A simple question

A simple question today as the Assisted Dying Bill is discussed in the House of Lords. It is not do you want the right to choose the time and means of your death in the face of terminal illness? It is are you prepared to be the elderly vulnerable terminally ill person who is pressurised into requesting death because you are made to feel a burden on family and society?

I predict a riot

Not long after the Brixton riots in 1981I happened to be in Keswick and heard a well known preacher proclaim that the cause of the riots was sin. He dismissed economic or social concerns, the racial tensions and problems with policing in the area. Sin is the cause was his message. In one sense he was right, sin was the cause. However, he chose to define sin purely in terms of personal sin and individual responsibility and dismissed the idea that there may be wider sinful structures at work in the situation. I found it somewhat ironic that here was a man whose ministry was based in one of the wealthiest parts of the city, where he served a large eclectic congregation, pronouncing on one of the poorest and most troubled parts of the same city.

I lived in Brixton following the riots and it didn’t take long to see at first hand some of the underlying issues behind the tensions in the community. On one occasion my parents witnessed a racial attack by a group of white men on a black man in the centre of town. The victim knew how to look after himself and got the better of the others only to be arrested by the police who turned up late to the scene and presumed he was the assailant. My parents tried to speak to the police as they had witnessed the whole incident and were told in explicit language to mind their own business. It was only when my father pointed out that he was a chaplain at Brixton Prison that the police began to take him more seriously. So worried was my mother that she asked me to take her to the police station a week later to find out what had happened to the young black man who had been arrested. It turned out that no one had been charged and the case was closed. 

All this has been brought to mind by some of the follow up to the riots in major cities across the land during the summer. I’ve posted on the riots before.This week the discussion about the riots and their causes has resurfaced and the Archbishop of Canterbury has contributed to the debate in an important piece written for The Guardian: Rioting is the choice of young people with nothing to lose. I thought of the Keswick preacher because following ++Rowan’s article several people on Twitter criticised him for not mentioning sin. I think ++Rowan mentions sin in his article quite frequently, though he doesn’t use the word explicitly because of the audience he is seeking to address. Here is his opening paragraph:

The Guardian's Reading the Riots reports left me with a sensation of enormous sadness. So much of what is recorded here reflects lives in which anger and depression are almost the default setting, thanks to of a range of frustrations and humiliations. Too many of these young people assume they are not going to have any ordinary, human, respectful relationships with adults – especially those in authority, the police above all. Too many inhabit a world in which the obsession with "good" clothes and accessories – against a backdrop of economic insecurity or simple privation – creates a feverish atmosphere where status falls and rises as suddenly and destructively as a currency market: good lives are lives where one's position within a fierce Darwinian hierarchy of style is temporarily secure. Too many feel they have nothing to lose because they are told practically from birth that they have no serious career opportunities.

He continues:

But because many of these people are damaged – by unstable family settings, by education delivered in almost impossible conditions, by what is felt as constant suspicion and discrimination – their way of releasing tension is destructive and chaotic. There is no point in being sentimental: they make appallingly bad, selfish, short-term choices.

The Archbishop is not excusing the actions of the rioters, he clearly condemns the choices made by those who took to the streets. However, ++Rowan goes on to question the values and priorities of a society in which these choices are made:

The question is why such choices seem natural or unavoidable to so many. We may well wince when some describe how the riots brought them a feeling of intense joy, liberation, power. But we have to ask what kind of life it is in which your emotional highs come from watching a shop torched or a policeman hit by a brick.

Nearly three years ago the Children's Society produced its Good Childhood report, a careful analysis of what young people thought constituted a nurturing environment to grow up in. Its conclusions were devastatingly simple. Young people need love. They need a dependable background for their lives, emotionally and socially; a background that helps them take certain things for granted so that they know they don't have to fight ceaselessly for recognition. We should be keeping a sharp eye on working practices that undermine this, and asking how law and society reinforce the right kinds of family stability by training in parenting skills as well as high quality out-of-school activity and care. We should be challenging an educational philosophy too absorbed in meeting targets to shape character. And we should look long and hard at the assumptions we breed into our children about acquisition and individual material profit.

In other words we are an idolatrous society whose worship of the gods of consumerism and money making are reaping their own particular fruits. If that isn’t sin then I don’t know what is.

The Archbishop is not content to sit on the side lines finger wagging like many of the commentators who spouted so much ill considered nonsense in the aftermath of the riots. Nor does he settle for platitudes and misty eyed optimism. ++Rowan presents us as a society with some hard edged truths which we have to face up to if we aren’t to see our inner city streets going up in flames every summer.

Demonising volatile and destructive young people doesn't help; criminalising them wholesale reinforces a lot of what produces the problem in the first place. Of course crime needs punishment, and limits of acceptable behaviour have to be set. The youth justice system has a good record in restorative justice that brings people up sharp against the human consequences of what they have done. We have the tools for something other than vindictive or exemplary penalties.

The big question Reading the Riots leaves us with is whether, in our current fretful state, with unavoidable austerity ahead, we have the energy to invest what's needed in family and neighbourhood and school to rescue those who think they have nothing to lose. We have to persuade them, simply, that we as government and civil society alike will put some intelligence and skill into giving them the stake they do not have. Without this, we shall face more outbreaks of futile anarchy, in which we shall all, young and old, be the losers.

This is the Archbishop doing his job. Speaking prophetically to a nation that needs to wake up before we drift into a state of perpetual anarchy.

An unholy trinity

Earlier this week I entered hell. Bank holiday Monday hell. Before the weekend my iPad experienced a nervous breakdown and I was booked for an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar to exchange it. Unfortunately, my nearest Apple store is at Lakeside shopping centre and so at lunchtime on a bank holiday I headed to an icon of modern day consumerism with another icon of the same tucked under my arm. My journey was surprisingly smooth and I was in and out of the shopping centre with little delay thanks to some excellent service from the Apple staff. Not quite the hell I was expecting.

I know Lakeside well. I served my curacy in a neighbouring parish and was there during the completion of the shopping centre and retail park. I remember my first visit to the site and how impressive the building looked. One thing in particular struck me and that was that Lakeside looked like a temple or a church. The centre of Lakeside is topped by a dome and spire and it reminded me on first viewing of one of the American mega churches from the 1980s.

The image of church or temple is appropriate because Lakeside has become a symbol of our culture’s values and priorities. In the aftermath of the summer riots, which I observed from a distance while on holiday in France, one of the most incisive comments came from French political commentator Agnes Poirer. Many of the foreign papers had taken some time before reporting the story including the French press. This was not a bad thing as it gave them time to reflect in a way that was sadly lacking in many of our media outlets. Poirer, interviewed on the BBC Today programme, argued that the wider social and economic context had to be considered in order to understand the rioting and looting. In a devastating observation she argued that London had become the epitome of inequality in the Western World before going on to suggest that ‘profit, speculation and consumption are Britain’s holy trinity’.

I think Poirer is right. Our culture is obsessed with profit, speculation and consumption. These forces have driven our politics, our economics, our priorities and values as a society. I do not in any way excuse the violence and the looting of the summer’s riots, some of which happened in places I know very well because I’ve lived there and friends and colleagues still do. But I am astonished at the way many of our politicians and commentators refuse to step back and look at the bigger picture. Only this morning the Prime Minister was again reluctant to accept that the behaviour of those in positions of authority and power in our society may bear some responsibility for what took place on our inner city streets.

For decades we have celebrated the Gordon Gekko ‘greed is good’ outlook on life. This attitude crosses the political boundaries. I remember the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when Peter Mandelson was reported as saying ‘we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich‘. No surprise to discover that Mandelson and his chums have spent a good deal of time holidaying with the world’s wealthiest and once out of office many have touted their services to the highest bidder, one describing himself as being like a ‘cab for hire’. It is this culture that led so many of our politicians to think there was nothing wrong with fiddling expenses, decking out houses with the most luxurious goods on the public purse, playing the tax system to best advantage and all the while condemning the 'undeserving poor'.

And then I remember the reason I was heading to Lakeside and my own part in the whole sorry mess we have got ourselves into. I know that I am just as caught up in the profit, speculation and consumption culture as the next person, be they Prime Minister or brick throwing Hoodie. So I find myself driven back to those words from Romans 12:1-2:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. 

Whistleblowing – A lose, lose situation?

The following is a guest post from my wife Kate who is an Associate Lecturer with the Open University.

When I was a child we had a dog who, from time to time, would take himself off on jaunts. We would watch, with a mixture of amusement and frustration, as he would trot past the lounge window, his head turned firmly in the opposite direction, presumably in the vain hope that if he could not see us, we could not see him.

It would appear, judging by the recent phone hacking scandal, that News International have been operating with the same level of blinkered denial – keep looking the wrong way and so will everyone else. Unfortunately that policy is now crashing fairly spectacularly on the buffers. This is not due, however, to any whistle blowing (i.e. revelations of malpractice) by NI staff, but because, initially, of a fairly innocuous story about Prince William having a knee injury.

In a recent article by Nick Cohen in the Observer he notes that not one member of NI’s staff challenged the management and wryly comments that had they done so, “their editor would have fired them and in all likelihood they would never have worked in the media again.” This conclusion does not appear to be without foundation. Cohen points, for example, to the case of Paul Moore, a risk manager for HBOS, who raised concerns about the level of lending in advance of the banking crisis. His reward was to be made redundant and to be ostracised by the banking community ever since.

Cohen makes a plea for the ‘law to save whistleblowers, not silence them’, but theoretically the law does that already. The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (“PIDA”) offers protection for employees making qualifying disclosures from victimisation. It has been recognised for some time that whistle blowing might have averted, for example, the Clapham rail crash or the Ziebrugge ferry disaster, and the enactment of PIDA was an attempt to empower and encourage constructive whistle blowing. Efforts have also increasingly been directed at encouraging corporate bodies to develop transparent policies on whistle blowing and a culture which values early disclosure of malpractice.

Despite this, many employees appear to remain ignorant of the protection available and frightened of reprisals if they raise concerns, perhaps with good cause. Public Concern at Work, (‘PCAW’) a charity set up to advise potential whistleblowers and promote greater awareness of the role and value of whistle blowing, has recently published a report on its website assessing the effectiveness of whistle blowing in the Care Sector. One of its key conclusions is that more proactive promotion of ‘best practice whistle blowing arrangements’ is required, with more transparency and clarity in the process to ensure that it is sufficiently safe and straightforward for employees.

According to Nick Cohen, the Commons Health Committee is suggesting a different emphasis – the imposition by the General Medical Council, and other regulators of the NHS, of punishment where clinicians have failed to speak out. I wrote an article some years ago for the Veterinarian Nursing Journal on the implications of similar requirements under a proposed new Code of Conduct for their profession. My conclusions then were that this could lead to employees being caught in a ‘damned if I do, damned if don’t’ situation: if they did not report suspected malpractice, they risked being in breach of their contracts and, if they did, they risked victimisation, both in the immediate and long term.

Cohen views the need to consider obligatory measures as a sad indictment on a cowardly society, but I have some sympathy with those caught in such a predicament. It seems to me that legal compulsion of care sector employees can only be justified if it is accompanied by clear and supportive guidance and protection for employees and a shift in the mindset of their employers towards whistle blowing.  I suspect this will only happen if further resources are invested in the activities of organisations, such as PCAW, to educate and inform.  Ideally employees should report concerns, not because they have to but because they feel empowered and encouraged to do so in a culture which values public interest disclosure and is not, like my dog, determined to look the other way.     



Article first published on the Open University blog Legal Verdict.

Perspective

One photograph dominated the front page of the newspapers last Thursday morning. The picture of a protester kicking in a glass window on Wednesday’s student demonstration in London.



The picture is a powerful image and encapsulates events on the demonstration as reported by most of the media. No excuse for the violence and vandalism. Dismay amongst the many peaceful marchers whose arguments were undermined. Student leaders scrambling to condemn and explain that they weren’t responsible, apart from a few attention seekers hawking themselves round the television and radio studios claiming the law breaking was justified.

But is this the whole picture? In this case, quite literally, it is not. Here is the scene from a slightly wider angle.



What we see is not massed ranks of students egging on the protester, but a horde of photographers jostling for the best shot. I am not saying this excuses the vandalism, however, it does demonstrate the different perspective given by the bigger picture. To what extent did the presence of so many photographers act as an encouragement to the vandalism? Why aren’t the police, visible behind the photographers, stepping in to stop a criminal act?

Sometimes when we are close in on the action we get a distorted impression or see only part of the picture. We need to step back a bit, see the wider view and get things in perspective in order to make more informed judgements and draw more considered conclusions.

Perhaps this is true for us as Christians. We can be so caught up in, or focused on, a particular issue or situation that we lose sight of the wider view. We fail to see the fuller purposes of God from our limited perspective and occasionally we need to step back and see God’s bigger picture.

(Jonathan Jones in The Guardian has some interesting reflections on why this particular image was so popular amongst the media.)

Muslims - compare and contrast

I was appalled at the attack on MP Stephen Timms by Roshonara Choudhry during a constituency surgery earlier this year. This week Ms Choudhry was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 15 years. Mr Timms is MP for East Ham in the Chelmsford Diocese and is well known for his Christian faith as well as being a hard working MP and former Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the last Labour government.

I’ve followed the events around the stabbing and subsequent trial with interest, not least because of the sensitive issues the case touches on with regard to faith and community relations in East London. Many of my friends and colleagues work very hard as ministers to foster good relations and positive dialogue against a backdrop of incessant rabble rousing by the BNP and other extremist groups. They are not naive about the problems associated with the radicalisation of young Muslims, however, they are greatly disturbed by the stereotyping and scape-goating that would characterise Muslims as the cause of all the ills facing local communities.

Today the papers and blogs are full of details and comments about the case and the content is all too predictable. To highlight the problem here are two examples of blogs commenting on the case and how it has been handled.

Cranmer has been clear about his reading of both the trial and the behaviour of Ms Choudhry and her supporters. Here is a flavour of his comments:

At the sentencing of Roshonara Choudhry, the trainee teacher who attempted to murder Stephen Timms MP, the public gallery erupted with cries of 'Allahu akbar' ('God is great'), 'British go to hell' and 'Curse the judge'.

Quite why they were not immediately arrested for contempt of court is unknown.

Praising their God in a court of law?
Just about acceptable.

Passing opinion on the limited soteriological options of the British?
Well, it might be ‘racist’, but we’ll call it ‘freedom of expression’.

But ‘Curse the judge’? How did that pass without immediate intervention by the Judge?

Miss Choudhry appeared by video-link because she 'refused to accept the jurisdiction of the court'. Why was this permitted? Are all ‘citizens’ of the UK granted this option? Are we not all subjects of Her Majesty, and therefore all subject to the Crown in Court, on whose behalf the Judge presides and dispenses the Queen’s Justice for the maintenance of the Queen's Peace? More 

Contrast Cranmer’s account with that of Minority Thought commenting on press coverage of the same events:

The front page and main story of today's Daily Express is a clear and unsubtle attempt at maintaining the "us and them" mentality which is so often levelled by that paper against Muslims:

MUSLIMS TELL BRITISH: GO TO HELL

The headline refers to the shouts from "a group of men" (according to the Mail) who were sitting in the public gallery during the trial of Roshonara Choudhry, the woman convicted of stabbing Stephen Timms MP earlier this year.

Rather than leading with the story at hand, the sentencing of Choudhry to "life" imprisonment, the Express has chosen to focus on the deranged rantings of a few nutcases in a courtroom instead. Both the Daily Mail and The Sun have also gone with this angle, but neither has chosen to put it across in as brazen a way as the Express.

That there are Muslim extremists who say such things is beyond a doubt. However, the Express' decision to make this the key focus of the story, along with the language used in the headline, is an attempt to imply that these shouts are in some way an expression of what every Muslims thinks about the British.

Can you imagine, for example, what the Express would have done if the men who broke into shouts of "Go to hell, Britain" were Christians? Would the Express have replaced "Muslims" with "Christians" in the headline? Would they even have mentioned it so prominently in the first place? More

Now I am not for a moment dismissing or diminishing the real problems of extremism, violence and terrorism. My family come from Belfast; I grew up there in the mid 1960s and regularly visited family there throughout the troubles. Yet, despite the generalised picture created by media coverage of blood splattered streets, I learnt from personal experience that not all Catholics were out to murder me in my bed and not all Protestants were frothing at the mouth preachers of hate.

What concerns me is the narrative slant that commentators choose to give to particular stories concerning matters of great sensitivity like the Choudhry case. What is it that these commentators are hoping to achieve? What attitudes are they seeking to foster in their readers? What reaction are they hoping to elicit? What values underpin the choice of their words and presentation of the story?

In recent years we have run a course in the diocese as part of our Lent and Eastertide Schools. Living With Other Faiths helps people explore why we should engage with other faith communities and how we can go about doing so. The course objectives are to identify biblical principles for engaging with other faith communities; to develop an understanding of the beliefs and sensitivity to the practises of other faiths; to consider a range of ways of engaging with other faith communities and to identify particular approaches appropriate to participants’ situations.

Approaches like Living With Other Faiths may be dismissed by some, sadly including some Christians, as a typical P.C. response to the issues raised by our multi-faith society. I prefer to see it as just one of many positive responses to our calling as Christians to seek the common good.

Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so
move every human heart [and especially the hearts of the
people of this land], that barriers which divide us may
crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our
divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Ed, faith, marriage and kids.

Ed Miliband became Leader of the Labour Party last Saturday and almost immediately his personal life became public property, or at least that is what the media would have us believe. And so began the exploration of all things Ed including not just his political convictions but his religious beliefs and family life.

In interviews Ed has explained that he doesn’t believe in God, though he respects those who do. There is an interesting summary of Ed’s publically expressed views on faith by The Church Mouse. I think Mouse is a little more cynical in his comment than I would be in saying:

It struck Mouse that Miliband was probably attempting to follow Clegg's line that in some ways he wished he did have a faith, but unfortunately doesn't.  This is designed to make believers feel that they are respected and valued, whilst making non-believers feel that he's also on the side of reason and rationality, no matter how nice it might be to believe in these fairy stories. 
Patronising all round really.  If the truth is that he looked at it and decided it was not true, Mouse would rather he just said that.

I have plenty of friends who express their admiration, even at times envy, of people of faith while not believing themselves.

As much attention has been focused on Ed Miliband’s family life. I think this is a matter of legitimate interest because in his Leader’s speech at the Labour Party Conference Ed spoke at length about the importance and value of family and family life, both for him personally and for society. Some have commented that this commitment to family didn’t stop Ed committing a public act of political fratricide, despite all his statements about how much he loves his brother David. Others have been quick to point out that Ed is not married to his long term partner and the mother of his child. It has also come to light that Ed had not been registered as the father on his child’s birth certificate.

In an interview on Channel 4 last night, Ed explained that he was planning to get married and when his second child is born he will register as the father of his children. He seemed very relaxed, if not laid back, about all this. There was one particular phrase that left me uneasy:

"Justine and I have a very strong bond and actually we've said in the past we intended to get married," he said. "I actually think the British people are very relaxed about whether we're married or not."

It may be a surprise to discover that the reason for my unease is not primarily because of what I believe about marriage as a Christian. I have clear views on marriage as a precious gift from God, but I don’t expect someone who isn’t a Christian to share that understanding of marriage. Nor is it the case that I think any less of Ed’s commitment to his partner than many of our politicians who are married. Let’s be honest, it hasn’t stopped some of them having affairs and others are so committed to marriage that they have decided to have several. No, what concerns me is that this ‘relaxed attitude’ might reflect a general ignorance about the legal state of those who are in committed long term relationships and yet not married.

My wife is a tutor and lecturer in law and she is frequently amazed and disturbed by the number of mature students who are under the clear impression that ‘common law marriage’ is legally recognised in this country; it is not. They assume that their long term partner and they enjoy the same legal rights as those who are married; they do not. The situation is clearly set out in this helpful statement: Marriage, cohabitation and civil partnerships. Once the students realise the true situation they are far from relaxed about whether they are married or not because a false assumption about their relationship has been shattered. Sadly, there are many people in our country who do not know about or understand the implications of not being married until something goes wrong and then it is often too late.

I am also uneasy about the relaxed nature of Ed Miliband’s attitude to being registered as the father of his child. Again, there are important legal implications arising from this situation. These  relate to parental responsibility and the rights of a father who is not registered as the father and not married to the child’s mother. If someone loves their child, then being relaxed about legal procedures that secure that relationship in law would seem pretty foolish.

Now Ed Miliband is an intelligent man and I would expect he is aware of the legal implications of not being married or registered as his child’s father. If he isn’t then that does not bode well for someone offering themselves as a potential Prime Minister, nor for the country they are seeking to lead. I would assume he and his partner have taken appropriate steps to mitigate the legal position. But it is not something to be relaxed about, as too many partners and parents have discovered at great personal cost.

h/t David Keen, Maggi Dawn, Bex Lewis and Martin Beckford for Twitter conversations on this topic.

killer victims

The less edifying of our media outlets are in full cry again. This time it is over the news that Jon Venables, one of the two convicted killers of James Bulger, has been returned to prison for a breach of the license under which he was released. People are demanding to know why Venables has been taken back in to custody and the press are engaged in a hunt to discover what he is supposed to have done. The Sun is heading the chase and an injunction has been sought to prevent information being revealed that might prejudice a future trial. There is also concern that Venables’ new identity might be revealed with the risk of putting his life in danger.

Nick Baines has made some important points on his blog about the Venables’ case and the demands to know what he is accused of doing. Nick rightly points out the following:

I remain puzzled as to (a) why the public needs to know what he has now done, (b) how the public will benefit from such knowledge and (c) why we assume that such knowledge will contribute to the common good of society. I hear the scream for blood very clearly and I recognise the voyeurism that we both gorge on and get fed. But, I have heard no reasonable account of why we should know anything other than that the processes of law are being followed in the interests of society and Venables. (I understand the response of his mother, but are we to be consistent and let every victim of every crime shape the future of the criminal involved? Think through the consequences…)

While agreeing with Nick about the demand for details, I would want to argue that there is a public interest issue in this case. The two boys convicted of James Bulger’s murder have been heralded by some concerned with the justice system as examples of what can be achieved with regard to rehabilitation. Lord Woolf’s decision to reduce their minimum tariff was partly based on the desire not to damage that rehabilitation by exposing them further to the negative impact of a young offender’s institution. Now it seems one of them has raised enough concern to be returned to prison under the terms of his license. This raises issues about the future handling of such cases and public perceptions about justice.

At a time when the prevailing narrative in the media is that the law favours the criminal over against the victim this case is grist to the mill. I think this is a false narrative but the speculation is inevitable. I would want to separate out the legitimate questions about punishment, justice and rehabilitation from the voyeurism of some of the press and public. The recent case of the Edlington brothers, convicted in January of a near fatal assault on two other boys, highlights that the issue of how society deals with these young people remains a pressing concern.

There is an interesting comparison with a case in Trondheim, Norway; the murder of Silje Raedergard (1994) by two 6 year old boys (and possibly a 5 year old), which was handled completely differently. Five year old Silje and friends were playing in the snow on a football pitch. The two boys became aggressive and stripped her, stoned her and then ran off leaving her unconscious in the snow where she died.

The city was stunned by Silje’s death, but what is surprising is the response of the community, which expressed grief and a level of responsibility rather than anger and a desire for revenge. Over the following four years the two boys were given counselling and they were treated as victims rather than killers. A week later the boys were back in school and the parents of other children accepted the situation. Silje’s mother expressed an extraordinary degree of understanding in the midst of her grief:

'I forgive those who killed my daughter. It is not possible to hate small children. They do not understand the consequences of what they have done...I can sympathise with the boys' parents...They must be going through a lot now. I do not know all of them yet, but they are welcome to contact me if they so wish.'

This is what Trond Viggo Torgerson, the Norwegian ombudsman for children, argued:

‘We must all ask ourselves some pertinent questions in order to prevent similar cases. How should we teach ourselves and our children to distinguish between playing games and committing abuse? How can we make our children want to copy our good habits, our good intentions without also copying our conflicts and inadequacies? This is what the Trondheim accident is all about. It does not serve any purpose to blame those who were involved in the accident itself. They are already unhappy.'(Dagbladet, 22 October).

The boys’ identities have never been released by the Norwegian press. One of the boys continues to receive psychiatric support while the other appears to be completely rehabilitated. It is worth noting that the legal age for prosecution in Norway is fifteen years and it is ten years in England and Wales. It is also worth noting that when Silje’s body was found the press chose not to publish photographs or a description of the dead girl, in contrast to the sensationalist reporting of the Bulger case in sections of the British press.

Now my questions are these:

• Can we possibly conceive of our society being able to engage in a discussion about the merits of the way the Bulger case and the Raedergard’s case have been handled?
• Is our media capable of considering the issues raised without a sensationalism engendering blood lust?
• Do our politicians have the courage to raise these difficult matters in a way that doesn’t pander to a law and order populism?

Most importantly; do we want a criminal justice system which is primarily about revenge or rehabilitation?

Update: It is difficult to find out all the facts surrounding Silje's tragic death, partly because of the way the case was handled, and there are conflicting reports about exactly what happened. The autopsy stated exposure as the cause of death. My summary of the case is based on contemporary media reports, including the BBC and The Independent, and on Open University material.

assisted suicide - a relative issue?

As a curate I played rugby for an old boys club. Each Saturday a converted van would draw up beside the pitch and the back would be opened. Inside sat a young man in a wheelchair, paralysed from the shoulders down and dependent on his full time carers to assist with his needs. This young man had broken his neck in the scrum while playing for the old boys and could only watch from his chair the game he had loved to play. The club did all they could to help him, along with family and friends, but not surprisingly occasionally he had severe bouts of depression and spoke about a desire to end his life.

The young man mentioned above came to mind when I first I heard the news reports of the assisted suicide of Daniel James the 23 year old paralysed rugby player. Daniel was taken to a Swiss euthanasia clinic by his parents in order to fulfil his stated desire to die. I can’t imagine what Daniel went through in the time following his accident, nor the pain and turmoil experienced by his loving parents, which led to the decision to end his life. I pray for them as they seek to live with the choices they have made.

Today new guidelines on the issue of assisted suicide have been published by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC. The publication follows many months of lobbying by assisted suicide supporters. Lord Falconer, for example, made a bit of a Charlie of himself recently when he rather arrogantly suggested that he knew better that the Archbishop of Canterbury what constituted Christian compassion when it came to this matter.

One of the most chilling contributions to the debate has come from Baroness Warnock, a trenchant supported of the legalisation of assisted suicide. Writing in The Observer last October she wrote Legalise Assisted Suicide, For Pity’s Sake. The first part of the article was a consideration of the legal implications of the James’ case and was a fairly straightforward rehearsal of the issues. And then came this statement:

But the more crucial argument is this: we have a moral obligation to take other people's seriously reached decisions with regard to their own lives equally seriously, not putting our judgment of the value of their life above theirs. Mr and Mrs James have sadly and dramatically carried out this moral obligation.

Why is it a moral obligation? What is the ethical framework within which Warnock expresses this obligation? Warnock’s argument is the ultimate retreat to relativism – there is no objective moral framework simply the belief that each person should be free to decide what’s best for them. I say belief but it seems to me to be nothing more than an assertion. No explanation is given as to the basis of this opinion and this is pretty worrying coming from someone who for so long has been involved in framing the debate and law on a wide variety of moral issues in our country.

I first studied Warnock’s approach to ethics as a student when I wrote a paper on the Warnock Report (1984). I was looking particularly at what the report had to say about surrogate motherhood but it led to a wider exploration of the methods and assumptions underlying the report’s findings and recommendations. My conclusion was that the report was characterized by a secular, utilitarian and technological world view. The report came out against surrogate motherhood but only on the grounds that there was a danger of commercial exploitation.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at Warnock’s article in The Observer. This is what she said in an interview for Life and Work, the Church of Scotland Magazine.

If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service.

I'm absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die.

So let’s be clear. The reason for supporting assisted suicide/dying is that the person is wasting other people’s lives and wasting the NHS’s resources by continuing to live. A person’s worth is measured by nothing more than this. It’s one small step from saying that people have an obligation to die when they become a burden and another short step to saying that the state has an obligation to get rid of those who have become a burden. Let’s go all the way and make Soylent Green our blue print for the future. Soylent Green is the Charlton Heston film in which people were encouraged to embrace suicide so that their bodies could be turned into food for the masses.

But there is another way of determining a person’s worth. A person’s worth is not defined by their abilities or faculties but by the truth that they are created and loved by God and precious to him and we will be held accountable by God for how we treat them.

An initial response to the DPP's Interim Policy for Prosecutors in Respect of Cases of Assisted Suicide by the Church of England can be found here.

The Church of England's position on Assisted Suicide is set out here.

This is a re-working of an earlier post first published here.

Bible on the beat

I fell asleep last night with the radio on and woke to hear a news item on an Australian police force which has issued officers with their own Bible. This morning I did a quick web search and discovered the story is true. The New South Wales state police force is being issued with its own Police Bible. Christianity Today Australia has an account of the story and includes the following from the Police Commisssioner Andrew Scipione:

"I believe the Police Bible will impact on generations of Police officers to come ..... Every officer who graduates from the Academy in Goulburn is offered a Bible and I would like to think an officer who receives one of these special Police Bibles will one day sit in my seat. The Police Bibles are sure to outlive the current administration."

The Bibles were the idea of the police chaplain Rev Russell Avery who explains:

"Coming from the Air Force I saw how popular the Defence Force Bible is, and wanted our law-enforcement officers to have a similar option available to them."

The Bible includes a police prayer and articles about ethics, service and integrity as well as pictures of serving officers. Police force chaplains will issue the Bibles to officers and the initial print run is 3000.

I wonder what the most read passage of the Bible will be? What about this passage from John 7:44ff:

Some of them wanted to arrest Jesus, but no one laid hands on him. Then the temple police went back to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, 'Why did you not arrest him?' The police answered, 'Never has anyone spoken like this.'

Other suggestions?

The other good thing about waking in the middle of the night was I got to hear Andy Murray winning his latest match in the US Open.