Derek Ogg

One of us is nuts. There is little room for debate after all the evidence is in. Either Jack Straw, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Home Affairs or me. One of us is nuts.

Two months ago, by the time you read this, the said Home Secretary announced the Government were determined to do something about dangerous nutters who might prey upon, torture and kill our children. Society he vowed must be protected from even the risk of such horror. Good, but, ahem, just how Home Secretary? Well he has a little plan, to have untreatable people with severe personality disorders who, in the opinion of psychiatrists, present a risk to the public locked up. Forever. All of them.

At first I thought it was me that was nuts. Say it fast enough and it sounds OK. The BBC news put it fifth in its evening news running order, so it can't be that bad surely? Then every ounce of my legal training, experience and instinct shrieked "what about innocent until proved guilty?" That's right, the government plans to lock up people who have committed no crime on the basis that two shrinks think a) you have no treatable illness but b) have a personality disorder that renders you a risk to the safety of the public.

I remembered Alexander Solzenitzin's epic book of the Soviet concentration camps full of people who had committed no crime but were sent there because of the risk they presented to society, In fact wasn't the Nobel Prize winning writer himself sent there after Soviet psychiatrists had earlier found him to be suffering from an incurable personality disorder making him a danger to the public?

Just because the Press can point to a rare case or two of dangerously fixated people still set in their ways even after serving their sentences (ie. pædophiles to you and me) the whole of British society has to surrender its rights to the presumption of innocence, a right to have a fair and open trial where your accuser gives notice of the act you have committed before a jury of your peers decides if you are guilty. These rights, readers, protect you and me from the mob, from trial by the media, from power mad politicians on the lookout for votes.

What I don't understand is this. We have here a hugely popular government, under no pressure to get cheap votes by pandering to the gutter press. We have no epidemic of psychopaths slaying kids or puppies. We are signatories to the European convention. Why in God's name is this huge change in our justice system contemplated?

OK. Nobody cares to stand up for the rights of people who might harm children (or, logically it follows, might never harm children). Pædophiles are the new Salem witches. Apart from abusing children they are presumed also to torture and kill them in the most satanistic ways. There is no room for debate. If you do not wish castration and eternal imprisonment upon a pædophile you must be an apologist for them, worse you must be one yourself. Pædophiles, the public will agree in their million, must be just the sort of people Jack Straw has in mind as incurables with a desire to harm children. So the public think "What's wrong with the plan to lock Œem all up?" The answer is so simple, yet nobody in the media is shouting it. In a democratic society due process means you pay for the crimes you commit, not the crimes someone else thinks you might commit at some time or other in the future. Due process means that facts not gossip, not psychiatric opinion, not public opinion and God Forbid, not the Sun or the Record decide who stays free and who doesn't.

So why am I writing this article in a gay journal rather than a legal one you ask?

Well, it was not long ago that gay men could be admitted to psychiatric hospital for reprogramming by electro-shock therapy. It was only in the 70s that the world's main psychiatric bodies declassified homosexuality as a mental illness. In the US, some right wing fundamentalists are clamouring for being gay to be re-classified, So who is and is not an incurable severely disordered personality rather depends upon who is writing the psychiatric report and what the contemporary attitudes of society are. In other words you can fill a Gulag up at any time in history with society's rejects, radicals, eccentrics, weirdos, rebels and unpopular providing you do one simple thing first, just one simple thing. Do away with the right to due process and the presumption of innocence.

In history society after society gets conned by control freaks and the power mad politician. First the politician scares the shit out of everybody with a bogey-man (heretic, witch, gypsy, Jew, homo, black). Then the same politician comes up with a solution to your fears (see how quickly they become your fears). 'Just give over some of your rights, just gimme a few more soldiers. I'll get rid of the nasty men, the disease carriers, the profiteers and scroungers, the spongers and the ones who refuse to fit in'. That's how it worked in every country in Europe for the last nine centuries until the final, last, awful orgy of hate that was fascism in Germany.

Then we said never again. Then we said our rights apply to everyone, not just the strong, rich, well connected, white, the Christian. The strange, the potentially dangerous, the eccentric, the outrageous are protected by these rights too. And everybody in between. That's why gay men and lesbians have to stand up for the rights of people with severe personality disorders who have either served their time for a crime or who have committed no crime at all. If we don't, under the next government or the one after that, the Home Secretary might extend that little list. Who will stand up for us?