Another reason to be nice to your turkey this Christmas

There are lots of reasons for eating turkey meat at Christmas: pound-for-pound, turkeys are a cheap way of feeding a lot of people; turkeys are traditional at Christmas (well since the 1960s anyway); and there are lots and lots of recipes, online and in books, for how you can improve the tasteless dry meat of the turkey. The last reason gives the game away: no-one enjoys the taste of a turkey. I have asked numerous people and have yet to find a single one who believes that roast turkey tastes better than roast chicken, goose or duck, or roast beef or lamb. People eat turkey for non-food reasons - to stuff themselves with tasteless food and to conform to some idiot tradition. So follow the words of the great Brummie poet Benjamin Zephaniah and be nice to your turkey this Christmas.

See also: Have yourself a merry/melancholy/some other emotion Christmas

Human rights and human wrongs

Britain is the only country in the World in which there is a sustained political campaign against the idea that its citizens should have human rights. There are of course many countries which abuse, torture, murder or neglect their inhabitants. But almost all have some written guarantees of citizens’ rights in their constitutions and/or are signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) and (in the case of all European countries except Belarus) its European equivalent, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

This campaign against human rights is puzzling for two reasons. In the first place, the United Kingdom played an important part in drafting both the UNDHR and the ECHR. The lead role in both was played by Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, who, as Lord Kilmuir, ultimately became Lord Chancellor in the Conservative government led by Sir Anthony Eden. The UK acceded to the ECHR in 1951, and also supported the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights, which was set up in 1959. The second reason is that England produced some of the earliest declarations of human rights in World history, with the Magna Carta of 1215 and the Bill of Rights of 1689. Some of the clauses in these documents, particularly the right that punishment should only follow the due process of law, appear in both the UNDHR and the ECHR.

Human rights laws are not abstract statements of philosophy: both the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were a practical response to the experience of tyrannical government. They were an assertion of the minimum standards that citizens (or, in the case of the Magna Carta, ‘free men’) should expect in their dealings with those in power. The UNHDR and the ECHR were likewise a response to tyranny, albeit one far more evil than those of Kings John and James II. Nor are statements of rights some strange innovation: all public laws define rights and obligations for classes of people. For instance, landlord and tenant acts define the rights of each group, and the actions they are obliged to carry out (paying rent, maintaining the property etc). Likewise, human rights laws define rights (in this case of the people living within a territory) and the obligations of the governments of that territory.

Why then the opposition to human rights laws? One reason is that the UNDHR and the ECHR are international, with the ECHR enforced by a European court comprised of judges from different countries. Citizens in countries which have signed the Convention (ie every European country except Belarus) can appeal to the European Court of Human Rights if they believe their rights under the ECHR have been breached by the actions of their national government. Even though the European Court of Human Rights has no connection with the European Union, it still includes the dread word ‘European’ in its title, which is enough to enrage the xenophobes on the extreme right-wing of British politics. This opposition extends to the 1998 Human Rights Act, even though this had the aim of repatriating cases from the European Court of Human Rights. Before the Human Rights Act, the UK did not have an legally-binding declaration of human rights, with the result that there were many appeals to the Court from the UK. One of the aims of the Human Rights Act was to reduce the number of these appeals by writing the ECHR into British law, so that our Supreme Court could adjudicate in place of the European Court of Human Rights. This has been successful, and the number of applications from the UK to the Court has halved in the last two years.

A second possible reason for the campaign against human rights is the fear of judicial activism, in which policy decisions are made by judges rather than elected legislators. This is a reasonable fear, based on the ghastly example of the US Supreme Court, which has become de facto the most important legislative body in the USA. Issues which in European countries have been decided by parliaments (like abortion law reform, the funding of political parties and public health insurance) have all been decided in the USA by a highly-politicised group of judges. However, the European Court of Human Rights has so far avoided this kind of judicial activism, and has tried to take account of the variations in the moral values of different European states. In any case, campaigners against human rights have grossly exaggerated the degree to which the Court has made rulings that contradict UK government policy. Cases of this kind are extremely rare, as shown in this expert blog post by Merris Amos:
http://ukconstitutionallaw.org/tag/european-court-of-human-rights/.

Reporting of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights has often involved not just exaggeration, but also outright lies. Merris Amos cites the case of three convicted murderers serving whole-life prison sentences who appealed to the Court on the grounds that such sentences constitute ‘inhuman or degrading punishment’ under Article 3 of the ECHR. The Court ruled that whole-life sentences were compatible with Article 3 provided that there was a possibility of reviewing the sentence after (it suggested) 25 years in prison. A review, of course, is not the same as a release. This did not stop the Telegraph reporting that the Court had concluded that whole life tariffs were inhuman and degrading treatment. The Times reported that the Court had ruled ‘that whole-life sentences for the most notorious murderers are unlawful.” The Sun described the judgement as “a bombshell ruling banning British courts from giving our worst killers whole-life sentences.”

This dishonesty is a clue to the third and possibly the main reason for the campaign against human rights laws: a commitment to corporate-compliant government. Human rights laws aim to prevent governments from committing arbitrary and unjust actions against their citizens. They thereby challenge the power not just of governments, but also of the vast corporations that increasingly dominate policy-making. Oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch (who owns the Times and Sun) will therefore tend to favour governments which give them a free run. This is hardly a popular policy, and deception is therefore required to help the public surrender their rights.

See also:
Xenophobia against who?

Living the dream

Dreams are supposed to give you messages about your secret desires and fears. If this is the case, then what I most desire/fear is boredom. My dreams in recent years have become staggeringly dull. The dullest of all was experienced two nights ago. In the dream, I was working in an office. The other people there were friendly but unstimulating. The office-building was a drab three-storey building from the 1950s with long corridors. There must have been a factory behind the office-block because I saw large groups of workingmen arrive and leave through some ornate gates in front of the building. In the dream, I was still living with my parents in Shirley, and I would catch a number 18 bus from a stop on the Stratford Road to get to the office, which seemed to be somewhere in Birmingham. The dream was devoid of any mystery or sense of strangeness, except that the number 18 bus never seemed to arrive, and I was forced to take other buses with unfamiliar routes and destinations.

It is possible, of course, that dreams do not reveal desires or fears, but just re-assemble new and old memories into narrative strings. I did once work in a 1950s office-block in front of a factory during a university vacation in 1967. This was repetitive work using a primitive adding machine called a ‘comptometer’, recording the orders for ice-cream collected by the team of saleswomen in the office who were on the phone all day to various shops. I caught the number 18 bus to work not at that time, but later in my life when I lived and worked in Birmingham. What evoked these memories and connected them to present experience? Perhaps it was the realisation that although my life includes satisfaction and stimulation, it also has its share of tedium.

The ratio of tedium to stimulation has shifted in the last week with the end of my teaching this year for the University of the Third Age (U3A). This involves leading a two-hour session once a fortnight to a group of very bright retired people. Each session deals with a different topic in social sciences, such as religion, learning and skills, crime, and  ageing. I have previously studied only a few of these topics, and so most sessions require a frantic search through the relevant social science writing and recent research to assemble my presentation. This is certainly stimulating mentally, and so are the following discussions. Teaching starts again in January, with a session on happiness. So my dreams should become less mundane next month.

A bar in La Herradura

There came a point in the life of our family when we could afford to go on holiday to a villa with a swimming pool. So in April 1994, we flew to Malaga, picked up a hire-car, and drove to a villa on a hillside overlooking the sea near the village of La Herradura. After a week there, we moved for the second week to a villa in a quiet street near the centre of Nerja. This was a happy time. My children were nine and five years old, and were full of curiosity and excitement. The villas were excellent, and the surrounding area has many fascinating places to visit. My wife and I could lie on our bed in the villa at La Herradura at night, and look out across the sea at the distant flickering lights of fishing boats. We travelled to Frigiliana (a beautiful white village full of flowers), visited  the Alhambra, threw snowballs at each other on the Sierra Nevada, wandered round the old city of Almuñécar, and travelled through the white mountainside villages of Las Alpujarras. We visited the caves of Nerja and strolled along the Balcón de Europa. We ate fresh fish cooked in a small café on the beach.

One day I walked down to the village centre of La Herradura, and went into a local bar for some beer. Sitting against the bar, smoking, was a gloomy-looking Englishman. He told me he was not on holiday, but was a local resident. “I left England because the country’s going to the dogs”, he said. “It’s full of bloody immigrants. They don’t learn our language and don’t learn our ways”. “Do you speak Spanish”, I asked a little later. “No, never bothered”, he replied.

The next week in Nerja, I saw a more impressive example of the English abroad. It was clear that the town had a substantial population from North-West Europe. The British had contributed to the culture of the place in a positive way. There were some pleasant cafes selling salads, tea and cakes, and an English-language bookshop. An English-language  newsletter reported meetings of ramblers (walking in Winter rather than Summer), a local history group and an animal welfare society. The British residents were essentially re-creating the middle-class life of their home country in a foreign land. But their very success in this task may have impeded their participation in the general life of Spanish society. Did the English immigrants to Spain ‘bother’ to learn Spanish? The magazine advertised Spanish classes, but it is hard to become fluent in a second language, particularly when you start learning late in life.

I too was struggling to learn Spanish. On the last week we stayed in Nerja, I saw a big headline in one of the Spanish papers. I translated it to read that Ayrton Senna was dead. ‘That can’t be true’, I thought. 'I must have made a mistake'.