The Sorry State We Live In

Published: 18 May 2020

Saying sorry all the time, whatever the situation and mostly when it is not necessary is an occupational hazard of being British ~ legacy British that is. It is like a virus (sorry!). We fail to open a door for someone: ‘Sorry!’; We pass by someone in a confined space: ‘Sorry!’; Someone says “excuse me”: ‘Sorry!’. We are forever saying sorry, even when we have nothing to be sorry for, except for feeling sorry for repeatedly saying ‘sorry’.

On a one-to-one basis this repetitive impediment warrants no further investigation than to apologise for it, but the words ‘warrant’ and ‘investigation’, two words which are almost always sorry-affiliated, invoke the question of what happens when saying ‘sorry’ becomes a matter of corporate policy, so rigorously underpinned and robustly enforced in an organisations Code of Practice that the organisation can no longer function efficiently?

The endemicity of this peculiarly British disease is so virulent, particularly as it relates to certain sections of the British establishment, that political commentators have dubbed it Institutional Sorryism.

Take the British Police Force, for example, which is accused of almost every institutionalism going. No matter what it does and how it does it, British plod, both at institutional and on a personal level, is constantly forced to apologise (is that what the ‘Force’ in ‘British Police Force’ means?)

The most recent case of sorryitis concerns the misapplication of police powers under the new Coronavirus Act, the emergency laws introduced to enforce restrictions to limit movement. Apparently, enshrined in these laws is the lawful whisking off of people whom the police suspect are infected with Covid-19, the art, science and inherent flaws of which have led to at least one legal beagle  condemning such acts as ‘shocking’ and denouncing our boys in blue for ‘over-zealous policing’. Now, if you are one of many hapless Britons who have suffered to have been mugged, have your car broken into and/or been burgled, you may be wondering what exactly ‘over-zealous policing’ is, but that is because apprehension like ‘shocking’ is reserved almost exclusively these days for human rights infringements, and yes, indeed, you’ve got it, the shocking in this instance is human rights related and the person being shocked a human rights lawyer.

Sorry for the over-zealous policing

Such ‘over-zealous policing’, the likes of which has not been seen since the days when stop and search was so effective, way back when before London acquired the dubious distinction of being the stab-fest capital of the world, has led to dozens of wrong convictions being quashed for which the police have duly apologised.

I’m sorry (saying sorry is so infectious! ~ er, sorry for using the word infectious), but what is not clear from these newspaper reports is where the wrongfully arrested were arrested? I am assuming that the police did not bust into people’s private bedrooms Sweeney style, guns drawn and polyester flared trousers sparking, shouting, “I am arresting you under the Emergency Covid-19 Act on suspicion of the illegal possession and distribution of coronavirus in contravention of the fact that even the world’s top scientists cannot agree on the symptoms”.

Even allowing for the mitigating plea of asymptomatica, I think we can presume that the arrests occurred in public places and as the arrestees were most likely contravening the social distancing rules, ie there was more than two people present, surely it would have been better to arrest them for that. But then what do I know? Sorry (there I go again), I am making about as much sense as a human rights’ lawyer. Sorry.

But even arresting people who are that unvanilla in their social intercourse preferences that they simply cannot kick the habit of indulging in threesomes or moresomes is not as straightforward as logic postulates and is certainly no excuse for not saying sorry.

A sorry State of affairs

I am fairly sure that I read somewhere, but I apologise if I didn’t, that 187 people were recently charged under the regulations that restrict movement and which prescribe that two’s company but three’s an illegal crowd. It turned out, however, that 12 of them were wrongly charged! Does this mean that the arresting officers did not have their specs on or that they thought they were arresting a group but it was, in fact, one man with a fat lady?

Whatever the excuse, it’s not good enough! We may be in the midst of a pandemic, the worst the world has encountered for over a century, but we will continue to gather socially in spite of laws made for our own protection, and should we be arrested we will accuse the police of all sorts of things (especially human right’s violations) and then demand an apology!

All this may be very satisfying for those who run around bleating ‘our police, police by consent’ but rather irksome for the police themselves as it so obviously undermines their authority and the ability to do their job (I don’t mean arresting people wrongly, but apologising abjectly), and we could hazard a not uncharitable guess that there are a lot of numpty heads out there who see this as a weakness just ripe for exploitation. The best example of this, and the silliest, was at a so-called lockdown celebration (sorry, I meant demonstration) when on being advised of his arrest the gentleman concerned, apart from shouting [police] ‘violence’, where there was not any, declared  ‘I do not consent to my arrest’.

“He’aint dun nuthin’”, some female orator shouts.

“Well he should have done!” ~ where’s John Wayne when you need him?

At least someone could have issued an apology to someone!

Didn’t anybody have a template Sorry note among them?

A sorry police force

Compulsive Sorry Disorder is another virus, older than corona, that is running rampant in the UK. Its source is a litigious society in copulation with Over Accountability Syndrome, and no institution is ravished more by this perversion than our good old British Police Force.

Institutionalised Sorryism is making our police sound like a boy scout leader who has been caught doing something that he should not be doing in today’s society, such as being heterosexual, or a doctor to whom you have presented with an earache and he’s immediately asked you to drop your trousers.

We really do need to nip this apologising malarkey in the bud or, failing that, rename the Police Force the Polite Force.

I don’t pretend to know what it was Elton was doing, or what he was thinking of, when he wrote that song, Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Whatever it was he should have asked a policeman.

I apologise if I’ve offended anybody.

Sorry.

Coronavirus & Rights: an Unholy Alliance

Copyright © 2018-2020 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.