The threshold of dignity
The best response to Sir David Amess's death is to hold fast to our values.
Image: 10 Downing Street by Creative Commons 2.0
The first duty of a columnist, before advocating or denouncing, pleading or berating, is to explain.
What just happened, why did it happen, what does it mean, and what is likely to happen next?
I doubt anyone can explain the madness unleashed in Belfairs Methodist Church on Friday. Perhaps not even the person responsible. If you have come here looking for answers, I will fail you too.
Sir David Amess was, by all accounts, a dedicated, industrious MP, a clarion voice for conservatism, a fierce and compassionate representative of his constituents, and now he is not. One minute, a slight colossus of the green benches; then, in a flash of steel and hatred, gone forever. No explanation could ever make sense of it.
Fulsome tributes have been paid by colleagues, opponents and constituents. The one that captured my eye was a joint statement from the various mosques in Southend West.
'He shared in our happiness, by attending our weddings and functions and he was there for us in our times of need,' it read. 'We will all miss him dearly, but his legacy of public service will live on, as will memories of his warmth, selflessness and kindness.’
This may be all we can hope for in times such as these: fond recollections to soothe the shock, legacy as a salve for the living.
There is anger, too, and there is no shame in that. What happened on Friday was monstrous, and all the more so because it happened to a man helping people and because it happened inside a church.
A church. There may be little sacred left in this world but reserves of the profane only seem to swell.
Sir David was himself a man of faith. One of the most distressing news lines to emerge from his killing was how the wickedness of the act was compounded by the insensitivity of the police. Sir David was a devout Catholic and, upon learning of his condition, a local priest, Father Jeffrey Woolnough, rushed to the scene to administer what are colloquially known as ‘the last rites’. Fr Woolnough was denied entry by officers on the grounds of preservation of evidence.
Catholics nearing death are urged to receive three final sacraments: absolution through penance; extreme unction; and viaticum, which is the Eucharist as ‘the seed of eternal life and the power of resurrection’. Non-believers may scoff at such mumbo-jumbo, but we believe these rituals are ‘the sacraments that prepare for our heavenly homeland’ and ‘complete the earthly pilgrimage’.
No Catholic I know would criticise the police for being attentive to crime scene integrity, but just as it is possible to admit uniformed officers, detectives and paramedics without imperilling evidence-gathering, it should have been possible to admit Fr Woolnough. For many, it will seem a trivial thing, but for a faithful Catholic like Sir David, the pain and fear of death would have been greatly worsened by being denied this modest spiritual comfort.
We are more than mere flesh and bone. Religious or otherwise, we all have a threshold of dignity that should be respected, even and especially in our final moments.
The impulse to act in response to this horror, to wreak revenge on circumstance, is natural. When barbarism no longer stirs our instinct for justice, it will be because barbarism has become our instinct. That we react with such disgust to violence is a sign that, contrary to much evidence, our humanity is with us yet.
Anger is to be expected but it must not rule what we do next. We should be suspicious of knee-jerk responses that sound reasonable but aren’t really germane. Already a ban on social media anonymity is being floated, with Priti Patel hinting at such a move on Sunday morning television, and the press is filled with stories of online abuse MPs and their staff have received.
No doubt the Home Secretary knows more than we do but so far there has been no suggestion that the suspect abused Sir David over social media. No one has explained how requiring social media verification, and removing the anonymity whistleblowers and dissenting voices rely on, would have stopped this horrific incident from happening.
I am reminded of how the Metropolitan Police spun the revelation that one of its officers had unlawfully used his powers of arrest to kidnap and murder Sarah Everard. Women were advised on how to verify if they were being detained by a real police officer, such as by asking to see his warrant card, as though Wayne Couzens had impersonated a constable rather than been a genuine one, who in fact did show his warrant card to Everard. The public conversation was deflected from the Met’s institutional failure to a hypothetical scenario of impersonation.
The abrupt pivot to social media regulation is likely to have much the same effect. Even if the suspect in this case was radicalised through social media, as some news reports allege, the onus is still on the state to prove that there is no other way to monitor or apprehend such people.
Of course, zeroing in on social media is a much more comfortable course of action than asking why a British-born man of Somalian descent might be attracted to extremism, or why the authorities failed to spot him, or how he managed to come through the Prevent programme and go on to allegedly kill.
The appropriate response to an act such as this is to identify the motive, assess how that motive came to develop, identify the lapses that allowed the motive to be acted upon and design remedial measures accordingly. Should it transpire that the suspect was motivated by Islamism, we should be no more reluctant to confront that ideology than we were the far-right white terrorism that motivated Jo Cox’s murderer.
Another proposal is that MPs be assigned police or private security. This is a much more sensible recommendation but the practicalities matter. Expansion of police protection for MPs should come about through expansion of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection branch and should, ideally, involve plainclothes officers. It would be inimical to British policing, to say nothing of parliamentarianism, for the constabulary to come to be seen as Parliament's private army, the thin blue line between voters and their MPs. The police are more than a human crash barrier.
It is for the same reason that we should resist the temptation to dilute the tradition of MPs' surgeries, a democratic institution that keeps politicians grounded and gives the very least of us a voice in Parliament. We bend to the assassins when we meet their outrages by changing how we live, how we are governed or what freedoms we enjoy.
Obscenities like the one that visited a pleasant waterside town at Friday lunchtime make us fearful that our open society is too open. We are tempted to shut down, to close inwards, in the superstitious conviction that by being less open, we would be less vulnerable to attack. That is not how it works. Liberty is our British religion and openness our threshold of dignity. We must surrender neither — ever.
Hope comes from the darkest places.
Eddie Jaku, a German-born Jew who has died aged 101, was seized by the Nazis on Kristallnacht. He was sent to Buchenwald before being put on a train to Auschwitz. He escaped en route but was eventually recaptured and dispatched again to the extermination camp.
Here his parents were gassed but again he escaped, only to be shot and wounded and returned to the camp. Later, he was sent on a death march but escaped for the final time. After the war, he emigrated to Australia, where he is survived by his wife of 75 years, Flore.
Jaku, who lived his life with the number 172338 tattooed on his arm, refused to feel bitter. He was 'The Happiest Man on Earth', the title of his best-selling memoirs. 'I do not hate anyone,' he remarked. 'Hate is a disease which may destroy your enemy, but will also destroy you.'
May his memory be a blessing and his philosophy an example.
It’s the unlikeliest of alliances.
Douglas Ross and the SNP are united in opposing Boundary Commission proposals to scrap two Scottish Westminster seats, including Ross’s Moray.
Moray is a distinct, self-contained community and shouldn’t be split across multiple council areas. Locals cherish their identity and should be allowed to keep it.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on October 18, 2021.
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