Beyond remedy

know the difference. But it kept pushing itself to the front of my mind

as I listened to this week's radio.

Time was when people suffering poverty, sickness, grief, or

bereavement would turn to religion, speak of God's will, and reflect

that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward; but it's as if, in

realising that some of these troubles could in fact be cured by better

medicine or an Act of Parliament, we've somehow lost our sense that

certain things are simply beyond human remedy.

If there's one thing our media makes clear day in and day out, for

instance -- most notably in repeated hysterical interviews with grieving

relatives desperate for someone to blame -- it's that our culture cannot

cope with death, with its finality, its arbitrariness, its frequent lack

of discernible meaning.

In the past month, Radio 4 has been presenting a fascinating serious

called A Year of Dying Dangerously, in which Hugh Prysor-Jones has tried

to look into the ugliest kind of mortality, examining a year's homicides

in England and Wales; and if the series failed to reach a satisfying

conclusion, I think it's because Prysor-Jones tried, with commendable

ambition to encompass in five short programmes the whole meaning -- from

the detail of judicial practice to the ultimate experience of grief --

of an event we hardly have the vocabulary to describe.

There were areas where the series functioned brilliantly, blasting our

preconceptions about murder and clarifying the facts. It pointed out

that the vast majority of murders take place within the family, or in

drunken street fights between young men at pub closing time. It

highlighted the sinister way in which random murders of women, which

actually account for a tiny proportion of the total, are nonetheless

emphasised by the popular media in what begins to look like an attempt

-- unconscious but systematic -- to frighten women off the streets and

out of their wits. It made no bones about the role played by alcohol in

the deaths of hundreds of murder victims each year. It offered a lucid

explanation of the way in which the mandatory life sentence actually

makes it more difficult to bring a successful charge of murder.

But when it came to the families of murder victims, A Year of Dying

Dangerously showed signs of coming seriously unstuck. Moved, I imagine,

by the best motives of compassion and respect, Prysor-Jones tried

throughout the five programmes to keep their pain in focus, as though it

were an element in the murder story that had too often been ignored; he

encouraged them to talk about their grief, about the pain (given the

prevalence of murder within the family) of having to be checked out as a

suspect, about the fact that relatives of victims have no rights when a

murder comes to trial, and have to queue for their place in the public

gallery along with assorted ghouls and eccentrics, only to see the

accused being courteously treated as innocent until proved guilty.

But the more the programme dwelt on this theme, the more I began to

feel that Prysor-Jones and the families were barking up the wrong

spiritual and psychological tree. If there is, traditionally, no place

for them at the trial, it's because the task the courts are carrying out

in trying to administer justice to the accused is simply irrelevant to

the lifelong task they face, which has to do with acceptance,

submission, coming to terms with anger and loss.

In implying that the bereaved families ought to be given more

consideration in the legal process, Prysor-Jones ended up by reinforcing

the shallow secular assumption that their grief would somehow be less if

only the wheels of justice turned smoothly, and they were given a

ringside seat in court. But wise people have known since time began that

vengeance is useless, that it turns to dust and ashes. On the evidence

of these programmes, what families need is to stop seeking relief in a

judicial process which cannot help them, and to look instead for serious

spiritual support in facing the fact that nothing, but nothing, can

bring their loved ones back.

It's a sad day, though, when people bring the same spirit of quiet

resignation to bear on man-made disasters that clearly could be

reversed, given the political will and organisation. Last week, to mark

the introduction of the poll tax, Radio Clyde ran a follow-up programme

to its award-winning feature of autumn 1986, The Charge of the Right

Brigade; and as Colin Adams unravelled his brisk, pungent account of the

story so far, I began to sense a gloomy air of inevitability about the

introduction and survival of what is, by any measure, a hopelessly

regressive tax.

From the point of view of the Conservatives in the Scottish Office, it

has to be acknowledged that the thing is a stroke of pure genius. At one

bound, it shifts the blame for high community charges squarely onto the

shoulders of local authorities; and because it bears relatively heavily

on those who have no way of increasing their income to meet it (the

unemployed, the low paid, pensioners with no property) it exerts a

tremendous moral pressure to economise by cutting the very local

services on which those low-income groups depend.

With every twist of the argument it becomes more obvious that the only

decent solution to the rating problem is the introduction of local

income tax; but according to Adams's programme, the administrative

mayhem surrounding the arrival of the community charge has been such

that it would take a bold Government -- supposing we ever have a

different Government -- to initiate yet another upheaval.

It looks as though the opponents of government policy may be on an

easier wicket, though, with the mounting outrage over the new social

security payments system, introduced last spring. I had no intention,

when I mapped out my listening for this week, of writing anything at all

about Thursday's edition of the Radio 4 magazine for the disabled, Does

He Take Sugar? But in more than five years of systematic listening, I

don't think I've ever heard a group of ordinary apolitical people sound

so moved, so bitter, so deeply angry as the various disabled claimants

interviewed for this programme about the impact of the changes on their

incomes.

In a nation that is constantly vaunting its new-found ''prosperity''

and improved economic performance, this kind of penny-pinching at the

expense of those already suffering the pain of longterm injury, illness,

or disablement is almost beyond bearing. But disabled people, who have

often had to face the fact that some agonies cannot be changed, at least

know a reversible man-made tragedy when they see one. They are angry,

they are right, and they have the support of the people; the Government

had better watch its back.

Joyce McMillan