Taking liberties

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On Friday, the Prime Minister of England warned people not to “take too many liberties” with the coronavirus guidance which his government has issued. He presumably thought that the official guidance wasn’t sufficiently vague or meaningless, and there is little so vague in life which Johnson cannot, with a few ill-chosen words, make vaguer or more meaningless.

Taken literally, his words mean that people should consider themselves free to take ‘some’ liberties with the advice – which I take to mean free to ignore it – as long as they don’t take ‘too many’, but the definition of how many is too many is a matter which he will leave to that good old British common sense which led thousands of people to congregate on beaches last week. And although the outcome didn’t look exactly like the mass application of common sense, the individual decisions of those people heading to the coast were entirely rational within the context of the PM’s words. Anyone who believed that everyone else was going to follow the government guidance could legitimately set out for the beach (aka taking a few liberties) safe in the ‘knowledge’ that the beach would be otherwise empty. And that leads us to a rather different interpretation of the PM’s words.

He doesn’t really mean that ‘all’ people are free to take ‘some’ liberties at all – what he really means is that a small minority can take as many liberties as they want as long as the vast majority follow the rules. It’s another variation on the ‘one rule for us, another for everyone else’ philosophy which underpins his whole approach. There is nothing particularly risky about any individual taking a trip to the beach (or, for that matter, and choosing a destination not entirely at random, driving to County Durham); the risk arises when thousands individually apply the same ‘common sense’ assumptions to their own decisions. The actions of any one individual may be considered excusable, but the problem with excusing the actions of one is that it becomes difficult to condemn the actions of others for doing the same thing. Or at least, it would be difficult for anyone who applied rationality or a sense of justice and fair play to the question: for those who start out with a perception that some people are privileged and have more rights than others, it’s very easy to do.

What the PM was really telling us on Friday is that the many need to know their place and stay there so that the world is relatively safe for the few.

Justice for the plebs, too

Tweet We may never know exactly what was or was not said in the infamous exchange between Andrew Mitchell and the police at the gates of Downing Street.  There will probably always be at least two versions to choose between.

What we do know though is that at least one policeman lied; he wasn’t even there but gave a statement reporting what he had “heard”.  (Although, of course, the fact that he wasn’t there to hear what was said doesn’t actually conclusively prove that it wasn’t said either!)

To an extent I have some sympathy with Mitchell, who lost his job as a minister and was disgraced for something which he (in all probability) didn’t actually say: and all on the evidence of a policeman prepared to lie.  I might have even more sympathy if he’d been a little more forthcoming with his own version of events; but in legal terms it isn’t up to him to prove his innocence, it’s up to others to prove his guilt.  To date, they have utterly failed to do so.

There’s another question here though, and that’s about how and why the police came to concoct evidence (there must surely have been more than one of them involved - who told the absent witness what he was supposed to have "heard"?).  It all seems to have been done so casually – it must surely raise a question about how common a practise this is.

I would not wish to suggest that all police are corrupt and dishonest; that is patently not the case.  However the knowledge that most people are more likely to believe a policeman than a defendant in the dock – or even more so than a politician – is likely to be a temptation which occurs to more than one policeman, and in more than one set of circumstances, particularly if they “know” what happened and are merely ensuring that the miscreant gets punished.

Mitchell is in the fortunate position of having the public profile, and the support from the media, to get to the bottom of the matter.  All power to his elbow in that endeavour, but I’d be even more supportive if those less able and privileged who had suffered from a similar approach came forward and were given the same opportunity.

Tackling the symptoms

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There are some fine words from Nick Clegg in his foreword to the UK Government’s strategy for social mobility.  Fairness, he says, is a society “Where birth is never destiny”, and he goes on to say, “In Britain today, life chances are narrowed for too many by the circumstances of their birth: the home they’re born into, the neighbourhood they grow up in or the jobs their parents do. Patterns of inequality are imprinted from one generation to the next.”  I think it’s fair, then, to judge the strategy on whether or not it tackles that fundamental unfairness.

He has certainly identified a very important point, which is that we live in a society where life chances are determined more by who our parents are and how much wealth or income they have than by any considerations of talent and ability.  As the document itself states very early on, “The income and social class of parents continue to have a huge bearing on a child’s chances”.

The problem is, though, that although they appear to have identified the cause, the strategy seems to vacillate between describing it as causality and correlation.  I suspect that that is largely because the whole strategy is about dealing with the symptoms, and completely avoids any actions aimed at reducing the underlying inequalities; to fully recognise those as being causal would only serve to underline the failure to tackle them.  In short, the basic inequality is taken as a given, and the government plans to concentrate its efforts on trying to mitigate the effects of that inequality.

I’m not against trying to mitigate the symptoms; anything that helps some is better than nothing.  But the result of this strategy, I fear, is that it cannot and will not live up to the worthy words of its sponsor.  Wealth and privilege will continue to give unfair advantages to the children of the wealthy and privileged.