No, Sir Humphrey

From Mark Colvin's blog, in a review of Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed (London: Fourth Estate 2009), a book in which the 1970s are hyped as "the golden age of paranoia" -

Did you know - I certainly didn't - that Britain's top public servant, Sir William Armstrong, literally went mad at a country-house seminar in 1974? It's a story worth quoting at length:

"Sir William stripped off his clothes and lay on the floor, chain-smoking and expostulating wildly about the collapse of democracy and the end of the world ... In the middle of this hysterical sermon, as the naked civil servant babbled about 'moving the Red Army from here and the Blue Army from there', the Governor of the Bank of England happened to walk into the room."

It was left to the Prime Minister's Principal Private Secretary to ring the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and tell him that the head of the civil service had been admitted to a mental hospital. Heath's reaction, that he "thought William was acting oddly", is either classic British understatement or a further testament to the overall lunacy of the times.

Denis McShane's review in The Independent asks

Did the Cabinet Secretary really take off all his clothes to lie down naked and start raving in the Cabinet Room? Yes he did, and was quietly led off to become Chairman of the Midland Bank as a suitable reward for going mad. Did Judge Argyle really ask George Melly to explain "cunnilinctus" in the trial of the journalists bringing out the now rather tame-looking Oz magazine?

The answer to those questions is yes, but we might question the pronouncement that

It was a very mad ten years, but enormously pleasurable as the 1968 generation indulged in sex, drugs, rock and roll and vacuous left-wing politics - in what surely was the most hedonistic, solipsistic decade in Western history.

So much for the 1920s ... or the 1890s if you had the wherewithal to party and were susceptible to mumbo jumbo from Madam Blavatsky & Co. What about the previous 'Age of Anxiety' ... and its precursors. Reds (or wobblies) lurking under the bed, ready to emerge and eviscerate the family moggie, socialise the means of production or fluoridate the water supply?

Bill Orr has meanwhile pointed to a cogent item by Greg Barns, author of What’s Wrong with the Liberal Party? (Carlton: Melbourne Uni Press 2003). In discussing selective compassion regarding bushfire victims and refugees Barns comments that

The true test of a nation's capacity for kindness and giving is not in an easy case like the Victorian bushfires, but when it confronts us. When we cannot readily identify with those who are suffering, but yet can let go of our fears and our hard-wired stereotyped thinking, and extend our generosity to them.

Recent history would suggest that we have some way to go in meeting that challenge.

As we do in understanding fundamental rights.

I've been reminded of his assessment in reading about what the great Paul Keating described as ministerial "jellyback", specifically irresponsibility on the part of the mass media and a governmental indifference to civil liberties in dealing with calls for the relocation from Ryde of convicted paedophile Dennis Ferguson, who's inconveniently completed the sentence imposed by a Queensland court and appears unhappy with people leaving petrol bombs and a cardboard coffin outside his residence. Barns, on behalf of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, is quoted by the ABC as commenting that forced relocation could set a dangerous precedent and that Ferguson would be entitled to compensation if he is forced to move.

The basic principle [for] everyone in New South Wales, in every state in Australia, is that if you are living in a house and you are abiding by the law, then governments have no business in moving you to another area.

This is a policy that we would have expected to see in apartheid South Africa or in authoritarian countries, not in a democracy.

Now there's no evidence that Mr Ferguson is breaking the law residing as he does in Ryde, and simply because a few community vigilantes want him moved on doesn't mean that our politicians should buckle to their pressure.

I don't know of any law in New South Wales or any law around Australia which entitles governments to capriciously simply move people from one house to another on the basis of the complaints of a few vigilantes in a community.