Born to Run?

Apologies for not blogging for so long. I have exams coming up and I am also running the London Marathon on 22nd April. And now seems as good a time as any to offer my readers the opportunity to donate. If you would like to so then please click on the widget below. I would be very grateful. You can still read my views on the New Statesman website once a fortnight and I will be back blogging here once again regularly when my exams finish at some point in June. See you then.

Are we in Denial?

Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK and the occasion has been commemorated by a number of events across the country today. Perhaps wisely, Google decided not to mark it with an adapted version of its logo. Such a national day of remembrance has been criticised controversially by the Muslim Council of Britain so I want to take the opportunity to comment on these arguments and ask more generally whether there is a problem with the way the Holocaust is 'packaged'.

The first thing to say is that there are definitely valid criticisms of the views of some Muslim commentators, many of whom are slow to condemn those on the fringes who deny the Holocaust or who give credence to the obviously fake 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. Also, while they rightly call for more acknowledgement of other genocides, such as those in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, they are themselves unjusifiably selective in their examples by omitting, for instance, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey.

However, as a disabled person, I am often frustrated by the almost exclusive focus upon the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, which can sometimes seem to give the impression that the deaths of disabled people were of less significance. This issue has been discussed by my fellow blogger at the New Statesman, Victoria Brignell, and also by the Goldfish, and I have nothing more to add at present. Nevertheless, I hope these articles make it clear why I occasionally find myself having some sympathy for the perspective of the Muslim Council of Britain.

Of course, I must be careful not to denigrate the imporatance of the fact that six million Jews were killed, but there are certain oddities in this respect as well. Millions of Jews were also murdered in the Soviet Union at roughly the same time and yet there is not a special day for them. One reason for the discrepancy is undoubtedly the mechanised nature of the Holocaust and the fact that it presents a particularly scary dystopian future, while Stalin's men used more old-fashioned methods, but I cannot help wondering is there is more to it than that.

A more cynical albeit realistic possibility relates to the fact that the British fought against Germany during the Second World War while the Red Army were on our side, and therefore we are less comfortable about acknowledging the evils of the latter. This explanation supports a popular revisionist view of the war, that Britain entered in order to protect the Jews, which of course we did not. In fact, British officials ignored all evidence of the Holocaust until the war was over. Despite this, we still did more than we did in Armenia, Cambodia and Rwanda, and this could partly explain the special status of the Nazi atrocities.

A similar issue arises in the case of histories of the Holocaust which perplexingly seem to start with the foundation of Auschwitz in 1940 or even the first use of Zyklon B there in 1941. A BBC TV series based entirely on this premise was screened a couple of years ago. Prior to 1940, the context includes not only the majority of killings of disabled people but also the piecemeal increase of restrictions on the freedom and movement of Jews, which were not always greatly more severe than those in Western so-called democracies during the same period.

These similarities are hugely significant and their glossing over highly revealing. Little that the Nazis did prior the Holocaust itself received much in the way of vociferous condemnation from the Allies who later fought against them, and many of their actions had been influenced by eugenics movements emanating largely from the United States and Britain. Similarly, the 'Euthanasia' Programme, about which German authorities were quite open, had its own parallels in other countries. Forced sterilization of disabled people was concurrently taking place in various states of America and continued in Sweden until the 1970s.

Therefore, the popular approach to the Holocaust seems designed to achieve two key effects, firstly to remove from every country except Germany any culpability for what happened, and secondly, by stripping away the context, to present it as an inexplicable aberration which could never happen again. All very reassuring I'm sure, but I am not convinced that this story does full justice to the memory of those who died. I hope you do not feel I have been disrepectful in using this day to write this critique because I am confident the opposite is the case.

Ministerial Responsibility: An Obituary

In an entry from last April, I discussed the decline of a consitutional tradition in which ministers were expected to resign for errors made in their departments. Such resignations are no longer considered to be necessary, as has been demonstrated by the ability of many of the current cabinet to weather an endless stream of self-induced crises.

However, the principle has a flip side which has proved more robust. When the Minister for Agriculture resigned in 1954, it was for some dodgy decisions which, at the time at least, appeared to have been made by civil servants without the knowledge of their boss. If this version of events is true, the resignation of Sir Thomas Dugdale was an honourable one from a mythical golden age of politics. Ministers would resign even when the mistake had been made by someone else while the Civil Service were protected from their own incompetence.

The tradition that senior civil servants can never be sacked nor made to resign has by and large continued until this day. Heads of quangos (quangoes?), such as Derek Lewis, and government-appointed spin doctors, like Jo "Bury Bad News" Moore, can be dismissed but, thus far, this fate has yet to befall a top-level mandarian. This made the story this week of the suspension of an official at the Home Office all the more intriguing. Are they about to lose their protected status?

My feelings about this development are mixed. I am a romantic soul at heart and Dugdale falling on his sword has a touching chivalry which appeals to me, and seems to be missing in politics today. However, a persuasive argument the other way is that, whether the government is Labour or Conservative, there's a cock-up at the Home Office every few months or so (it's been just nine months since the last one), and it would not be helpful to keep replacing the Home Secretary if there are structural problems in the department which need to be fixed.

A further consideration is that civil servants have been protected as a ruling elite for far too long. It is ironic that the people who have the responsibility for developing policy on, say, employment, and those who are charged with enforcing any new law in this area (i.e. judges) are among the professions with the most secure tenure, and the least need to rely on any such legislation themselves. Anything which can go some way to give them a dose of reality must surely be a good thing.

On the Feast of Stephen (+10)

I hope you all had a great New Year. This blog has been fairly inactive again and so it is time to post my Prague photos before the Christmas feeling entirely disappears. I was there in mid-December and though it did not snow, sadly, there is nothing like Good King Wenceslas to create the festive spirit. Here he is in the square named after him.

Old Square was also looking the part with a large Christmas tree and a Christmas market. Below is the clock known for its famous mechanical performance to mark the hour. If like me, you are a fan of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, you will be interested to know he is buried in another church nearby, having been Court Astrologer to Rudolph II.

Prague's other great landmark is its castle from which two men were thrown through a window during the Defenestration of 1618, marking the start of the Thirty Years War. Isn't it a relief to have moved on from those times of religious tolerance? Hmm. This picture is not the most striking but I like it because of the Czech flag in the foreground.

Most people who go to the Czech Republic never leave Prague, which is a shame because there are plenty of other amazing places to visit.

I particularly recommend the World Heriatage city of Kutna Hora, an hour away by train. It has a comically creepy church decorated with human bones (very Christmassy) and this rather stunning cathedral.

Blog Update

Everything is changing with my blogs. I have excitingly been asked by the New Statesman website to write a fortnightly blog about disability issues called 'A Different Way of Thinking'. It is aimed at a general audience but there is also a lot in there for people who are already knowledgable about the area so I would ask you all to check it out.

You may also have noticed that I have not updated my other blog 'Help! I'm Turning Normal' for some time. For the record, I feel that many areas of my life are still improving at a steady rate, but there is not really enough to say to justify blogging about them frequently. The New Statesman gig will also impact upon the time which I can dedicate to that blog and therefore I have decided to discontinue it. Nevertheless, I will update you about any major developments here.

By the way, this positive step by the New Statesman will not stop me from complaining about the coverage of disability issues in the press. I will not be content and I will not rest until all other sections of the media show a similar level of commitment. Have a Merry Christmas!

Law - What is it Good For? Part 3

I have saved the biggest topic in this discussion for last so I will be as brief as possible. It is often assumed that having few laws increases freedom of choice but, in fact, the competive nature of human beings often means that the opposite is the case. For example, a libertarian hobbyhorse is that drugs in sport should be legalised. The argument is that if athletes choose to take risks with their health they are free to do so. The problem is with what happens to the athletes who do not wish to abuse their bodies this way. As their rivals begin to consume more and more steroids, they are forced to either join them or simply to drop out of the sport altogether, which is no choice at all. As the drug-taking increases exponentially, the women's events may as well be abolished because the competitiors will be men within six months.

A similar, although rather more complex, case arises with regard to the capitalist free market. Without the minimum wage, an employer could still choose to pay his employees a reasonable amount of money but he would be at a competitive disadvantage which may eventually drive him out of business. I believe that this is why many good people become corrupt. They do not feel that their actions are morally right but they know that they have little alternative if they want to survive.

A solution commonly proposed to tackle disability discrimination is to educate employers about it. The above analysis shows that this will not be successful if businesses feel that they get an competitive edge from their disciminatory practices, for example, if they believe that customers of a supermarket would be put off by seeing disabled staff. The knowledge obtained by educating them will simply be used to find out how to avoid their responsibilities. Similarly, the proposed laws on corporate manslaughter can be criticised because the likely fines will be much less than the cost of missing a deadline in a construction contract, rendering it a poor deterrent from a commercial point of view. Only if punishments are sufficient to influence cold financial reasoning will employers be truly free to listen to their consciences.

However, I want to end on a slightly more pro-active note. The main problem with concluding that the law must be strengthened is that it sometimes discourages people from looking for other solutions. If it is not worth educating employers then what is worth doing? The missing link are the customers because, unlike businessmen, their antipathy towards disabled supermarket staff is based on ignorance rather than economic considerations. Ironically, although many of them probably do experience an unconscious discomfort in the presence of disabled people, they would be equally horrified to discover that there is active discrimination taking place. Therefore, the key is to educate these people, the general public, whose consumer behaviour can change the calculation which businesses are forced by the market to make. It may also eventually encourage them to vote for new more effective laws.

A Humorous Interlude

I interrupt this serious discussion for something more light-hearted. However, it is not entirely unconnected with the theme of my recent posts. Critics of the criminal law, especially pro-defendant lawyers, often have a tension between their discomfort with anything which seems to give more power to the state and a reluctance to be seen to be sympathising with murderers and rapists. This is often resolved by obsessive over-analysis of the legislation in an attempt to find some flaw, no matter how ludicrously implausible. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of sex crimes so here is my top three most ridiculous hypothetical questions posed regarding the Sexual Offences Act 2003:

Firstly, the 'Textbook on Criminal Law' by Michael Allen, asks,

'A and B agree to have vaginal intercourse with A entering B from behind. A is inexperienced and in the dark by mistake slightly penetrates B's anus... Must the prosecution prove intentional penentration of B's anus or simply intentional penetration of B?'

I suspect that this example from Smith & Hogan can only be properly understood by visualising it and thinking about it for a long time.

'Would soaking B's flimsy T-shirt be a sexual touching? Does A have to be holding the implement that touches B?'

But the winner has to be this gem from the BPP Criminal Law Manual, which threatens to undermine the whole institution of marriage.

'Do you that a defendant who has sexual intercourse with a man who is indifferent as to whether or not sexual intercourse takes place is guilty of rape?'

However, lest it be thought that I am rampant Daily Mail reader with a 'lock them up and throw away the key' attitude, there is one place in which I think that the drafting of the legislation is unnecessarily wide. This is found in section 69 (good number), which concerns intercourse with an animal. To be guilty of this offence you must have sex with an animal and intend that what you are having sex with is an animal or, rather bizarrely, be reckless as to whether what you are having sex with is an animal. How the latter is possible is beyond me. They seem to be worried about the 'I thought it was just a woolly person' defence.