ANOTHER VOICE
A country which is morally, as well as intellectually, dead
AUBERON WAUGH
Lord McCluskey's previous moment of prominence, as Solicitor-General for Scot- land in the Labour government of 1974-79, escaped my attention. Perhaps he was a good Solicitor-General for Scotland, per- haps he wasn't. It is only now, as a Scottish high court judge of 65, writing in the Edin- burgh University magazine, that he comes into his own with the suggestion that persis- tent criminals should be publicly flogged, put in the stocks and tattooed or branded.
Although disapproving of such uncivilised penalties himself, he feels that juries should be able to recommend penal- ties, and that local communities should be given a say. Judges have little experience of crime, he explains, but I wonder what expe- rience Lord McCluskey has of local com- munities. Some, no doubt, can be relied upon to produce the oafish, bloodthirsty noises they have learned from the gutter press, but most are riven by feuds, personal alliances and animosities, and in no posi- tion to produce coherent advice on any- thing. In any case, a community, being an abstraction, is incapable of spontaneous utterance, without a spokesman or leader to speak for it.
Has Lord McCluskey any experience of community leaders? The best type has a bright optimism in its eyes and wears Boy Scout shorts. The worst is infinitely more sinister, consumed by strange hatreds, full of guile and hidden agenda. Whatever it is, it is always bearded. Can Lord McCluskey be serious when he suggests that such peo- ple should be encouraged to determine judicial punishments — let alone that juries should do so, when it is almost universally acknowledged that they are no longer com- petent to return a sensible verdict?
But if one disregards these populist ges- tures — I personally would also be tempted to disregard Lord McCluskey's avowal of distaste for such fancy penalties as brand- ing and public flogging — there is a hard core of good sense in what he says. Prison, as the only severe penalty we can impose, is failing to do its job: 'It doesn't deter, it doesn't rehabilitate, it doesn't satisfy our primitive desire to see wrong-doers suffer, it is desperately expensive, it is purposeless and pointless.'
And crime proliferates endlessly. A car is broken into every 20 seconds; crimes against cars in public carparks have multi- plied by seven times in two years; my own house has been burgled three times while the police watch birds'-nests and harass motorists. When the ludicrous Mr Howard threatens longer prison sentences and invents new imprisonable offences (like supplying athletes with steroids), an intel- lectually dead society can think of no solu- tion except to give more money to the police and build more prisons. As I have pointed out previously, this is precisely the opposite of what is needed, which is to keep the police lean and hungry, close down half the prisons and give citizens the right to defend their own property.
The problem with having written regular articles in the same magazine for slightly over 27 years is that I have covered every subject. The punishment of persistent offenders was dealt with I don't know how many years ago in my proposal for Waugh's Udenopticon, a penal colony within which prisoners were given total freedom but forced to live unsupervised in the company of their fellow-criminals for the rest of their days. Failing that, I suppose the best thing would be to allow fancy penalties at the judge's discretion, with the rider that nobody should be permitted to preside over a Crown Court who was not a Scotsman or, in extreme cases, a Scotswoman.
It is not just that the Scots take a reason- ably old-fashioned view of crimes — win- ning an acquittal on appeal is notoriously difficult in Scotland, with only two success- ful eases this century, as George Beattie discovered to his cost last week. It is that the Scots still retain a sense of morality — slightly defective, perhaps, in a few respects, but infinitely preferable to no morality at all.
Which seems to be the state in our own intellectually dead country. I noticed it first at the time of the Gibraltar shootings, when every saloon bar wiseacre chuckled in sup- port of the killings with no awareness that they were chuckling away any moral right we had to keep the peace in Northern Ire- land. The latest demonstration of our national amorality has been in reactions to
'It'll be a dog's life under Labour.' the Kenneth Dover story. Spectator readers will not need reminding of its salient fea' tures — how Sir Kenneth plotted killing aa academic colleague who obligingly commit' ted suicide, much to his delight and plea" sure.
My own reaction on first reading Cason' dra Jardine's brilliant interview with Dover which appeared in the Daily Telegraph of 25 November — I think it may be the best piece of journalism I have ever read, and, wish somebody would give her a gold medal — was that the old boy was sufferiq from a senile displacement of ordinary rell" cence. Any of us might wish a colleague dead, and even joke about ways to kill lorn in an idle moment among suitable friends, but to set it down in print and defend it as a rational position — these things betray 3 certain slipping of the controls. Be that as it may, the reaction among our so-called intelligentsia, as all the newsPa' pers galumphed behind with follow-ups to Jardine's story, was almost universally favourable. Dover was praised for his inc' sive thinking and courage in speaking up' The man who wrote, 'My problem was . • how to kill him without gettinginto trouble . . . We had to get rid of the man. We couldn't have him lurching around the front quad . . . ' and told Jardine, I don t have a reverence for human life per se' was praised by Philip Howard in the Times as 'one of the sharpest, most original and humane minds of his generation'. Laurence Marks in the Independent 05 Sunday explains, 'Sir Kenneth's obviona humanity (notwithstanding his profession of cold-bloodedness) was graduallY exhausted.' As Jardine points out, there were elements of personal dislike in the feud. Dover was brought up to dislike alco- hol and his colleague was a drunk. So is the wretched Independent much against aleci- hol, of course. But does this add up to a. humane man? Is there anything sharp 0' original about it? The simplest and most fundament.al„ tenet of social morality is that you don't ki" people or have them killed because theY are inconvenient to you. That was what ,ther Thorpe trial was all about, as my olue.; readers may remember. There is nothings Greek or Roman philosophy which all°, you to kill for the honour or smooth roll.t fling of the School, and if there were, it would be rubbish. If we lose sight of we have lost sight of everything.
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