For the 'Do-gooders'

I would have been fifteen when I made up my mind that capital punishment was a 'bad thing'.  It happened quite suddenly at the end of a house assembly at secondary school, in which a fellow pupil and I had been chosen to debate the whether it was right or wrong.  I had never really given the subject much thought although both of my parents thought it should never have been abolished - which it finally had, about ten years earlier.


I let my opposite number pick her side first - she picked 'against' so I got 'for' by default.  Our house-master, who I will call 'Mr Curry', although that wasn't his name, primed us both with arguments and evidence to support our cases.  From the start, I felt that he gave my opponent more and better ammunition, including details of the Derek Bentley case.  I started to wonder if I had ended up on the wrong side.

On assembly day morning, my classmate and I delivered our little speeches to the bored hordes of our house with all the awkwardness self-consciousness you might expect from a couple of fifteen-year-old girls and absolutely no rhetorical skill whatsoever.  Mr Curry thanked us both and sent us back to our seats where I waited to hear him give a better explanation of why capital punishment was wrong.

He didn't.  Instead, quite unexpectedly, he launched into an emotive argument about why it was right and just, focusing on how he would feel if anyone killed someone close to him, especially his own young children, and how he would want that person dead.  I waited for him to qualify that with an observation that law shouldn't be made on the basis of raw gut instinct, except he seemed very much of the opinion that it should.  There was no attempt to present a properly balanced, reasoned argument; no comparison of murder or violent crime rates in countries with or without.  There wasn't even a feeble, faith-based 'Eye for an Eye' attempt to do so.  It was an ugly appeal to embrace revenge.  Coming from a teacher, it seemed completely wrong and shocking.  I expected adults in positions of responsibility to present logical arguments supported by solid facts or moral ones exhorting us to be better humans.  Naively, perhaps, I still do. 

Back in the 1970s, our politicians were passing anti-discrimination and equality laws which put them well ahead of public opinion, just as their predecessors had been when they abolished Capital Punishment - and corporal punishment in our schools - despite being derided as 'do-gooders'.  Fortunately for many innocent people wrongly convicted since, and many guilty ones willing and able to rehabilitate, MPs in the 1960s didn't wait on the whims of focus groups.  They argued and legislated out of conviction.  MPs still do, of course; the introduction of Civil Partnerships and, more recently Equal Marriage, being cases in point.  However, there are also times when principles are sacrificed to perceived political expediency; the Labour Party I joined in 1987 jettisoned so many that, even before the Iraq War, I had left it.

As campaigning in the EU referendum restarts after the respectful pause to remember murdered MP Jo Cox, I can't help but be reminded of that 1970s morning assembly.  Too much of the campaign has looked and sounded like Mr Curry's ranting.  With staggering hypocrisy, the usual suspects in the right-wing press filled their front pages with tributes to Jo Cox, nudging their anti-immigrant stories to the inside pages and muzzling Katie Hopkins and Richard Littlejohn for a moment, lest one of their bile-filled rants against 'lefty do-gooders' spoil the mood.  They will have every intention of resuming normal service as soon as possible but, perhaps as a tribute to Jo Cox, perhaps for the victims of the Orlando shootings, or simply to show that we are better than our capacity to hate, we must tell them we want better.  If you see hate speech against anyone lurking in the comments column of your local paper, on social media, in your workplace or down the pub, don't collude with it, call it out.  Support your local 'do-gooders' - better still, be one.

A watched pot never boils...

Biscuits are back on the menu!

I've posted previously about both my ineptitude at marketing and my general awkwardness when it comes to self-promotion, so I should probably celebrate the fact that I seem to sell or give away more books when I don't try to promote them that when I do.  I seem almost to have a knack for 'anti-marketing'.  Events this weekend have made the point rather dramatically.


I've been away from home and regular Internet access for a few days which, as luck would have it, coincided with the 'first Friday' (and Saturday and Sunday) when the first episodes of the 'welfare rights lit' stories are free to download, and also with a 'Grand Union' giveaway to coincide with the Etruria Boat Festival.  I managed a few tweets from work lunchtime Friday that 'Severe Discomfort' was free and a couple of friends kindly shared the usual Facebook/Amazon link but, otherwise, marketing was even less organised than usual.  So you can probably imagine my surprise, when checking sales figures on my return home, to find that on Saturday - the day after a 'Severe Discomfort' freebie day which shifted only single figures - more than thirty people decided to actually buy the book.  Hardly a level of sales to make the best-sellers lists but, for a three-year-old self-published novel in an obscure genre that can go weeks without a single paid download, that's both quite encouraging and completely inexplicable.  I hadn't even linked my tweets from the day before to topical hashtags so, even if #universalbasicincome or #don'tbelievetheDailyMail were trending, it wouldn't have helped.


I had a Google about to see if there had been some unexpected kindly review or reference, or even a slating from the Daily Mail Book Club (a truly terrifying concept in itself), but I've seen nothing to explain this little flurry of sales.  I can only hope that some of them turn into reviews and recommendations.  At least Stoke-on-Trent CAB's beleaguered staff can look forward to biscuits for what remains of my current contract, after a few months of relative drought.  Since that's possibly as close as six weeks away, success as a writer would be both welcome and well-timed, though I'm not relying on this trend to continue or planning to give up the day job - not if the Big Lottery gives us a reprieve, at any rate.


While not remaining at such dizzy heights, sales of 'Severe Discomfort' are now at 45 for the month, about 44 more than average, after just six days.  Quick readers amongst them can grab 'Continual Supervision' free of charge this Friday.  I should probably be generous and tweet this fact widely, even if it has a detrimental effect on the 'Beverage Fund'.  Either way, I shall be shopping for treats for my colleagues tomorrow!