It's all going pear shaped

A few years ago I felt something was wrong. It seemed to me that things in England weren't quite the way they should be and it frustrated me. Frustrated me because I couldn't really put my finger on what it was and because none of the people that I socialised with felt it to the same degree that I did.

England seemed to be loosing sight of the meaning of justice and what caring really meant and in its place came a kind of legislative care. The state would tell us what was right and wrong, who was good and bad, who was permitted to punish wickedness and who was not.

This was bad enough for me because I have always been comfortable with my view of good and bad, right and wrong. My own good sense had always served me well in the past and it seemed to be a mainstream kind of sense where goodness was rewarded and wickedness punished.

And then it changed. I don't know when it happened but I started hearing news about how this person was arrested for resisting a burglary, or that person was in court because they had restrained a school bully or some such.

It seemed to me that interpretation of the law (and there was more and more of it with each passing year) and the meaning of justice had passed their closest point and had started on a new route onwards to some kind of apogee where being wicked or being good is not the point. I hated it, but I seemed to be the only one who felt it so acutely.

Of course I was not the only one and the Internet, and more specifically blogging, has shown me that there are many more who feel the same way.

Peter Cuthbertson is one of them and his moving article about 77 year-old Bill Clifford, a good man who took his own life because he could no longer take what life in England was offering him, articulates my feelings perfectly:

What an outrage against the most elementary principles of justice such cases are. What a signal they are of the sick liberal cancer at the heart of British society.

Go and read it. Decide if you agree with his sentiments. If you do not you are not welcome here. The England Project can do without you.

Posted by JohnJo at November 28, 2003 08:55 AM | TrackBack