Extracts from my diary

Retribution in the Criminal Justice system (1994).

Commentary on British Politics (1995).

The Monarchy (1995).

Role of Monarch as Defender of the Faith (1996).

The National Lottery (1995).

Moral Relativism (1996).

Russian Presidential Election (1996).

Michael Howard's Law and Order policies (1997).

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Poltics - an extract from my diary entry for 21/Apr/1995

11:15 pm. Discussion on Newsnight about how our Millennium Commission will spend its money in celebrating the new millennium. How about giving the homeless homes? - rather than building lots of enormous buildings for the upper middles to admire....

[A recent article] said how young people, while not very party political, care deeply about such issues as the environment, poverty, racism. It is up to the Labour Party to make clear, as is already clear to me, that it is they who are the party of the environment, of the fight against poverty, of the struggle against racism, of the war against deprivation. If young people realize this, their nonpartisanship should quickly dissolve. No one who cares deeply about poverty can be a Tory unless they are greatly misinformed about the fundamentals of Tory beliefs and policies. Maybe some Tories do care, but do they show it? How much do they care? And just how far down their list of priorities is poverty? A long way down, I think. Tax bribes to try to win elections, even at the expense of economic common sense; refusal to implement laws guaranteeing minimum wage or other minimum working conditions; successive repealing of safety-at-work legislation; yes, these are the Tory priorities. Certainly the first is - tax bribes. Can you believe it? They have raised taxes for three years - because they have had to, although they have not raised them fairly -, and now they wish to lower them, though not by so much. well, why raise them as much in the first place? Did they accidentally put them too high or are the electorate too stupid to accept other than tax cutting?

And cutting taxes, when the National Health Service and public education are agreed by all independent observers to be going down the drains. Even Mrs Shephard, the education secretary, could surely not deny that the councils' funding, especially of education, was tight this year. If taxes are cut, how can it but get tighter? Already there are signs that the economy is again faltering. Yet our priority should not be economics - it should be people. People without homes, people without jobs, without without money through no fault of their own. People who need homes, people who need jobs, people who need the social skills to start agreeing to going down town on a Friday night rather than saying no in one stupid almost automatic reaction to a tragically uncommon request.

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday that the Commons agreed to suspend the Tory MPs who accepted money for questions. Of course, there were lots of protests from Tories claiming that they should not be suspended (even for ten days in the case of one and twenty in the case of the other) and should merely be cautioned. Tories claimed it was a minor error of judgement, and that the major error was on the part of the Sunday Times, which, sin of all sins, had been deceitful. Its reporters had pretended to be from a company wanting questions asked in the Commons, in order to find out if several Tory and Labour MPs would take £2000 for questions, which two Tories and no Labour MPs would. Scandalous? Not at all. What is so wrong about it? If I pretend to be someone I am not, not for my own advantage but in order to judge the morality of others in a wholly fair and accurate way, am I acting immorally? Not at all! The Sunday Times acted with impeccable integrity. The criminals lied at the heart of Britain's legislative system, and should have been expelled from the Commons, hopefully causing byelections. (If they had been Labour MPs, that still holds.)

This country has so few morals when it counts, and so many when it doesn't.... The Tories must be stopped. Look at the mess American health care is in - a bigger mess than ours, because they have a private system. What of private care here? If it grows into a large industry, the NHS will become a safety net. Its services will, as a result, diminish and worsen. Thus the poor will get radically worse health care and radically worse education than the rich. The only way to stop this is to elect a Labour Government with a very large majority.

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The Monarchy - extract from my diary entry for 7/Aug/1995

We shouldn't try to cut a middle route. This is not a hard-line, black-or-white, uncompromising view. It is simply a logical one. The arguments for having a republic are clear, and few of them could be satisfied by reform. Yet with monarchy, what I take to be the best reasons for having it would be dumped if we moved onto some "middle ground", some "compromise" solution.

The best reason to have a republic is the theoretical one, that monarchy is undemocratic. This could never be satisfied by a compromise. The best reason for keeping the monarchy is that it is part of our British tradition. It is easy to keep it; it is the established and tried route; it goes back many hundreds of years and has always developed gradually. This is really why people who want the monarchy want it: tradition, history. This advantage, in my view, would no longer apply if any attempt at anything other than piecemeal reform were attempted; yet reform would have to be very radical to satisfy any of the republicans' demands, and to satisfy what I regard as the best reason for republicanism, only a republic would do. (There are many other reasons people can come up with for republicanism, such as claims that the Royal Family get too much money, own too much, and so on. But the only problem with monarchy that would endure no matter what reform were attempted is that it is undemocratic. If it were democratic, we would be a republic. Nonetheless, we can't get rid of it, I suppose, until the majority want to. A contradiction of democracy is that you cannot abolish the undemocratic unless the majority want it. So if most people in a dictatorship agree with dictatorship, that is well and good - or is it? because those who don't agree would generally have very restricted scope for challenge.)

So, a middle road can never work.

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Role of Monarch as Defender of the Faith - diary entry for 26/Mar/1996

Mr Major said yesterday that it would be odd if Prince Charles were to be "Defender of Faith", as he said he wanted to be, instead of "Defender of the Faith" when he is King. Yet a rift has been denied. What no one has realized, though, is that the Latin for "faith" and "the faith" is the same; the title would be "Fidei defensor" either way.

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Lottery - extract from my diary entry for 26/Oct/1996

Mary Ann Sieghart on Question Time. Can't bear the Tories playing the race card. Such a voice of common sense.

Diana Maddock MP (Lib Dem) on the Lottery: "Nobody's saying we should totally do away with [the Lottery]". Well, we really should.

Sieghart, unfortunately, I must disagree with on this, tho she seems to have a consistently libertarian stance, and a consistent stance, of course, is something I have never achieved. M.A.S. likes the lottery.

Norman Lamont: no difference between the morality of gaining a quarter of a million pounds (from the Lottery) and gaining much larger amounts. Well, *of course* there's a difference! Is there a difference between killing one person and killing twenty? I think you know the answer. A matter of scale.

Oh, I can't believe it! Woman in the audience: "I'd just like to say, if I won the Lottery I'd keep all of it, however much money I won, and I think everyone who said they'd give some of it away would as well." Really! What does she know? She's trying to reduce the rest of us to her own moral level.... I am not on her moral level and I wouldn't shrink to it. Of course, this is already proved because I don't enter the Lottery.

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Moral relativism - extract from my diary entry for 5/Jul/1996

Today the Archbishop of Canterbury began a fightback against the view that moral values are relative. How, I wonder, can so many serious and intelligent people (such as him), profess that they are absolute? It is obvious that this is not so. Does anyone really think that there are no circumstances in which you can justify killing someone? Probably some people do. Yet pacifists are much more likely to be moral relativists, whilst moral traditionalists (absolutists) are likely also to mount a traditional defence of war.

I was thinking about telephones earlier today. There aren't many times at which someone isn't doing something, and very often a phone call can disturb someone in a way that a letter or an email or a fax could not. You may often be tempted into saying that you hope you have not disturbed your caller, that you hope they were not busy; and naturally they will reply that they were not, or that it is quite all right. Is this the truth? Surely it sometimes is not. Politeness does not come into morality, and yet for the traditional Englishman (and most moral absolutists in England are traditional English people), politeness comes above truth. Lying about trivialities has always been considered an acceptable surrender to etiquette. So, not bearing false witness is not a moral absolute, and I doubt many people other than hypocrites have ever so considered it.

There are more substantial cases in which one might wish to lie too. I need hardly cite past examples again (you are hiding a Jew in your loft and it is 1942 in Paris, etc).

The Archbishop spoke of the danger of relegating God to the status of a private hobby. I must confess, I thought that was what religion was. A few people make it more public by attending Church or some such institution, but fewer and fewer. Why do even most of those who say they believe in God pray rarely, go to church rarely, and know nothing of theology?

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Criminal Justice system - extract from my diary, 14/Sep/1994

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[My comment after a judge rules some key evidence inadmissible and an accused man walks free.]

According to legal sources, evidence based entirely on confession is unreliable anyway, so when there is not even a confession to go on, it's unbelievable. Why are the parents of the dead woman so angry that the man has not been convicted? The only possibility is vindictiveness, since they have no way of knowing if the man is guilty, and why should they think him so? In any case, who are they to question the ruling of a judge, much more experienced in these matters than they?

No, the only answer can be that they wish to see their child's murder avenged. More than likely they favour the death penalty; most people who have their relatives murdered turn to a rightwing stance on law and order (treating the accused as guilty unless proven innocent). I would guess that it does not matter to the parents who is convicted; they just want to see someone punished. How would they feel, though, were they to discover, years afterwards, that the accused had been innocent and convicted on unsafe evidence that the judge had not ruled inadmissible (just as they had wanted)? Yet, whether the accused is guilty or not, you simply can't send people to jail if there's insufficient evidence. I can't get away from that one immutable truth.

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Michael Howard's policies - Extract from my diary, 1/Jan/1997

Michael Howard made a disgusting speech on crime. He was appealing to the lowest, basest instincts of our people. What is he on about, anyway, when he talks about redressing the balance in the justice system "between victim and criminal"? He's been on about this before. Victim and accused, not victim and criminal.

He wants to make it so much easier to convict, and the effects on justice could be disastrous. Monday's Panorama showed how Howard's tough on crime measures are unlikely to work and could well be counterproductive. Yet he goes on, hoping to satisfy the masses in the least human ways. If Labour wins next time, the New Right could well turn to the death penalty as an election winner. Once that sort of thing starts happening, the road to the kind of right-wing politics we see in America will be well lit. The Republicans in America have pushed the political agenda to a very rightwing perspective, and the Democrats seem powerless put to follow them rightwards.

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©1998 Richard Pond

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