If this blog has one theme running through it, it’s a morbid fascination with the grotesque, mewling shapes into which morality – as most of us thankfully recognise it – is often twisted when political pressure is applied to it.
Take Alistair Darling and his peach-like ego for instance. He goes on the telly last night and says Gordon Brown’s crew unleashed the ‘the forces of hell‘ against him when he predicted the worst recession in 60 years, as if he was some poor Germanic tribesman being swooped down upon by a horse-riding, sword-wielding Russell Crowe.
It’s the complete and utter lack of perspective and self-awareness (on both Darling’s part and the way the media have lapped it up) that makes you torn between whether to laugh yourself sick or emigrate with alacrity off this toilet-bound rock. We unleashed ‘the forces of hell’ on millions of Iraqi men, women and children. Alistair Darling had a couple of fat blokes say a few things about him that he didn’t like. He’s still in his job and nobody died.
How about New Labour’s much heralded ‘Fast Track’ asylum system, built to outflank the Tories and appease the right-wing press? Human Rights Watch released a report yesterday that…
…documents how women asylum seekers with complex claims are being routed into a system designed for much simpler claims. The women are held in detention largely for the UK’s administrative convenience, have very little time to prepare a legal case, and have only a few days to appeal if refused. But the claims often involve such sensitive and difficult issues as sexual violence, female genital mutilation, trafficking, and domestic abuse. There is little time for lawyers or other representatives to build the trust with their clients needed for them to explain their claims or to obtain medical or other evidence needed to verify them.
It’s more and more apparent you couldn’t trust Gordon Brown’s moral compass to stop him taking a whizz on the the bathroom rug let alone show some humanity to these people.
Speaking of the devil, the Prime Minister is in this morning’s Telegraph speaking out against assisted suicide. Such deep respect for human life would be laudable, consistent and admirable coming from most people but Gordon Brown was at the centre of a government that assisted at the very least 100,000 Iraqis off this plane of existence.
Is he the right person to be lecturing us that, in high moral tones that ‘I know in my heart that there is such a thing as a good death’? I suppose there’s an argument to be made somewhere that those herds of brown people had good deaths in that they died in the service of the Greater Good (not, unfortunately, the abstract concept but the exclusive club of politicians and business leaders).
Brown’s obvious hypocrisy would be lessened if palliative care centres weren’t having to hold fundraising events and the hospice movement (founded by Brown’s heroine Dame Cicely Saunders) wasn’t scraping to get by. After 13 years of New Labour, many people have anything but ‘a good death’ in this country.
The corollary to an anti-euthanasia stance should be well-funded, universal, humane and dignified palliative care systems, shouldn’t it? His claims to seeing ’such a thing as a good death’ in his heart is one thing, seeing it in his government’s actions is quite another. As with many other things, Brown’s claims to morality on this are engulfed by a greater one. That’s conveniently forgotten, however, when another pitch has to be made to religious voters and Daily Mail readers in an election year.
