I'm glad to see the world hasn't gone completely mad.
Tory MP Nadine Dorries, who proposed a 20-week limit, said the government was "out of touch" with the public on the issue.
The *public* would bring back hanging. This is why we have governments.
joella
3 comments:
Yes, quite a scary thought!
The Daily Mail rage I suffered this day was a sight to behold (I came across its cover unexpectedly in a cafe). The thing is, the thing is
I spend quantities of my time with the general public to whom this is RELEVANT (statistically, say -- through the local teenage pregnancy statistics, and face-to-face through young mum groups and their ilk) and they're actually broadly fine with things as they are.
A noisy minority making a lot of noise and a bunch of people (to most of whom the issue is purely theoretical) responding out of a sense of vague outrage, fuelled by irresponsible and ill-informed journalists seeing how far they can push an issue -- well, you can decide to define that as the public (and the tabloids certainly do) but in this case I think that Dorries and the Mail are the ones who're out of touch.
I should follow that up with an emotive case study really, shouldn't I? Well, an Oxfordshire Tory recently went to the press to complain that Oxfordshire's access to abortions for young women was too dependent on using London clinics after a young constituent complained about the amount of time it meant she had to take off school.
The people in this story, they're as much part of the public and politic as Dorries and her ilk.
I know... I was thinking of the sort of summary justice mob rule type of public who used to stone adulterers, drown witches and lynch black people. These days they read the Daily Mail. And listen to Radio 2: *my* rage that day was directed at a lunchtime phone in: "have you had a premature baby and did that change your views on abortion?". There were tearful tales of miniature babies perfect in every way (apart from having to spend ten weeks in an incubator and being a bit slow at school).
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