TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?

The window display in a referendum shop, Scotland 

Referendums – referenda? – seem to be all the rage at the moment.  I am writing this in Scotland where the nationalists, far from accepting the 2014 choice by Scots to stay in the UK, are pressing for another vote. Presumably, if they get and lose that one, they will press for another – and another – until they get the result they want, when they will suddenly lose enthusiasm for the concept of asking people their opinion. 

A similar problem exists with the European Union which we voted on a couple of years ago.  Several people are now suggesting a second referendum on the subject with the hope of reversing the first vote.  The trouble with that idea would be that you would have to offer people not two choices but three – stay in, leave with a negotiated settlement the like of which the government has proposed, or crash out without paying a penny and saving some £40 billion pounds in the process.  Plenty of people favour the last option and would not accept the result of a vote which did not offer it.  The nightmare scenario would then be, say, 45% for staying in, 30% for leaving with a settlement and 25% for crashing out.  This is quite possible and would leave a majority wanting to leave - but not agreeing how – with the biggest single vote for staying in.  No politician would ever allow that scenario to arise and leaving one of the three options out would effectively disenfranchise a large part of the electorate so a second referendum is, I would have thought, very unlikely to happen.

In fact, to be precise, it would be a third referendum on Europe, not a second.  I am old enough to have voted in both the first and second ones, choosing to stay on both occasions, being on the winning side (comfortably) in the first and the losing side (narrowly) in the second. The original referendum was in 1975, the very first time the British people had encountered the phenomenon of voting on a single issue.  It seemed quite jolly at the time and, even if the second vote was marred by immigration scares and outright racism, it did at least get people to exercise their franchise in larger numbers than they had ever done before.

But you can have too much of a good thing.  Voting is about decision making not about detail: him or her for office; this party or that; in or out of Europe, proportional representation or first past the post. Then you leave the detail to the politicians, which is what they are paid for after all. Maybe we can have another either/or vote when the dust has settled and we can see if breaking with the EU has worked and we remain prosperous and comfortable. If it leads to huge queues of lorries on the M2, vegetables rotting in the fields and the NHS in even greater trouble because of a lack of workers, we might want to go cap in hand to ask if we can come back, please. Otherwise, we need to accept the first vote and get on with the process.

The elephant in the voting booth when it comes to allowing the people to decide, of course, is capital punishment.  The accepted wisdom is that, if you allowed the people to decide, they would vote for its restoration and bring back hanging.  Yet there is not the slightest possibility of that actually happening.

Why not? Not only have we managed to create a relatively safe society without resorting to executing criminals but we have lost the means and the will to use the death penalty.  The USA still has it and still executes people in certain states. Yet it is one of the most violent countries in the world with a far higher murder rate than that of any state which does not execute people.  The Second Amendment, which allows the carrying of weapons, leads to their use when minor confrontations turn deadly and to hideous unstoppable massacres of the innocent by nutcases whose lives have gone wrong. 

In contrast the UK, in or out of Europe, is a relatively peaceful place.  There are acid attacks and knife crimes but we trust the police to get on top of these problems and maintain some sort of law and order.  There is no evidence that restoring the death penalty would effectively deter crimes of this sort.

And what if we did bring it back?  We would need lawyers, judges and doctors to argue for and implement it and there is no sign that they have any enthusiasm for bringing back state killing.  How would it be done anyway? There are no trained hangmen around; lethal injection would almost certainly be challenged successfully in the courts as cruel and unusual punishment; the electric chair is obsolete. Firing squads? The heart sinks at the thought of getting enthusiastic amateur volunteer killers to shoot the condemned. 

The great majority of lawyers would refuse to argue in favour of the death penalty, judges would flinch at the thought of donning that black cap and not many doctors would want to become involved in the process. Any professionals who facilitated capital punishment would become known as death-mongers and find that invitations to fashionable cocktail and dinner parties rapidly dried up.  While they lost hope of professional advancement and acceptance, there would be armies of volunteers who would oppose efforts to use capital punishment and make life a misery for those who tried to enforce it.  Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.  The chattering classes will not support the death penalty so it is not coming back – ever.

Get over it, death penalty restorers.  It is a hopeless cause and, while there may be enthusiasm amongst the general public for its return, the people who would have to put it into practice are simply not there. Restoring the death penalty is one option that will never be put to the people in a referendum.  Thank God.

Edwin Lerner.  (My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com)

WOULD I WORK FOR WOODY?

Woody Allen (picture from Wikipedia)

You do not see it very often nowadays but there is a British road sign which occasionally raises some knowing sniggers.  It shows an adult holding the hand of a child as they walk along the road.  It is meant to act as a warning to look out for pedestrians but it reminds some people of an older man grooming a younger girl – inevitably with a sexual overtone.  Having sex with children is one of the crimes that horrify us most of all and anyone locked up for it can expect little mercy from his fellow inmates who show far more respect for a man responsible for crimes of murder or robbery than for a ‘nonce’. Prisons can be Old Testament places when it comes to passing judgement.

This is the source of Woody Allen’s problems.  He has been accused by his stepdaughter Dylan of molesting her when she was young and this has led to a boycott of him by actors who were previously falling over themselves to appear in one of his films but now refuse the honour. The accusation was first made by Dylan years ago but has now been reiterated by her as an adult.  There is nowhere near enough evidence to convict Allen in a court and he has never been charged with a crime.  That does not stop people passing judgement in the court of public opinion.

A single accusation is one thing, multiple accusations another.  If a group of women or,  in the case of Kevin Spacey, men accuse Harvey Weinstein or a Bill Cosby of predatory behaviour (ie rape), then you feel there has to be some truth in the allegations.  One or two of them may have acted out of spite but a whole group of people who did not know each other?  Not bloody likely.

Only one person has accused Allen of molesting her but that someone was in his care.  Was she being manipulated by a vengeful mother who felt herself to have been wronged in the person of Mia Farrow, whose own brother has been imprisoned for the same crime she accuses Allen of?  Or was she bravely exposing the crimes of her famous stepfather who exploited his position and had demonstrated in films like Manhattan a fascination with younger women?  The short answer is that we will almost certainly never know in the absence of a confession by either person that they had either committed an offence or fabricated an accusation of the crime we fear and hate most.

But what if they were both telling the truth in different ways?.  Sexual crimes are notoriously hard to prosecute because they usually involve two people giving different versions of the same event, both sides convinced that they are telling it like it was.  This leads to many women having an absolute conviction that they have been raped without gaining the satisfaction of a conviction in court against the man they feel certain has raped them.  That same man breathes a huge sigh of relief and then walks away Scot fee, hopefully having at least learned not to repeat his mistake.

It is possible that Woody, in showing natural affection for a child who has been brought into his family but with whom he had no biological relationship, overstepped the mark and did things which did not amount to sexual molestation but which were significantly uncomfortable for Dylan. Don’t laugh.  Many fathers, encouraged to show affection towards their children, find themselves wandering into this grey area.  Blake Morrison wrote about this in When Did You Last See Your Father? and I have to admit that I have been there myself.  Yet I have a perfectly healthy relationship with my now grown-up daughter.  I can understand how a child, caught up in a vicious break-up of the type Woody Allen and Mia farrow had, and feeling the need to take the side of the parent she lives with, manages to turn behaviour which probably would have become an embarrassing private memory for both of them into a highly public crime for one of them.

The film industry is notorious for stories of aspiring actresses who are given parts if they submit to the advances of ruthless producers. They were once expected to accept these advances with a shrug or even the appearance of gratitude but are no longer prepared to become human fodder for sex predators.  There is a difference between actresses, who were usually thought to be sexually mature women, and sexually immature seven year old girls.  So Allen, who was untouched by allegations from the many actresses he worked with, has found his life torpedoed by an accusation he can never rebut by someone who was part of his now fractured family.

Whatever you think of his private life, he was and still could be a great director.  He has gone off the boil in recent years and I no longer make a point of going to see any film he makes, but I still have a soft spot for comedies like Café Society and Magic in the. Moonlight and I think Crimes and Misdemeanours and Annie Hall two of the greatest films ever made and Blue Jasmine worthy of an actress Oscar for Cate Blanchett, who has been asked but declined to boycott him.

I have never been tempted by acting as a career and do not have the skills needed to work in the technical side of the film industry so it is unthinkable that I will ever receive a call from Woody Allen to help him in what is left of his career as a director.  Moreover, where I come from you generally wait for the invitation before you send back the RSVP.  However, in the vanishingly unlikely event of being asked to work for Woody Allen, I would be inclined to accept the offer. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com