Did somebody forget to send me the memo about this being National Self-Incrimination Week? First, we had Oxfam's Mark Goldring jumping into the hole dug by a depraved minority of his colleagues and grabbing the shovel:
Sure, there are some spiteful individuals in politics and the media who hate Oxfam just for existing and being bleeding-heart do-gooders who give help and comfort to "undeserving" foreign people, but I'm afraid that being hated by terrible bigots doesn't make their staff any less guilty of a terrible act when they sexually abused vulnerable people. Better to just take it on the chin than plead mitigating circumstances, as Mark Goldring acknowledged when he rightly apologised for this comment.
I had high expectations of Oxfam and was disappointed. My expectations of David Davis are so low that he couldn't possibly fall short, could he? Oh yes he could. Now he's "reassuring" his straw man critics that Brexit won't see "Britain plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction."
For a man said to be pushing for an "ambitious" post-Brexit deal, this reassurance is rather lacking in ambition. If you want to reassure people about the results of a policy, the bar is pretty low - if you can make a credible case that doing it will make things better (or at the very least, no worse), than doing nothing, you might change some minds.
If the best you can come up with is "this policy won't actually turn the country into a lawless post-apocalyptic wasteland, ravaged by murderous gangs of desperadoes", then don't expect to capture many hearts and minds. The UK's population didn't end up hungry and cowering in terror, as they were hunted down by vehicles full of heavily-armed psychopaths desperately seeking the last few litres of unleaded, as a result of notorious policy failures like the Suez invasion, the Poll Tax and the 2003 Iraq War,* but that doesn't mean that any policy that doesn't result in civilization collapsing should be viewed as a success.
Although to be fair to David Davis, I suppose he could have scored an even worse dystopian fiction own goal. At least he didn't cite The Road, only to find that the Brexit memes had got there before him:
*It's ironic that the Iraq War is the one decision of the three that some people still hail as a success, as opposed to an object lesson in catastrophic failure, given that it was the one which came closest to delivering a Mad Max-style outcome (not here in the UK, but for any Iraqis who had to live through the subsequent breakdown of law and order, followed by a spell under the dystopian rule of a heavily-armed cult of violent fanatics, who were every bit as terrifying as any fictional gang of road warriors).
"The intensity and the ferocity of the attack makes you wonder, what did we do?No, nobody ever suggested that Oxfam was about killing babies. People just had a reasonable expectation that Oxfam was about altruistically helping the most needy, as opposed to coercing the poor and powerless into abusive sexual relationships. That's what angered most reasonable people.
"We murdered babies in their cots? Certainly, the scale and the intensity of the attacks feels out of proportion to the level of culpability. I struggle to understand it. You think, 'My God, there’s something going on there'."
Sure, there are some spiteful individuals in politics and the media who hate Oxfam just for existing and being bleeding-heart do-gooders who give help and comfort to "undeserving" foreign people, but I'm afraid that being hated by terrible bigots doesn't make their staff any less guilty of a terrible act when they sexually abused vulnerable people. Better to just take it on the chin than plead mitigating circumstances, as Mark Goldring acknowledged when he rightly apologised for this comment.
I had high expectations of Oxfam and was disappointed. My expectations of David Davis are so low that he couldn't possibly fall short, could he? Oh yes he could. Now he's "reassuring" his straw man critics that Brexit won't see "Britain plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction."
For a man said to be pushing for an "ambitious" post-Brexit deal, this reassurance is rather lacking in ambition. If you want to reassure people about the results of a policy, the bar is pretty low - if you can make a credible case that doing it will make things better (or at the very least, no worse), than doing nothing, you might change some minds.
If the best you can come up with is "this policy won't actually turn the country into a lawless post-apocalyptic wasteland, ravaged by murderous gangs of desperadoes", then don't expect to capture many hearts and minds. The UK's population didn't end up hungry and cowering in terror, as they were hunted down by vehicles full of heavily-armed psychopaths desperately seeking the last few litres of unleaded, as a result of notorious policy failures like the Suez invasion, the Poll Tax and the 2003 Iraq War,* but that doesn't mean that any policy that doesn't result in civilization collapsing should be viewed as a success.
Although to be fair to David Davis, I suppose he could have scored an even worse dystopian fiction own goal. At least he didn't cite The Road, only to find that the Brexit memes had got there before him:
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| Apocalyptic sarcasm shamelessly nicked from Gerry Lynch |
*It's ironic that the Iraq War is the one decision of the three that some people still hail as a success, as opposed to an object lesson in catastrophic failure, given that it was the one which came closest to delivering a Mad Max-style outcome (not here in the UK, but for any Iraqis who had to live through the subsequent breakdown of law and order, followed by a spell under the dystopian rule of a heavily-armed cult of violent fanatics, who were every bit as terrifying as any fictional gang of road warriors).
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