It’s something we’ve been hearing about for a while now; the unsustainable lifestyle of the City lawyer, the late nights, early mornings, the demanding clients and the hostile superiors. 

Firms may make smarmy claims about ‘work life balance’, but I’ve been there, and I can assure you: it is all nonsense. I was a trainee solicitor at a top international corporate law firm, based in London when I fell severely and almost fatally ill in 2008. For six months I had worked excessively and continuously under the fluorescent lights. The partners were creaming the profits off the slavery of young, keen trainees like me.  For a week, I felt queasy. I was forgetful. I knew I was ill. But there was a deal on, I was under pressure, and my superiors were demanding. My job depended on it. Then I was rushed to hospital, was placed in a coma, nearly died, woke up paralysed and spent two years in hospital having extensive neurological rehabilitation in order to function again and to gain some semblance of independence.

I have made only one huge mistake in my life, and it very nearly cost me my life. It  was being duped by the dream of working at a high level in a corporate law firm. What was I taken in by? The money, the power, the promise of an exciting lifestyle? It isn’t exciting, I can assure you. It is dull, repressive, repetitive, and hostile. The junior associates pressure the trainees to complete their work, so they won’t be bollocked by the senior associates, who are trying to make partner, so they can swan round the world schmoozing clients and earn millions. And then, along the way, these people become sociopaths; lacking empathy, driven only by money, unable to see, or even to care, that doing deals with unethical governments for oil and huge hotels in Dubai to be built by Bengali slave labourers is ultimately not a great way to earn your living- particularly when it involves making so many sacrifices along the way.

Graduates, thousands of pounds in debt, are taken in by the promises of the legal recruiters as they do the rounds at law fairs. It is shameful, to both the duped young lawyers and to the millionaire partners looking to deceive intelligent, enthusiastic, graduates, that all it takes to seduce them into entering the gilded cage is some expensive dinners and promises of a huge salary and visions of success- or rather, what society deems successful.

The long hours, the hostile superiors pushing you to do the grunt work so they can grab their bonus, or the ‘prize’ of partnership, the pressure to smile when all you want to do is scream, the conservative dress code, the false smiles and camaraderie, the perpetual repression and the sinking feeling that as you are immersed deeper into the culture of the firm, you are losing your creativity, your joie de vivre, until all you are, all that you are valued for, Is your utility as an economic unit.

Yet the money isn’t great. In fact, it is rubbish. If you work sixteen hours or more,daily, all week, and you work out the hourly rate, then on a graduate salary of £35,000 then you are being financially ripped off- big time. It’s a wonder that these eager young lawyers don’t work this out.

Over the past few years there have been a spate of lawyer suicides. In 2007, Mathew Courtney at Freshfields Bruchhaus Deringer, one of the elite ‘Magic Circle’ firms, threw himself off the Tate in London. That’s what depression does to you. Whatever your views on suicide, depression can make someone desperate. The late nights, the deadlines, the status and importance that lawyers place upon themselves and their profession, the years spent training. When work comes first, having a life doesn’t get a look in. Your soul is corrupted, and then you lose yourself.

It is depressing. And depression among lawyers is rife. We burn out. It isn’t sustainable; but the firms aren’t listening. They don’t care about the sacrifices, the corruption of the soul. My mental strength was tough, but the stress came out in my body, and it nearly killed me. One friend escaped to South America to become a yoga teacher. Another close friend is retraining as a psychotherapist.

It takes a huge amount of strength to look at your life, to examine society and who you are and everything that has made you who you are, and extreme experiences push you to do that. Mine was near death and two years in hospital. But it was precipitated by my gruelling experiences of life in a corporate law firm.

It is well documented that lawyers are notoriously depressed and that suicide is rife. In his seminal work ‘On Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud explained that depression was caused by the individual suffering from guilt, who subsequently experiences anger from this guilt and then turns it inwards, directing the anger he feels at himself, while Seligman, in his 1974 work ‘Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death’,  promoted his theory of ‘learned helplessness,’ describing depression as a learned behaviour in which people who find themselves unable to exercise control over their own lives begin to consider such helplessness as their own fault, subsequently finding themselves unable to control their lives even in situations when it would be possible to do so. In a law firm, only the partners are in control.

Depression and anxiety are linked. Sufferers of anxiety feel constantly threatened by people and circumstances, living lives of chronic worry, insecurity and vulnerability. Whilst depression is typically characterized by a sense of complete apathy, of dissatisfaction, pessimism, guilt and worthlessness, anxiety and depression are two sides of the same coin.  Lawyers daily experience high levels of stress which attacks them from various angles, from their colleagues, from their superiors, from their clients, and from the work itself. And stress is the fight-or-flight reaction to some perceived threat…feeling anxious or depressed in the face of perceived danger stems from your concluding that you can’t successfully defeat your adversary – real, or imagined.  

Then there is the stigma of suffering from mental health problems- even though the very nature of the work and the repressive surroundings makes such suffering likely. So young lawyer who find themselves struggling with the condition must admit they are suffering and search for treatment in a competitive environment where to admit to struggling with mental health problems might be to risk losing professional trust and respect. Unbelievably, in America, bar associations may legally question applicants about their mental health histories, and ban them on the grounds of mental health problems.

Some of the highest achieving law students go into City law, and numerous psychological studies have shown that the tendency to anxiety and depression amongst students is most pronounced in those students who are high achieving, and who consequently place themselves under the greatest pressure, and experience the greatest stress. Lawyers are more prone to suffering from depression than members of any other profession, experience feelings of inadequacy and inferiority in their personal relationships, as well as anxiety or social alienation.

Lawyers have a distinctive personality type. I know; I was one of them. Some of my best friends are lawyers. We are high achieving, competitive, dominant, less cooperative than others, and apparently, less interested than others in emotions. (I’m not sure that’s true for us all). But- there is, without doubt, amongst lawyers a strong tendency towards perfectionism, not only in their work in the sphere of law, but in every area of life. And a tendency to perfectionism is very likely to lead to someone becoming inflexible. Such attributes may lead to alienation from other people and consequently isolation, itself a cause of depression. This alienation may be exacerbated by the tendency of the lawyer to think, rather than to feel.

Interestingly, the psychologist Alfred Adler developed the theory that the early memories of individuals are responsible for their choices later in life, in contrast to Freud, who was a proponent of the unconscious and conscious dichotomy of the mind. Adler theorized that if an individual has suffered in his early years from what he terms ‘psychological exclusion’, his later choices in life will always be motivated primarily by his desire to subdue those early feelings of inferiority. It follows then that using Adler’s theory as an explanation; an individual is not choosing the law as a profession out of a conscious desire, but solely due to his unconscious desires to thwart the inner voices of his early youth which told him that he was inferior. When the individual graduates from law school and realizes the reality of the profession, this confrontation may be a trigger for depression.

Added on to all this, is the actual nature of the profession. A strong cause of depression is a lack of autonomy and social isolation. Lawyers do not have autonomy. They are answerable to their bosses, to their clients, and to their colleagues. They deal with time restraints, and suffer from working long hours. They may have conflicting loyalties. The practice of law is rarely as glamorous as it appears from outside. When the law firms put an ordinary, mentally and physically health individual with unresolved issues and inadequate defenses in  a highly stressful, ultra-competitive, hostile, fluorescent light lit box, with little sleep and masses of intellectual work to do, the formula for a psychological crisis is established.

Then there are the bosses. It is interesting that instead of becoming angry with the senior lawyers who are exploiting them, lawyers revert to blaming themselves. At a law firm, a trainee, and indeed, an associate, is reduced to the level of a child. There is no right to speak your mind, to advocate for yourself, to stand up to authority. When the junior associate is giving you a roasting, demolishing your personality  because you made a mistake on the contract you stayed in the office until five in the morning to finish, when he calls you incompetent, or lazy, you can’t ask him if he’s annoyed that his girlfriend realized his bank balance didn’t compensate for his erectile dysfunction, or that you understand he lost his personality long ago, but you’re not planning on taking the same route-although really,  thanks all the same for the heads up. .  Instead, you go helpless, and try to please.  Any anger, if it is acknowledged to any degree, is tightly bottled.  You can’t show it. And then you hate yourself. Freud might have a point here. His explanation of depression, as hostility turned inward is a convincing explanation for the increase of depression among lawyers.   

This toxic combination of competition, rigidity, hostility, the stifling of creativity, the culture of homogeneity results in a horrible combination of stress which adversely affects everyone who experiences it, one way or another. To those entering the profession now, I’d say, get the training, and get out. It isn’t worth it. And to the law firms themselves, I wouldn’t even bother. 

On Holocaust Memorial Day, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford, David Ward, caused a furore by accusing ‘the Jews’ of not having learned ‘lessons’ from the Holocaust. On signing a ‘Book of Commitment’ in Bradford  to commemorate those persecuted and killed during the Holocaust (not only Jews, I might add, but the disabled, homosexuals, political ‘undesirables’ and Roma gypsies), he stated, ‘I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians…on a daily basis.’

 Now, I wasn’t aware that the Jews were supposed to have learned lessons from the Holocaust. I wonder what the Nazis could have been trying to teach them, those starved, humiliated, tortured innocents in the death camps of Europe, those murdered men, women and children. David can tell us; he appears to be labouring under the impression that the Nazis were teaching Jews how to be better, more compassionate people. In his ‘apology’, he noted that he had been ‘trying to make it clear that everybody needs to learn the lessons of the Holocaust.’ Well, I’m sorry, Hitler. Must try harder.  I always thought you were aiming for total annihilation of the Jews; the history books must be mistaken. There are many examples of victim blaming (inebriated girls wearing short skirts being culpable for their own rapes, apparently), but this is particularly odious.

His accusation is abhorrent on so many levels; on the assertion that the Holocaust ought to have taught Jews how to behave, the implicit suggestion being that Jews are held to a much higher standard than other people, the assumption that 'the Jews' (and he did not even specify Israeli Jews, the implication was all Jews, everywhere), all share the same views, and the use of their own history  against them, the use of their industrialised genocide as a stick to beat them with in the present. Really, David Ward, most anti-Semites are at least subtle enough to say 'Zionist' when they mean 'Jew'. He isn't very good at disguising his anti-Jewish prejudice.  You can tell he's only just coming out. 

He need not have worried; he received a minor dressing down from his party, and has support from such nefarious individuals and organisations as David Icke, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, and Chris Davies MP, who has been recognised as an anti-Semite since 2006. I do wonder what it is with these Liberal Democrats; they seem to attract fruitcakes. Jenny Tonge, Chris Davies, and now David Ward. I suppose it is good to know where they stand. What is worrying, however, is that anti-Semitic discourse appears to have become increasingly more acceptable over the past few years in the United Kingdom. And it is Anti-Semitic. Whereas once these sentiments might have been voiced on university campuses by select members of the Socialist Workers Party, who normal people tried to avoid, now they are expressed by senior politicians.

 To clarify; to object to Israeli policies is not objectionable. It is quite possible to criticize the Israeli government, army, and the actions of certain groups of citizens without being called anti-Semitic. The current settlement policy is morally wrong and counter-productive to any potential peace with the Palestinians and two state solution, and what I find particularly worrying, is that the necessity of policing the territories risks brutalising Israelis and destroying Israel’s democratic values. I’m certainly no fan of Netanyahu, who in just a few years has hugely increased the vilification of Israel and its isolation, significantly more than any other leader in Israel’s entire history. I say this as a friend of Israel; as a Jew, as a Zionist, with close Israeli family.

 If Chris Ward is serious about fighting injustice, then to avoid being called a hypocrite, he must tackle all prejudice, wherever he sees it, not jump on the bandwagon when it is convenient for him. One might even accuse him of political convenience; his abhorrent use of Holocaust Memorial Day to take a cheap political shot. When I saw he was MP for Bradford, with a high proportion of Muslims who appear to have an obsessive concern with Israel (but little concern for Syria, or the mistreatment of women in Arab countries, or intolerance and the persecution of Christians in Pakistan and Egypt) it all began to make sense.

I have come to use a single test for smoking out an anti-Semite. They refer to Israel as a ‘Nazi state’. I still cannot understand what this means. I do, however, know a complete subversion of historical facts when I see one.  I don’t see any racial laws, any burning of books, any death camps. Certainly, the current situation is far from satisfactory for the Palestinians and it must be resolved; the current rejection of extreme right wing politics by a huge portion of the Israeli electorate gives some hope for this.  But one might mention that the Wall, so often cited as an example of apartheid, was built to keep out the suicide bombers who have in the past waged terror in Israel, the mistreatment of Palestinian women and gays who often escape into Israel where there is no such discrimination, and the cruelty and corruption of Hamas towards its own people.

Inside Israel, there is nothing that I would recognize as an apartheid regime, as in South Africa. People who claim this should visit Israel; they’d soon see for themselves how ridiculous this claim is. Israel’s Arabs form 20% of the population, and under Israeli law, they have exactly the same rights as the Jewish and Christian population. Notably, those of the Bahai faith, whilst cruelly persecuted in Iran, have a beautiful temple at Haifa. Israeli Arabs use Israeli public transport, go to Israeli cinemas, eat at Israeli restaurants. They are treated in Israeli hospitals; alongside Palestinians from the West Bank. Certainly, in some areas, there is tension. But it doesn’t resemble apartheid, and it rather diminishes the struggle of Black South Africans to term it as such, just as it diminishes the horror of the Holocaust and its victims to refer to Gaza and the Palestinian conflict as a holocaust.

Those hysterically protesting against ‘Nazi’ Israel are wilfully ignorant of reality. In Palestinian schools, children are taught to hate Jews, encouraged to admire suicide bombers, and taught not to recognise the existence of Israel. Now, I believe that the Palestinians should have their own state. But if Palestinians want  their prospective state to be recognised, so too must they recognise Israel. 

 David Ward MP used the Holocaust as a cheap political tool to gain votes in Bradford. I have a message for him: he worries that ‘the Jews’ failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust. I can assure him that we did learn one important lesson: not to rely on non-Jews for help, to remember the refugees from Hitler sailing round and round, hoping that a country would deign to let them in, being  turned repeatedly away . They learned that they would never allow themselves to be victims again, dependent for kindness on the whims of men like David Ward.

David Ward makes a fool of himself and keeps on digging that hole:

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/feb/06/david-ward-not-racist

Howard Jacobson in The Independent ‘Let’s see the criticism of Israel for what it really is’http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/howard-jacobson/howard-jacobson-letrsquos-see-the-criticism-of-israel-for-what-it-really-is-1624827.html  

Daniel Finkelstein The Times  ‘Lessons from the Holocaust; Try these two’http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/danielfinkelstein/article3672191.ece

Guido Fawkes shows David Ward MP digging his hole even deeper on Sky news  Guido Fawkeshttp://order-order.com/2013/01/25/watch-david-ward-car-crash-sky-jews-interview/    

Toby Young in The Telegraph ‘Lib Dem MP David Ward's grotesque caricature of Israel and 'the Jews' is all too common on the liberal Left’http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100200145/lid-dem-mp-david-wards-grotesque-caricature-of-israel-and-the-jews-is-all-too-common-on-the-liberal-left/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Implications for the Leveson Inquiry and the freedom of the press in the UK

Published in 1974, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Appearing in the midst of a violent period in Germany, after the 1972  murder at the Munich Olympics of the Israeli  Team by Palestinian terrorists ,  the story is a polemical parody of the mentalities of the people. Boll uses the novel to criticize violence in society- but physical violence is the least problematic. It is the structure and mentality of society, where the collective view of the sheep like majority rules, and industrialists and politicians rule society, and collude with the freedom of the press to tear apart and ruin the life of an innocent woman, that Boll criticizes with icy clarity.

Briefly, the novel covers Katharina Blum, who  is pretty, bright, hard-working and at the centre of a big city scandal when, at a carnival party, she falls in love with a young radical on the run from the police. Portrayed by the city’s leading newspaper as a whore, a communist and an atheist, she becomes the target of anonymous phone calls and sexual threats. Her life ruined by the distortions of a corrupt press, she shoots the offending journalist and gives herself up for arrest.

 “…the News, which, of course, through its reporter Totges was responsible for the unquestionably premature death of Katherina’s mother, depicted Katharina in the Sunday News as being to blame for her mother’s death and, moreover, accused her-more or less openly- of stealing Straubleder’s key to his country home! This point should be reemphasized, for one can never be sure; nor quite sure whether one has fully realized to what extent the News has slandered, lied, and distorted. Let us take Blorna as an example of the extent to which the News was able to affect comparatively rational people….”

As the story continues, we see how the utterly false and salacious stories which appear daily in the widely read News, a tabloid like newspaper, turn the innocent Katharina into a public focus for hate and social exclusion. Her reputation is ruined, her business suffers, and finally the intrusion of a journalist into a hospital ward directly causes the death of her mother.

Although set in 1970s Germany, when social violence predominated, the story is familiar in that it discusses the basic interaction between politics, industrialists, and the press in an industrialized society. The novel has huge relevance for the debate today on the extent to which the freedom of the press should be permitted and the Levenson Inquiry in the United Kingdom.

I have no sympathy for Hugh Grant moaning about his girlfriend being followed by paparazzi,  but I do react with horror when people are not granted a fair trial due to the accusations and inferences of the press, or when innocent people are falsely accused, such as in the tragic case of the Joanna Yeates murder in Bristol, in which her landlord Christopher Jeffries was falsely accused.[1]

It is a fact that with the regular appearance of articles in the Daily Mail and the like on claimants of benefits for disability, the resulting “scrounger rhetoric”[2] has permitted the current Conservative led government to bring in disability reforms which have terrible implications for the lives, the chance for independence and even the existence itself of disabled people. It is a fact that disability hate crimes- crimes committed against disabled people have increased by almost 25% in the last year.[3]

The current Leveson inquiry is still ongoing, and a difficult task is faced between ensuring the preservation of privacy and freedom of speech, and solving the problem of libel in the media. The freedom of the press is vital for a healthy democracy, and it must not be allowed to be eroded. And yet….whilst the true value of journalism is to expose corruption, to hold the powerful and the establishment to account, too often we are seeing the lives of blameworthy people torn apart to fuel a vicious public appetite for a scapegoat to blame for the current economic crisis, such as with disabled people, or to satisfy a prurient and salacious interest in the lives of those who have never done anything to court public interest: the victims of crime, the families of murder victims, the falsely accused and those still yet to go to trial.

The newspaper lobby is powerful. The establishment: the newspaper moguls, the political class and the industrialists, mix together at the dinner table; they are inextricable.

Can the press ever be trusted to regulate itself? Heinrich Boll thought not.

[1] http://news.sky.com/story/894630/wrongly-accused-yeates-landlords-living-hell

[2] http://www.disabilityplanet.co.uk/

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9456603/Disabled-still-facing-unforgivable-abuse-in-care-homes-charities-warn.html

Since this government came into power with David Cameron as Prime Minister, this country has been regressing to a Victorian style nation where jingoism is fervent, where industrialists rule the country with impunity, and where the poor and the weak are vilified. This government is run by the elite, for the elite. Career politicians such as Osborne and Cameron are selling off Britain (at least protests stopped them from selling off the forests). These are men from extraordinarily rich families, with no history of real employment, no experience of having needed to struggle. They have no empathy, nor do they have any understanding of the people they rule. They certainly do not rule in our best interests. Certainly, austerity is necessary, but perhaps the billions evaded every year in tax by massive corporations might be a better place to start rather than ripping vital support away from the most vulnerable. This government is certainly not motivated by social justice and the desire for equality in healthcare and education. This is the ideology of the free market, and who cares who it stampedes over in the process?

The NHS is being privatized; university tuition fees are being raised to an incredible amount (I certainly can’t afford a PhD), much loved libraries are being closed (could a Tory explain to me how a bright but socially disadvantaged child will cope without a local library, or is this a plan to stall social mobility completely?),and despite Cameron’s pre-election promise that the mark of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable, and the DWP’s own official rate for fraud being less than 1%, disabled people are being vilified and subject to harsh testing that the British Medical Association has termed ‘not fit for purpose’ and has called for it to be scrapped.

ATOS, the French companyperforming  the tests, is the company sponsoring the Paralympics. This is beyond a joke; it is like a terrible dream. The people doing the tests on disabled people, are not specialists. They are not neurologists, or oncologists. They are second and third rate doctors and physiotherapists who are unable to get jobs within the NHS. They ignore expert medical records from the doctors of claimants. They fill in a tick box computer exercise; essentially, ‘Computer Says No’.  This ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology is the epitome of Conservatism.

At the opening of the Paralympics tomorrow, there are going to be huge protests by the disabled against ATOS. And I support them, wholeheartedly, because however much I am looking forward to the Paralympics and admire the athletes, there is no way that any of them would have succeeded without the state support that is now being snatched away from them.

As the novelist  Ahdaf Soueif writes (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/17/ahdaf-soueif-politics-fiction)

‘...we know that it will take two taps on the keyboard to bring our screen chiming to life with trafficked women, terrorised children and desperate men. We known men and women brave seas and deserts in search of a livelihood, we know half the world goes hungry and the planet is crazed with man’s excess and that there is, particularly amongst the young, a great and urgent desire to change the system.

   The question is: do you want to engage with this? Or do you want to escape it? Do you want to live your life in a bubble? Or do you want to be part of the great narrative of the world?

    Is a novelist a literary activist? An activist is impelled by a cause and adopts it. Most people are content to live their lives within prescribed and personal boundaries. But one of the points of artists is that they live outside their own skin. That they’re connected. That they hurt with the hurt of their fellow humans. How, then, can they disengage? How can you-if your task, if your gift, is narrative- absent yourself from the great narrative of the world?'

 The Facts on welfare: http://www.redpepper.org.uk/mythbuster-welfare-reform/

ATOS holds 3bn worth of government contracts: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/28/atos-3bn-government-contracts-paralympics?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038

ATOS- SPONSORING THE OLYMPICS BEYOND A JOKE http://www.dpac.uk.net/2012/07/new-survey-to-collect-your-experiences-of-atoswork-capability-assessment/-

Centre for Welfare Reform: the reality of disability benefits  http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/library/categories/disability/the-reality-of-disability-benefits.html

ATOS terrify the disabled http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/25/contract-terrify-people-incapacity-benefit?commentpage=last

The demonisation of the disabled: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/04/ian-birrell-prejudice-against-disabled?newsfeed=true

ATOS targets, regardless of how ill/disabled people really are:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jul/27/disability-benefit-assessors-film?newsfeed=true

The myth that criminals are claiming sickness benefits shattered: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/24/myth-criminals-sickness-benefits

Lack of disability access is contempt for disabled people: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jul/16/mixed-messages-on-disability-access

Orwell Prize winning site article on ATOS tests http://benefitscroungingscum.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/q-when-is-target-not-target-when-its.html

Welfare reform death scandal; legislation for legal challenges: http://calumslist.org/legal/

Judicial Review against work capability assessment allowed http://www.ukdpc.net/site/news-archive/103-high-court-rules-work-capability-assessment-posted-26072012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/21/global-elite-tax-offshore-economy

Professor Harrington, who designed ATOS tests, steps don after criticizing them as ‘inhumane’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9440065/Back-to-work-tests-expert-to-step-down-after-saying-system-needs-to-be-more-humane.html

ATOS and UNUM exposed http://paper.li/CreativeCrip/1330065056

Tories/ATOS take benefits of paralympian http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=29451

‘ATOS forced me to crawl on the floor in tears’http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=29452

Action against ATOS http://www.dpac.uk.net/2012/08/latest-information-on-atos-games-week/

McCartney M. Well enough to work? BMJ2011;342:d599. http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d599?ijkey=0b7185cd5e8f015d1292dfd185c3a43784ffccd6&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha&linkType=FULL&journalCode=bmj&resid=342/feb02_2/d599

McCartney M. Atos and changes to disabled people’s benefits. BMJ2012;344:e1114. http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e1114?ijkey=e2856c8351f2f4feb1f9d8bbfe38358d3c29056d&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha&linkType=FULL&journalCode=bmj&resid=344/feb14_3/e1114

Citizens Advice. Cuts in CAB funding leaving thousands with nowhere to turn for help. 6 Sep 2011. www.citizensadvice.org.uk/press_index/press_20110906.htm.

I’ve been reading a great deal recently about human cognition and the tools we use to support it. Where is the mind? In our brain, one supposes, unless it is placed in a vat, like in some scene from science fiction, viewed through Perspex, pink flesh and electrical wires trailing. That’s the identity thesis; where the brain is always to be found within the skull of the person to whom it belongs. And yet; the extended mind hypothesis holds that the mind is not to be found exclusively within the skull, but extends beyond the skin of the person, out into the world.

Opposition to cognitive enhancement still holds true; for all the resistance to drugs, and the fear of cognitive enhancement, the preference for talk therapies over chemical regulation, psychopharmacology and deep brain stimulation holds unprecedented possibilities, as yet not openly investigated. There is too much fear, an insistence on the inchoate prejudice of the internal, that the mind is to found only within the skull. What are we capable of?

New developments in cognitive science and in technology make this more of a possibility than it once was.  Humans have externalized information for centuries. Now the boundaries become blurred, what will become possible?

Texts on the subject:

Fukuyama, F. (2002). Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution  New York:Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

 Hurley, S (1988) Consciousness in Action Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press

 Adams, F and Aizawa, K.  (2008) The Bounds of Cognition. Malden, MA: Blackwell

Apart from running, Iwas never  particularly interested in sport, and yet now I find myself partly immobilised, I am hugely active. Every day  I do physiotherapy, studiously going through my exercises, I swim and I horse ride.  Every minute, every second of the day, I am conscious of what my body is doing. Am I breathing properly? Is my back straight enough? Am I doing my stomach exercises? Are my legs tighter than usual, can I walk the length of the house with my sticks today, or are my feet going to give up on me? That’s what trying to recover from a neurological illness is like, and some people never recover. That’s something that has to be faced; as yet, medicine has no answers, so the only thing to do is to keep persevering.

That is why I am going to be watching the Paralympics. Because these athletes are incredible people, and because my own body has been damaged and I can’t wait to see their strength and what they can do with their bodies.  Unfortunately, not everyone thinks like me, or admires athletes who have pushed their way through illness and accidents, near death and paralysis, constant barriers and countless setbacks to become the elite. No, some people think they are freaks.

 I’m talking to you, Alexander Boot,  who believes that the Paralympics is a ‘sick spectacle’, a ‘freak show getting freakier by the minute’,  full of people ‘debasing themselves for cheap notoriety.’ I read his words with incredulity, but Boot’s own sordid preoccupations become unfortunately clear. He believes that ‘paraplegic sex ought to be turned into another competitive event’.

When I read this, I thought it was some kind of sick joke, a parody of a dirty old man, but no, Boot is for real.

The paralympians are successful athletes, admired, highly respected and yes, inspirational.  Now,  I was under the impression that a freak show is what used to happen where people considered to be outside the societal ‘norm’ were stared at as strange figures of fun , and laughed at.  Then they were hidden away from society, so that they wouldn’t offend society’s ‘aesthetic sense and the notion of human dignity’ according to Alexander Boot.

A closed man cannot empathise with the dedication, the determination, and yes, the anger. Some people might be uncomfortable with it, but there’s nothing wrong with focused anger. Anger is what propelled me, whilst paralysed in hospital for two years, to get my arms and hands moving again, to force myself through the pain to write my first novel. My interests lie in literature, not sport, but I imagine that it is this anger, the determination to succeed against all costs , to prove wrong those who don’t believe in you nd to be the best that drives many of the paralympians.

So tell me, Boot. What exactly is wrong with drawing attention to disabled people achieving, considering that disabled people still don’t have full equality in society, despite the fact that most people will find themselves with some kind of disability during their lives. The human body is fragile.  What do you object to? Do you think that disability is something to be ashamed of, and that disabled people should hide themselves away, so that people like you are not offended?

 In public space, disabled people, like everybody else, encounter idiots. The problem is that those idiots seem to imagine that they can behave more invasively to wheelchair users. There are physical barriers, hostile stares, people gawp, are condescending and make stupid comments. Or, when encountered by someone with a disability, they appear to momentarily lose all social skills. It’s fascinating to watch.

The very fact that the Paralympics exist at all is due to the persistent efforts of Ludwig Guttman, the Jewish neurologist who fled Nazi Germany and forced a change in attitudes to disability and in  the rehabilitation of patients with spinal injuries. He was the first to understand that sport could help patients who had been disabled to become mobile and to have pride in themselves again- a pride in themselves as people, as equals, and a pride that Alexander Boot doesn’t believe they are entitled to. Is Alexander Boot also disparaging the work, and the legacy, of this wonderful, eminent neurologist?

 The language he uses shows how uncomfortable he is with people with disabilities. Well, I’m not comfortable with nasty, prejudiced, closed minded individuals who disparage the achievements of incredible people. The paralympians have had extra barriers to overcome and they have pushed themselves to the limit.  That doesn’t seem to be something Alexander Boot can understand, although perhaps he might consider how he offends our aesthetics, with his  greasy comb over, this bitter,  old man, writing  nasty articles mocking those who achieve. People like Oscar Pistorius, or Martine Wright, who lost her legs in the  July 7^th bombings and survived to compete in the British volleyball team.  She calls herself one of the lucky ones. So, do you think that she is a freak, Alexander Boot?

 Check out this narrow minded old toad here (hint, he’s a homophobe too)  : http://alexanderboot.com/content/freak-show-getting-freakier-minute

Members of the British Paralympics Team:  http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/08/22/introducing-team-gbs-london-paralympians_n_1820754.html?utm_hp_ref=paralympics

http://www.paralympics.org.uk/gb/news/im-the-lucky-one-now-says-eager-wright#

Oscar Pistorius: http://www.oscarpistorius.com/

Se les preguntará
sobre lo que hicieron
cuando
la patria se apagaba
lentamente
como una hoguera dulce
pequeña y sola

No serán interrogados
sobre sus trajes,
ni sobre sus largas siestas
después de la merienda,

Nada se les preguntará
sobre sus justificaciones
absurdas
crecidas a la sombra
de una mentira rotunda....


Intelectuales apolíticos
de mi dulce país
no podréis responder nada.

Os devorará un buitre de silencio
las entrañas,
Os roerá el alma
vuestra propia miseria,
y callaréis,
avergonzados de vosotros.

One day

the apolitical intellectuals

of my country will be interrogated

by the simplest

of our people.

They will be asked

what they did

when the county was being snuffed out

slowly

like a sweet fire

small and alone.

Noone will ask them

about their dress,

their long siestas

after lunch,

no one will want to know

about their sterile combats

with the “idea of nothing”

They won’t be questioned

on Greek mythology,

or regarding their self-disgust

when someone within them,

begins to die

the coward’s death

They’ll be asked nothing

about their absurd

justifications,

born in the shadow

of the total lie.

On that day

the simple men will come.

 Those who had no place

in the books and poems

of the apolitical intellectuals,

but daily delivered

their bread and milk,

their tortillas and eggs,

those who drove their cars,

who cared for their dogs and gardens,

and they’ll ask:

“What did you do when the poor

suffered, when tenderness

and life

burned out of them?”

Apolitical intellectuals

of my sweet country,

you will not be able to answer.

A vulture of silence

will eat your gut.

Your own misery

will pick at your soul.

And you will be mute in your shame.

–Otto Rene Castillo

The behaviour of last summer's rioters rioters was revolting. They may not have been able to properly articulate their dissatisfaction with their lives; on high rise estates, in a time of high unemployment, with little hope of aspiration, social mobility and hope for the future, whilst the super rich formulate global policies and plot the domination of their monopolies. But it was then that Britain became suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the stark disparity between the haves and the have nots.

Jurgen Habermas is German's most important living philosopher, and he is calling now for a halt to the mania for privatisation, for his criticism of the extensive outsourcing of activities which have been primarily the responsibility of the state to private companies, who are largely unaccountable for their actions. Opendemocracy calls the constant references to ‘outsourcing’ and ‘mutuals’ the ‘language of privatisation.’ Privatisation is expanding rapidly. Hospitals, schools, prisons,even the police. The grip of the private security group G4s tightens its hold on the land.Serco is the private company which has the multimillion pound contract to run the National Citizen service. Voluntary bodies will lose. They will have to close. The voluntary sector will ie off.  Not so Big Society, Dave? As for the treatment of the disabled, no government, no group of people have ever so disgusted me.  When ATOS, ironically sponsoring the paralympics, to lend a gloss of legality to their activities, is holding the blind,  wheelchair users, amputees, the chronically ill, fit for work, using a tick box computer programmer with no access to medical notes, when even the readers of the  right wing newspapers, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, begin to criticise the government and make clear their sympathy and solidarity with the people the government is victimising, those people that the government vilified for so long as scroungers, then there is a problem with government policy. People aren't quite as nasty as Cameron thought. 

In short, activities which should be the responsibility of the state, of the British government to its citizens, are being farmed out purely for profit, to companies who have been justly criticised for their utter incompetence. One has only to refer to the farcical activities of G4S and the subsequent need to draft in the military during the recent Olympics for an example.

This government is imposing a massive programme of austerity: one which has been imposed by our hapless chancellor, George Osborne. And what are Mr Osborne’s credentials, exactly? He has, from the University of Oxford, a 2:1 in History. One would need a greater knowledge of economics to run a Chinese takeaway.

Libraries are being closed. Where, I would like to know, is a bright child, who has no support or encouragement at home, who has a volatile home life and no peace in which he or she can work, to go,  if his local library is closed? Where will he discover his aspirations, what he might do with his life,  how will he walk in the shoes of others, travel distant lands?

This government is enthusiastically going for privatisation in a way that was unsurpassed even by Thatcher. Cameron, Maria Miller, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove,; none of them have a clue. Yet they all worked really hard to get to government, didn't they? They were never given a leg up by their contacts and huge wealth. They completely understand where most people are coming from, don't they? What most amazes me about conservatives is how convinced they are that they deserve to hold a superior place in society, their arrogance, an their overbearing confidence in their ability to lead.Rich boys playing at power; they don't have a clue. They have no idea what it is like to have no opportunities, or indeed, any options at all. Decent people are concerned with a more equal society. 

Ultimately, the state is necessary and unfortunately, people do not do the right thing without governance and interference. Corporations won't pay takes, bankers will cheat, the media will pay bribes and the police will sneak them information. Companies won't pay fair wages, and private companies will make a killing out of healthcare that many people can't afford. Ultimately, it comes down to, do you believe in a fairer, more equal society. Do you care about the collective good. 

Yet the British do not revolt, at least not intelligently. The BBC, the mouthpiece of the British government, and the main newspapers, such as The Times, do not report on the closures. Leave it to The Guardian, which is preaching to the converted. We know, but we are on our own. Tell the truth to those  who believe what they are told, tell the sheep who like to fall into line, what the future holds for them too, and who knows; perhaps change will come.

Vaclav Havel was the Czech dissident who l became a politician. He was an intellectual, but he put his intellect to good use. He didn’t lounge around Prague reading Sartre when his country was oppressed. he spoke out and he fought against Communism. He believed that the role of the intellectual is to uncover injustice and speak the truth. There was a reason Hitler and Stalin hated intellectuals. I just wish that the intellectuals in this country would start talking about the injustices of this Tory led government. Perhaps, however, they are all too busy watching X-factor.

 The Deapartment of Work and Pensions: own report on fraud and error in the benefit system. By own estimates, only 0.5%. Less than corporate tax evaders and avoiders.  http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd2/fem/fem_apr10_mar11.pd

False Economydocuments the impact of the government's austerity cuts: http://falseeconomy.org.uk/blog/repost-benefit-fraud-the-levels-are-very-low

The wily Tory assassination of the poor; vilify the enemy and then demolish them: http://www.labourleft.co.uk/the-tory-assault-on-the-unworthy-poor-what-kind-of-society-do-we-really-want-to-be/

Centre for Welfare Reform: a clarification of benefits:http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/library/type/text/unimpressed-camerons-ideas-on-welfare.html#.UA1RFUNmL7M.facebook

UK Uncut: Treasury Minister Gauke ignores £13 trillion in tax havens to focus on tradespeople
http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/blog/press-release-gauke-blames-plumbers

Every so often, when I feel that I have read everything I have been able to get my hands on, all the classics, the post-moderns, the surrealists, everything by Camus, Greene, Thackeray, Orwell, Moravia, and I pick up books and put them down a few pages later because having discovered what great writing is, I have no truck with the mediocre, the mundane, or the just plain awful, I discover a novel that strikes that chord, that reveals to the reader an entire world, entire psychologies, and entire social systems, all competing for attention.

My MA thesis is taking up all my time. Until it is finished I am unable to write creatively or take on paid work. I’m researching the legal implications of our increasingly sophisticated knowledge of neuroscience on memory, and I wake up at three every morning because whilst I’ve been sleeping my brain has been teeming with questions of memory implantation and lie detection and neuroscientific data, whilst all I really want to do is get on with my new novel which investigates the links between fascism, capitalism  and sport, and the corporatization of war.  

Journey Into Fear is a 1940 novel by the long neglected writer Eric Ambler. He wrote in the vein of Graham Greene, but his stories are more thrilling, less introspective and moralistic. I still prefer Greene’s writing, but Ambler is gripping. Set during the phony war, when France was still standing and Italy was neutral, the protagonist, Graham, is an engineer for a British armaments company, and the Nazis want him dead. Having been in Turkey on business, the Turkish authorities set him on a boat to Genoa, where he is surrounded by people he cannot trust.

The setting is claustrophobic; a filthy, tiny cabin on an Italian steamer, with only a couple of characters, all of whom are under suspicion. This is the classic tale of the hunted man.

In Journey Into Fear, Ambler was speaking for a generation that was now set firmly on the road to world war. Into this short novel, Ambler packed an array of intriguing characters; the debonair Turkish colonel, a sophisticated Spanish prostitute and her husband/pimp, a Romanian graduate of the fascist Iron Guard and assassin in the pay of the Nazis, and a Turkish secret agent. Graham is naive and out of his depth. Although it is obvious that Josette is a prostitute, that her financial situation is precarious and that the surly Jose is her pimp, his male vanity presumes that after knowing him for only a few days, she will be willing to lose work as a dancer and spend a week cooped up with him in the Paris hotel room of cliché, for mere affection of him.

But there is more to the novel than that. In the taut writing and in the successive dramatic episodes of Journey Into Fear, Ambler moves the plot relentlessly along with dry wit and acute social commentary. The world he creates is grey; each character is morally compromised, and the dark forces of Nazism swirl ever nearer. Ambler was a left wing writer, and his sympathies with socialist ideas lie close to the surface of his writing. His world is populated by the sleazy spirits of the European cafes and bars, mixing with  villains who are Nazis and fascists, bankers and industrialists, extreme capitalists with little regard for human rights and social justice, whilst his heroes are ordinary people trying to navigate this strange world. The only character that the hunted Graham comes to trust is the henpecked French husband Mathis, who tells him how he began using socialist commentary to irritate his reactionary wife;

‘For a time I was free. I could command my wife and I became more fond of her. I was a manager in a big factory. And then a terrible thing happened. I found that I had begun to believe these things I said. The books I read showed me that I had found a truth. I, a royalist by instinct, became a socialist by conviction.’

Mathis was a petit-bourgeois, but his experiences in the Great War of 1914-18  cemented his conversion. He explains his disillusion thus;

‘Have you heard of Briey, Monsieur? From the mines of the Briey district comes ninety per cent of France’s iron ore. In nineteen fourteen those mines were captured by the Germans, who worked them for the iron they needed.  They have admitted since that without the iron they mined at Briey they would have been finished in nineteen seventeen. Yes, they worked Briey hard. I, who was at Verdun can tell you that. Night after night we watched the glare in the sky from the blast furnaces of Briey a few kilometres away: the blast furnaces that were feeding the German guns. Our artillery and our bombing aeroplanes could have blown those furnaces to pieces in a week. But our artillery remained silent; an airman who dropped one bomb on the Briey area was court-martialled. Why?" His voice rose. "I will tell you why, Monsieur. Because there were orders that Briey was not to be touched. Whose orders? Nobody knew. The orders came from someone at the top. The Ministry of War said that it was the generals. The generals said that it was the Ministry of War. We did not find out the facts until after the war. The orders had been issued by Monsieur de Wendel of the Comite des Forges who owned the Briey mines and blast furnaces. We were fighting for our lives, but our lives were less important than that the property of Monsieur de Wendel should be preserved to make fat profits. No, it is not good for those who fight to know too much. Speeches, yes! The truth, no!"

It sounds familiar. I wonder what the truth is today, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in so many wars.  The petit-bourgeois read the mainstream newspapers such as The Times and listen to the BBC and believe what they are told, because they are under the illusion that we are living in a true democracy, and that what we are told is the truth. Sometimes, they wonder vaguely if it is the truth, but generally they tend not to question it, and if they do, they have endless debates based on the partial information and the half-lies that have been fed to them.  Ambler’s themes never go out of fashion, and all these people are still with us today. What Ambler wrote about is the material of reality; the people of the street, the evil of fascism and the greed of big business, joining together in a run down and decadent Europe ripe for revolt.

We have only to look at the disintegration of the decaying Greece to know this.