18 July, so it must be the 45th anniversary of Bertrand Russell’s son standing up in the House of Lords and declaring that Britain’s entire criminal justice system should be abolished and replaced with a police force like the Salvation Army that just made people cups of tea.
He was speaking in a debate about the country’s policy on aid to victims of crime, and had listened to learned contributions from Lords Longford, Foot, and Mishcon, and the Bishop of Leicester, before he stood up at 9.08, according to Hansard, and began.
My Lords, I rise to raise the question of penal law and lawbreakers as such, and to question whether modern society is wise to speak in terms of law breakers at all. A modern nation looks after everybody and never punishes them. If it has a police force at all, the police force is the Salvation Army. and gives a hungry or thirsty people cups of tea. If a man takes diamonds from a shop in Hatton Garden you simply give him another bag of diamonds to take with him. I am not joking.
There was more in this vein. Quite a lot more:
What are you? — soulless robots? Schoolmasters who are harsh with schoolboys, who later as a result burn down the school house, ought to be more human. Schoolboys in any case are at present treated with an indescribable severity which crushes their spirits and leaves them unnourished. The police ought to be totally prevented from ever molesting young people at all or ever putting them into gaols and raping them and putting them into brothels, or sending them out to serve other people sexually against their wills.
That was just the opening of his second paragraph, in fact. There were more than 3,600 words of this. As S. D. Tucker’s Great British Eccentrics summarises one section, for example:
Earl Russell had some interesting plans for the nation’s schoolgirls, too. At the age of twelve, he said, every girl should be considered a woman, and given a free house by the State. Then, 75 per cent of the nation’s wealth would be donated to the fairer sex, while the remaining 25 per cent would be used to protect men from the police in their large communal huts, which the girls could then visit in order to choose their husbands — as many as they liked, the men would have no say in the matter. This, he said, would be the true realisation of ‘Women’s Lib’.
Not that there weren’t nuggets of wisdom.
Leisure is the point and working is wrong, being in any case the curse visited by God upon Adam, and not blessed
is just Philip Larkin’s “Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?” in a different form.
And a section on robots replacing us, and Universal Basic Income, could be seen as visionary — if it didn’t go… off course a bit at the end:
Drawing parallels between Soviet Russia and the United States’ enthusiasm for incarceration, it must be said, contains at least a grain of truth:
…but the idea that “Since the so-called Protestants who govern Britain, or claim to govern her, are spiritless papal bum-boys”, the British should withdraw from Northern Ireland… stands up to scrutiny less well, let’s say.
Not that he’d finished yet. Man must be allowed to return to his prelapsarian state, for example:
Actually, he pretty much had finished by then, because his colleague Lord Wells-Pestell stood to make an interruption.
I dislike doing this intensely, but the noble Earl has been speaking for 10 minutes.
Thankfully, though he didn’t get to finish, his words were preserved for posterity by ‘alternative’ publishers the Open Head Press — financed, according to the Earl’s Telegraph obituary, by his mother Dora
You can still find it online, and occasionally pick up a first edition at auction if you’re prepared to shell out something in the region of £140 for it.
It was not Russell’s last speech. In 1985, he contributed to a debate on foreign policy and defence to say “I do not think most people believe that either the CIA or the police exist”, and in 1986, on public order: “we should free prisoners and learn to have fun”.
He spent much of his life living with his mother “in a dilapidated cottage near Land’s End”, getting only £300 a year from his father’s estate, which perhaps explains the… unusual fashion choices detailed in the Telegraph obit:
