Political column – August 7

The jury has been deliberating. And the verdict is... You're soft. Soft in the 'ead.

Given the current fashion for looking into the past and judging events in that foreign country by modern standards, I wonder what the converse judgment would be, if people from yesteryear could sit in judgment on our supposedly better modern world.

The idea that we are today inherently better human beings than they were 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago is the height of arrogance and confuses advances in science and all the rest of it with some sort of magical improvement in humanity within a timescale which in evolutionary terms is the mere blink of an eye.

We recoil when we read of those medieval days when people were executed and their bodies swung on gibbets as a warning to others. Yet nothing has really changed. When American special forces killed the sons of Saddam Hussein and a 14-year-old boy – nobody ever mentions him for some reason – they published pictures of the bodies to demonstrate to the Iraqis that they were indeed dead.

And the body of Colonel Gaddafi was put on display for so long that it rotted.

My feeling is that if somebody from 1921 landed in 21st century Britain they would think we had all collectively gone mad, and were hypocrites into the bargain. They would be amazed and disappointed by our lack of progress.

In the 1960s there used to be a comic called TV21 about adventures in the 21st century. I have to admit that these were adventures involving Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds, and Stingray, but my point is that people were predicting a sci-fi world for our present times, with people flying to work, living on moon bases, and so on, and yet none of that has happened.

It's like that episode of Star Trek when Captain Kirk and co landed on a planet and were shocked by the human inhabitants' lack of progress, which in that case was basically because everybody was stoned.

I'm one of those who is wary of sitting like a modern jury on people and events from the past. The principle of jury trial is that you are tried by your peers. We are not their peers, so what right do we have to judge when we do not share the collective experience and understandings of those days?

Some day in the future we shall ourselves be all judged. Maybe in 50 years' time there will be a show trial of the ageing former bosses of social media and tech companies, accused of enslaving a generation of children and causing them untold misery by facilitating online bullying and abuse.

I might be all for that but won't say so in case my internet gets cut off.

Those folk in 2071 may all have become vegans who are horrified when they read of the industrialised killing of animals in the earlier years of the 21st century. A very brutal and unenlightened time, the history books (if books still exist) of the future may say.

Boris is in hot water for portraying the 1980s closure of Britain's pits as some sort of pioneering far-sighted action by Margaret Thatcher to combat global warming.

It is still not too late to put the bosses of the National Coal Board on trial, posthumously mostly, both for championing a fossil fuel which we are now all taught is bad for the environment, and also for forcing hundreds of thousands of men to work underground in dirty and dangerous conditions.

.............

Those who have been caught up in the great holidays kerfuffle have my sympathies.

Personally, I let my passport run out a little while ago, but there you go, each to his or her own.

My late father in his young days travelled across the globe, occasionally killing people along the way – it was the war years – but he always used to say that nowhere else in the world could beat the scenery in this country.

So our childhood holidays were never abroad, and almost always to Wales, in various manifestations of what we would today see as discomfort, but when you're a kid you think nothing of having a hole dug in the ground with big beetles in the bottom of it for a toilet.

His dream death would have been while sitting on a foldable chair on the Welsh coast and looking out to sea.

Yep, you just can't beat Wales.

........

I'm no ageist but... is it right that small children are taking part in the Olympic Games?

It is a fact universally acknowledged that in certain sporting activities stature is all important, whether it is being tall in a game of basketball, or small in things like gymnastics. So admitting the not-fully-grown gives them an unfair advantage in some sports.

Then there's the mental health aspect, the pressure and the weight of failure on the world stage in front of so many television viewers at such a young age. For a 12-year-old competitor the four-year build up would have meant starting to prepare for the next Olympics at just eight.

So if this is to be the trend, how about having a separate Junior Olympics? At the lower end it could involve an Olympian beautiful baby competition.