Living Wittily

Susan Boyle dreamed a dream - bless her!

OK. So after all the hullaballoo earlier this year about Susan Boyle, the pros and cons of Britain's Got Talent, the ambiguous roles of three millionaire judges, and the impact of instantaneous celebrity status on a modest Scottish woman who seemed to be unravelling before ruthlessly voyeuristic cameras; the album is out, is selling in millions, and the woman herself much more self possessed and a pleasure to watch and hear.

I watched the repeated documentary the other morning, in which she did indeed sing with Elaine Paige - who was encouraging, supportive without a hint of patronising. We bought the CD for Christmas. And yes it's good. She has a voice that is versatile though I don't like the arrangement of several of the songs - Daydream Believer was never a slow croon.

But the overwhelming sense I had as I listened to the Cd, and watching the Documentary, was of a woman who had shown immense courage in ever going to those auditions at all. And then seeing it through, right through to a final in which she came second and ran out of places to hide. But there she is. Doing what she dreamed of doing. I don't buy into the "dream it and it will happen" approach to life. I've known too many people whose dreams just didn't happen for them. But unfulfilled dreams have never been a reason to stop dreaming; nor to depsise what we have, who we are and what is still possible. Still less to knock someone else whose dream has come true

I salute this brave woman. She should be made Scot of the Year. Her talent, her personality, her vulnerability and her sheer guts, her self effacing sense of who she is, make her the best kind of ambassador for Scotland, a country that too often blaws its own bagpipes while simultaneously letting the air out of the air bladder. Nobody can predict what will now happen for her and to her - but I wish her well, and have nothing but admiration for the way she has taken hold of her life, and walked into a different future.

We all know reality TV cans its audience responses and plays on viewers' mixture of gullibility and cynicism. The wide road that leads to exploitation is too easily taken. But now and again someone transcends the polyfoam programming. I for one will never foget that first night when she sang "I dreamed a dream" - that kind of moment transforms viewer voyeurism into a much more wholesome human solidarity, rooted in recognition of significance, beauty and the sheer triumph of immediate human gift over mediating technology.  

Barack Obama and the Political Incorrectness of the Nobel Peace Prize

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama was a serious misjudgement. So was its acceptance, compounded by an acceptance speech that required considerable semantic redefinition and conceptual conjuring. This masterclass in rhetorical agility sets unhelpful precedents in a world where truth and language are already too vulnerable to the distorting pressures of political market forces.

The award of the Nobel Peace prize to one whose political and personal contribution to date is by his own embarrassed admission "slight", put Obama in an impossible political and moral position. In the space of nine days Presdient Obama committed another 30,000 troops to "the war against terror" and received the Nobel Peace Prize. The incongruity of being a Peace Prize recipient and a Commander in Chief of tens of thousands of troops on foreign soil and sand, is so bizarre that it required an acceptance speech defending just war, and insisting, as most protagonists do, that their war is indeed just, and is an essential prerequisite for peace.

Which raises for me the most significant moral consequence of Obama's acceptance speech. Obama claims to stand in the succession of Martin Luther King not only as recipient of the Nobel Peace prize, but as one whose appointment was made possible by MLK and the non-violent stance of the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. But says Obama, armed and violent conflict will not be eradicated in our lifetime, and as a Head of State he must not be guided only by the example of Luther King and Ghandi. I agree. But in that case the wise and morally defensible position would be to decline the Nobel Peace Prize as that which cannot be reconciled with his duties as Head of State, and which he has sworn on oath to make his priority. But of course how could a US President do that?

Nevertheless, to accept it is to want the best of both worlds, the prestige and power of a Commander in Chief of a nation at war, and the moral authority of one whose life work is seen as a major contribution to peace in our time and in our world. It is not possible to be both, at one and the same time; not in any way that makes moral sense. It is dangerous to melt down key concepts in a debate and remint them in the more flexible plastic currency that enables political leaders to purchase the truth that suits already agreed agendas.

I admire Obama, but not uncritically. He is I believe a man of moral stature, but who lives in a world that requires ethical fluidity and political expediency. That is the price of power, and the personal cost is felt at the level of the moral. Whatever the political pressures on him to engage in this piece of theatre, his collusion cannot but diminish his own moral authority and the credibility of a Peace Prize that seems to have become fatally politicised.

And that is a shame. For we need more than ever a globally recognised prize for those like Martin Luther King, and in our time Shirin Ebadi of Iran, (pictured here) Recently she and her family have been further victimised by the Iranian regime - including the nonsense of announcing the confiscation of her Peace prize!. As if!

People like Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King and Shirin Ebadi represent achievements not only in a different league from Obama, but in a different moral category. They have risked personal safety and borne real hardship for the sake of peace, and they represent a way of being that is in direct contradiction to state sponsored military inytervention. And as for the Nobel nominating committee, it would surely have been a more ethically secure nomination to award the Peace Prize some years later, and for evidence of real achievements in peacemaking, than to celebrate the recipient of a premature prize based on (as yet) unrealised expectations, and while that candidate commands an army engaged with other countries, including the UK, in armed conflict abroad.

Gary McKinnon, Asperger Syndrome, obsession with UFOs, and the wounded pride of Empire

Update, November 28, 2009.

The most recent decision by the Home Secretary to allow the extradition of Gary Mackinnon to the United States is not surprising. The absence of ethical content and responsible moral control in the decisions of the current government, its wholesale capitulation to the demands of the United States that US security concerns give carte blanche for political and military pressures, and that country's now expedient assertions about the importance of international law, come together against the ironic and morally tragic exposure of US and UK complicity that now forces seasoned diplomats, facing public enquiry, to openly question the legality and legitimacy of the war in Iraq. 

I have little to add to the reflections I offered in August. Except this. I am ashamed of the failure of the UK government to protect its own citizen. I am ashamed of the lack of moral courage and legal wisdom on the part of the Home Secretary and the Government which, if they are now over a barrel because of a bad law, were the very Government that drove through its approval. Either way, Gary Mackinnon should not be the one to bear the cost of ill conceived legislation enacted by a supine legislature administered by a domesticated administration.

Gary Mackinnon's mother asks the right question - if her son's Asperger's condition and his current distress, which no one denies, do not constitute a fundamental threat to his well-being such that it compromises his human rights, then what in fact does? "How does a British citizen claim asylum in his own country?" is one of those twisted legal questions that exposes the nonsense of the Home Secretary's position. Rightly, this country does not send people away if they face a credible theat of serious harm abroad. We have had no medical report published by the Home Office indicating Gary Mackinnon's health will withstand the trauma of extradition. The impact of edxtradition, trial and sentence on a person with autism whose sense of self and the world is so fundamentally different, is so obviously severe that it would rightly be called inhumane.  At which point I want to repeat here my post from August 1, and stand by each word of it.

........................................................... 

Disquiet. Unease.
A persistent mood of ethical anxiety.
Discomfort like toothache of the conscience.
Awakening suspicion that something is wrong.
Hard to place and hard to ignore anger.
An inner resistance to saying nothing.
 

1. No one denies that Gary McKinnon hacked into US computerised defence systems.
2. Computer hacking is bad enough. But to compromise high level national security systems is by any standards a matter of serious concern. In most cases it is also a matter of criminal intent and is rightly treated as such by the relevant legal and judicial systems. (Perhaps the vulnerability of such high level computer systems to attack from an amateur UFO researcher in the UK raises questions of incompetence or negligence which are themselves definable as criminal).
   
3. Extradition is an important legal process of national co-operation and of reciprocal help between nations in ensuring that it isn't possible for people to escape justice by virtue of living in another country. But for a nation to give up its citizens to another such laws need to be secure, fair, reciprocal and reviewable to avoid anomalies and injustice.
   
4. National security is the top of the agenda concern for the Unitred States for reasons that are obvious; the 9/11 attack and the determination to secure again the safety of the homeland, and as its inevitable corollary, the widespread hostility to the US and the UK amongst many Muslim countries and communities, many of the radicalised, following the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions by US and UK troops backed by other non Muslim nations.

So for Gary McKinnon to breach the supposedly elaborate security hardware and software of the Pentagon and other defence facilities, with their lauded military standard fail-safe systems, at such a sensitive time, raises questions that are both worrying and embarrassing for the United States and its global reputation. Somebody needs to pay.

Add now to these observations the equally undisputed fact that Gary McKinnon is a person with Asperger syndrome, obsessive about UFOs, and that his patterns of behaviour are classic expressions of a condition that essentially defines his way of relating to the world. Then ask what questions this raises about the legal and moral implications of a decision to extradite him to the United States, to stand trial for actions he does not deny, but which are explained by a pre-existing condition that is by definition related to compulsive behavioural patterns, and when the likeliest outcome is an inevitable and long jail sentence.

And this because the UK has a treaty with the United States intended to ensure co-operation in dealing with serious crime and terrorist threats, but which was intended for people with ambitions to kill, not persons with an autistic spectrum disorder. Add to this that UK Judges, charged with upholding the law, while acknowledging the severe impact of extradition on this man's mental health, which they themselves admit may be life-threatening, suggest nevertheless it would not be a breach of his human rights to extradite him to the United States. I find it profoundly ironic that Judges appointed to uphold law, including international and human rights law, take at face value "assurances of appropriate care", on the very same day it is reported that evidence about whether or not the CIA and british Intelligence knew of or were involved, directly or indirectly, in the mistreatment and alleged torture of a British citizen, could not be heard in a UK court, on the direct intervention of Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State. Human rights indeed! I am not reassured by the cynical ambiguity of the term "appropriate care" for someone who has so embarrassed the might of the United States, and whom the US sees as a continuing security threat.

I'm not arguing that Gary McKinnon should not face up to the consequences of what he did. He himself recognises that. But given his condition, there are issues of justice here that are deeper than the desire to put on trial, convict, sentence and make the public power statement that seems to be so important to the US authorities pursuing this extradition. The law is not there to serve the political interests of Empire, as instruments of power at the disposal of the state. Justice fundamentally involves using just laws justly, and for the purposes they were intended. Justice, and therefore moral and legal accountability, takes into consideration a person's capacities, intentions and ability to recognise how personal acts have social consequences. The proper administration of justice requires the law to take into account the reality of a person's medical condition and the impact of that condition, in this case autism, on a person's recognition of boundaries and the overall context of their actions - or why not arrest and try persons with Tourette syndrome for using obscene language in public space? As David Cameron said yesterday, in the application of law, justice is not incompatible with compassion in our ways of dealing with people. That is particularly important in a world where compassion now seems to be massively discounted, and hard edged "justice" understood as legal retribution is considered a high value virtue. Mercy does not undermine law, it enhances its authority, demonstrates its value to the community, and quality assures its expression for the public good.

What I miss in the judgement of the judges, and in the reiterated refusal of the Home Secretary to allow a trial in the UK, is the moral courage to discern more deeply, the mature wisdom to decide more humanely, and thus to raise our respect for the law as that which serves us fairly and well. Under this present Government, for all its hyped up claims about making our country more secure, our own citizens are considerably less safe. In the political and cultural background, can be heard the remorseless grind of the machinery of Empire, armoured and determined that those who threaten it will feel the full force of the law. Even when a particular law is badly framed, inadequately qualified and increasingly recognised as open to political manipulation.

That's why I'm suffering from

Disquiet. Unease.
A persistent mood of ethical anxiety.
Discomfort like toothache of the conscience.
Awakening suspicion that something is wrong.
Hard to place and hard to ignore anger.
An inner resistance to saying nothing.

The BBC, Question Time, murky waters and the need for navigation charts

It's the morning after the night before. I suppose I have two initial comments. My main question remains: Where in the whole BBC editorial decison making process does moral responsibility and social ethics feature alongside the political principle of impartiality - a principle which the BBC invests with considerable moral rhetoric? Second, having watched the programme it neither clarified BNP policy nor fulfilled the impartiality which the BBC itself holds so highly. Were BNP members allowed to be part of the audience and invited by the chair to participate? Not one voice in support of the BNP in the audience - I am not arguing for this, I am asking why the BBC isn't. The logic of insisting elected politicians are entitled to be there, surely holds for the entitlement of members of his party to be there. Were they?

But David is right in his observation in his comment - a media driven culture is a place of murky, complex, contested values - and the BBC has to navigate a way through them with a diminishing number of moral depth charts. I am left with the irony that the plaque inside BBC Headquarters erected inside on the appointment of its first Director General, that wild Scottish secular Calvinist Lord Reith, quotes Philippians 3.8. In 1931 the following inscription was unveiled

To Almighty God, this shrine of the arts, music and literature is dedicated by the first Governors in the year of our Lord 1931, John Reith being Director General. It is their prayer that good seed sown will produce a good harvest, that everything offensive to decency and hostile to peace will be expelled, and that the nation will incline its ear to those things which are lovely pure and of good report and thus pursue the path of wisdom and virtue.

I know times have changed - and we are no longer a biblically literate culture. And the BBC now sees itself as reflecting culture rather than seeking to shape it, and is therefore a cultural follower rather than a creative initiator - or is that too hard? Anyway, that earlier vision for media as humanising, entertaining, educational and reflective of a culture's core values was not wrong. There are a few moral depth charts in that quotation, a few lights to navigate by, and the verse itself, though from the Christian New Testament, has significant resonance within the faith and cultural pluralism that makes up our culture and our changing social fabric.

OK. I broke my own rule. I didn't complete a week of one liners. Sorry. But five out of seven might be called " a reasonable attempt at the assignment". 

Cursed are the merciful? Megrahi and the collision of legal worldviews

"Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy".

I suppose we've grown used to so reconfiguring these words of Jesus in our minds and hearts that we have lost the sense of the aboslute nonsense they can sound. I too was embarrassed and angry at the Scottish saltire being used to celebrate the return of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi to Libya, his homeland.

• Because the St Andrews Cross is a powerful and culturally embedded symbol of a Scottish nation whose positive contribution to the world is out of all proportion to our size.
• Because Scottish lives were also lost when the plane fell from the skies on a rural Scottish town, which means Scottish people also have an interest in ensuring justice is done.
• Because the assumption is being made by many in the watching world that there was some kind of collusion between Libya and Scotland, a fact and a motivation denied by the Scottish Government.
• Because undoubtedly many families affected by the Lockerbie atrocity genuinely feel let down, betrayed, denied closure of their grief and desire for justice, by what they see as an act of weakness and injustice.

But on the other hand, I am neither embarrassed nor angry that the Scottish saltire is linked to an act of mercy, and to a form of justice that incorporates the option of compassionate release - not as a negation of justice as we are accused, but as its proper expression by a people whose legal system operates on different principles from the United States, and under whose legal system there was international agreement Megrahi should be tried and if guilty sentenced. That our judicial system is not the American way is a reality of history, of politics, of social ethics and of unarguable legal fact. If Megrahi is to be treated in a way that is just and legally defensible, then he must bear the full weight of the law, and be afforded the full range of options to which he is entitled under Scots Law. And Scots Law provides for compassionate release, which is not an act of pardon, which is not a statement of forgiveness, poltically, nationally or privately, which is not a declaration of any kind about the prisoner's legal status of guilt or innocence. It is, pure and simple, an act of compassion to a dying human being.

However it's more than a pure and simple act. Far from being an absolute mistake as Senator Clinton asserted, it is a demonstration by a small country that law doesn't have to be as savage as those it punishes. Far from being outrageous in the sense that FBI Director Robert Mueller meant, it is outrageous that the head of a law enforcement agency should presume to criticise the legal processes of a sovereign nation acting within its own judicial and legal traditions. It can just as cogently be argued that this act of compassion under the provisions of Scots Law, as it encounters the terrorist mindset, breaks the eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth mentality which is a primary driver in cycles of violence. Far from being regrettable as President Obama has claimed, it would have been more regrettable still if an entire legal tradition of a small country, with its humane provisions that have stood for centuries, were to be overturned because of political pressure from a powerful ally.

That pressure, overtly exerted by the United States, is entirely understandable. The American Government represents the interests and human rights of its own citizens, and the release of Megrahi seems to fly in the face of law, friendship and the realities of the 21st Century so called "war on terror". The truth is, nothing can compensate for the years of anguish and the enormous loss experienced by those families whose relatives were on the airliner that was blown out of the skies over Scotland twenty years ago. Nor the similar loss of other nations, including Scotland.

  But I would offer one further observation. Acts of compassion and mercy are far too often portrayed as weakness. They are not. They are acts of strength. Enacted statements of mercy publicly recognise the humanity even of those who may have acted inhumanely. Tne Scottish Saltire is the St Andrew's Cross, a symbol of crucifixion, and an embedded declaration of our rootedness in the Christian tradition as a major source and influence in the development and principles of Scots Law. To be accused of compassion, to be condemned for showing mercy, to be politically vilified for upholding our own judicial provisions with their humane instincts, perhaps we should expect no less, and simply be prepared to be misunderstood, though seeking to act justly. Compassion it seems, is expensive in our polarised world, and may cost friendships. But I still think that Scotland as a nation would carry a more just shame had our Government denied Megrahi his legal right to be treated within the legal provisions for compassionate release, to avoid offending powerful and vocal friends whose own judicial system operates on quite different principles. The clash of legal worldviews makes mutual understanding all but impossible.

And to the questions, "Why should we show compassion? What compassion did he show"? The answer is because enacted implacability and denial of humanity are precisely the crime for which Megrahi has been convicted. Scotland, still indebted to the Christian faith for some of our pivotal legal principles, operates on a different level of human responsiveness. I doubt if Jesus intended the Beatitudes as a political platform for nations - but "Blessed are the merciful" seems to me to be a better basis for human relations than "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But I do recognise, that if my children had been on that plane, my own hermeneutic would be under enormous pressure to give priority in law to the Old Testament injunction. Which is why it will always be wisest not to allow the victim to write, or re-write the law.  

Attempted murder in a classroom - time to pray for our schools

Today I am making time to pray for Jack Waterhouse a fourteen year old pupil. And for Peter Harvey the teacher now charged with his attempted murder. And for their respective families. Whatever explanation emerges from police enquiries about what happened in that classroom, the reality of a boy seriously head injured and a teacher remanded in cusody for attempted murder, gives cause for very serious thought.

Fourteen year old pupils are legally children; teachers have a duty of care; inside a school classroom is in theory, and ought to be in practice one of the safest social environments for children and young adults. Violence by a teacher against a pupil should be unthinkable, an option so guarded round by management processes, professional ethics and prudence, human and institutional support resources, internalised and restraining social values, and high ideals of educational vocation, that long before violence erupts there are enough fail-safe and prevention systems in place. But obviously not.

Whatever the provocation (and we are yet to hear what that might have been), but whatever the provocation, such a violent assault on a pupil and at least two others is unacceptable, and absolutely requires the intervention of the law. What charges Peter Harvey eventually faces, any sentence he receives if found guilty, and how far his act of violence will affect Jack Waterhouse, his family and the class that witnessed what happended - who knows? But it is such questions that must now inform our prayers, for healing of people indelibly wounded by this tragic happening, for justice to be seen as more than due process of law but to include the making right of whatever it was that went so badly wrong, for pupils and parents, teacher and school staff, and local community to learn from what happened, and then to allow those lessons to be the basis of real changes more widely and deeply in school culture and political goals.

Parents say the teacher snapped. Previous pupils turned up at court with letters of support and character endorsements. Earlier reports suggested the teacher had previous underlying health issues. Maybe so. Such fragments need context in a more thoroughly investigated and more carefully told story. What happened was shocking, because it shouldn't have happened - ever. But such acts have a context, each person caught up in it lives in a community, that living community has its peculiar history, values, relationships and tensions - and so the task of interpreting what happened will require more than forensic expertise.

 Like fragments of text, the evidence gathered requires a disciplined hermeneutic of human behaiviour, intellectual integrity and moral imagination, and a willingness to ask the kind of questions that interrogate not only victim, perpetrator and witnesses. There are questions for the school, for the education authority, for Government - about support for staff, about resources and budgets, about teacher's experience of fear and intimidation, about pressures on schools, staff and pupils to perform to externally imposed standards, about a culture of failure and success too closely tied to statistics, performance indicators and funding issues.

Because what happened in that pressure-cooker classroom is not likely to be a one-off meteorite in the back garden,but a particularly tragic example of human beings placed under intolerable strain. Eventually the courts will decide who is "to blame". Perhaps only a more public enquiry can answer the deeper question, "Why did this happen?"

And in the meantime, two people's lives are broken, others are traumatised, a community is angry, bewildered and demanding answers. So today would be a good day for Churches to pray for our schools, their pupils and teachers, and for that great human achievement that modern educational approaches don't use much in their documentation - wisdom.

Two sides of Glasgow - passion for social change and the virus of sectarianism

Been an interesting weekend. Yes I did watch the longest Wimbledon final ever, and admire both players, so was happy for Federer and sorry for Roddick, and would have felt the same if the result had been the other way round. And sat Sunday evening, from 7.30'ish p.m. to 8.30'ish p.m., in my garden, sipping tea and reading, on a warm balmy evening with no midges in sight. And this in the West of Scotland in July!

Saturday we went to the People's Palace on Glasgow Green and spent the morning revising my Scottish political history of the past couple of centuries. The banner carried by the Suffragette's in 1910; the manifesto signed by a dozen ILP activists in the 1930's; archive films of strikes, marches and protests that took place in Glasgow in the past century. These included footage of the early 1970's Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' work in, inspired by Jimmy Reid and for those of us who remember it, a still potent reminder of how organised labour can at times grow out of and express the deep social, moral and human concerns of ordinary folk, in the face of political indifference and economic decisions made with little thought to their social consequences. I am a Baptist, a paid up member of the dissenting tradition, an upholder of freedom of religious conscience and of the right to think differently from the prevailing establishment. Being Baptist also commits me to communal action and a valuing of community as a primary context for human development and spiritual formation.

Amongst the exhibits in the People's palace is the corner given over to Rangers and Celtic football clubs, the "Old Firm". To get to the Palace on Saturday morning we were held up at Glasgow Cross as the annual Orange Lodge Parade passed. Eight thousand marchers, 90 bands, and music that was martial, belligerent and religiously validated as militantly Protestant and anti Roman Catholic. The marching season, whether under the Union Flag or the Repaublican Tricolour, creates a problem for me as a Baptist. On the one hand I believe deeply in religious tolerance, the rights of people to express and support their religious convictions without intimidation. But it doesn't commit me to endorse activities which have only a tangential connection with religion, and which by their very nature are intimidatory - the words that accompany the tunes, whether the marchers are blue or green, and whether the words are sung audibly or not, are intentionally offensive, like playground taunt songs laced with menace. Sectarianism isn't a mere confrontation of religious differences; it is a social toxin distilled from bigotry, overblown historical myth, and a people blindness largely caused by the psychological need to find security by identifying a common enemy to demonise as 'the other'. And the hate virus infects both sides. (The photo is deliberately chosen for its light-hearted seriousness).

It is when such language and social attitudes surface that I am in a dilemma as a Baptist Christian. I find it impossible to make any connection between those banners, sashes and tunes with their vitriolic intent, and the Jesus encountered in the Gospels, the living Lord of the Church whose ministry is reconciliation. I wholly support the Scottish Government's initatives to tackle sectarianism, which is both a religious and social reality in the West of Scotland. And while I am committed to freedom of religious expression, I recognise that such a conviction cannot oblige me to legitimate or defend these annual hate-fests of blue and green marches through the streets of a City where in a proud history, others have marched and suffered to win those human rights, civic freedoms and social values that safeguard and undergird responsible citizenship. And where many still live in peaceful co-existence with neighbours whose differences are cause for interest and celebration and welcome, rather than suspicion and ridicule and segregation. For those interested, there's an earlier post on sectarianism over at this post.

An interesting weekend, with much to ponder, enjoy, and ponder again.

Ronnie Biggs - the hard argument between justice and mercy

The Great Train Robbery happened over 40 years ago. I remember the mixture of romanticised hero worship, fascination at the ingenuity and audiacity of stealing such a huge amount of money, and anger at the violence against train staff. Then the finding of fantastic sums of money, bags of it, in various locations across England. I also remember the unprecedented lengths of prison sentence, more than the tarriff required of most murderers. Then the escape of Ronnie Biggs, and again the public fascination, even at times secret admiration for this high flying crook. His return to the UK in 2001 to resume his prison sentence was surrounded by a media circus, much of it orchestrated by Biggs himself.

So I listened to the reasons given by Jack Straw, the Justice Minister, for refusing parole to Ronnie Biggs. Significant among the comments made was that if he had not escaped, he would have been freed long ago. These are complex decisions, and I realise that public perceptions of law and justice are not inconsequential in an age when respect for fundamental institutions is easily eroded. Mr Straw speaks of the demands of justice, and the requirement that criminal act and due penalty should be demonstrably upheld and consistently equated. But there are other issues here. The Parole Board recommended release. Biggs is clearly an old and much weakened man. There is pressure on the present Government to show it can be tough.

And something more, which I don't put forward as an argument, more an observation disguising a plea. Ours is now one of the least generous, and most hard-edged societies I can remember in my lifetime. The sickening crimes of violence against children, the levels of greed that till very recently have been socially validated, corroded standards of public courtesy and respect for persons, creeping indifference to the plight of elderly and vulnerable people unable to command the clout to secure adequate late life care, and a level of outrage at the financial abuses exposed in MP's expense claims that perhaps shows where our our society's heart truly is - the temple of mammon.

Which brings me back to Ronnie Biggs. Criminal, violent gang member, unrepentant thief, - and ageing human being. What might have given us more dignity as a society, would have been a decision to uphold the Parole Board recommendation, but to set it in the context of mercy not justice. Such decisions have profound moral resonance when the majesty of the law is expressed in mercy rather than retribution, and when natural instincts of humane responsiveness are at the right time, allowed to ameliorate the demands of the law. I don't blame Jack Straw - nor question his integrity.  But I wish I could admire him more for moral imagination, that capacity for applying the law in ways that can be recreative of public virtues such as mercy, that demonstrate also the majesty of compassion and show that legal power harnessed to humane ends, strengthens and does not weaken the fabric of our society.

The dangers of a moral recession

An economic recession happens when economic activity goes into sharp decline. If it persists and becomes long term then it becomes an economic depression, when jobs are lost, profits erased, trading confidence evaporates and investment is too big a risk.That has devastating consequences for the prosperity and morale of everyone it affects.

So. Is there such a thing as a political recession? A time when the normal machinery of Government no longer gets the job done, and those charged with maintaining the fabric and structure of our democratic processes have prejudiced public trust? And if that persists would that produce a political depression, a long term loss of confidence in the integrity and capacity of our political system? And who gains most when political process and foundational institutions are discredited? I write this as the news comes in of the first BNP county councillor being elected in Lancashire and Leicestershire.

And. What about an ethical recession? Same problem. When public expectations of moral accountability, personal integrity, and some evidence of altruism, are not only disappointed, but made to look ridiculous, we begin to feel we have moved into a new and dangerous historical moment. When so many of those who formulate our laws and social policies are perceived to be or shown to be self-serving, and claim to have stayed within rules they formulated, and that allow such unchecked abuse, what does that do to the moral ecology of our society? What happens when "flipping" houses generates tens of thousands of tax free profit at the tax payer's expense? And this during a recession? When people are losing their job by the ten thousands? When every house repossession is a family tragedy? And when the cause of so much of the problem has been - well - money and the lengths some people will go to accumulate it.  What happens then? Something toxic happens. And that affects the ethical environment we all have to live in.

I remember, long before we became so environmentally aware, as a boy of 9 or 10 living on a farm in Ayrshire, standing broken-hearted beside the burn where I used to guddle for trout, watching dead fish float past. Minnows, catfish, stickleback, trout - all belly up, bloated and dead. I was standing beside the man from the Council (the 1950's equivalent of Environmental Health). Seemingly a farmer further up the burn had (accidentally or irresponsibly - the result was the same) released sheep dip into the water table. The result was catastrophic; the ecosystem was poisoned. It took years for the burn to recover - it was a long time before I was as a child, again able to lie on the banking with a jar tied to string, a cunningly placed rubber lid and some bread, and catch those beautifully marked small shoaling fish called minnows. Because someone had poisoned the system.

I've no party political point to make. I just sense that something toxic and dangerous is happening in the stream and flow of our political systems and social values. The picture of the Prime Minister at the start of this post isn't meant to be a dig either - I'm more interested in the words behind him, about the fight for our future. The economic recession is due to the credit crunch we're told; well in that case the political and moral recessions are due to an integrity crunch. The first might be easier and quicker to fix, and on a different scale of values, cheaper.

Pray God our ethical crisis doesn't deepen into a moral depression of lost values and desperate selfishness. And whatever else the church is doing at this moment in our national history, we should be looking for light and encouraging it, identifying the good and defending them, and praying for a nation struggling with the consequences of moral recession. 

MP's Expenses - duck islands, moat cleaning and ludicrously elasticated self-interest

As usual, Rowan Williams speaks with a combination of moral imagination and common sense. His most recent intervention into the outrage-fest over the abuse of the expenses system set up by MPs for MPs expresses the deeper concerns behind the scandal.

Individual Members of Parliament who have cases to answer have undoubtedly ranged between errors of judgement, to deliberate maximising of personal advantage, to outright abuse of a system intended to be generous but not to be open to wholesale exploitation. Their behaviour sparked a competition for the best verb to describe them - the winner was "trough-jostling".

The Archbishop warned that the systematic humiliation of MPs would in the long term erode public trust not only in the capacity of people to work generously and justly as MP's, but in Parliament itself and even in the entire democratic process. Already he has been rubbished by a labour peer who described Williams' conerns as rubbish. That sounds also like a response not likely to strengthen our faith in peers to conduct debate in a public discourse underpinned by levels of civic respect.

But I've felt for over a week now, that the press are now indulging in the mentality of the striptease artist or artiste. What is revealed is intended to provoke, to create hunger for more, to pull the voyeur into that half-way world between reality and fanstasy where ethical judgement and respect for the other dissolve. It is this lust for the humiliation of the other that is morally corrosive of respect, and is ultimately abusive.

There are good, honest MPs whose public record, and the expenses records, are above criticism - but we are not hearing of them. There is also a difference between those who have stepped over the imaginary but well known line of honest interpretation, using the necessary and intentional hermeneutic latitude in well conceived regulations, and those who have made a second career out of turning these same expenses criteria into a deregulated free for all expressing ludicrously elasticated self-interest - some now shown to be requiring criminal investigation.

The frequent defence that claims were within the rules exposes so much of what is wrong with contemporary ethical discourse and conceptuality. How so many MP's are to be entrusted with framing laws, paying due regard to moral, legal, economic and fiscal justice, when some of them seem incapable of making basic ethical distinctions or demnostrating rudimentary characteristics of conscience in relation their own affairs, is to be sure cause for public concern, anger, even ridicule.

So perhaps the most significant gain to come out of this scandal (original meaning was stumbling block), will not be the increased transparency of out-sourced auditing and changed rules. It will be public insistence that our public servants rediscover and recover inner personal ethical dispositions and virtues such as integrity, honesty, respect for persons, social compassion, and these as a prerequisites to public trust. Rules and auditors don't make people moral, they enforce compliance and honesty. The deeper questions are about the inner transformation of the person. I don't need ritual public executions. Genuine repentance evidenced by changes in behaviour would be a more durable outcome.