Ian Bell
Notions of justice within the Scottish prison population are rough and ready, not to say disgusting. Progressive folk - folk like us, decent folk, you and me - should never tolerate judgements from those lowlifes, or indulge their imaginary right to judge. It's called the rule of law. Our law.
The scum are harsh, especially towards other scum, and especially towards the scum who harm children. We deplore them for it. But what of Robert Cunningham?
Find yourself in a prison wing after a conviction for harming a child and the justice tends towards summary, then to bloody. No-one will mess around. You will be handed this week's version of a serious doing.
So what?
Education and instinct say I should know better, but there it is. When Robert Cunningham is sentenced later this month for culpable homicide, having been found guilty of a "blunt force" stomach injury intrinsic to the death of a 23-month-old infant, I won't give a damn. Not about the prisoner, or about his subsequent welfare. He can rot.
This is wrong, obviously. I do not believe that the penal system should be an instrument for anyone's revenge. I dislike the fact that the difference between our media and a lynch mob is always slight. But offer Cunningham to my keeping for 10 minutes, or five, and I would not vouch for his skull. As I said: wrong.
Brandon Muir had no life. He had a brief span in which pain and debased adults were the only constants. The little accidents awaiting Cunningham, with luck, in some gloomy Scottish jail cell will not come close to making first amends for a tiny existence betrayed. Then what?
Three urgent inquiries are in train. Alex Salmond, first minister of Scotland, is rightly treating one child's death as the most important thing in the world. It marks us all, like it or not, and ready or not. Yet even that proposition offends some among the decent, safe majority who would never dream of harming a hair of an infant's head. Which bleeding heart could dare say that this horror is "our" fault?
Me, for one. There is, to begin with, a default prejudice: blame "social workers". Do not, however, agree to fund child protection adequately. Do not respect the profession of social work. Do not acknowledge that drugs, dereliction and the abuse of children are Scottish problems so monumental no single, struggling, overwhelmed case worker can ever begin to pretend to cope.
But write the headlines, nevertheless. I've written them. It's a craft. How do you cram generations of abject ignorance into a character count? That's easier, I think, than making a bet on a child's survival when you have 10, 20 or 30 such wagers to make each week and each day. Brandon Muir was failed, serially, by social work, by the NHS, by education, by the legal system, and by an old Scottish conceit: community. Us.
And then by his mother, the birth canal toxic from beginning to end. That does not count, I think, as a "professional issue".
Nobody flinched when the child, in pain, was vomiting into his mouth at some "party". That was not an issue for the social, or for "the government". That was people, young, wasted and stupid people, as ever, more interested in crack and smack than in an infant over whom they had claimed rights.
Robert Cunningham's jail term should count, I hope, as educative for the inmate. If not, and should there be a call for volunteers, I'll kick him. Otherwise, I don't hold my breath. My satisfaction will not "resolve" anything, or offer "lessons" to anyone. Cunningham should be disqualified from the business of being human: agreed. But on that topic I have no right to legislate, or any hope for legislation.
Some would have us believe that a society being "soft" on drugs - there is no soft, as it happens, in a Dundee housing scheme - explains Cunningham. Some note a mother for whom whoring without a second thought became rational economic behaviour. So kick the scum. Write the headline. Blame the politicians, then the so-called professionals "who failed". You'll have had your drug crisis, then?
Brandon Muir died because no-one cared. There was a hierarchy of neglect. First, a birth parent - "Eat that, you little bastard. I am going to put you in a home if you don't eat it. I f***ing hate you." - then blame this week's psychotic, visiting, parasitic and ineptly coupling sadist partner.
Then family, then "pals", neighbours, or "society". Failed, one after the other. Failed, in each human particular. But no-one said that you can take the life from an infant much as wings are pulled, sometimes, from butterflies. They did not dare. It happened, though, and those who think there is a difference between smack and a nice Merlot will tell you all about it. In due course.
I can't, however.
Heroin does not displace moral intelligence. Overwork and the absence of "systems" do not resolve an oxymoron named "bureaucratic concern". Outrage does not answer the fact, the overwhelmingly fact, that in the case of this toddler no-one, from the top to the bottom of the scale, gave a shit. Systems do not function in such a fashion. And nor, still, do we preserve 23-month-old children in a society with a fetish for cute kids.
Brandon Muir was both a number on a case file and, finally, no more than "you little bastard". He had no reality, no existence, and could barely speak his own name to those who communicated, always, by means of unremitting pain. He was erased and, in the logic of such brutes, ended. Now write me a human being, 23 months on the planet, every hope unexpressed. Do the sketch. Try it, if you can, in your head, then let me see your notes. Robert Cunningham was that too, once.
I can smell the outrage. I can fill a headline. Pity for the pitiless? Typical bleeding heart crap? Indulge the scum and the junkie wasters? I hear it. It's fine. It's wrong.
I would kick Robert Cunningham's head off, ears first, given half a chance. I could kick it higher than most. But that thought is, of course, deplorable. And I would deplore the response for a reason.
It is not a drugs problem. It is not a problem of poverty. It is not an issue dependent on the funding of decent social care in a half-modern social-democratic society. It is as old as the planet: some of our number are scum. So what do we do? On that question every idea (I will not test you with hope) of our society depends.
Kicking the head from the shoulders of Robert Cunningham would be satisfying. Reminding the politicians that there is no privatised or "tough love" answer to natural-born losers who prefer to guzzle booze, dope and perfunctory sex: that has a passing attraction. Swine of Cunningham's stripe like to harm children. I would wipe his face across a wall. But that doesn't work, and never has. They gave God to some and to me all this education. So what follows?
There's a prison population liable, I think, to arrange something in the stairwell for Robert Cunningham. I wish they would not. There are the hoodlums out in tabloid land who really should, what with their posh degrees and their redundancy schemes, know better.
So we return to a species with a taste for brutality and a species disgusted, endlessly, by its tastes. And by our Robert Cunninghams, and to what each of us, decently, would like to do to that feral little killer. Good for us. Progress, then.
Sack a couple of professionals, by all means, attempting to do jobs that you and me (and all the decent folk) would not touch with the biggest barge-pole. Take it for granted that no-one cared enough about a 23-month-old infant. Your emotions will not describe reality truthfully.
The truth is that the world contains a Robert Cunningham, and worse, every day of every week, on each and every continent occupied by this species. Here's the monster: here's me, you, good folk, decency, neglect, failure, and every foulness imaginable.
I don't believe in your God, obviously.
