Moral ignorance on a staggering scale

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David Davis MP appears to have been so disgusted by the notion of extending preventive jail from 28 to 42 days (an extra two weeks) that he resigns to fight a by-election over it.

He apparently did not consider that the law, or rather "law", that allows the hybridization of human and animal cells was not so serious. He made no such fuss then, when the immorality of Gordon Brown compassed most of those who heard of it with a shudder.

I hope this man is a posturing mountebank. Because if he is serious and means what he says, then his complete inability to distinguish moral issues is horrifying in a politician who claims to be Conservative. Not, of course, in the least surprising, but horrifying nevertheless.

Comments

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First you have to realize that groupthink dominates, in Britain, to a scary and breathtaking extent. Thanks to bad education and worse media - I have spent so long railing at the British press and the BBC that I have run out of things to say - the amount of viewpoints that can be put forward is staggeringly narrow. The difference between the two leading parties amounts to the haircuts of their leaders, and any attempt to make us believe otherwise only ends up disgusting more and more voters.

One of the subjects of groupthink in Britain is the powers of the police. No acting police chief would ever put his head above the parapet and personally state that the police need more powers: he might as well paint a target on his own foreheard for the press and TV to shoot at. However, it is well known that behind the scenes they have been begging the government on bended knees for not 42, but 90 days. However, since the same people who went to ministers on their knees to ask for this were not willing to defend their request in front of a parliamentary committee, of course the ministers could not deliver what they asked for. However, the former head of the Metropolitan Police (AKA Scotland Yard), Lord Stevens, now retired and with nothing to lose, has defended the demand vigorously, and so have several retired intelligence heads. IN this country, you can only trust a man's view when he is retired and has nothing to lose; otherwise you can bet your life that any public views expressed will not be his but those that his group finds it most convenient for him to have.

The reason for the increase I set out elsewhere: the need to investigate the tangled and difficult overseas connections of terrorists and organized crime. It is something that has always been recognized in Italy, where we know a bit more than the clueless British MPs on such matters as mafia and terrorism.