Dear Cherie...
Published on 14/11/2006
The high life: Prisoners are poised to win payouts after suing the Home Office because they were forced to stop taking drugs in jail. Inmates claimed the ‘cold turkey‘ withdrawal treatment they were forced to undergo amounted to assault When writing letters of complaint, it’s always best to address them directly to the individual who gets things done – the bossy one rather than the boss, the formidable one behind the figurehead, the one who scares grown men witless with a frosty glare... the zealot. The wife.
“Dear Mr Blair/Mr Reid/ Mr Prescott...” Or, to avoid unnecessary beating around the bush:
“Dear Cherie,
I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms. Someone has left me off the register. My human rights are missing.
They have been overlooked, misplaced, lost or more likely given to somebody else in error. At any rate, I haven’t got any and as a grown woman paying rather a lot in taxes to your neighbour (and I think we both know how you feel about him) I’d have thought I might have been due at least some. Just a few would be nice, as a starter.
I know, along with state-funded hairdressing, crystals, acupuncture, the Clintons and property dealing, you’re the expert in such matters. That’s why I’m turning to you. I really need your help.
My friend says my rights have been lost because I’m not shooting up heroin, snorting cocaine, breaking and entering, wearing an Asbo with pride, sharing a borrowed house with 15 kids abandoned by 15 fathers and supported by your neighbour – via misguided mugs such as myself who work for a living – and my feelings are not hurt easily enough... or don’t count, on account of a lack of all the above.
My friend says that because I’m a smoker and not a junkie I don’t qualify for human rights. I have to earn rights by clocking up a collection of committed wrongs.
My swiftest route to the human rights register would be through prison, she says – but only because it’s too late for me to join a minority. I’m too white, she says, too middle class and middle aged. I’m too Christian, too easy going, a mortgage payer, wage earner, taxpayer, voter, recycler, meat pie eater and sufferer of no distressing persecution for colour, creed or culture, other than that routinely applied to the likes of me by your husband and his friends – for all the above.
I’m sure you’d agree that seems a bit harsh, so I’m appealing to you to prove my friend wrong.
Your Tony looks like a man who might be scared witless by one of your famous frosty glares, so I wondered if you might have a quiet word before the guy next door gets a grip – because he seems to me to be a chap unlikely to listen to any woman, other than his beloved Prudence.
You see, I find it really hurtful that while I’m pilloried, demonised and chased out into the cold of a pub car park for enjoyment of the odd cigarette, prisoners are able to gain legal aid to sue your husband’s lot – and by default me – for being told not cook up and shoot up their heroin in the warm, cosy comfort of their cells.
Then, when defeated by the indignant human rights pleadings of junkies and criminals, your Tony and his mates dig deeply into my pockets and settle out of court for hurt feelings brought on by the unwelcome chill of cold turkey. I’m incensed. I’m incandescent with a fury, enraged, ashamed of my own government and despondent about what extra maniacal misery the future might bring – but my friend says I’m being naive.
She says it stands to reason that all addicts are equal but jailed, serial-offending drug addicts are more equal than others in the eyes of New Labour. Even if I could begin to understand that I would find it incredible – as I’m sure must you. And that’s why I’m trusting in you to give your husband a stern talking to.
Is my friend wrong? I have an awful feeling she might not be. Is your husband right? I know he simply can’t be. But if he and his pals continue to believe he is infallible, this once great nation, already a long way up a poisoned creek without a paddle, is sunk.
In a former life, while living in another place, I was burgled three times by the same young habitual heroin user, known to the police – and to all the neighbours who suffered similar inconvenience – as a waster and a toe-rag who, once old enough to be imprisoned in an adult jail for his dozens of crimes – armed robbery among them – would be well and truly sorted out.
In jail his drugs would be withdrawn, the nice CID man said. He’d be taught the error of his ways, cleaned up and set straight.
Only a matter of time, he said. I think you lawyer types call this process rehabilitation.
The policeman could offer no more reassuring advice other than purchase of taller railings – but not too spiky because a scratched burglar could sue for his human right to steal without injury – more sophisticated alarms and snarling dogs. Always the offender’s victims had to pay.
Even he couldn’t have foreseen the lad wising up to human rights, using them to enhance and extend his drug use – free gratis, while the guest of Her Majesty – making a few thousand quid out of compensating taxpayers he’d already repeatedly ripped off and monkeys of the law-abiding, whose rights were cheerfully handed over to him without so much as a by your leave.
I firmly believe strong women are the ones who get things done. It’s the one point on which my friend and I agree.
My friend and I know you are arguably the country’s best-known, most influential human rights lawyer. I appeal to you to do something about all this – she reckons you already have.
I implore you to drop a persuasive word in appropriate ears on behalf of ordinary people who don’t do drugs, don’t burgle, don’t rob at knife-point, don’t land themselves in prison for collection of human rights.
We used to be afforded them by - er, right. All we ask is that someone, somewhere might put us back on the register and give us a few back.
We’re easily found. We’re the ones having our recycling bins monitored for the wrong rubbish, being penalised for driving cars and taxed through the nose for having a fixed address.
We need your help to find our missing rights and don’t want to have to be down and out, jailed junkies to claim them.
We were taught drugs were bad things, crime didn’t pay, honest endeavour did and that respect for law, order and other people would always be rewarded.
Somebody turned that teaching on its head. My friend says you would know all about that. So Cherie, woman to woman, I implore you... could we have our rights back please?
Yours hopelessly...
Flo & Joe Public
http://www.newsandstar.co.uk/unknown/viewarticle.aspx?id=434404