Britain: Not so Great now

Incorporating adjectives into your country’s name is, if you stop and pause, a very strange thing to do.  Yet nobody in Britain I have met has ever been troubled or bemused by the prefixing of the word Great to our nation’s name.  Historically Great Britain as an entity evolved as a geographic appellation distinguishing our island from Brittany and, upon the now imperilled Union of England and Scotland in 1707, as a shorthand way of referring to the whole of our island rather than its constituent kingdoms.  Great now, of course, has the meaning  communicated by Tony the Tiger when he’s flogging Frosties or Donald Trump when he’s flogging xenophobia.

But the events of the last week have made a mockery of our nation’s name.  I wrote at Christmas about how misconceived this referendum was and as Friday morning unfolded disbelief, distress, denial gave way to the feeling that I know will now endure for some time and that is shame.  I am ashamed of what my country and my countrymen have done.  One of the greatest acts of voluntary self-harm that any nation has inflicted upon itself in recent times presents a real risk of harm to people far beyond our borders and within them.  The forebear of the European Union existed before our membership and it may subsist beyond our departure but the evidence is clear that nationalistic fervour across the continent has reached an alarming pitch.

Many are convinced that Article 50 will never be invoked, many are resolute that it must and shall.  I am no sage but am confident that those whose task it will be to press the red button can now be under no illusions about the magnitude of that step even if there are some, in the country more widely, still labouring under the delusion that this process is no more fraught than uncoupling a trailer from a Land Rover.

Whatever happens now, however, the unfolding of Britain’s humiliation has only just commenced.  A staying of the divorce from Europe will involve Britain playing a permanently diminished role in the EU.  Any reputation we once enjoyed for cool headed pragmatism will be obliterated.  The ill will attaching to holding a continent to ransom cannot possibly be underestimated.

On the other hand if we go through with this catastrophic schism we can expect such a precipitous falling away from our previous status in the world and the high regard that attached to it that there is a serious question to be asked about whether Britain could tolerate such an economic humbling.  We have no manufacturing base.  We sell services, primarily financial services, we are attractive as a market because we are the gateway to Europe for the world.  There is no reason why Dublin or Frankfurt could not supplant us in months.

Underlying my shame at Britain’s naively or maliciously self-interested folly, however, is a real hope for the future.  The Socratic dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living is a precept that Britain has in the past conspicuously failed to execute.  As a country we are amazingly bad at soul searching, at desiring to understand how others see us.  At its best this liberates us from the interminable navel gazing that can hobble some of our near neighbours but at its worst this stifles development and national emotional maturity.  Our press is often adolescent at best and therefore it is no wonder that our politicians follow suit.

The moribund mythologising of World War II is to a very great extent responsible for the impulsive rejection by so many of even the concept of the European Union.  In Europe we were a valued partner but just that.  Faragist self-delusion about our importance in the world looks absurd in Brussels, as it should and does anywhere, yet here it resonated with so many.  I wrote previously about how victory in the World Wars gave Britain a free pass in facing up to its profoundly difficult role in the world over the previous two centuries.  We have never embarked upon a truth and reconciliation process but we are about to and this is long overdue.

However much the truth hurts it is better than living a lie and lies and liars are being found out right now.

Brock Turner: There are words & they are these

There are so many remarkable things about the victim’s statement in the Brock Turner case it is hard to know where to start.

One clear starting point is to read it.  Read all of it.  Right to the end.  If you have children, give it to them to read.  Daughters and, most especially, sons.  This is as essential reading as any textbook a schoolchild will ever see.  It is a very long document but no word is wasted.  The length of time it takes to read a mere thousandth of a fraction of the time its author will have to live with the effect of what was done to her.

Taking what is not yours involves the expropriation of power.  Victims do not lose just that which is taken but, much more significantly, their power.  When sex is taken victims lose their bodily integrity and such a total loss, such complete powerlessness, is unimaginable to those that have not experienced it.

Trying to render experiences such as these into a coherent narrative is a superhuman task.  A trite expression of the social media age is: there are no words.  And true it is that no words can really communicate from one human to another the total devastation affected by the theft of bodily and sexual autonomy.  However that has not deterred this truly exceptional woman from making a painstakingly considered and finely wrought attempt.

An experience which would prompt animalistic anguish in anyone has nonetheless not prevented this extraordinary person from crafting a document of unrelenting reasonableness and power. 

 

To an outsider familiar with American jail sentences of 100 years plus the six months imposed on Brock Turner seems a mystifyingly inadequate punishment.  But, as the victim observes, prison sentences are served.  The reality is that the truest and wholly deserved punishment for this still very young man is that whatever he achieves in his life these twelve pages of denunciation and defiance will be his epitaph.

I salute her courage and her power.

The EU in the Dock - Are you sure?

Put emotion to one side. Decide this case not on sympathy or antipathy but on the evidence. If there are any directions more honoured in the breach than observance than these I would like to know what they are. The reality is that separating emotion from reason is impossible and it is impossible because we are human. The best we can possibly hope to achieve is to be aware that we are bringing both emotion and reason to bear when we make decisions. And of course few decisions are more important than a jury’s verdict. When a jury decides correctly justice is vindicated when wrongly it miscarries. 

A jury’s verdict can dramatically affect the destiny of another or a few others. But a nation’s verdict affects the destiny of millions. On 23 June 2016 every one of us will be called to provide a verdict. Is the EU guilty of making our lives in Britain worse? Juries have to be sure before returning guilty verdicts. Messrs Farage, Gove, Johnson, Grayling are among the most prominent of those asking us to reject the EU as a failed experiment, as a brake on our prosperity, as a vast funnel for teeming hordes of unwanted immigrants and Islamic extremists. 

 

They are the prosecutors calling for what is the certainly the biggest verdict, at 36, of my lifetime. Where is the evidence? What is their appeal to reason? Certainly statistics have been bandied about by both sides, but how many can you cite, how sure are you of their accuracy and their provenance? 

 

One of the greatest virtues of jury trial in this country is that, correctly, it is in fact trial by judge and jury. Without the judge acting as an impartial umpire there would be no check on improper or underhand conduct by the advocates. Furthermore without the judge there would be nobody on hand to direct the jury and define the terms of the debate. Who is the judge in the EU Referendum? The answer is that there is none. Instead we as individuals must be judge and jury defining for ourselves what evidence to admit or exclude and what test to apply. What questions are you asking yourself about how you will determine this life changing decision? 

 

It is sometimes said about barristers that their entire lives become their jobs and many is the family member that has complained that a casual conversation has undesirably degenerated into a forensic cross-examination. However in the case of the EU Referendum I urge you to look on it as a prosecution of our membership of the EU. What exactly are the charges on the indictment, what evidence has been adduced by the proponents of Brexit, are they appealing to reason or to emotion alone? 

 

Most importantly are you sure? There is I would suggest some real irony in that our two most recent Lords Chancellor are spearheading this campaign. That is because the Lord Chancellor is the head of the judiciary. But neither Mr Grayling nor Mr Gove have ever practised as lawyers still less presided as judges. They have never sought to persuade a jury that they can be sure of guilt or directed a jury that they must be sure of guilt.

 

But that is the test, I respectfully suggest, that you should apply before making a decision that will affect your life, the lives of your family and of millions within this country and beyond.

Just dotty about totty

Here’s a test.  Are you a dad?  Do you have a daughter?  Do you have a pet name for your daughter?  Is that name Totty? I thought not.  What about other fathers’ daughters?

There are, of course, other  soubriquets with which to address an assistant editor of a national magazine: slag; slut; whore; darling; sweetie; and dear to name a few.  Where in that spectrum of familiarity totty falls is open to debate.  What should not be open to debate is that the best way of addressing someone with whom you have a solely professional connection is by their name.

Colonel Bob Stewart DSO MP is 66 and a Conservative politician.  Isabel Hardman is 29 and assistant editor of The Spectator and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph.  Miss Hardman reports on Twitter that on 11 April his opening gambit to her at an event was: ‘I want to talk to the totty.’ She did not name Mr Stewart but complained to the Whips and apparently an apology was forthcoming.  It was not long however before his name was reported prompting a storm of commentary with Gaby Hinsliff deploring his conduct in The Guardian and Isabel Oakeshott in The Daily Mail deploring hers.

Here’s another test.  The Queen; Margaret Thatcher; Theresa May; Samantha Cameron; and his commanding officer’s wife.  Which of these women do you think Mr Stewart would call totty to their face?

It is very easy to dismiss this as a generational thing; clumsy flirtation meeting stony ground or just frigid humourlessness.  It is easy because that is what society has always done.  But just because something has always happened does not make it right.

I remember when I was a pupil shadowing a barrister from Doughty Street Chambers in the Court of Appeal.  Returning in a taxi from the Royal Courts of Justice with his phenomenally clever legal researcher the cabbie pulled up with a cheery: ‘There you are young lady’.  This elicited the immediate response: ‘Thank you very much middle aged man’.  He was not being rude.  She was not being rude.  She was simply pointing out that if he was going to comment on her age she would comment on his.

For that reason some, with Miss Oakeshott prominent amongst them, feel that the better way for Miss Hardman to have handled the situation would have been with a witty retort and put down.  But not all people, men and women included, are confident meeting graceless condescension with a verbal stiletto or oral head butt.

I recently undertook training to become a pupil supervisor and was astonished in how many different ways it was possible to communicate the warning: Don’t have sex with your pupil.  Frankly it is embarrassing that such explicit advice needs to be imparted in the 21st century but some people are completely oblivious to professional boundaries and the spectacular imbalance of power that prevails between pupil and supervisor.  This applies as much in politics as it does in law.

In the final analysis, for me, Mr Stewart’s salutation is a simple example of bad manners and that is not conduct becoming an officer and a gentleman.

Talking 'bout a Velorution

When one’s job so often considers imprisonment, thinking about it, pleading about it if not, thankfully, experiencing it then it is perhaps no surprise that thoughts turn sometimes to freedom.  I don’t know when you feel most free but for me it is without question when in the saddle and I mean two wheels not four hooves. 

Few stop to think that even the most glorious cruise down a deserted Route 66 at 100 mph in a little red Corvette or whatever your wheels of choice still involves containment, still involves disconnection from the natural world and its rhythms.  And that of course assumes the best possible drive in the best possible car.  A second’s thought of the lurching reality of driving in Britain, in the rain, in a Corsa, on the Milton Keynes bypass haemorrhaging money on tax, insurance, MOT, petrol, parking, it’ll cost yer mechanics and the rest makes it a wonder that anyone could countenance car ownership.  And yet we remain resolutely wedded, welded almost to our cars, the blue skies above London occluded by an ever greying pall of acrid fumes. 

If the private motor car is the enemy of empathy, and any of the scores of road rage incidents occurring daily irrefutably proves that it is, then public transport should represent the happiest realisation of E.M. Forster’s maxim - Only Connect.  But instead we have the Tube aka the panic attack in (slow) motion.  No man is an island, never truer than on the London Underground where every man and woman congeals into one huge, bad tempered and malodorous land mass. 

Cycling remains the preserve of weirdos, the sanctimonious, the midlife crisis ridden, the masochists and me.  It is not without reason therefore that I balk at referring to myself, considering myself even, a cyclist.  And yet I am one and am convinced that if London is to be even tolerably habitable in the years to come that you should be one too. 

In my experience all objection to cycling by the able bodied reduces ineluctably to one or more of the Ss, of which there are three like the heads of Cerberus that must be slain: Safety, Sweat, and Style. 

Safety – The reason why the death of a cyclist makes headlines in the Evening Standard is because it is so rare an occurrence.  Not surprisingly however the notion of dying in the midst of so banal an act as your journey to work acts as a deterrent to many people.  If however those same many people took to their bikes they would not only come to understand how rare these tragedies are but the simple presence of thousands more bikes on the streets would militate against such tragedies occurring in the future.  You might unthinkingly swat one mosquito but you would give your full attention to a swarm of thousands.  This is just as true for lorry drivers as it is for you on your holiday in Spain. 

At long long last London is being made fit for every day, normal people to ride bicycles with miles of segregated lanes running from North to South and East to West.  I genuinely believe that this, in tandem with the Boris Bikes, will trigger London’s overdue ‘velorution’. 

Sweat – Contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe it is not necessary to wear Lycra when riding a bicycle.  Nor need you be a trained lout.  In fact in the Netherlands and Germany and other enlightened places people ride bicycles wearing perfectly normal clothes (as I am in the photograph above) because riding a bicycle is a perfectly normal thing to do.  If you walk gently you don’t perspire.  If you cycle gently, you also, don’t perspire.   

Style - When you drive a car the car is speaking for you.  And, in the main, what the car is saying is how much money you have.  Even if it’s a Corsa you have the money for a Corsa.  If it’s a Porsche, well, we all know what that is saying.  When you ride a bicycle you can wear what you like and present to the world whatever image you choose.  That is freedom right there.  In Holland nobody wears a helmet because people don’t drive like helmets and that is because everybody rides a bike. 

In summary riding a bike: 

•  Will make you live longer 

•  Will make you live happier 
•  Will make you live healthier
•  Will make you live sexier