One or two things in yesterday's (23 March 08) Observer newspaper raised my eyebrows for me:
It's not that the fears expressed are unreal. Global terrorism is a threat, Israel and Palestine really do menace each other's existence, colonialism isn't an innocent legacy and so on.
— Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, We live in a culture of blame – but there is another way
Does the archbishop really believe that Israel menaces Palestine's existence? Israel certainly often handles its relations with the Palestinians brutally and the kind of Palestine it says it wants to co-exist with may well not be the kind of Palestine that the Palestinians would be willing to settle for. But does it menace Palestine's existence, meaning that Israel rejects a two-state solution while pretending to want it? It would be interesting to see the archbishop substantiate such an assertion.
As regrettably often with the archbishop's utterances, I have only the haziest of ideas what he means by writing that "colonialism isn't an innocent legacy". This is presumably different from saying that the behaviour of the colonial powers was bad in some undefined respects, which would be a statement of the obvious, even if it's a statement that would need extensive qualification. But how a legacy can be 'innocent' is far from clear.
Excessive gaming, viewing online pornography, emailing and text messaging have been identified as causes of a compulsive-impulsive disorder by Dr Jerald Block, author of an editorial for the respected American Journal of Psychiatry.
— David Smith, 'Addiction to internet "is an illness"'
Not sure what text messaging has to do with the internet, unless sending the occasional text message from one's computer instead of from a mobile telephone is an especially morbid species of behaviour? However, as an incurable addict myself, I can't dispute Dr Block's description of the negative 'repercussions' of the addiction, including "arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation and fatigue", not forgetting death from blood clots caused by sitting for long periods at the keyboard. Better close down Windows, close the windows, and go for a long walk in the snow.
The bill proposes to legalise the creation of hybrid embryos, make it easier for gay couples to access IVF and encourage the development of stem-cell therapies. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of the Catholic church in England, last night told Sky TV there should be a free vote 'because Catholics and others will want to vote according to their consciences'….
— Gaby Hinsliff, Brown faces deepening revolt over embryo bill (front page lead story)
If the [Roman] Catholic church, in the person of its leader in England, has undergone a sudden Damascene conversion to the doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual conscience, a quintessentially Protestant idea, then I suppose we should rejoice. I fear, though, that what the cardinal really wants is that the prime minister should 'allow' Labour MPs who are Catholics to vote in accordance with the instructions and teachings of the Catholic church, as conveyed by himself, and not in obedience to the instructions of the party whips, still less to the dictates of their consciences. It's debatable whether this would constitute a more "free" vote than one governed by a three-line whip. However, the cardinal seems to have felt a little queasy about his apparent adoption of individual conscience as guide to action: in a subsequent comment to Sky News he exhorted MPs to vote in accordance with something that he called their "informed consciences", presumably meaning informed by himself — an almost Orwellian bit of obfuscation, using the language of freedom to mask the reality of authoritarianism. [Update, 27 March 08: Having graduated from urging that MPs be allowed to vote in accordance with their consciences to specifying that these appendages should of course be 'informed' consciences, but still apparently uneasy about even that formulation, the good cardinal has now started saying that MPs should vote "in accordance with their faith". Now we're getting there!]
Downing Street is said to be torn over whether to make further concessions to accommodate Catholic ministers, and sources said it could be weeks before a decision is made…. Despite the church's opposition, some leading Labour Christians say there is a religious argument for the bill on the grounds that it could save lives.
— Ibid.
Journalists who serve up vague speculation under cover of the passive tense ("is said to be"), or by attribution to completely unidentified 'sources', need to be sent off to a boot camp for re-training. Said by whom? What kind of sources? Unless we are given at least some vague indication of where these stories came from, we're bound to suspect that the speculation is home-grown and the sources for it fictitious.
The claim by "some [again unidentified] leading Labour Christians" that justifying the bill by reference to its potential for saving lives is a specifically 'religious argument' is beyond parody.
Influenced by the belief that there is still a natural anti-Tory majority to be found among Labour and Lib Dem voters combined, the Alternative Vote is beginning to look attractive.
A third, and especially ominous symptom of defeatism, is the noise of various Labour factions trying to conduct a postmortem of this government before they actually have a corpse to bury. The left predict that Gordon Brown is doomed unless he breaks with all things Blair. From the other side of the party, he is urged to be more aggressively reforming of public services and that is the advice he appears to be taking.
— Andrew Rawnsley, Mr Brown's getting a grip on Number 10, but not on voters
Is some disaffected Observer sub-editor avenging himself on poor Mr Rawnsley by injecting such sloppiness into his magisterial prose? The first sentence quoted starts with an unforgivable hanging participle (an electoral system can't, obviously, be influenced by a belief); the second has a distractingly misplaced comma; and the last heaps more baggage onto the quasi-adjectival participle 'reforming' than the traffic will bear, especially when a minor rephrasing would so easily avoid it ("he is urged to reform public services more aggressively").
As for our hero [Jonathan Powell], the only risk attached to promoting his peacemaking skills [publishing his memoir of his role in the Northern Ireland peace process] in a week when he might, more properly, have been reflecting on his part in the deaths of 175 British soldiers, was the obvious similarity of this diversionary tactic to Jo Moore's very good day to bury bad news. But where brazen acts of spin are concerned, the public has become more tolerant. Jo Moore's fate was universal contempt, followed by resignation, followed by atonement in a north London primary school. Jonathan Powell, on the other hand, has been indulged with a week of self-glorification, during which he depicted himself as a wry yet principled drudge, whose role in pushing this country into an illegal and catastrophic war has been hugely misunderstood.
— Catherine Bennett, They led us into a disastrous war, yet still they prosper. Why?
Here Ms Bennett helps to breathe new life into the triple misconceptions that Jo Moore, Stephen Byers's special political adviser at the department of transport from 1999 to 2002, (a) said that 9/11 was "a good day to bury bad news" (she didn't), (b) committed a grave sin by pointing out that if bad news had to be released, it was prudent to release it at a time when the media were preoccupied with other things (a perfectly sensible observation with which anyone responsible for the presentation of information would have to agree) and (c) lost her job for saying it (she didn't).
What Jo Moore actually said in the celebrated e-mail was: It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses? The largely synthetic outrage that this generated was prompted not by the observation itself, reflecting an irreproachable judgement about timing, but her temerity in openly stating it. We tolerate all sorts of more or less Macchiavellian tricks of numerous trades designed to put ourselves in the best possible light and to minimise the damage when we have to admit to deficiency or failure; what we can't tolerate is owning up to them. In any case, it wasn't this that eventually cost Ms Moore her job, as Ms Bennett seems to believe: despite the uproar and hypocritical indignation, Jo Moore's indiscretion was officially judged to deserve nothing worse than a ticking off; sacking her was formally ruled out, and rightly so. What put paid to her appointment, several months later, was the increasingly obvious impossibility of continuing the poor relationship between Ms Moore as a political adviser and the civil servants of the department to whom she was inclined to issue orders going well beyond her authority (for example, she seems to have tried to instruct departmental officials to plant unfavourable stories about Bob Kiley, the then transport commissioner for London; the civil servants very properly refused). There were also controversies over the announcement that Mr Byers was forcing Railtrack into administration, a question of selective minute-taking at a meeting, and so forth. No doubt the 'bad day to bury bad news' uproar, even if based on a misquotation, helped to undermine her position, and no doubt that position became ultimately untenable for a number of other and more weighty reasons. Jo Moore broke a number of fundamental rules and paid the correct price for doing so. It's just a curious paradox (or, as the hacks would say these days, 'ironical') that what she's almost universally remembered for, including by Catherine Bennett, is at worst a minor misjudgement, and not for the much more serious errors that actually brought her down.
But there are lots of good things in the Observer, too, as usual.
Brian
The Cardinal who heads the Roman Catholic church in Scotland has strongly attacked a government Bill shortly to come before the house of commons and demanded that MPs be given a 'free vote' on it. According to the BBC's report, –
The leader of the Catholic church in Scotland has urged Gordon Brown to rethink "monstrous" plans to allow hybrid human-animal embryos. Cardinal Keith O'Brien will use his Easter Sunday sermon to launch a scathing attack on the government's controversial proposals. He will also call on the prime minister to allow Labour MPs a free vote on the issue at Westminster. Mr Brown has said the bill would improve research into many illnesses. Supporters of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill believe hybrid embryos could lead to cures for diseases including multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease.
Cardinal O'Brien has already come under attack for allegedly trying to tell MPs how they should vote. He has reportedly replied, with some justice, that all he has done is express a view on the Bill and urge that MPs should be allowed to vote on it according to their consciences. Labour MPs, including several ministers, who are also Roman Catholics will be in a difficult position if their party leaders in the House insist on putting out three-line whips on this Bill (the Tories and the LibDems have apparently already decided to 'grant' their members a free vote). If Catholic Labour ministers defy the whip and vote against the provisions of the Bill to which the Cardinal has taken such strong objection, they may well have to resign their ministerial posts; if they obey the whip and vote for the measure, they will presumably find themselves 'disciplined' by their own church, perhaps even — who knows? — excommunicated from it. Not a happy situation to be in.
We may question whether the Cardinal is really asking Catholic Labour MPs to vote, or to be allowed to vote, according to their consciences: presumably he is implicitly, although not in so many words, telling them to vote according to the instructions of the Roman Catholic church, whether or not their consciences happen to agree with those instructions. And since no-one is forced to belong to or to conform to the requirements of the Roman Catholic church (in this country, anyway), that's surely fair enough. If you join the club, or even if you're born a member, you observe its rules. If you don't like them, you can always leave. And if you remain a member but persistently flout the rules, you get thrown out. Nothing wrong with that.
The position of the party whips, however, is rather different. They too instruct their fellow-MPs how to vote, with a corresponding threat of excommunication from their party if they disobey. But in the case of the MPs, excommunication — withdrawal of the party whip — is likely to lead to the disobedient MP losing his party's endorsement at the next election, which means another candidate for the party being selected for his or her seat. In most cases, this means that the erring MP will lose the seat, unless he has managed to build up a significant personal following of voters willing to continue to vote for him against the official candidate of the party — and even in the rare cases where this has happened, it's even more rare for the rebel to hold the seat as an independent, or candidate of a different party, for more than one election. Thus the instructions of the party whips are effectively backed up by the threat that continued disobedience will ultimately mean the end of the rebel's political career. This is the political equivalent of blackmail: demanding not money but parliamentary obedience with menaces.
Which prompts the question: why is this not a contempt of parliament and a gross breach of parliamentary privilege? How dare the party bosses decide in their infinite wisdom and benevolence whether or not to 'allow' hundreds of elected members of parliament to vote on every measure according to their own judgement and conscience? There's certainly a case in a parliamentary democracy for party loyalty and even party discipline: some degree of party unity and general adherence to the core values and policies of each major party are essential if government is to function in an orderly way, and if the voter can have reasonable confidence that he is voting for (or against) a reasonably coherent body of political actions and measures likely to be backed by each party's representatives in parliament. But consider the position in the United States: party discipline is far looser, partly because the party machine in each state is much more independent of the party machine at the centre than is the case in Britain, but also because the failure of the executive (the president and cabinet) to get its legislation through the Congress because of rebellions on the part of the relevant party's Senators or Congressmen can't lead to the collapse of the government, as it can in Britain. Consequently the president and the party leaderships are forced to exercise persuasion in order to get their way in Congress: they can't simply issue instructions to the members of their party and assume that 95 per cent of the flock will automatically obey, whatever they might think privately.
More than anything else, it's the power of the whips over their MPs in Britain that has led to the collapse of the power of parliament effectively to hold the government to account, to head off reckless and ill-judged action by a headstrong executive even if a substantial body of opinion in parliament individually has doubts about it, and ultimately to dismiss a ministry and insist on the substitution of another. On top of this seizure by government of control over parliament, we have the effective control of the whole government by the prime minister, who can — and often does — dismiss any minister at will and whose immense power of patronage makes him almost wholly invulnerable, at least until he — or she! — so abuses this personal power that a critical mass of hostility builds up within the Cabinet sufficient to force an over-authoritarian prime minister from office. But this is a rare and politically cataclysmic event; and anyway the ultimate safeguard is in the hands of ministers (if they are brave and conspiratorial enough to use it), not their back-bench MPs. It's true that back-benchers can very occasionally mount a rebellion big enough to defeat a government, but almost never on a vote of confidence, nor on an issue of such momentous importance that defeat on it would force the government to resign.
How then to restore parliament's independence of government, and its power to hold government to account?
The first thing might be to establish the principle that defeat in the house of commons never obliges a government to resign, however important the issue, provided that parliament continues to vote supply to enable the business of government to be carried on. Back-bench MPs would no longer be vulnerable to the argument that if a rebellion leads to a government defeat, the government will be forced to resign and call fresh elections at which the rebels' seats might be at risk and their party thrown out of office.
Secondly, a way needs to be found to break the power of party headquarters at Westminster to dictate to constituency parties which candidates they may or may not adopt. All three of the serious (i.e. potentially governing) parties would need to force this fundamental change on their national leaders through the internal procedures available in each party's rule book, mainly no doubt concluding at the party's annual conference.
Thirdly, there needs to be an amendment to Erskine May, the parliamentary rule-book, to the effect that any member of parliament who seeks to influence the vote of another member by threatening him, directly or indirectly, with any form of action against him, will be held to be in contempt of parliament and will suffer the penalties laid down for such contempt.
As a tailpiece, I foresee that some readers of this will be tempted to argue that the objectives I propose could most easily be achieved by substituting proportional representation (PR) for First Past the Post as the system for elections to the house of commons, since this would lead to a situation in which no single party would ever have an overall majority in the house of commons. Thus all decisions would have to be made by a combination of members of different parties who would not be subject to coercion but would need to be persuaded on the merits of each individual issue. My own view, expressed at no doubt tedious length in several earlier posts and comments in this blog, is that any such benefits from PR would be more than outweighed by its negative consequences, including especially the abolition of the power of the electorate to choose a government with a pre-defined set of policies, and the substitution of the power of a group of politicians to choose a government and a set of government policies after the election in a process of bargaining that would conclude with a government for which not a single voter had voted, and a set of policies which had not even been devised when the electorate went to the polls. I know that many sensible and liberal-minded people strongly disagree about this: but I hope that those who comment here will resist the temptation to re-start a debate on PR, concentrating instead on other ways to restore the authority of parliament and to break the power over our elected MPs of the prime minister, ministers and above all the whips.
Brian
A friend (who understandably wishes to remain anonymous) has set me the following exam question:
Having put in place laws against incitement to religious hatred, the Government now proposes to repeal the law against blasphemy. How far in making derogatory remarks about the founder of Islam would that entitle one to go? Till now I've been very careful, when quoting to my students from Dante or Tasso or Camoens concerning the Prophet (Peace be upon him), to make it plain that those poets' views are not necessarily my own (even when they are!). I'm pretty clear about which side of the line the Danish cartoons would fall, but how about Gustave Doré's illustration from Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno XXVIII, 29,30) showing a naked Prophet ripping his breast apart? The whole of Inferno XXVIII is dangerous stuff, unspeakably blasphemous to any Muslim, and easily viewed as incitement to religious hatred. As for the illustration, well…
The essential query is 'When does blasphemy lay itself open to interpretation as incitement to religious hatred?' The follow-ups are 'What about the great literature and art of the past?' and, as David Lodge would say, 'How far can you go?' — and, just as important, 'How far dare you go?'
Just to get you away from Russia, NATO, Obama bin Laden and the rest for a wee moment…
My friend has also sent me his own blood-curdling translation of the relevant passage from the Inferno, but to reproduce it here would probably be as much as my life's worth; as bad as, if not worse than, reproducing the celebrated Danish cartoons. But the reference above should allow any seekers after truth or blasphemy to look it up: you can get a rough idea from this, and, as to the text, here's a clue.
The first comment to make in response to this dodgy challenge is that the present blasphemy law offers no protection to Islam, nor to any other religion apart from Christianity, and within Christianity only to the Church of England: the BBC's account makes it clear that it is 'restricted to protect the "tenets and beliefs of the Church of England."' So its repeal won't affect any other religion, church or sect. There have been a few vague proposals to extend it to cover all religions, or to the main religions by name, but in the light of the widespread view (which of course I share) that any law against blasphemy is an anachronism and an unwarranted abridgement of the right to freedom of speech, any extension of the existing law should and would be fiercely resisted. The discriminatory nature of its present application can therefore, in my opinion, be cured only by repealing the whole wretched thing. (The last conviction and prison sentence under it in England was in 1922, and the last prosecution under it in Scotland was in 1843, so the practical effects either of its continued presence on the statute book or of its eventual repeal are or would be purely symbolic.)
So we come to the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, in which –
29A …“religious hatred” means hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of religious belief.
Acts intended to stir up religious hatred
29B (1) A person who uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred. [Emphasis added]
According to Wikipedia, the original draft of the Bill was qualified by House of Lords amendments –
which have the effect of limiting the legislation to "A person who uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening… if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred". This removed the abusive and insulting concept [in the original text, taken from the Public Order Act 1986], and required the intention – and not just the possibility – of stirring up religious hatred.
Critics of the Bill (before the amendments [inserted in the House of Lords] adding the requirement for the intention of stirring up hatred) claimed that the Act would make major religious works such as the Bible and the Qur'an illegal in their current form in the UK. Comedians and satirists also feared prosecution for their work… Supporters of the Bill responded that all UK legislation has to be interpreted in the light of the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of religion and expression, and so denied that an Act of Parliament is capable making any religious text illegal."
The intention test also presumably precludes action under the Bill against pre-existing works of literature, whether religious or secular. Dante seems to be off the hook.
So to be guilty of an offence under the Act, it's necessary both (1) to use threatening words or behaviour in public, and (2) to intend those threatening words or that threatening behaviour to 'stir up hatred' against a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of it. I doubt whether using insulting words about the Prophet, or Jesus, or any other religious figure, real or imaginary, would in itself qualify under either part of that test. Whether the courts would agree, however, is of course another matter.
Finally, is the Act, with such heavily circumscribed application, really necessary at all? Threatening words or behaviour deliberately designed to stir up hatred of any group, whether or not religious, would seem on the face of it to be more than adequately criminalised by the Public Order Act 1986, which provides in its very first Section that –
A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he —
(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.
Tipping religion — or the absence of it! — into this capacious pot seems both unnecessary and undesirable: clogging up the statute book with virtually meaningless gesture politics. Despite the faintly comical inclusion in the definition of groups protected from hatred by the Racial and Religious Hatred Act of persons defined by their lack of religion, the general impression given by having such an Act at all is that religious groups of all kinds both need and deserve special protection from the stirring up of hatred of them by others. Of course the violent animosity frequently exhibited by one group of religious people against another group of marginally different religious people — Northern Ireland, Iraq, Israel-Palestine come to mind — might be thought to require a specific law to restrain it. What though can surely not be justified is any protection of religion itself from criticism, however vigorously expressed, and including mockery. In a free society, nobody, even the religious, has any right to automatic and unearned 'respect' from others, nor any right to legal protection against being offended by what others say or do, subject only to the laws of the land.
It will be a sad day for our freedoms and our democracy when we are legally prevented from asserting publicly that in the 21st century, all religious belief and practice has on balance an overall negative effect on human happiness: that ancient writings containing social and moral commandments for communities of an earlier age in conditions quite different from our own should not be regarded as having supernatural or universal authority and that their prescriptions each require rational justification before they can properly demand to be respected: that the founders of religions, like everyone else, can't be immune from rational assessment of their behaviour and teachings in the light of reason and of contemporary values and knowledge; and that the use of violence or compulsion to impose any form of religious practice or belief on others against their will is totally unacceptable. It's more than ever necessary to assert that our understanding of the kind of people we are and our ability to manage the world we live in depend on the principle that we should believe, and act on, only those propositions for which good evidence exists and which are probably true or valid in the light of well documented human experience, at least until further experience or evidence demonstrates the contrary; and that human progress and understanding are impeded by belief in propositions that are improbable and for which no reliable evidence exists. If this means (as clearly it must) rejecting as improbable and unsubstantiated the existence of a supernatural creator, supernatural interference in the natural order, the survival of the human personality after death and the possibility of resurrection from the dead, so be it. It can't seriously be maintained that insistence on these basic rational criteria threatens or stirs up hatred against those who persist in their contrary religious faith, memorably defined by Mark Twain's schoolboy[1] as "believing what you know ain't so". Scorn, possibly; pity, more likely; hatred, no.
I think my anonymous friend can relax.
[1] Mark Twain, Following the Equator, ch. 12, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" (1897)
Brian
In a blog post here five months ago (and at greater length in reply to some of the comments on it, especially here) I argued that the point in a pregnancy at which the foetus becomes theoretically able to survive outside the womb — the moment of 'viability' — should not, logically or ethically, determine the point at which it should be made illegal to abort the foetus if the mother needs or wants to end the pregnancy. Polly Toynbee and Zoe Williams among other media commentators, and the great majority of those commenting on my earlier blog post, agree that the viability test is fallacious, but also that it's extremely dangerous: since medical science will no doubt find ways to enable a foetus to survive at an ever earlier stage of its development, and eventually achieve survivability for a fertilised egg at the moment of conception, the inevitable consequence of the viability test will be a complete ban on abortion at any time — which the Roman Catholics and some others freely acknowledge is their objective, and their reason for strongly supporting the viability test even though it's actually incompatible with their own doctrinal attitude to abortion. There's even a clip on YouTube in which assorted Roman Catholic parliamentarians (and possibly others) seek to exploit the viability test (in which they can't logically believe) in order to stir up opposition to any move designed to make abortion easier.
So it's depressing to find that the viability test is apparently still accepted without question both by the Tory leader of the opposition, David Cameron, and by the Labour minister responsible for public health questions, Dawn Primarolo. Last week I submitted to the Observer a letter which attempted to summarise the arguments (today's Observer unaccountably fails to publish it):
Robin McKie and Gaby Hinsliff, in their article about embryos and abortion (This couple want a deaf child, 9 March), like the Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo, implicitly accept the proposition that abortion should not be allowed once the foetus becomes theoretically viable outside the womb. But this is a fallacious and dangerous test. The viability test is fallacious because our growing ability to keep a foetus alive outside the womb has no logical or ethical connection to whether a woman should be required to keep it alive inside her womb. Whether a foetus is yet a person cannot possibly depend on the state of incubation technology. The viability test is dangerous for those of us who believe in a woman's right to choose because progress in medicine will cause the point of viability to recede, eventually back to the time of conception, at which point the viability test becomes a total ban on abortion. The Roman Catholics are creditably honest about working towards this for their own doctrinaire reasons, but those who respect a woman's right to control over her own body, and who believe that her rights should take priority over any theoretical rights of a foetus which is not yet a person, should beware of letting the argument slip onto this treacherous ground. Viability does not a person make.
Yours sincerely
Brian Barder
Here is David Cameron on the subject, reported in an article by the Guardian's Andrew Sparrow, senior political correspondent, on 25 February 2008:
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, today called for the legal time limit at which abortions are allowed to be carried out to be cut. He said that the current limit – 24 weeks – was no longer acceptable because of medical advances allowing some babies to survive outside the womb at that age.
MPs campaigning to lower the limit want to force a vote on the issue when they debate the human fertilisation and embryology bill. The government has so far not accepted the case for change, but it is expected that there will be a vote on a backbench amendment to the bill as it goes through the Commons over the next few weeks. Cameron told the Daily Mail: "I would like to see a reduction in the current limit, as it is clear that, due to medical advancement, many babies are surviving at 24 weeks. If there is an opportunity in the human fertilisation and embryology bill, I will be voting to bring this limit down from 24 weeks. This must, however, remain a conscience issue and a free vote."
Some campaigners want the limit reduced to 20 weeks, although Cameron's aides stressed that at this stage he was not committing himself to any specific lower time limit. … When abortion was first legalised in 1967, abortions were allowed up to 28 weeks. In 1990 MPs voted to cut the limit to 24 weeks. In 2006, 1,262 abortions were carried out at 22 weeks or later. Around 194,000 abortions were carried out altogether.
And the Hinsliff article cited in my abortive (oops) letter to the Observer makes clear the position of the government, also based on viability:
Tory backbencher and former nurse Nadine Dorries is to table an amendment to the bill which would reduce the upper limit for abortions in Britain from 24 to 20 weeks: David Cameron has pledged to support it. Dorries argues there is evidence that babies above this age are sentient – capable of feeling pain – although the scientific evidence is hotly contested.
Dorries first thought there was no chance of changing the law but is now more confident: 'I only have to walk through the House of Commons and MPs say: "I am with you on 20 weeks, I don't want to go any lower, don't want to ban abortion, but I'm with you."' … The Commons debate will concentrate on viability, the age at which a baby is considered to have a good chance of survival outside the womb. Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo, who will steer the bill in the Commons, will tell MPs the medical consensus remains that babies cannot be considered viable below 24 weeks, which should remain the legal limit. 'The care of premature babies is clearly improving but it hasn't improved to the point where you can move the point of viability,' she told The Observer. 'There just is a certain time limit when things like lungs are formed. Clearly if the science changes we would have to make that clear to Parliament, but it hasn't.'
But a change in "the science" can't affect the argument, which is a moral and philosophical one, not a matter for scientists or biologists.
It's depressing that people who should know better cling so tenaciously to their acceptance of the discredited viability test and refuse to recognise where it will eventually — probably quite soon — lead them, and us. Presumably our brave political leaders of both parties are terrorised by the thought of the deafening screams from the anti-abortion lobby if they were to announce that they were abandoning the viability test and recognising the right of a pregnant woman to terminate her pregnancy at any point in it. Or perhaps they simply don't understand and can't see either the fallacy or the danger in relying on viability. If not for heaven's sake, then for that of thousands of women, wake up!
Brian
(Continued from "More Media Monstrosities ", 11 February. The horror! The horror! They keep on coming….)
The more the two Democrats contend that the other is unfit to step inside the White House, the more likely it is that the next President will be neither of them.
Andrew Rawnsley, Observer, 9 March 08
In this sentence "the other" can only mean Senator McCain, which robs it of any meaning.
It can be done, but it is much more difficult than for you or I.
Lord (Jeffrey) Archer, 'I saw a side of life I had never seen', Financial Times, 8-9 March 2008
More difficult even for he?
Boris, the Tory, is presently MP for Henley…
Simon Hoggart, Guardian, 12 March 08
But "is" and "presently" are incompatible, Simon — or did you mean "currently"? Or even "now"?
Asif Ali Zardari, widow of Benazir Bhutto, announced a power-sharing deal…
Agencies, Pakistan Judges may be reinstated, Guardian, 10 March 2008
Still in mourning for his late husband? 'Widow', er…?
Security Minister Tony McNulty, … as though infected by the ghosts of previous Labour hard men John Reid and David Blunkett, claimed, “The threat (of terrorism) is clearly real, serious and represents a threat unparalleled in our country's history.”
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/02/392117.html, 23.02.2008
One more 'and', please, Minister.
– - – - -
And this is this is [sic] the crux of the moral slight [sic] of hand that the PM is… trying to affect [sic] …
Leo Docherty, 'It's not about the uniform', Guardian, 8 March 08
A howler hat-trick in a single sentence!
– - – - -
Wednesday night's abstention and pro-referendum rebellion was [sic] probably the least worst option for the party.
Martin Kettle, 'This shambles is in fact a sign of Lib Dem strength', Guardian, 8 Mar 08
Was they, Martin? And are it the least bad option, or only the 'least worst'? How many worst options were there, or was there?
- – - – -
In a mesmering scene in which Mason walks along the south bank of the Thames, we see Tate Modern as it once was…
Jude Rogers, 'The London we should all know' (DVD review), Guardian Films and Music, 7 March 08
We've all been mesmered on the south bank, Jude.
– - – - -
I remember my mom, my dad and I always around the radio, listening, my parents crying….
Joe Eszterhas, 'I hit Mikoyan with a rotten egg', Guardian Films and Music, 7 March 08
Anyone, especially a Hungarian, who hit Mikoyan with a rotten (or any other) egg, can be forgiven the occasional lapse.
– - – - -
Three years her senior, she met him at school in 1940, his family having fled from Berlin to Holland…
Caroline Davies, Observer, 24 Feb 08
Cherchez l'autre femme!
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"Obama is … a uniter of men who realises he has to reach across the isle," Lucio III said.
Dan Glaister, Guardian, 22 Feb 08
Would that be across one of the British Isles, or possibly the aisle dividing the parties in the Senate?
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Late on a Saturday night, most British palettes are too dulled to be able to distinguish a chicken korma from lamb pasanda.
Editorial, 'Tandoori furore', Financial Times, 16-17 Feb 08
Don't paint it, eat it — then you'll know the difference.
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When it comes to making a care decision, both seniors and their loved ones need to be confident they will always enjoy a good night's sleep.
Advertisement for Sunrise Senior Living, 'the new high quality alternative to a care home'.
Or they could all try Temazepam? (Nothing wrong with the grammar here: it's just the sense that's elusive.)
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Like most reasonably intelligent secularists, you won’t find me petrol-bombing mosques, spitting at Muslim women, or threatening British Asians.
Julian Baggini, Open Democracy, 4 Aug 04
How do you know that I'm like most reasonably intelligent secularists, Julian? (Actually, I am, but you weren't to know!)
Brian
Timothy Garton Ash is a formidably well informed and shrewd commentator on international and especially European affairs, but his article in the Guardian on 28 
February 2008 laid him wide open to the charges of hypocrisy, ignoring the beam in the west's eye in his enthusiasm for denouncing the mote in Russia's, and perpetuating a kind of knee-jerk anti-Moscow prejudice, a hang-over from the cold war which is badly in need of a quadruple dose of political Alka-Seltzer. It's heartening to see reactions to Mr Garton Ash's piece on precisely these lines in the numerous critical comments appended to it in the Guardian blog, Comment is Free.
Today's Guardian publishes a (by my standards) short letter from me pointing out three specific examples of notably explicit double standards in the Garton Ash article: it's the second of two letters on the Guardian website page (click here and then scroll down to it). As the Guardian's published version is slightly truncated, here's the text of my letter as originally submitted:
Sir,
Timothy Garton Ash urges us to spell out to Moscow the terms of closer western engagement with Russia: more respect for the sovereignty of neighbouring states, for human rights and for the rule of law, at home and abroad ('Russia has run rings round the west', February 28). But since Britain has failed to respect Serbia's sovereignty by colluding in the illegal amputation of part of its sovereign territory (Kosovo); has failed to respect human rights by introducing a mass of illiberal anti-terror legislation that includes detention or virtual house arrest for people neither charged with nor convicted of any offence, and permitting UK sovereign territory to be used for illegal extraordinary rendition flights; and failed to respect the rule of law when we participated in armed attacks on Yugoslavia (1999) and Iraq (2003) without UN authority and in breach of the UN Charter, wagging our fingers at Moscow in the way suggested might invite a rather embarrassing retort, don't you think, Mr Garton Ash?
Yours sincerely
Brian Barder
Russia is no-one's ideal example of a liberal democracy, but the obloquies constantly heaped on it from the west do seem quite out of proportion to the realities, as well as ignoring the extent to which western policies and attitudes have shared the responsibility for current tensions and suspicions. It's now fairly generally admitted that it was a mistake to saddle Russia, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union (itself a by no means unmixed blessing), with a peculiarly crude form of free market capitalism which brought real hardship to millions of Russians and created the régime of the mega-rich oligarchs that we see today. The similar rush to extend NATO membership out to the borders of Russia, including large areas that Moscow legitimately regards as within its own sphere of influence, was widely denounced even at the time as a crass misjudgement, certain to revive traditional (and perfectly understandable) Russian paranoia about encirclement by potential enemies.
There's more. The west's attempt to exclude Russia from involvement in the action against Milosevic's Yugoslavia over Kosovo in 1999 was a humiliating failure, depriving the NATO bombing of international legitimacy and eventually forcing the west to seek Russia's help in ending the crisis and allowing NATO to end its destructive and pointless bombing campaign. Four years later the US and UK failed to learn the lesson of Kosovo — that it's both possible and desirable to include Russia in a major international action which affects its legitimate interests — by ignoring Russian and many other countries' objections to the premature use of force against Iraq, by-passing the UN, and going ahead with an illegal aggression whose dire consequences we still live with.
On a smaller scale, the UK sought to make good relations with Russia conditional on Russia's agreement to extradite a Russian citizen to Britain in the face of the reality that the Russian constitution forbids any such extradition (would that ours did the same!), on the face of it an idiotic, because obviously doomed, condition to try to impose.
Now we have yet again repeated the same mistake as those in Kosovo and Iraq by ignoring the powerful and well-founded objections of Russia and Serbia (as well as of other regional countries) by going ahead with the active incitement of the Kosovo Albanians to secede illegally from Serbia and precipitately recognising that phoney 'independence' as soon as it had been declared — guaranteeing that the new status is deprived of UN recognition and international legitimacy because of the resolute opposition to it of at least two veto-wielding members of the Security Council.
In every one of these cases patient and constructive diplomacy could almost certainly have produced eventual agreement on collaboration with Russia instead of the doomed attempt to ignore and defy her. The resolution of the Kosovo crisis was brought about by precisely such constructive and patient diplomacy — conducted secretly by envoys of the US, Russia and Finland, almost certainly without the knowledge or approval of the Blair government in the UK — producing at least an interim solution which ended the bombing, secured the substitution for the former Serb administration of an international UN-backed administration and peace-keeping force in Kosovo, and gave the settlement the blessing of international legitimacy, all by securing Russian participation.
In the words of the song, when will we ever learn?
Brian
