Jimmy Savile

Imagine this; the day that the scandal over Jimmy Savile's hundreds of unprosecuted and unpunished crimes against children was revealed, a newspaper publishes the following headline: "Exclusive! Man who we all strongly suspected to be paedophile turns out, amazingly, to be pedophile." Much to Fleet Street's shame, no such headline was published, but it might have been one of the more genuine statements that could have emerged in this most troubling of scandals. There is so much that is distressing about this case it is hard to know where to begin, but a quick examination of the facts might help to focus the thoughts. On his death Sir Jimmy was deified by the press, he was exactly the kind of loveable eccentric that the British tabloid media loves to celebrate, his work for charity and his lesser known, and now darkly ironic, campaigns for public decency in the 1970s and 1980s with Mary Whitehouse created a persona of simple down to earth integrity. And yet...and yet no one was really fooled, were they? Jimmy Savile presented society with an awkward conundrum, do we harass any single adult man who has a desire to be kind to children and make their wishes come true? Do we cast aspersions about a man who visits sick children in hospital, who frequents hospices and care homes, ostensibly out of human decency? If we do, does this take us another step down the road to the kind of hysteria that sees all adult men as suspect? There is a simple and effective way to square this circle, and it is a strategy that would revolutionise nearly every known area of child protection, from dubious Top of the Pops presenters to under age drinking, and that strategy is one of full and complete openness and honesty throughout our society about the things that shame us the most. Evidently Jimmy Savile's crimes were known to many, many people, there were those who covered up for him, those that ignored his victims, those that were compromised by this manipulative sociopath, there was enough actual knowledge to arrest and jail him decades ago. It was not acted upon because child sexual abuse was then, and to some extent still now is, the great pink elephant in the room that we cannot bear to acknowledge, we can only bring ourselves to discuss at times of acute crisis. At the Living Room in Cardiff, we know all about these pink elephants, be they alcohol, drug, gambling or other addictions. There seems to be an acute parallel between the way in which we deal with the horror of child abuse, and the manner in which we discuss addiction in society, our sense of shame shuts all discussion down. The time has come for all of us, victims, addicts, loved ones, bystanders, accidental facilitators and even perpetrators who want to stop, to get honest and to talk. Jimmy Savile operated freely not because, as some have suggested, that he was too powerful and influential, but because we were too afraid, not of him, but of acknowledging the existence of abuse in our society. We are still too afraid to acknowledge openly what everyone knows privately, that as with abuse, addiction is rife everywhere we look, in off licenses, casinos, pubs, down back alleys, supermarkets and online. Both these twin evils will be present, each and every day, no matter how hard we try to ignore them, but they cannot thrive under the spotlight of the truth. A society that embraces guilt, shame and secrets will continue to produce abused children and addicted adults, one that fights tooth and nail for the truth and honesty will be that much healthier for its struggles.

Please Drink Responsibly, Because We Will Do As We Please

When a history of advertising in the 21st Century eventually comes to be written, special mention should be given to the alcohol industry's appropriation of the word 'responsible', and the hidden ideology that goes with it. In cinema adverts, full page features in newspapers and the sponsorship of popular TV shows, we are gently reminded to drink alcohol responsibly, whilst being bombarded with powerful alluring images of the good times it supposedly brings. The critic Roland Barthes argued that an object is mythologised when the politics and history attached to it is replaced with a sense of 'naturalness'; the word responsibility has surely become the alcohol industry's great mythologising tool. The subtle subtext, always unspoken, but by implication unmistakably there, is that once the product is purchased, the responsibility lies completely with the consumer, and that the alcohol content, pricing, promotion, advertising and packaging are not factors in the equation worthy of considering. It is if these elements of the discussion have been erased completely, and the drinker must now live up to society's expectations and try to behave. No one, of course, would advocate anything less, we all have a personal responsibility to act in a law abiding manner and be sociable to our neighbours, but the trick with responsibility is to shunt any of the burden of it off the shoulders of the alcohol industry and retailers. There is a sound reason for this as well, when seen from the point of view of the industry; Alcohol sales are worth billions in the UK, but the actual cost to society, the massive, massive clean up job that we have to take 'responsibility' for, comes to the princely sum of £21 billion a year. These eye watering figures are something that the alcohol industry is working very hard not to have to be associated with, the subtext to their insincere pleas for moderation make more sense in the light of these kinds of sums; they are less a plea for sanity in a world gone mad with alcohol, and more a disclaimer - 'we've asked people to drink sensibly, and if they don't it's hardly our fault is it?' Alcohol retailers and manufacturers are only showing the most cursory signs that they are willing to make and sell this powerful addictive drug more responsibly. Heineken, embarrassed by the cider brand White Lightning stopped producing it last year, and Tesco and Co-op in Ipswich, with the backing of local police, have ended the sale of super strength lagers. All of this is to be commended, but it is a tiny step along a road to recovery for Britain during a time which more and more shocking revelations are coming to light. In a recent article in the Independent newspaper Jeremy Swain, Chief Executive of Thameslink, a leading homelessness charity, said that his charity's clients were harmed more by super strength lager than by heroin and crack cocaine. He said: "We are not talking about people dying at 68 or 69. We are talking about people dying in their late 30s," highlighting the absurdity that one can of 9 per cent Carlsberg Special Brew contained 4.5 units, whereas the recommended daily intake for a man is 4 units. Buy one can of super strength lager, and automatically, you aren't drinking responsibly, but what of the brewer? How, in the face of such facts, can Carlsberg or any other producer of such dangerous products preach responsibility towards the consumer, when they have acted in such a reckless manner, if not causing then certainly facilitating untold misery? They manage to do it through another term that is worth its weight in advertising and marketing gold: choice. Equip consumers with enough choice and they can make their own minds up without being patronised by governments, doctors and do gooders, choice was a preferred phrase of the smoking lobby until recently too. Choice will only be a term that can be meaningfully applied when people are made aware on the packaging of beers wines and spirits that they are buying a powerful addictive drug that has been aggressively marketed at them, that it is an aggravating factor in the vast majority of violent crimes, features in most of the NSPCC's recorded cases of child abuse, and as latest figures suggest, causes an additional 22,000 deaths per year.

Perhaps it is one resolve that will somehow not dissolve

I'm thinking of setting up a spiritual group at Living Room Cardiff for all those suffering from what Eric Fromm describes as 'the unbearable burden of alonness'. I e-mailed my friend Jim McGovern in Philadelphia this morning just to seek out his opinion and to ask whether he had any literature that might be of any use to me. Below is his reply: Loneliness The cringing desire not to be alone. Loneliness can seem all pervasive. Behind it and next to it, everything else is subsidiary. We can talk the talk of Universal Oneness and God always being with us and so on and so forth…. But this Oneness does not sit across from us as we eat our meal. Sharing our joys or our sadness-es with it, seems terribly remote. We cannot reach out and touch it in the middle of the night…. The Enlightened speak of the illusory nature of our physical world - that reality is in our metaphysical unity with all of humanity and even nature Tell that to the child or woman or man curled up in a depress-ed ball because they have no real mortal human being to connect with or talk to. And thus we put up with the drama and pain and anguish and maybe even abuse of a partner with whom we just cannot get along…. We refuse to accept the abject discomfort of being alone. Stop in a nursing home and see human beings who’ve been shunted to the sidelines of life…folk that no one comes to see….or maybe they come on Christmas or Easter only…. Sitting in a corridor, in a wheelchair, staring at your eyes as you walk on by hoping, pleading, begging for even a glimmer of recognition, of connecting …of some kind of assurance they still are and that they still matter…. All the lonely people – they come from everywhere, from all walks of life… But like all people, lonely or not, they live, they live, they live and then they die…. And who is to know, but perhaps the field levels out then. Perhaps the escape from the mortal flesh brings with it the escape from the illusion of aloneness….and maybe even those that were so lonely, are even more enthralled with being an unencumbered part of the Universal One because it is so far away from the cold lonely corner of their mortal days. Perhaps. Perhaps I’ll make good on my idea to take a poetry group up to one of those nursing homes. Perhaps it is one resolve, that will somehow not dissolve. ----- i'll try again at that nursing home that keeps ignoring my calls my book is a kind of generic 12 step guide. i also have a 9 step program for berevement i'll send you when i write from home. peace always, jim mcgovern

The Lost Prince

The nation seems to be divided over Prince Harry's most recent antics and two positions on his drunken Las Vegas behaviour have emerged. The first argues that Harry has every right to behave as he sees fit in the privacy of his own hotel room, and in Britain, after the scandals of press intrusion and faux moralising, the pro-privacy argument seems to carry a lot of weight. The second argument is that Harry is a citizen like no other, he is an ambassador for Britain, showing off to the world all that is positive about Britain and emphasising British values. He should therefore be on his best behaviour at all times and the recent scandal over naked photos taken of him in a hotel room is just another embarrassment that the House of Windsor periodically inflicts on the nation. Coming so soon after the success of the London Olympics, where Britain truly showed off in its opening and closing ceremonies and in its record of gold medals won, what British values at their best are. There are merits in both these arguments, yes, Harry is entitled to privacy and there is no journalistic reason worthy of mention to publish embarrassing pictures of him; despite the Sun's defence of 'public interest' there is a gulf of difference between 'what interests the public' and public interest itself. Also, anyone in his position with an iota of common sense would protect themselves from embarrassment far more rigorously than he does. Perhaps there is a third perspective to view this recent debacle from? Is it possible that we can feel sympathy for Harry, a lost young man with immense privilege but no role or purpose. It is easy for us in recession hit Britain to look at Harry, a man who seems to live a life of endless opportunity and fun and feel no sympathy at all, but that is to deny a few human truths that apply to all of us, irrespective of wealth. There is no role for Harry in the future, not even the position of Duke of York, not in the next few decades at least, direction, purpose and contribution is something human beings cannot live without. He has lost the guiding hand of his mother at an early age and exists in a culture that was defined by the stiff upper lip and emotional repression of aristocracy and wartime national service. He has few achievements of his own to point to, the controversy surrounding his art exams at Eton College, where the work was shown to be someone else's, speaks volumes about how far Harry's real abilities have been tested. Similarly his deployment in Afghanistan was cut short after an article in a magazine announced his presence there, once again emphasising his differentness and hampering his ability to be counted for who, not what he was? Acting the fool in these circumstances isn't perhaps as aberrant as we might think, for all intents and purposes, he might as well, there clearly isn't anything better to do. What does this story tell us about our own times? Look at the countless Prince Harrys on every high street on a Saturday night, engaged in an alcoholic nihilism, seeking for a few hours to negate their very beings. Their existence is a powerful indication of a hopelessness that exists in the core of our society and in the very fabric of our thinking. it existed long before the recession, it hasn't been helped by the lack of jobs for young people, but unemployment and high university costs aren't the sole cause. Instead there is a massive desire on the part of our youth, just like Prince Harry for annihilation and humiliation instead of engagement. There is the desire for anaesthetic experiences where people sleepwalk drunk and hungover through swathes of their lives, instead of aesthetic experiences where they feel at their most alive. Why is this so? We don't fully know because there is no meaningful debate about our relationship between drink, drugs and ourselves. Until we start talking about this most pressing of national concerns we will have no right to judge Prince Harry because we will not be demonstrating that we are committed to finding alternatives and solutions to a generation lost to alcohol and other drugs.

A Leveson for the brewers?

Decades of wrongdoing, criminal and unethical behaviour and the scandalous abuse of vulnerable people by Britain's tabloid press have been finally brought into the public sphere in the last twelve months, but one area, perhaps most importantly has been spotlighted. It is the relationship between corporate media power and both Labour and Tory Governments. The evidence surfacing does not paint our democracy in a good light, and it is unlikely that media companies are the only conglomerates who have had a hand in shaping government policy in the past few decades. Following the outrage over the manipulation of interest rates, a scandal just in its infancy, some politicians have called for a 'Leveson for the Banks', as if the term Leveson is a new British shorthand for exposing hidden conspiracies against the public. If this is the case then there is another industry who's relationship with government needs urgent examination, the alcohol industry. Brewers and distillers have traditionally been a formidable lobby, scions of the great brewing magnates have frequently stood as Conservative MPs and funded the party that understood its concerns and interests. During the heady, booze fuelled years of Blair's Cool Britannia, the drinks trade found a new ally in the Labour Party, who's policies regarding licensing have had apocalyptic consequences for British high streets and hospital A&E departments over their 13 years in office. The Coalition Government, faced with an historically unprecedented level of alcohol abuse has, to its defence, taken the first positive steps towards dealing with Britain's societal alcoholism, but the planned minimum alcohol pricing strategy is but one small, fairly reluctant step on a long journey and plans to reverse 24 hour drinking have been kicked into the long grass. In this country people will always drink and they will probably always take other drugs too, but in order to find a solution to the rapidly escalating alcohol crisis that confronts Britain, some painful truths must be addressed. The government in Westminster and here in Wales should now be obliged to face the same kind of questions regarding the alcohol industry that they have faced about the media. We should ask them the following things: 1) What is the extent of industry involvement in the creation of new laws or codes of practice to regulate the marketing and sale of alcohol? 2) How often do representatives of the main brewers, distillers and supermarkets meet with the Secretary of State for Health and the Assembly Minister for Health and Social Services? 3) Have ministers or senior civil servants responsible for policy regarding alcohol accepted any form of hospitality from parties interested in shaping policy towards alcohol? Has this been declared? We might also wish to question the previous administration, given that its policies seemed to benefit the industry so dramatically. It might be pertinent to ask: 1) What motivated the 2003 decision to introduce 24 hour drinking licenses? What industry involvement in the decision was there? 2) What was the relationship between the previous Labour Government and the big four supermarkets when it came to the issue of minimum alcohol pricing and selling? Why ask these questions? Because as all former addicts know, truth is the key to recovery. We must stand back and realistically assess the carnage that alcohol has wrought in the past decade and before. In the year following the 24 hour drinking relaxation, a further 64,000 alcohol related assaults were recorded and drink driving leapt to a 30 year high. This year, at a conservative estimate, 15,000 people will die of drinking, there will be a million hospital admissions, and one in four young people who die in Britain will be killed by alcohol. With statistics like these, we need urgently to be told the truth about how the alcohol industry and the government work together to create immense profits for drinks manufacturers and retailers, while leaving the costs for the rest of us to pay. To date, distasteful though his publications are, Rupert Murdoch's newspapers haven't cost any lives, but the laissez faire way in which alcohol is sold and consumed has, and will continue to do so unless the public is allowed a thorough investigation into the industry.

Wales of the 21st century

If we can think of a country of a society as being analogous to a human being, then is it possible to make comparisons between the recovery of a person and the recovery of a nation? The individual who has stopped drinking or taking drugs or engaging in other harmful behaviours often experiences a rebirth, a renaissance, in fact in most instances this rebirth is the strongest chance of a lasting recovery. They must learn, or re-learn authentic and open ways of articulating themselves, a language of recovery that makes them independent, not co dependent. In much the same way, Wales has begun the long process of the reclamation of her identity, and the Renaissance of the Welsh language is gradually becoming her people's way of articulating themselves and their world. Language itself is our most important means of making sense of experience, and Wales quite literally, must find her own way of speaking and feeling in Welsh and also in English, for her society to be at ease with itself. The fact that she is not at ease, not in a state of acceptance, or of harmony, can be seen in every large town and small village, not just in Cardiff, on Saturday night, but also increasingly, all week round. Addiction, once confined to the living room or bedroom, behind the lace curtains, is now spilling on to our streets, the old Wales of community, chapel, proud and not a little puritanical, has been swept away, helped in no small part by alcohol, the drunken displays of violence and illness we see (and, amazingly, featured in the Wall Street Journal in 2010) have made cities like Cardiff renown for this appalling social problem. The curious irony here, and it is one that is once again linked to language and our inability to properly articulate what we mean, is that in the same breath as referring to public alcoholic drinking as a social problem, politicians and commentators to a man put the problem down to individual weakness. The idea that social problems might have social causes, and that they might be the result of anything more than a lack of moral fibre or self restraint on the part of the drinker raises questions that are too incendiary, too deadly for our modern political and cultural discourse to deal with. Questions of exclusion, alienation, boredom, hopelessness, meaninglessness, let alone poverty, fairness or consumerism or egotism are conveniently ignored by mainstream discourse, which is why Wales urgently needs a new language of recovery, a people's language if you will, one that speaks in a multiplicity of tongues but that holds honesty to be its constant. If our society can be thought of as a people making machine, crafting all types of individual consciousnesses, based on whatever settings are programmed in, we must direct our words, and thoughts to ask simply how we have programmed it to produce so many alcoholics, addicts and people who feel addictive substances or behaviours can do for them what they cannot do for themselves. If we are courageous in addressing this question in Welsh, English, Polish and Urdu, in every language where addiction cuts a bloody swathe through communities, then the Wales of the 21st Century will be able to clearly articulate itself as distinct from the rest of the UK, and will be able to show the way to the rest of the peoples of these islands, tormented, as so many of them are, by addiction and fear.

A spiritual dilemma?

Today I was asked my opinion on charities partnering with the alcohol industry, whether through sponsorships, partnerships or accepting funding. Here’s my reply: “It's the Lottery dilemma magnified. Can't using drinks industry money be justified, however, as a means to an end? I think we should take the money from the government and the drinks industry if it helps people recover. We wish to continue and develop our relationship with the drinks industry and the government in promoting responsible drinking. However, there are people in our communities, like those with a nut allergy, who cannot take alcohol in any form. We should welcome what support we can get from whatever source in dealing with this chronic condition and offering first class, on-going support and after-care. However, our goal is to be properly funded. And it goes without saying that we should always operate within the law. What would the Master have done? From my knowledge of Him, he'd have put saving lives as a priority and broken the "rules". He’s my role-model.”