone. He was – no doubt painfully – aware that whichever way he jumped he would attract intense, even vituperative criticism.

The vituperation has come almost entirely from the United States. There seems no sentiment anywhere in that nation on behalf of release. One bereaved mother declared that MacAskill’s decision was not compassion but weakness. This is hard to compute. The most pressure was coming from the US and the US is used to getting its way. Buckling to that pressure might well have been characterised as weakness.

Nobody on the American side of the Atlantic appears to take into account the very real concern over whether al-Megrahi was justly convicted. The evidence was wholly circumstantial. The court at the time alluded to “others” who were not arraigned but those others have never been tracked down or even named. Among those asking for further investigation of the case are bereaved people from this side of the Atlantic. That they do not subscribe to what inevitably comes over from the Americans as a naked desire for vengeance and punishment is as eloquent as it is moving.

David Cameron, ever looking for a bandwagon, has joined the condemnation of Obama, Clinton and the American families. His statement sounds like that of a self-confident but naïve Vth former: “I think this is wrong and it’s the product of some completely nonsensical thinking in my view … This man was convicted of murdering 270 people. He showed no compassion to them”. Cameron is in the same tit-for-tat mindset as the Americans. He’s probably getting his head ready for switching to an American-style attack on the NHS.

By all means should there be a fresh investigation of the evidence that remains of what is somewhat misleadingly known as the Lockerbie bombing. The debris of the exploded aircraft still exists. It is obviously a disadvantage that 21 years have elapsed since the atrocity. All this time, the conviction has looked unsound and al-Megrahi has been protesting his innocence and trying to effect an appeal. If his name comes to be cleared posthumously, it will be instructive to see what the Americans have to say about it then.

OH, SAY, CAN YOU SEE?

Here are ten sets of important and urgent questions for right wing Americans.

1: What do you understand by the term ‘Socialism’? Do you imagine it is simply a synonym for ‘European’? In what ways do you believe President Obama – or any previous American president or indeed any current world leader – is or was a Socialist? (Write on one side of the paper only).

2: The party of Adolf Hitler called itself the National Socialist Party (hence Nazi). Was Hitler actually a Socialist as you understand the term, though? Could (for instance) Hitler, Trotsky, Gorbachev, Castro, Mitterand and Blair all be deemed Socialists? Is it possible for Obama simultaneously to be Socialist and Hitler-like? Discuss with illustrations.

Images like these are all over the net and the current health debate in the US

3: According to a Facebook entry by Mrs Sarah Palin (the former governor of Alaska and apparently thought to be a significant political commentator in the United States), the President intends to introduce a new health care system whereby senior citizens and the disabled “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’, whether they are worthy of health care”. Never mind the carelessness with which Mrs Palin describes the disabled as “standing”; what do you imagine would in practice be the function of these death panels? What kind of public servants would agree to serve on a death panel? (“Hello, darling, how was your day?” “Oh, I had such a long afternoon on the death panel. Do you know we condemned 127 seniors and six autistic children to the electric chair”. “Poor darling, you must be quite exhausted”).

4: What do the letters NHS stand for? What does the NHS do? How many death panels does it fund? Do you really and truly know anything at all about the NHS? Have you seen any English people with teeth lately?



5: What do you think is the domestic political status of Daniel Hannan MEP? As he is a member of the European parliament, doesn’t that make him a European and hence a Hitler Socialist? Does the fact that his views were immediately repudiated by the leadership of his party mean that they are in some way unrepresentative? In any case, if he works in continental Europe, how much contact does he actually have with the NHS in Britain?

6: Does it trouble you at all that as many as 45 million American citizens have no health insurance and therefore cannot afford to seek treatment when they are ill or injured? Have you ever heard the pathetic appeals for help that are routinely broadcast on some public service radio stations? Isn’t there quite an embarrassing dislocation between the fact that the USA is the richest and, you don’t tire of telling us, the greatest nation on earth and the lack of a health system that tends to people who need it. Would you want a fire department that only came out to douse fires at premises that could show up-to-date fire cover, a police department that looked the other way if your policy protecting you against muggers wasn’t fully comprehensive?

Of course if you went through all the pix of any public figure – Ann Widdicombe, say – you could always find one that seems to mirror some gesture of somebody else's

7: How much cash has the health insurance industry put into your campaign? Does it ever occur to you that insurance is the most corrupt, self-serving industry in the whole capitalist system, little more than a form of sophisticated casino operation in which, as everyone knows, the house always wins? What do you say to this proposition: that the president wants to establish a public health system because he believes that Americans will benefit from it and that it is the right thing to do, whereas the insurance companies want to preserve their businesses because they make a vast amount of profit? Does that really sound like a fantasy to you?

8: Don’t you know that there is already a huge public sector in the American health system, just as in many other services you take for granted? Do you think that, unless you were a multi-millionaire, you would survive in a totally free market that had no public provision and no public regulation?



9: Isn’t it a little bit anti-American to attack your own president and government in the terms that you have been employing lately? Anyone being so extreme about Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes would have been denounced as unpatriotic. Isn’t it time someone did a comprehensive exposé of the shock-jock fascists, the Fox News bigots and all the other detritus of the American commentariat who have no compunction about spreading the wildest of lies about anyone with a decent thought in their heads?

10: And finally, are you fucking insane? (You may need health care).

You can play this game with anybody

(PS: This posting is a little late; my server has lately been experiencing difficulty both contacting and maintaining contact with blogger.com. I don’t know why – no other internet address presents such a problem).