Thursday 31 May 2012

How many children is your car worth?

Dr Melanie Nichols, an epidemiologist working for the British Heart Foundation, has determined that 4,500 lives per year would be saved if the government changed its advice regarding the safe limit for alcohol consumption to a quarter of a glass of wine a day (that's about a mouthful). In this insightful front page spread, The Daily Mail claims that 'Cutting consumption could stem the epidemic of alcohol-related chronic diseases set to cause 210,000 deaths during the next 20 years.' 

No Shit? Cutting inhalation would undoubtedly reduce the number of cases of infectious diseases although, because everyone would be brain dead, there seems little point in recommending this as a policy, even for the Liberal Democrats (though one doesn't need a focus group to see the obvious political benefits for the party of fairness). The only relevant difference between suggesting that people stop inhaling and that they stop drinking alcohol is that anyone following the first set of advice would die whereas those adopting the latter would merely wish they were dead.


Melanie seems to have assumed that deferring (she said 'preventing' but let's assume she's not as stupid as she sounds) 4,500 deaths is a good so obvious that it requires no further analysis. If you think about it for just a second, however, you will immediately see that some lives are worth more than others. I seriously doubt you disagree with this. Imagine yourself in the philosopher's balloon. With you is a healthy child and an old man, with cancer. You have to chuck one of them out, or you'll all die, and you are bolted to the floor, so you can't sacrifice yourself. 


In fact, we all implicitly calculate the value of an average life every day. The question posed in the title of this blog asks you to consider how many kids you think it's OK to kill every year in exchange for the freedom and convenience associated with driving yourself where you want to go. If you answered 'none' you are either an idiot or a hypocrite because a world in which cars driven by amateurs roam the roads implies that some children will die. Come on. How many do you think is reasonable? Ten a year? Twenty a year? A hundred? If the speed limit in towns were reduced to 10mph, the number of child fatalities on the roads would fall dramatically - I dare you to disagree with that claim. So surely you support a 10mph speed limit in towns? No? Well then you are implying that a certain level of child mortality is an acceptable price to pay for your freedom to drive through towns at a speed that gets you where you're going reasonably quickly.


As it happens, I agree with you, sicko. There is an acceptable level of child mortality - a price worth paying for the freedom to drive. Likewise I'd argue that, given we all will die eventually, the question we should be asking ourselves is not how long we shall live but how well? To take my own case, I could extend my own life, perhaps by decades, if I stopped drinking alcohol. I might also enhance the life of my wife and children and others who love me. But my own life would be diminished, a lot.

Wednesday 30 May 2012

Blighty

So I land at Heathrow after three fantastic days in Turkey. Extraordinary flora, delightful people, nice kebabs, Turkish Delight, an enlightened attitude to alcohol. Need I say more?

Joining the queue accessible only to those with a new passport containing a chip enabling iris-scanning cameras to do the job of customs officers, it immediately became apparent that the line of people waiting to enter the UK the old-fashioned way was about half as long and moving much faster. Many of the people ahead of me voted with their feet, ducking under the barrier and presenting their passports to an actual person but I was determined to test my theory that the new technology doesn't work. I was not disappointed. Two in front of me was sternly expelled from the queue for having a baby with him. 'What? Aren't babies human beings?' He loudly asked as he was marched away. One in front of me was a black man who made the mistake of wearing spectacles into the booth where your iris is scanned. A helpful lady told him to remove his glasses, which he meekly did, but it then became obvious that without glasses he was practically blind, so he started swaying around, trying to see his own image on the screen. Eventually the system rejected him and he was led away, muttering. I approached the booth, fairly confident, being childless, sighted, white, middle class and still closely resembling my recent mug shot. No deal. The computer detected an 'intruder alert', which turned out to be the small rucksack I had been carrying as hand luggage. So far I've used the new system four times and it has allowed me to enter the UK once.

On the Turkish Airlines flight home I had drunk a certain quantity of wine and, having been grudgingly readmitted to the land of my birth, I urgently needed a pee. Following the signs after arrivals I was directed out of the terminal building to a bog in a bus stop. Both the male and female toilets were out of order. Diverting all available resources to my sphincters, I made haste to the Heathrow Express ('Enjoy The Journey' said the advert in the terminal. Given that it costs about £1.20 per minute, in the highly unlikely event it's on time, that's a particularly stupid suggestion). I didn't have a ticket, so I approached the ticket desk and, not unreasonably I thought, asked to buy a ticket to Chippenham. 'Sorry', said the bloke with the air of someone who had heard this question before, 'I can only sell you a ticket into London.' 'So I have to queue again when I get to Paddington?' 'Yes.'

The 7pm train to Chippenham, the first one of the evening that doesn't require a mortgage to finance, was late leaving. It always is.

My question for Boris Johnson, David Cameron and other apologists for this shit-hole of a country is this: when visitors from the USA, elsewhere in Europe or from a developed country such as Singapore arrive to witness the Olympic Games, what are they going to think when they encounter the series of entirely routine inconveniences that we place prominently in the way of travelers at every port of entry? There can be few British subjects less patriotic than I am but even I feel genuinely embarrassed by the shoddy fashion in which we greet tourists and returning inmates.