As I’ve said before here, in the context of exporting democracy down the barrel of a gun to Iraq and other places where it has no history, western parliamentary democracy relies on one of two compromises: either one party gets an inflated majority, allowing it to control Parliament and thus legislate more-or-less at will (which is the norm in the UK), or a group of parties get together, make deals, and exclude other parties. This is more-or-less accepted in most western countries. In countries with major religious or ethnic fault-lines, it could be a recipe for civil war. In the vast majority of cases where a major party has to find a partner to form a parliamentary majority, they choose a minor party over the other major one (Germany being a well-known exception, where there have been Grand Coalitions of the Christian and Social Democrats including very recently, although coalitions of one of those two parties with the Free Democrats, a small third party, are more common). In some countries, the balance of power is held by an extremist party, as has been seen in Israel.

Some countries have a constitution to protect citizens from the excesses of politicians. Some (like the UK) don’t. However, these laws always focus on the right to freedom of religion, speech and assembly and against detention beyond what is necessary to uphold law and order. They do not protect against unjust or irrational laws. The USA continued to uphold slavery for decades after its well-known Amendments were passed. Its judges upheld segregation for nearly a century after that was abolished. Its disabled citizens are not granted the right to an independent life, and freedom from effective incarceration or forced sterilisation, by their constitution. It did not bring about the abolition of institutional dumps for disabled children. This was the achievement of disability campaigners, and the worst institutions persisted well into the last quarter of the 20th century, much as they did in the UK which has no written constitution.

For a disabled person, unless he or she is from a very rich family, the right to the same freedom as everyone else is dependent on decent welfare provision, because their ability to work is diminished, either by the limitations of their disability, or their increased vulnerability to medical crises, or their inability to physically enter the buildings where there is work. Whether this comes from some kind of private philanthropy or from tax-funded state provision, the ability of a person, including a child, to stay in their home and receive a decent education requires support. Without it, the strain on a family is often too great: the burden of lifting a heavy disabled child on a sole female caregiver, for example, or the necessity of one wage earner giving up their job, or the financial burden of wheelchairs, extra clothes, equipment, modification of the home and so on. With adequate support, most disability can be managed by the affected person or their family. Without it, people will not be able to stay in their homes, and people will be less likely to take on a disabled partner, and more likely to take “advantage” of genetic tests to screen out disabled children. People are more likely to relinquish their duty of care to disabled relatives (including children) if the support is not there.

I used to be a republican. These days, I am an agnostic about what type of democracy I want the UK, as it currently is, to be. Republics often tell their citizens myths and lies about their origins, and how they established a state of the people and threw off the yoke of the monarchy, or the church, or a foreign invader — it was never about a bunch of slave-driving tobacco farmers who didn’t want to pay their taxes, or a merchant class who wanted power for themselves. In the UK, we tend to wear our patriotism lightly and unless you go into parliament or the Armed Forces, nobody ever asks you to swear allegiance to the Queen. I’ve never been asked to in 35 years. Yet, in many republics, they insist that you do the equivalent, and sing the national anthem, every morning. In some, they even insist that you recite an ethnically-specific slogan, regardless of your actual ethnicity (Turkey, in particular). As a Muslim, I have found that, in terms of day-to-day practice of Islam (including the wearing of religiously-mandated clothing in public places), the UK protects its Muslim citizens’ freedom to a greater extent than the republics on the continent.

Therefore, I support the initiative to petition for a refusal of Royal Assent for this bill, have signed it myself and urge anyone concerned for the welfare of disabled citizens to sign it. While not totally abolishing state support for disabled people’s independence, it will revoke vital supports for categories of disabled people who do not fulfil various tick-box criteria, such as being totally unable to walk (some people can walk a bit, at the risk of causing themselves injury or making themselves more ill). It is not even likely to save public money, as the government have previously admitted. It is not going to be temporary, as the Labour party have not pledged to reverse it if they regain power at the next election, and is not something anyone expected of the Liberal Democrats, who attracted votes until the last election precisely because they were not Tories and were not the pro-war New Labour (for that matter, it was not even in the Conservatives’ manifesto). This coalition’s mandate to govern is not unconditional, as it is the result of a back-room deal that nobody else got a vote on. If the monarchy is one check against this stitch-up, we should not have qualms about trying to use it.

(Please note: please leave a sensible message if you leave one at all. Telling the Queen to get a job or threatening her with the guillotine are not helpful to our cause.)

His government, he said, was rejuvenating the job market by getting people off benefits and into work: “Everyone should work who can.” It was the “saddest figure in Europe”, he said, that Hungary had the lowest employment rate in the EU.

For the long-term unemployed – a disproportionate number of whom are Roma – this means taking part in the government’s new public work programme. According to Jeno Setét, a Roma activist, between 70% and 80% of Hungary’s Roma population do not work (the rate for the whole population is around 10%). This scheme aims to get 300,000 people into work by 2014 via a sort of community service scheme for which participants are paid less than the national monthly minimum wage (around 80,000 HUF – £214 – for unskilled workers) but slightly more than they would receive in benefits.

Anyone unemployed for 90 days is offered a place on the programme, which administers projects cleaning streets or sewers, cutting down trees or building football stadiums or dams. Refusal to accept a placement will result in all social security benefits being stopped to the refusenik and family. Gyöngyöspata was chosen last year to run a pilot scheme. Unemployed locals – almost exclusively Roma – were deployed to cut down trees in a nearby wood.

For Setét, the public work scheme is a “smokescreen” that will do little to help Roma get “real” jobs and will reinforce their position at the bottom of Hungarian society. “If people on the scheme were paid properly and trained properly, I’d be all for it,” he added. “But they are not. Right now it’s a way of humiliating people and paying them a slave wage.”

While the system of “work for benefits” does not involve the obvious racism present in the Hungarian version, it does not even pay more than benefits and is not even in public services but consists of fake “work experience” schemes for large commercial organisations and also carries the threat of lost benefits. The US version is known to have pushed people into food banks and soup kitchens by withholding benefits in the absence of work; our other fellow-traveller in this is a notoriously racist country in eastern Europe which is becoming an undemocratic pariah state.

Has BMT been carried out in patients with EB before?

Yes, two clinical trials of bone marrow transplants from healthy donors without EB into children with severe EB are currently ongoing in the US. Early results from the trial indicate that, in some patients, there may be some benefit derived from bone marrow transplants.

However, overall results are mixed and, sadly, there is a significant risk of death. Consequently, such trials are not planned currently in the UK.

The episode was titled “Butterflies”, and although in the first few minutes Dr Griffin presents Henryk Hanssen with a newspaper front page reading “Hope for Butterfly Child”, the significance of this reference was never explained (it refers to the fragility of the affected person’s skin, which can tear and blister very easily from friction or pressure). Hanssen and Griffin have some apprehension about the exploitative nature of the media coverage and the experimental nature of the procedure, as well as the patient’s enlarged liver, but agree to proceed with “extreme caution”. The girl with EB, named Cindy, had a sister who was a year younger, who decided she did not want to donate her bone marrow and explained that her sister’s condition had completely dominated their lives, with at one point her bicycle being taken away because her sister could not ride it. Dr Griffin later managed to persuade her to give her consent by telling her that they were very fortunate to have an exact tissue match and that, if successful, the treatment could change her sister’s life (this after her mother said she had signed the consent form and that her underage daughter’s consent was of no significance). The operation goes ahead, but we do not find out whether it was successful; we do not see Cindy after she goes to theatre, and Griffin tells her mother that the operation is not a quick fix, which might open the possibility for future appearances, but none of the family are in the next episode.

I’ve raised concerns about ridiculous storylines in this strand before — Holby’s Saturday evening sister programme Casualty ran a storyline in which a man who had been diagnosed with ME was shown beating his wife (he was later re-diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, which was a curious diagnosis in itself as you don’t just have muscular dystrophy, you have one of several dozen types of it). I objected to the ME storyline because it is more common for sufferers (who are more likely to be female) to be abused by medical professionals of both sexes, rather than a male sufferer to abuse his female partner, who was a nurse. It was a lot like having one programme on domestic violence in several years, and it featuring a violent wife rather than a violent husband. That time, my complaint was brushed off on the grounds that medical accuracy had sometimes to be sacrificed for the sake of the drama.

This storyline was very clearly inaccurate, presenting a treatment which is very much in its early stages and which British doctors have refused to offer because of its experimental, high-risk nature, as if it offered a very significant hope in curing EB now (or at least checking it, as damage that has already been done cannot be undone). Is there no limit to this organisation’s “artistic licence”? People die of complications from this disease every year, and many of those who have it (particularly if severely), especially if they have many friends with it (which they are more likely to nowadays because of social networks) will have known people who have died. There are many ways a story like this could have been told — there are other conditions which require a bone-marrow transplant (or an organ donation, even) to cure them, so why could one of them not have been used, rather than pretending that something that, right now, doesn’t work, does, and that something will radically improve a patient’s life when it is more likely to kill them?

Cait Reilly is currently suing the government after the DWP forced her to leave a voluntary work placement in a museum to do one of their unpaid “training” placements in Poundland (for overseas readers, this is a chain of shops that sells everything for £1) which turned out not to be training at all, but two weeks’ unpaid shelf-stacking and floor-sweeping, something anyone can learn to do in under an hour. Ms Reilly had worked in retail before, as have I, and even till work does not require two weeks’ training — in my case, it took one working day to give us the “customer service” pep talk and to train us on the tills.

There have been a number of moronic, mean-spirited responses to her campaign from the right-wing media; Reilly speaks of how Vanessa Feltz “attempted to humiliate [her] on air” and having listened to her atrocious show (she is a columnist on the Daily Express, by the way) I can well believe that. There was also a piece by Jan Moir in the Daily Mail, which accuses her of exhibiting a “sense of entitlement” which might not endear her to future employment, and ridiculing the human-rights angle of her legal claim by comparing it to ten years’ in Guantanamo Bay:

I would argue that doing a little unpaid work in return for benefits is not a breach of your human rights, it is actually a bonus. See it as a life lesson — and you might get more out of it than you think.

I would argue that a little perspective might not go amiss, even from a typical 22-year-old graduate who knows everything and has big ideas about what she wants to do in the world.

I would also argue that her stance is deeply insulting to those whose jobs actually do entail sweeping floors and stacking shelves. And who do so without complaint to feed their own families and to help to pay Cait Reilly’s benefits allowances. For nobody owes this girl a living. Least of all those who work for a living.

To start with, I think her Job Centre’s insistence that she take part in this placement was a bureaucratic error: she did not need retail work experience (she already had it) and was already in work-related activity, i.e. her ongoing museum work experience placement, which she had shown the initiative of organising for herself. Work experience placements do have a place: for a prospective employee to demonstrate their suitability (over a short period) with an offer of a job if they are, or for a teenager to get a glimpse into some sector of industry, or for someone inexperienced in recent work to gain experience without a great deal of risk for the employer. It is more agreeable that the employer be a small enterprise or a charity, and that the placement be a learning process of some sort.

This type of “work experience” involves doing menial work which requires little or no training that the employer could be paying someone to do, for free, which is a disincentive to them to actually pay people to do the same jobs. Much the same could be said of council work such as bin collections, but public sector jobs are often heavily unionised and employing unpaid menial labour on a routine basis would result in industrial action, and rightly so (while the retail sector has fairly weak union representation). Supermarkets, in particular, nowadays require fewer till staff as many of them use self-service tills which require only one or two for a bank of six or more. When the beneficiaries are enterprises the size of Poundland or Tesco, there is also enormous potential for corruption.

Most people would not mind doing a voluntary position for a charity, or a brief work-experience position with the promise of a job (or at least a reference) afterwards. Increasingly, young people have found themselves doing one “internship” after another, never receiving a wage and leaving them unable to move away from their families’ home. This is not work experience; it is exploitation and benefits nobody except the employer, and serves to make some professions inaccessible to anyone whose families cannot afford to support them for extended periods after leaving school or college. Nobody is talking about the world owing anyone a living, except the Mail with their straw-man headline (“It is my human right not to work for Poundland”). Most people want to work, but if I’m going to sweep floors for nothing, it had better be for a good cause.

I was shocked that a radio presenter is even asking whether protecting someone from being raped, murdered or otherwise physically harmed is “worth the money”. Mind you, the BBC did air a pre-recorded joke about the possibility of George Michael being raped when he was sent to prison last year (and when I complained, I was told they had to consider everyone’s tastes). One reason they protect vulnerable prisoners is that it is a simple matter of preventing crime, and attacks by self-righteous lags on unpopular prisoners is just as much crime as the act that prompted the victims’ imprisonment. It is not supposed to be a perk of being imprisoned for some crimes (like holding up terrified bank workers or householders with a sawn-off shotgun, for example) that you get to victimise those guilty of lower-class offences.

But another reason is that some people who are sent to prison for sex murders, acts of terrorism and the like are in fact innocent, and it is well-known that some of them have faced the same treatment some members of the public would like to see meted out to Norris and Dobson. These include people like Stephan Kiszko and Stephen Downing, both of whom were now known to be innocent but at the time were believed to be every bit as guilty as Norris and Dobson are. Even prisoners with developmental delay have faced extreme abuse from other prisoners, with one such young woman (featured in an inside-prison TV programme a few years ago) committing suicide because of it.

Of course, some might argue that if we still had the death penalty, we would not need to house men like these at all (although when we did have it, it did not apply to people who were the age Norris and Dobson were at the time of Stephen Lawrence’s murder). However, we would also have put to death people like Kiszko, Downing, the Guildford Four and others who had been framed by unscrupulous police and are now known to be innocent. If we allowed other prisoners to murder the unpopular inmates, prison would become tantamount to the death penalty. I question whether the protection afforded by segregation is significantly more costly than keeping in someone in prison in general: the safety is mostly afforded by spending more time alone under lock and key, and it must be a pretty lonely existence. While it is to be expected that someone might suggest that their protection is not worth the money on a radio phone-in, it is quite unacceptable for the presenter to be suggesting it to their listeners.

One recalls those who could not vote for Clinton in 1996 and then 2000, for all manner of reasons (his climb-down on healthcare, support for the death penalty even in dubious cases, signing IRA-IRA and so on), and chose to vote for Ralph Nader instead being blamed for George W Bush’s victory, even though the latter had as much to do with the irregularities in Florida as with anyone voting for Nader. Left-wingers who voted for Obama in 2004, having been promised so much only to see their hopes dashed as Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay and is now set to sign a bill which allows the military to treat a citizen as an enemy combatant while on home soil. No doubt many will vote for him simply for fear of a Republican getting back in, and those who choose to vote for minority candidates will be blamed if he loses.

The same is true of Labour voters here in the UK. A fair number of us started voting Liberal Democrat from about 1997 onwards, as Tony Blair changed the party so as to appear acceptable to the tabloid-reading public. This is not simply due to its softening its 1980s stances and promises to withdraw from the (then) EEC and reverse the sale of council houses: there was also the total subservience of Blair’s government after 2001 to Bush’s war machine, leading us into two disastrous, misguided wars that many people could see would be a failure from the start, along with the attacks on civil liberties and the onslaught of state surveillance and database schemes (notably the ID card scheme).

While Labour could not be expected to maintain their 1997 landslide performance in 2001, they lost votes hand over fist in each election after that. They ultimately pleased nobody, and even the claim that their “Iron Chancellor” could manage the economy better than anyone else had fallen to pieces with the economic collapse of 2008: it was all shown to be an illusion, even if the collapse originated with the American banks and their risky lending practices. The Lib Dems (and even some Tories) offered a strong and consistent civil libertarian position, and seemed to offer some of the social democratic vision that Labour seemed to have abandoned. When some members even dared to suggest in public (such as in letters to local newspapers in south Wales) that voters might vote for other than a Labour candidate, they were expelled from the party. Labour had also been trying to muzzle grass-roots activism since the 1990s at least, as I saw for myself in the National Union of Students. The reasoning is always that, if you rock the boat for those who are working to make (or keep) the party electable, you risk letting the Tories in.

Labour cannot blame those who voted in good conscience for a party that seemed to offer what they had left behind. Not everyone will vote for a party, whether it’s Labour or any other, just because they are not the opposition, or on the basis of a threat that the opposition might get back in, or stay in. Finally, we know that the “modernisers” in the Labour party and the Tories have some common policies in any case (including support for their wars) and are just as willing to use the Tory press (and certainly to play to them) as the Tories themselves, so scaring us about the Tories coming back sounds a bit hollow. After all, in Animal Farm, the very pigs who told the animals that “Jones will come back” eventually let Jones back in themselves.

This article, by Vicki Helyar-Cardwell of the Criminal Justice Alliance, appeared in the “Response” section of the Guardian last Wednesday, and relates to an earlier report in which neurologists had said that the age of criminal responsibility in the UK (currently ten) is too low, based on a report issued by the Royal Society. Referencing the same report, there is an article on the paper’s “Joe Public blog” by Caspar Walsh, an author and journalist who works in a young offenders’ institution, that expresses the view that many young violent offenders, when not having to display their streetwise-ness to other inmates, reveal themselves as “vulnerable, damaged, frightened and confused”. The Royal Society report these articles refer to indicates that “key factors around decision making and impulse control are not fully formed until the age of 20 and that teenage brain development varies a great deal from person and is heavily dependent on a mix of upbringing, education, environment, and peer relationships”.

I first heard the argument about the immaturity of young adults’ brain development in the context of American juvenile law enforcement, which treats children in their early teens, or even younger, as adults if they commit a serious enough crime, and allows them to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. The offences which attract this penalty include “felony murder”, which means participating in a serious crime in which someone is killed — regardless of whether one was there at the point of the killing (for example, being a look-out counts) or whether one knew that anyone was carrying a weapon. “Without parole” can and frequently does mean the convict is never released, although in some states the possibility of executive clemency exists, as is the case with murder in the UK (release must be authorised by the Justice Secretary, or a state official in the USA); however, releases of murderers after 12 or 15 years inside, sometimes more, is accepted as normal in the UK, while in the USA it may be very bad for that politician’s re-election prospects.

The stakes in the UK are generally lower, and the offences more serious and the sentences less so than the look-out example mentioned earlier. Walsh mentions a young offender who had committed a premeditated murder, and received a sentence of a minimum of nine years; an adult murderer would very likely receive a much longer minimum. It is the absolute minimum for murder by an adult, and the only person I have heard of receiving that sentence was Frances Inglis, who murdered her son with a heroin overdose when he was in a coma, believing he was in pain and would never get better (her minimum sentence was reduced on appeal). By his own representation, he had committed the act with careful thought and while sober, but this writer did not believe he really knew what he was doing, while the prison staff did. The article by Vicki Helyar-Cardwell comments on an appeal judgement by Lord Justice Judge (his real surname) that several adults jailed for various offences during the riots last August were not “mindless”, that their “actions were deliberate, and each knew exactly what he (and in one case, she) was doing”. The sentences were of a maximum of four years, and mostly of one to two years, for burglary and theft during the riots.

There is a danger of treating youth as if it were some sort of cognitive impairment, in which young people could not be expected to recognise the gravity of what they are doing. Bo Hejlskov Elvén noted in his book, No Fighting, No Biting, No Screaming, that punishment does not work on people with cognitive impairments and severe autism because they do not understand cause and effect, other than very obvious ones such as when you press a button and something happens, or that rules that apply to the next person apply to them as well, and thus punishment should not be used in facilities that cater to such people. The same is not true of other young people and their ability to know what they are doing should not be underestimated — after all, they know the consequences for the person they hurt.

In fact, young people are given the powerful impression that acts which cause hurt to others, particularly other children and other young people, have no consequences: much bullying, harassment, physical violence and sexual harassment carries no negative consequences for the perpetrator (in fact, they may see their victim being told it is their fault, part of growing up or that they should “just ignore it”) as long as the victim is a peer or young person and not a member of school staff or someone else in authority. Youths often lack the inhibitions of adults, and are often apt to do or say things that adults would not, at least in polite society, either because they have not learned these things, or because rebellion has been made to look “cool”, or because adults will not intervene. This plays out in the streets, where those with obvious disabilities are subject to extreme harassment and violence, sometimes to the point of murder or until they have a heart attack, while young women cannot visit some parts of our cities without experiencing catcalls or more threatening forms of harassment. I have heard equally harrowing things about what goes on in some of our schools: a lady I know told me that a transgendered friend, who had been living full-time as female since aged 12 and was undergoing hormone treatment, committed suicide aged 15 because of relentless harassment and violence from her peers, despite having supportive parents and sensitive school staff. She also said that other pupils (including boys) had used her disability as a means to attack her physically and sexually on more than one occasion.

A large part of the problem is that our schools have a large number of physically adult pupils who have no interest in being there and have no real reason to be there, other than that society has decided that it is preferable to being at work, for someone that age (whether for their benefit, or to keep jobs for older adults), who have adult physical abilities without the liabilities, and as government moves to keep people in school up until the age of 18, secondary schools are likely to become more top-heavy, with more uninterested adult pupils who are able and willing to make life difficult for younger and weaker pupils, and those who actually want to study. Many of those of us who stayed on until 18 or later by choice remember those days as the best of our school days because there were fewer people, more of whom wanted to be there, and a less pressured environment without a school hierarchy (for example, no prefects and all the students being of the same age group).

We should not go any further down the road of making excuses for young people’s criminal misbehaviour by claiming they lack judgement. This excuse should be reserved for the demonstrably cognitively impaired, who in the event of involvement in crime, themselves need to be put in a position where they cannot continue with it, and for those who acted under extreme provocation or pressure. While I accept the point that the age of criminal responsibility could be raised to, say, 12, we should not be unduly lenient with older youths when they hurt other people, whether for gain or for its own sake: the strength that comes with being an adult must come with responsibility, particularly for those in a socially dominant position. There is no reason why adolescence should be as traumatic as it is for many people: it is up to adults to make sure, as much as possible, that children and young people are safe from abuse, including that of their peer group. This means that they should be taught that some behaviours are hurtful, particularly where there is ambiguity (for example: a woman responding with apparent good humour to unwanted male attention does not mean she enjoys it), but teaching empathy only goes so far: it must be clear that behaviour which harms other people carries stiff sanction, and where the harm is severe or the behaviour persistent, it is entirely appropriate that this may include prison time.

I’ve been following the story about the French breast implant recall with some interest, as it may affect someone in my family (I am not sure if her implants are from the company involved in this scandal). The French government has advised all women who received any of this company’s implants to have them removed; the British government has said that there is not sufficient evidence to justify the risk of putting women through another operation to remove them. What I am concerned about is the misconception put forward in Penny’s article, which appeared in today’s printed Guardian:

Breast enhancement is by far the most common cosmetic surgery procedure in both Britain and the US, and the number of operations continues to rise, despite the recession. A significant proportion of those surgeries are performed on women who have lost their breasts to mastectomy, or on trans people as part of gender reassignment surgery, but most are straightforward choices made by women seeking to make their healthy, normal mammary glands look a little more like the pert, rigid teats you see in the pages of Nuts and Loaded.

This is simply inaccurate. A fair number of women who receive these implants for cosmetic reasons do so because their existing breasts, though perfectly functional, do not actually resemble the breasts of any other women they know, let alone those in Nuts or Loaded (as if most women read those rags anyway). Some women become self-conscious because they have been bullied at school (as is the case with the family member I mentioned, as with someone mentioned in a story about this issue in yesterday’s paper), even by so-called friends, but either way, they want average-sized — or even below average, just noticeable — boobs. It is not fair to assume that they have all been brainwashed by the media, the patriarchy, or anyone else; it is a matter of being aware of not looking like other adult women. As plastic surgeon, Prof Simon Kay, said:

There’s a perception that women having breast implants are all bobble-headed bimbos looking for enormous pneumatic breasts, but this is not the case. They are ordinary women.

Quite.

Are sex offenders and lads’ mags using the same language? - University of Surrey - Guildford

A recent study carried out jointly by the universities of Middlesex and Surrey in the UK (press release above is from Surrey) have found that, when presented with quotes from lads’ magazines and from interviews with convicted rapists, men have difficulty working out which is which, is likely to identify more with a quote he believes is from a lads’ mag (which stands to reason, really) and often think that the quote from the lads’ mag is more offensive than the one from the rapist. Jezebel has a list of some of the quotes, with the answers at the end.

I’ve never read a “lads’ mag” in my life, so I wouldn’t know what’s in them and in what context these quotes appear. I agree that it’s disgusting that this sort of thing sells freely and perhaps that teenage boys as well as young men are being exposed to it. However, I wonder if they explored exactly why the lads’ mags discussed women and sex in more offensive terms than the rapists did?

Perhaps the reason is that the actual rapists came from a broad spectrum of social classes and many of them are middle-aged, milddle-class men who have not read many (or indeed any) of these magazines and are what you might call gentlemen if you didn’t know better. Lads’ mags are aimed at a particular demographic: young, single men of a particular mentality, who might well share the magazines among themselves or pin the pictures from them up on their walls, either at home or at work. Besides which, the lads’ mags are not actually referring to rape, so there is not the gravity to the situation and the writers feel free to talk about sex in ways that would not be acceptable in a prison group therapy session, or when spoken to a psychologist in a prison who he knows is certainly not “on the level” with him. The rapist also knows that to use brazenly offensive language about his own rapes might well prolong the time he spends inside.

Again, the fact that this kind of material sells to young men is a great cause for concern, but it stands to reason that a midde-class rapist will sound less crude and offensive when talking about his crimes to professionals in prison than a lads’ mag will, when it is their purpose to be crude.

Baroness (Syeeda) Warsi recently said in an interview with the Guardian that Muslim extremists such as Anjem Choudhary, who led the group which was threatening to outrage the public with a counter-demonstration on Remembrance Sunday until it was banned late last week, forfeited the right to call themselves Muslims. Her reasoning is pretty extraordinary: in a video interview with John Harris, she says:

From the Islam that I have been taught, and grown up with … and most people have been bought up with, it has to be rationed, reasoned, contextualised. Now if you detach reason from religion, then you are no longer a follower of that faith. If you are a follower of a religion that is so clear in its support of humanity [and you behave the way they do] then you are no longer part of that faith.

Asked specifically about Choudhary, she alleged that “nothing about the way they conduct themselves is in accordance with the teachings” and that “the minute they detach reason from religion, they’re not part of that faith any more”.

It is actually pretty dangerous for a Muslim to be issuing statements that clearly imply that someone who identifies as a Muslim in fact is not (known as takfir). There are pretty strict criteria for exclusion from Islam, such as expressing a belief which is contrary to what is well-known about Islam (whether in relation to law or doctrine) or showing clear contempt for Islam (such as by defiling a copy of the Qur’an or insulting any Prophet). There are certain sects which are held not to be Muslim despite their identifying as such and having a superficially Islamic culture or using Islamic language, because their beliefs are incompatible. The American-based group which calls itself the Nation of Islam is the best-known of these in the West.

Crucially, sins do not nullify one’s Islam, unless you deny that something well-known to be a sin is a sin. This does not include things on which there is any dispute about them being forbidden, even if only a small minority regards it as permitted. Making unusual or invalid excuses for a sin also does not constitute disbelief: one common example is justifying killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that all Israelis are soldiers, or justifying killing anyone associated with the army of any contemporary Muslim country on the grounds that they support a non-Islamic government. The early Muslims had to deal with a sect called the Kharijites, some of whom proclaimed anyone who disagreed with them on very minute matters to be an unbeliever and slaughtered them in their thousands. Yet, they did not call the Kharijites unbelievers.

When murder does not put someone outside of Islam, one can easily deduce that hurting people’s feelings by making a noise on Remembrance Sunday does not either. It is not even a sin as such, it is simply bad manners and politically naive, assuming that they were not actually intending to attract negative attention to the community as they did with their demonstration against the Royal Anglian regiment parade in Luton in 2009, which did immense damage by prompting the founding of the English Defence League. Some Muslims certainly suspect that they do their publicity stunts for ulterior motives and may in fact intend harm, but it is also possible that they intend to provoke a conflict in which Muslims will be forced to take sides and which they presume will lead to their victory and domination, or that of a group very much like them. A dishonourable intention, as most Muslims do not want to live under their rule, but not something which, on the face of it, stops them being Muslims.

Takfir is something that is by turn condemned and encouraged: a few years ago it was being presented as the root of the entire extremism problem in the Muslim world, and Muslims everywhere were encouraged to sign the “Amman message”, which declared that members of several named sects were, at least, Muslims and could not be called otherwise (some scholars refused to sign it, among them Mufti Taqi Uthmani). However, when the takfir is against the extremists themselves (and against those who cause embarrassment to the Muslim community), some people are only too keen to call them unbelievers. The fact remains that the criteria are extremely strict, and usually it is up to scholars, not ordinary Muslims, however famous or politically influential they are.

Image source: Wikipedia.