A man attacks someone, punching them in the mouth after 30 minutes of screaming abuse. No one called the police. Hundreds of thousands of people, including his workmates and people in positions of enormous power and influence, support the attacker. The person he assaulted is sent hate mail and death threats.

Yes yes, this is what is happening right now after Jeremy Clarkson got sacked, but it’s standard for women who report domestic violence. So the next time you hear someone ask, “Why didn’t she report him to the police?” please feel free to refer them to #OisinTymon



* 'Bastard' wasn't the original word in this twitter, a word which would have got my post banned.

Back in July ’14 I wrote about compulsory therapy for people with mental illness on benefits. This policy idea was not based on any research – which demonstrates that making people go to counselling is counterproductive – it was a kite-flying exercise to test public opinion: just how much cruelty are we prepared to accept?

Something similar was floated last month this time seeing if the public will accept enforced major surgery. Just like the compulsory therapy business forcing obese people to have surgery perversely ignores all the research:

“ . . . any mandated program should have a strong evidence base for success.       Unfortunately, diet and lifestyle interventions have restricted, often transient, benefits due to biological adaptations, that act to sustain high bodyweight. It is therefore important to ask whether requiring people to participate in weight-loss programmes, despite a high likelihood of failure, is acceptable from the point of view of an individual, provider, or society. Although there is some success with pharmacological treatments for obesity, the only treatment for obesity that has been proven to be successful for substantial long-term weight loss and improved quality of life in a high proportion of people is bariatric surgery."

"It is not fair to ask hardworking taxpayers to fund the benefits of people who refuse to accept the support and treatment that could help them get back to a life of work." This is the standard announcement to persuade people who pay tax (and many who don't earn enough to pay tax) to agree with policies that provably worsen medical problems. 

We all know people who pay tax and don’t work hard. Sometimes it’s us. Whenever I hear “Hard Working Tax Payer” I hear the Shadow echo, “Idiot” because that’s how this term is in fact being used.

At the end of Downfall, a dramatisation of the last days of Hitler’s life, a boy is shown returning home to find his mother lynched by the Greifkommando. This paramilitary group murdered ‘cowards and traitors’ – old men, children, women – to create a climate of terrified compliance. In the film a civilian in a typically Bavarian hat is part of the Greifkommando: he’s not a soldier, he won’t be court martialed or shot if he doesn’t murder people, he’s just along for the pleasure of instilling terror and, if he gets the chance, killing people weaker than himself. He uses his righteous love of country as justification.

Some of us succumb easier than others to this psychopathy. We can’t deal with complexity. Immigrants are bad: it used to be that immigrant simply meant non-white but now we’ve broadened the term to include people from Eastern Europe. People on benefits have always been sneered at but now the disabled are also Scroungers. We can’t cope with the fact that the highest proportion of benefits - 47% - go to pensioners so we ignore that. We’re comfortable with Them and Us where They are something to be despised and therefore so much easier to devastate. 

This is simply human nature. Germans didn't suddenly go bonkers in 1938, any more than Rwandans, American settlers (AKA the British) Cambodians, former Yugoslavians, Turks or any other group of people who lost their sense of humanity. Part of all of us, myself included, loves to hate. Our job is to resist that, to retain our empathy and intellect. Because apart from anything else it might be you who is cut from the herd next.

Once again, our attitudes are being assessed to see just how far down that road Hard Working Tax Payers have gone. Are you happy to force someone to have major surgery?

Are you?

I’m writing this listening to Tallis’s  Spem In Alium while the growing spring light and warmth is bringing my garden to budding life.     

Terry Pratchett intended to die listening to this - “That’s the one where every single part of it comes together at once, where God picks you up and drops you on your head,” - in his garden drinking an excellent brandy. Apparently he died in his own bed with his family and his cat with him, and I hope he was listening to this music.

Many of my friends and acquaintances are texting, emailing and talking on Facebook about the loss of this good man, all of us feeling a bit stupid about the terrible sadness we’re experiencing. But we’ve shared a world, landscapes, lineages, lives, adventures and histories with him and with each other, and that world has now come to an end. The characters we love can now only repeat their stories, they can’t develop or mature any more. Discworld has suddenly become preserved rather than living on in a kind of real time.

The most common element on Discworld was Narrativium, which caused people to act and events to play out as they are meant to in a story. Heroes were guaranteed to win if the chances were a million to one. If a little girl walked alone through the woods she had to meet a wolf, who was forced to try and eat her. But Pratchett’s most complex characters fought the pressures of storylines that cast them as the Evil Witch, the Killer Cop, a Farmers Wife or an Unwilling Reaper and in doing so became more fully themselves and infinitely more interesting people.   

Mistress Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, Susan Sto Helit, Tiffany Aching and Death himself exerted self control, experienced pain and unhappiness in order to learn and grow and become who they were truly meant to be. None of them were interested in being nice or even particularly liked, and paradoxically became loved.   

Please take the time to listen to Spem In Alium and raise a glass to Terry Pratchett who brought good philosophy to millions of children and adults, and whose legacy is fierce, funny and full of wisdom.