Soundbites are no substitute for justice

It was just hours before someone declared that justice had been done for Daniel Pelka.  According to the BBC website report, Senior Crown Prosecutor Lisa Windridge said Daniel’s killers had been sentenced for a ''heinous'' crime. ''We are pleased that justice has finally been achieved for Daniel Pelka.''

It hasn’t. Daniel, 4, starved to death by his mother and her partner, died a tragic death as dozens of people failed to notice what was going on.

Justice is not handed out to victims posthumously. Justice is handed out to the criminals, and if we are to have any hope of achieving and maintaining a sensible justice system we need to be able to sort out the differences between crime, punishment, revenge, retribution, public safety, rehabilitation, and any number of other quite difficult ideas.

I have no dispute whatsoever with the 30-year jail sentence in this case. But the process must involve rather more than lock up, throw away the key, hope everybody feels better and can forget what happened.

Sloppy soundbites and turgid thinking provide nothing but comfort blankets for some who may be feeling uneasy.

Royal baby: all circus and no bread

So July 22, 2013 repeats the situation of June 23, 1894, when the royal family had three direct heirs lined up. Not much has been made of this precedent in the Bullshit Media, possibly because the 1894 birth was that of Edward VIII, who proved not to be such a hot royal prospect, and abdicated when he was expected to turn up for work, preferring to shag an American Nazi sympathiser.

Bullshit Media has had a field day dropping its turds this week, gawping and drivelling about how popular the royal circus will be for the next million years or so. Radio 4’s Today programme asks republicans why the public seems, as it does seem, so comfortable with the monarchy.

The answer is that the public feels, justifiably or not, comfortable enough at the moment, and will happily applaud a moderately well organised circus decently stocked with a baby script and clown princes. The monarchy’s weakness will show only when the public doesn’t feel comfortable with life; when the bread issues – unemployment, homelessness, food prices, getting killed abroad for no good reason – become acute and the circus looks like a piss-take.

In tough times an overpaid family which does little but prance about in helicopters and procreate may find that no one gives a flying f**k about them, and would rather turn their royal mansions into publically owned museums.

Ding dong! Ask not for whom the bell should have been tolling...

In the old public school and media circles I once inhabited, chaps would talk about life as if everything was a sporting event and then assess how people had performed during it. Thus reporter x would be deemed to have had a Good War, or a politician would have had a Good Election (without necessarily winning).

So far then, who’s having a good Thatcher Funeral, and who’s having a bad one?

The Thatcherite Right look they’re having a Bad one. The Socialist Workers Party has got it totally wrong.  Russell Brand has written the defining piece so far, and Ed Miliband is having a Good One.

I’m watching it all from my sick-bed (actually housebound, but pottering and tottering).

The Thatcherite right was caught out by a successful campaign to make Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead, a 1939 song by Judy Garland from the film The Wizard Of Oz, top of the pops in the week Thatcher died.  The more they protested, the more successful the campaign became.  The more successful the campaign became, the more they protested. As a non-drinking alcoholic, I can recognize the symptoms: they couldn’t let go.

Russell Brand, a fellow non-practising addict, wrote a beautiful essay in The Guardian which showed why funerals are useful for the living. We sort out our attitudes to death, and to life, the gap between being born and dying. If we are lucky, we can experience the sort of empathy Brand was able feel for the frail old lady watering the roses who had once been a mighty world figure.  We learn about humility, and change.

Ed Miliband won deserved plaudits for a Commons speech  that noted the deep divisions that over Margaret Thatcher’s record as a politician and respected the mourning process, and won more plaudits for leaving it at that.

The supposedly Marxist Socialist Workers Party got it completely wrong, deciding to celebrate the death of the frail old lady watering the roses.  Marxism, and I’m happy to call myself a Marxist, is not humanist, and Marxists believe that class struggle has more social importance than idealized individual humans, polishing their individual humanist egos. But in the face of death, Marxists always support life.   From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! , a key aspiration of communism, is entirely about supporting life.

I downloaded the Judy Garland song. I think it is fair enough, if the Thatcher funeral is to be a public, participatory event, to register my dissent from public adulation of the deeds of Margaret Thatcher and that the download did that effectively.

Then a friend posted online: “Thatcherism or the death of Thatcher has brought out the wide spread and contagious disease known as 'immensely passive aggressive assholism' on Facebook threads across the country. Also known as 'I really judge and hate everything you stand for but I'm gonna be polite and pretend like I don't know that we are insulting each other whilst talking as though I am a professor of political theory,' disease. There is no known immunisation but symptoms are relieved by getting involved in your own community and getting off of Facebook.”

She has nailed the paradox. She’s right about the passive aggressive assholism. She’s wrong in that this might be a good week to just be polite and try not to insult anyone. Her antidote to all this bad behaviour – get involved in your own community – is helpful. Thatcher’s funeral, just like anybody else’s, reminds that we all have to die and death is a sad business for those left living.  And the way we move on is by helping each other.

There is, after all, such a thing as society. Whoever said there wasn’t?