Political disinterest is a serious business, and whilst modern politicians put it down to apathy, the real answer can be summed up in one word, gibberish. There has always been a degree of self interest in politics and none more so the further one looked to the right, just as there have always been the mavericks, like Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn, who have striven to serve the common good. Today, though, politics and reality are so far apart it should be a national sport to observe the brain dribble that emerges from mouths of the likes of David Cameron, George Osborne, Ian Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and on and on ad nauseam. However, political gibberish should not in any way be construed as ignorant, accidental or the result of too much education and too little common sense, it serves its purpose very well by persuading a busy electorate to inattention. In general people have better things to do than spend time deciphering the time consuming gibberish of politicians intent on pursuing their own ends, vested interests and self importance. Times have changed, though, and inattention now has become a very dangerous thing.
An astonishing thing has emerged in the mainstream media that could only have been reported in a culture of inattention and inaction. The BBC and the Daily Mail report Barbara Hewson, a barrister at Hardwicke chambers in London, as saying the age of consent should be lowered to 13 to stop the persecution of old men and sex assault victims shouldn’t get anonymity. Let me put that another way, in the light of the current investigations of abuse and molestation following the revelations about Jimmy Saville (and many others), Hewson is saying that the age of consent should be lowered to protect people who prey on children. This is so extreme it beggars belief and leaves me wondering how someone so inhuman and uncivilised yet highly placed could possibly have hoped to get away with it unless she was pretty sure of the orchestrated inattention of the majority.
Hewson has now exploded across the media and perhaps her mistake here is that she failed to set up her victims as the Tories do in ensuring they lay the ground of endless blame on the very people they want to attack. Whilst the workless, the poor, the sick and disabled in no way deserve the attacks that have been launched against them, they have at least reached an age of maturity in which they might seek help and fight back. Hewson, firmly sets the responsibility on the child in saying, ‘we should focus on arming today’s youngsters with the savoir-faire and social skills to avoid drifting into compromising situations’. She thus suggests that adults need bear no responsibility for the safety of children nor should be blamed if they manage to find a victim who they can molest. Certainly, with more and more children going hungry and living in poverty, the government has reneged on any semblance of a duty of care for children and has set the ground nicely for such a predatory challenge to the age of sexual consent. For the sake of children if no one else, the time pay attention to gibberish is now.
Keith Lindsay-Cameron
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22459815
https://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13604/
