The State is not your friend

People like me, brought up in the knowledge that we were on the side of law and order, could always trust a policeman and could rely absolutely on the golden thread of English justice that has stretched through the centuries since the Magna Carta, guarantor of liberty can find it hard to accept that in some ways the State can be, rather than a comforting presence, a malign force. Camilla Cavendish, writing in the Times, has been waging a lonely campaign against the iniquities of the child courts for some time now.

What she has reported is horrifying. The principle of secret courts, reporting of which is not permitted under pain of prosecution, is fundamentally contrary to justice, and in flagrant breach of the tide of English history and law. The almost untramelled power wielded by social workers and 'child protection officers' is profoundly offensive. In this case a man has been jailed for 16 months, and classified as a violent offender, because he drove his partner and her son to Calais. The son had been removed from his mother and put into care 'temporarily' though with seemingly no prospect either of being allowed back, or of being looked after by the mother's sister or mother, both of whom had offered to foster the child. Suffering horribly in state care, the boy ran away of his own volition, and in helping him, the mother's partner has been convicted of abduction. We aren't even allowed to say his name.

This is so fundamental an abuse of English law that it's hard to be entirely dispassionate. It's becoming clear, however, that the total block on reporting of the child courts is unsustainable. Social workers have an extraordinarily wide power over the lives of people in this country. This power is being abused - whether by ludicrous accusations of Satanic cults or by counter-productively over-zealous enforcement of care orders, or by callous abandonment of children in real danger.

The secret imprisonment of offenders is not a characteristic of a free society. Secret trials, in all but the most extreme cases involving national security, are the hallmark of illiberal and totalitarian regimes. It took civil war and the overthrow of a ruling order that believed itself above the law to rid England of the Star Chamber itself, what will it take to abolish star chamber justice today?

Idle question

An idle, almost certainly ill-informed, question came to me yesterday while watching an adaption of Northanger Abbey (you may guess that I don't always have control over the remote in my household). If you look back over the three great cultural forms, art, music and literature, over the past two hundred years why is it that, of the truly great in art and music (specifically composition), so few are women, when, by contrast, so many of the great novelists are?

Although I've never especially seen the point of Jane Austen, I do recognise that she, along with the Brontes, George Eliot and leser lights like Baroness Orczy and Mary Shelley, is regarded as a first rate novelist - up with Dickens, Hardy and (ugh) Henry James as the great 19th century novelists. But ask me for a truly first rate female artist of the nineteenth century and my mind is a blank. The same applies to composers. Why should this be? In the nineteenth century, for example, art and music were considered eminently appropriate pastimes for young ladies, whereas writing was considered unfeminine and rather declasse. That ought to suggest that there would be more female artists and composers, but the opposite is palpably true. Why?

One answer I have heard (from my wife) is that, whereas 'quality' in music and art is a standard, set by an inherently masculine establishment, that suits male creativity much better, while a feminine style of writing is not only equally as 'good' as a masculine style, but the reading public require less guidance from critics as to what is enjoyable. This is rambling because I don't know the answer, and am, obviously, unsure of my facts. Is there anything at all to this?

Intelligence?

In analysing constituencies, some figures are illuminating. It's instructive that average property proces in Kensington and Chelsea are £715,000, while in Rhondda they are a mere £61,000. What is less insightful is the 'urban intelligence' quotient. This figure, which is highest in Battersea, gives the proportion of academics and students and public sector professionals in the constituency. In the past I would have qualified under two of these (no prozes for guessing which) and have a reasonable amount of day-to-day contact with the third, and I dpn't think I'm entirely alone in questioning the title. Perhaps 'urban emotional immaturity' would have been better - unless you genuinely believe that Battersea is the home of British intelligent society.

Incidentally, it's 'Who or why or which or what/Is the Akond of Swat?' Isn't it lucky these guys have editors...