Question Time's Shame
Tim Saward, a man far smarter than I am, once told me that the world moves in enormous great swathes of political opinion. The free-loving, hemp wearing Sixties were a reaction to an overly paternalistic, grim and grey Fifties. The brown and socially oppressive Seventies were a reaction back toward the Right (except of course we had all that trouble with unions.) Anyway, that sort of continued along in a similar path to the Eighties. Two decades worth of children were growing up under the grim eye of the right-wing. Terribly though, as we hit the fag-end of their evil reign, things were looking up and I am not even talking about Tony B.
The Conservatives were doing something about the “troubles” in Ireland. Admittedly, it got nowhere very slowly, but at least it stopped the writ-large proportion of Londoners ducking every time a car’s exhaust broke. The nail bombs had stopped. We were again living in a free and happy paradise. No-one wanted to kill us, no water shortage was going to cause us all to drown, no talk of peak oil, no climate change. There was just the hole in the Ozone layer, which was, allegedly, getting smaller! It was as if the Right had moved Left just enough to accommodate the world, and we were finally able to get on with the task in hand – getting pissed on cheap beer and wondering if Star Trek: Voyager would ever get any better.
Which brings me onto Question Time this week, set in our wonderful Right-Wing homestead - Canterbury. More accurately, the broad man in the pub darts-calibre white shirt, double bridged glasses (the humourless, NHS kind, as opposed to the hip and cool Top Gun style - these were worn without a trace of irony) and facial fuzz to make the cast of Yacht Rock weep like wet children. He is very much the key to reminding me that Mr Saward was right, and despite not realising it, we should have enjoyed 1995-2000 as perhaps the last hurrah for a long while of the Left. For those five years this nation was invulnerable, enlightened and smart. The worst thing our public consciousness had to deal with was Bjork, and even she was seen as a cheery and inoffensive loon. At least that is how hindsight presents itself, as much as a Sandi Thom reminicipackages to the Seventies (curiously omitting fun times with the National Front, the three day week and Vietnam).
So back to my point, if I even had one. This chap was delirious in the same way your average Essex cabbie is, in his nasal, deadpan way, telling the Question Time panel that it was time that “any foreign criminals have forfeited their human rights”. Well. I am sure his sentence would have continued, had he not been shouted down by the near ovatory applause comparable to the degree of moisture on the floor of the front row of a Westlife concert (although Take That fans, older and more incontinent, beat the younger fans in terms of wet-floors, I want this joke to be predicated upon teenage girls experiencing arousal, and not the over twenty-fives, bodies broken through the abuse of listening to Take That, pissing in joy at their comeback tour), would have continued with “…and I think paedophiles should be castrated in the street, bloody nonces, and what’s the deal with black people?”. It would not have been so bad, had the bloke not sounded exactly like Peter Cook’s George Spigott.
Compare this to the booing the rather attractive student had to endure, who responded with the point that - immaterial of crime - all humans have these (I am sure quite irritating) things called Human Rights, and you will see that we no longer reside in an age where people think that creating inequalities in society is a bad thing. Also, she was hot. But moving on.
I was always told in Critical Thinking class that to write a “slippery slope” argument was to succumb to a style of argument that would not look out of place in the Daily Mail, but sadly watching the beating hands of those who quite honestly believe that just because someone is a criminal, they deserve to be tortured, or just because he is foreign, he deserves to be put into a camp leads me to believe that unless people start thinking before they speak and clap at these sort of people, it may lead to the inexorable slide back down the “enlightenment” slope, until we are again treating women as feudal pets below the trading value of oxen, living in mud huts and burning those who “don’t look exactly like us”. You can hear the rallying call of the yokels as they grab their pitchforks and run toward “where them tharr blackie people are”.
All I am saying is that in terms of poetic justice for that man, who I shall appropriately name the “Right Wing Moron”, is that I look forward to the day he travels on holiday to Egypt (not because of anything Egypt has done mind you, it is just I know that 88.95% of all Cabbies holiday there) the day after seeing that, and decide to adopt his policy. We will soon see how he really feels not from the safety and security of his driver side door, his armchair or a seat in the Gulbenkian theatre, but instead being one of those “dangerous individuals” that are publicly castrated in the square.
By Dan Cooper
Copyright May 2006
