Grumbles

I read in the Guardian of yesterday of the sad case of a young lady badly injured in a car crash, with the injury compounded by the death of her mother. While the crash was someone else's fault, they have not thrown the book at the someone else, so presumably the fault was not deemed to be huge. The point of raising all this though is the matter of compensation, amounting to £23m in the form of  £7.25m down and £0.27m a year for life.

Now it is all very sad and the life of a young lady has been badly damaged. But I grumble that an award of this sort is disproportionate. It may be that she needs full time care but it is hard to see how that comes to the sums mentioned, sums which will be drawn from the motor insurance premiums of the rest of us. It is right that the collective takes the cost in this way, but it is wrong that the cost has been set so high. What on earth are the people who claim or set compensation payments of this sort thinking of - other than their own payment by results? We need to get a better grip on this sort of thing.

I wonder how many victims have declined to play the game. Mr. Lawyer, I dare say you can wangle £X out of the system for me (gross) but this is not the sort of game that I want to play. I do not need money of that sort to rebuild my life out of the wreckage. Bog off.

Whereas down at Greenpeace they seem to have missed a grumble. It seems that someone has invented a eucalyptus version of leylandii which you can plant across hundreds of square miles of what was tropical rain forest in Brazil in order to grow fuel for power stations. The point of the new version being that it grows fatter and faster than anything much else on earth - and on the face of it providing part of the solution to our energy and global warming problems. But Greenpeace object to everything, so why are they not objecting to this? I have not seen a peep out of them? Asleep on the job? They could make an awful lot of noise about loss of biodiversity if they put their minds to it. Not to mention loss of habitat for one of the last tribes of cannibals on the planet. Not to mention that awful word genetic modification.

I grumble at Greenpeace for grumbling about everything and never providing solutions, but then, this morning, it occurred to me that their role is that of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, a role which used to be explained to one in civics classes. It is the duty of the Loyal Opposition to oppose, to pick holes in, to rubbish whatever Her Majesty's government proposes to do, without regard to what they might actually think about it. If whatever it is cannot stand this sort of heat then maybe we should not be doing it.

One advantage of this arrangement is that debates about proposals are something of a performance. Both sides take the performance terribly seriously but once the performance is over they can calm down and saunter out together to take their tea and crumpets. We avoid the solemnity and pomposity of the true believers, the people who really care about a proposal. Right pains in the behind mostly.

But one can go too far. It can become offensive to have people debating a serious proposal, a proposal affecting, perhaps, the prospects of hundreds of thousands of poverty stricken inhabitants of our inner cities, who clearly do not really care. This is serious matter about which people should care, not spin entertaining lawyery quibbles and paradoxes or score entertaining points off of each other. The sort of thing some of us started to learn about in the debating societies of our schools.

Somehow, we need to strike a decent balance.