Wednesday, 15 May 2013

Living in interesting times

England seems to be shifting from being a rather right-wing country to a frighteningly right-wing country. JRF research published the other day shows not just that ‘the public has become increasingly likely to say that individual characteristics rather than societal issues cause poverty;’ but also that this is largely accounted for by a shift in attitudes among voters on the left. In 1986 the proportion of Labour voters who cited social injustice as the main cause of poverty was 41 per cent: in 2011 it was just 27 per cent.

Never mind, let’s see what’s in the news to cheer us up. How about this? A brand new UK Independence Party councillor, Eric Kitson, has made racist ‘jokes’ and shared ‘a cartoon of Muslim people being burnt at the stake with copies of the Koran fuelling the flames’, on his Facebook page. The following sentence seems to be his explanation for why Ukip have not suspended him:

‘I'm not a politician - I'm a bit of a fool really.’

Meanwhile, Colin Brewer, the previously mentioned independent councillor in Cornwall who said that disabled children should be put down, apparently was re-elected in the same round of elections: according to the Indy, ‘with 335 votes – a winning margin of four votes.’ Brewer compared disabled children with deformed lambs that are dealt with at birth by ‘smashing them against a wall.’ His presence on the candidate list would certainly get me out to the polling station.

In both cases, I’m perversely curious about whether some voters put their cross against these names without at least some understanding of what they stood for. The logic of democracy means that you have to believe that a majority of those who voted for these people knew what they were doing. Something is very rotten in the state of England.

 

15 May 2013 09:07:12 | Citizenship and democracy, Social exclusion

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Don’t start blaming the neighbours Now things have quietened down a bit, what can we say about the questioning of neighbourliness around 2207 Seymour Ave in Cleveland Ohio? Don’t blame the neighbours; avoid knee-jerk conjuring of halcyon historic community; and take mental health more seriously. Exhibit A is the cliché of American ‘community’ life, half-heartedly examined by Rupert Cornwell in the Indy for instance: ‘Cleveland has somehow given the lie to all this. If communities are supposed to look after their own, this particular one failed.’ I think it must be a bewildering, deeply disturbing experience for the neighbours concerned and I don’t see that it helps to clobber them with a sense of having let the side down. As I wrote a year ago with reference to such contexts, the experience of local people may be complicated by a sense of guilt mixed with cruel deception: ‘Can we understand how it felt in retrospect to have been a neighbour of Josef Fritzl, and to have respected his privacy? I imagine people saying simply, We knew nothing, what should we have done? – and never really recovering. An anti-social or deranged individual determined to use privacy as a smokescreen will do so, unless as a society we were to dismantle the structures and culture of privacy… ‘How close could the best of good neighbourliness have got to an Anders Breivik or a Josef Fritzl? No closer than they’d let you, through a street rep scheme perhaps, and no closer. You cannot see what he brings home from the stores in boxes or the magazines going through the letterbox, or what he views online.’ So far I don’t see that the case of Ariel Castro is particularly different. And it doesn’t help to refer to more halcyon days or localities, mythical or not, unless we are also going to offer analyses which suggest how we can reduce the likelihood of deranged behaviour having brutal and lasting impact on the lives of others. With that in mind, there’s one social imperative which seems to be missed every time: the need to create a culture in which the disorder of the individual in question is self-recognised as treatable by an available, confidential, caring system. Castro is said to have prepared a ‘suicide’ note in which he speaks of a sex addiction and said he needed help. What realistically were his chances of getting it, of taking it? Maybe we need to put more effort into pre-emptive services for all kinds of mental ill-health; and to normalise or de-stigmatise the idea of consulting them. Implementing the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Mental Health and Policing would be a start: ‘mental health is core business’ it says. Today we tend to find the treatment of people with mental illness, in previous centuries, distasteful or even barbaric. Unless we learn how to learn from tragedies like Seymour Avenue, I think that future societies may reflect in the same way about our own primitive disinterest in mental health.
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Being honest about poverty statistics So in Wales they have appointed a ‘Poverty Minister,’ the excellent Huw Lewis. His aim is to ensure that the government machine ‘turns to face the people caught up in the poverty statistics.’ Ah yes, when it comes to addressing poverty statistics, the rest of the UK gets this chap, known for his use of what Fry would call ‘terminological inexactitude’ regarding statistics.

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