10 February 2024
An impressive example of kindness and compassion was reported this week when Esther Ghey’s, Brianna’s mother, said she’d be open to meeting the mother of one of the teenage thugs who horrifically murdered her daughter to tell her she “does not blame her for what her child has done”.
Brianna Ghey was an ‘out and proud’ transgender girl and the judge decided this was the “driving force” behind her “exceptionally brutal” killing. The two murderers, whom I refuse to humanise with names, were given sentences of 22 and 20 years.
This kindness was disappointingly balanced by the unkindness and insensitivity which Rishi Sunak demonstrated at Prime Minister’s Questions last week when, even knowing that Brianna’s mother was in the gallery, he implicitly showed his transphobia and then refused to apologise.
My heart also goes out to Brianna herself, imagining what she must have suffered in the last few minutes of her life as she was repeatedly stabbed and bled to death.
Have we learned nothing since various prophets and leaders preached peace and understanding? I have no more right to impose my views about, say, trans people on other people than they have to impose their views on me? We can discuss our differences but failing to accept another’s views doesn’t justify a death sentence.
You might remember that I wrote last September about the state of Alabama spending over an hour in 2022 trying to find a vein into which they could insert the needle full of poison that would kill Kenneth Smith. (You have to be a very special sort of person to be prepared to do that.)
Well, they beat him in the end and killed Smith on 25 January using nitrogen gas, previously untested on humans but claimed by the state to be “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised”. It took him 22 minutes to die, during which an eye-witness reported that he “writhed and convulsed on the gurney. He took deep breaths, his body shaking violently with his eyes rolling in the back of his head.”
Rev. Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser, who was present during the execution, said prison officials in the room “were visibly surprised at how bad this thing went.”
When our older dog’s time had come, the vet gave her an injection and she fell asleep and died in less than a minute with no visible discomfort. He said it was a mixture of a barbiturate and a diazepine and you’d think that, somewhere in Alabama, somebody would be clever enough to wonder if this would be a painless and fast way to kill a person.
I rather admire our new king who has broken tradition by announcing he’s had treatment for an enlarged prostate so as to encourage other men of a certain age to get theirs tested. He’s also been found to have cancer, though its location and stage haven’t been released. Wouldn’t it be great if people generally did admit to their medical problems, particularly with mental health, to reduce the social stigma sometimes attached to them and demonstrate just how many people are currently suffering in silence.
An incidental benefit of this might be to realise that your nearest and dearest has a shorter life expectancy than you’d hoped so we should all tell people today that we love them before it’s too late, even if they already know.
Keir Starmer seems almost as determined to undermine Labour’s chances at the next election as the Conservatives are. His watering down a commitment to funding green energy has sadly overshadowed his commitment to allow everyone a right to equal pay. I didn’t know that Conservatives believed black, Asian and minority ethnic workers and disabled people aren’t worth the same as white Brits so they can be paid less. How disgusting is that!
A new government will also need money to repair what’s been broken by the Conservatives in the last 13 years, perhaps starting with the NHS, and that might mean previous pledges would have to be updated.
The Tories have become adept at sneaking tax increases under the counter while boasting about tax cuts. For example, over the last few years, they’ve given local authorities more ‘autonomy’, or responsibility for providing local services, but failed to give them enough money to do this so all of us council tax payers have to pay more for them.
They’ve also taken money from us by increasing the age at which people can claim the state pension. The UK pension age was 65, is now 66, is set to rise to 67 between 2026 and 2028 and possibly to 71 by 2041, not just because people are living longer but because nobody dared do the sums to show the chances that, when every child born in any year, they would claim a pension 65 (as it was) years later. Why was this so difficult? Because it was after the next general election and getting themselves re-elected was more important to politicians than the future of the country.
Sadly, one person who only qualified for his pension last year died in January. I first discovered Erwin James when he regularly wrote his humane – and often very funny – articles in the Guardian about his life in prison. After his release, he wrote about his shit childhood and the descent into crime that ultimately led to his receiving in 1984 a sentence of 14 years for murder when he gave himself up after he’d spent some years hiding in the Foreign Legion. The sentence was later increased to 25 years and subsequently reduced to 20 for good behaviour – he was only lucky not to live in Alabama.
While he was incarcerated and still facing many years in prison, James discovered the joys of the education he’d never had, worked hard, was awarded an Open University degree in history and started writing. On his release in 2004, he became a journalist and writer, and wrote about his life in ‘A Life Inside’ (2003), ‘The Home Stretch’ (2005) and ‘Redeemable’ (2016).
The world needs more people like James and fewer people like … (fill in the name(s) of your unfavouritest people here).
Lesser Mutterings 