Tonight:
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It is a disgrace, no question, that the Government proposes to chisel a few bawbees off the bottom line by reducing the compensation payment to any victim of crime found to have convictions for motoring offences.
But how to make things fair? The best way to resolve this issue, if you ask me, is to make sure compensation for the victims of crime is the same across the board: that is, no compensation at all.
This is a subject on which I am bewildered to find myself — as far as the current political landscape seems to go — out in the long grass of burst-blood-vessel Right-wing lunacy.
I simply can't understand why there should be a Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority in the first place.
One of the glories of our civilisation is a welfare state that struggles to make good the injuries and agonies life inflicts on us.
It does this regardless of whether we have any outstanding parking tickets; and regardless of how these injuries and agonies were inflicted in the first place.
Being stabbed up by a mugger, losing your liver to hepatic cancer and being flattened by a falling snooker table are all examples of what you might, heartlessly, call bad luck.
All will require treatment which — praise be to the wise and benevolent founders of the NHS — is free at the point of need. Should any of these victims struggle psychologically — “Why, God, did you single me out to be flattened by a snooker table?
Why?” — there are mechanisms to provide help. Long-term disabilities are — albeit often with terrible inadequacy — cared for and compensated through the medical and benefits systems.
But only in one of these cases does the state see it as right and necessary to soothe the victim further with a dollop of cash to the bank account. Yet why should being the victim of violent crime, as opposed to any other sort of bad luck, be a special case?
The rubric on the CICA website says, a little simperingly: “We know that we can never fully compensate [victims of crime], but we can recognise their suffering and give them some financial support that may help them move on.”
That seems a bit fuzzy as a rationale for allocating money from general taxation.
I don't say this because I think rape victims deserve what they get or the parents of murdered children ought to show a bit of stiff upper lip.
And I don't say it because I think we should be spending less on the unfortunate: let's tax the middle classes till they wail in agony, and spend scads more money on care for those who need it.
I just don't see how having been a victim of crime means you need that care more, and you need it in cash.
Happy 70th to the nicest poet of them all
SEAMUS Heaney — spryest of oldies, most artfully modest of Nobel honourees — is 70. Wise, twinkly, funny, good alike at grave and gay, he's still making poetry of the first rank.
A friend of mine once proposed starting up an “I Hate Bill Deedes” club, simply because adoration for him was so tediously widespread as to demand some sort of corrective.
One would feel the same way about Heaney ... if he wasn't so damned nice.
I just can't do it. It'll have to be a “Death To The Dalai Lama Society” instead. At least we'll have the Chinese government on side.
The modest man in the moon
Michael Collins — who he? The third of the Apollo 11 astronauts, who sailed alone around the dark side of the moon while his colleagues Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to its surface, is the mission's forgotten man.
Yet — as Charles Lindbergh wrote to him — his achievement had “a greater profundity ... you have experienced an aloneness unknown to man before”.
He has been further from the rest of humankind than any person who has ever lived. In a new interview, he modestly says: “Heroes abound, but don't count astronauts among them. We worked very hard, we did our jobs to near perfection, but that is what we had been hired to do.”
How proper. This may be Collins's way of being catty, too.
In Buzz Aldrin's new memoir Magnificent Desolation, the epithet he attaches most frequently and with most obvious pleasure to himself is “hero”.
• Kingsley Amis had a smashing idea for an advertising campaign designed to highlight the key selling point of his product. “Beer”, his posters would proclaim, “makes you drunk.”
My memory is that he proposed accompanying the slogan with an image of someone's mother-in-law falling down the stairs.
I'm put in mind of this by the Foreign Office's latest awareness-raising project, Know Before You Go: a campaign to remind British hooligans embarking on the seasonal Mediterranean rampage of the perils of drink.
“Know your limits” beer mats in bars will warn. “Don't get spiked! Keep an eye on your drinks”, read cards intended to be carried as aides-mémoires by potential date-rape victims on bar crawls.
“Drinking makes you more vulnerable to violent crime” slogan Frisbees will admonish holidaymakers at 300 revolutions per second.
“Much of the language of the campaign is cheeky and humorous,” a Know Before You Go spokesman enthuses. Frisbees. Frisbees. I suppose we have a duty to be open-minded. Perhaps it will work.
Reader views (3)
• Kingsley Amis had a smashing idea for an advertising campaign designed to highlight the key selling point of his product. “Beer”, his posters would proclaim, “makes you drunk.”
I believe it's Badger Beer whose unimprovable selling pitch, offical or not , is: 'Helping Ugly People to Have Sex Since 1763'.
- Mdj E10, london uk, 24/07/2009 13:07
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Where did the whole compensation thing begin? Did the lawyers scent a money-making bonanza? What happened 50 years ago when, say, a wife lost her husband to a drunk-driver? Presumably, nobody expected money equivalent to a win on the football pools to ease their grief.
- Brian Taylor, Oxford UK, 20/07/2009 15:17
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Agree with your comments about the government paying compensation for criminal injuries. I've never been able to understand the logic either. Surely this is something
that the individual should ensure he or she is insured against.
- Scotty, Cambridge UK, 20/07/2009 13:22
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