The Price is Right?

Let's consider a couple of hypothetical scenarios - in the first, you've been voluntarily taking part in a drug trial which went horribly wrong, leaving several participants seriously ill, although, luckily, you turned out to have been given the control placebo and emerge unscathed. Do you now:

a) keep a public silence over the matter, co-operate with any investigation and hope everyone else survives;

b) give single public statement to the press giving the facts of your particular case and stating you hope the others recover completely, or;

c) sign an exclusive deal for your story with a national newspaper for an undisclosed, but undoubtedly large, sum of money (despite the fact that you'd already received several thousand for doing the drug trial in the first place and will probably get further compensation from the pharmaceutical company involved)?

Hypothetical situation number two: you find some classified military documents in a pub. Do you:

a) hand them over to the Ministry of Defence;

b) hand them over to the police, or;

c) send them to a national newspaper which pays you an undisclosed, but undoubtedly significant, amount for your story?

If you answered anything but c) to either of those scenarios then you are clearly have a dysfunctional personality and should immediately seek psychiatric treatment. You certainly shouldn't be at large in modern Britain, where the very idea that one's actions should be guided by anything other than personal gain (such as morality, civic mindedness or simpy a desire to do the 'right' thing, for example) is clearly ludicrous. Such anti-social behaviour can have no place in today's society!

It seems that everything, particularly personal tragedy, now has a price. Nothing can be done for altuistic reasons - look at the way the press treated norman Kember, the former Iraqi hostage: the idea that he might genuinely have believed in the concept of promoting peace in Iraq was treated with incredulity. Contrast this with the case of another British hostage who was, sadly, executed by his captors, who was working in Iraq as a contractor. The idea that someone might go to a war zone to make a quick buck was considered entirely understandable. Principles = crazy, profit = rational, as far as Britain's concerned, apparently!

You find this grasping attitude seeping into every aspect of modern life in this country. Take what's left of the civil service: the very concept of working there because you actually believe in elivering a service to the public is considered antediluvian. There's a new breed of managers (or, as I like to call them, cunts), who, in attempting to ape their private sector cousins, see the civil service merely as ameans to their personal advancement, pissing on the ethos of public service in the process. Meaningless targets replace the idea of service, because they are easier to quantify and therefore achieve. Achieving targets in turn means that managers can claim their fat bonuses and brownie points for promotion. In the process, the actual core business of the department and the idea that it has a responsibilty to the wider community rather than jst narrowly-defined stakeholders, goes out of the window completely.

But it is the way that personal tragedies now seem to have a monetray value which really bothers me. Hardly a day goes by when some newspare or other has a front page story in which a victim, or the family of a victim, or a friend of the victim or maybe even a victim's bloody dog, is telling us how horrendous their ordeal has been. You know something? I don't want to know! I'm sure that whatever has befallen them or their loved ones ios terrible. I'm sure that in the same situation I'd be devastated. However, the whole point of a personal tragedy is just that - it is personal, not something to be screamed cross the front pages of tabloids. At best it is undignified, at worst it is distasteful. Worst of all, from then on, every time I hear that particular tragedy referred to, or see the victim or relatives on TV, there's a part of me thinking 'how much are you charging for this appearance? What's it worth to you?

There's no doubt that the concept of a division between private and public life is fast being eroded. The desire for money is undoubtedly driving it. Not only is it now considered OKmto flaunt private tragedy across the media, it seems to be acceptable to be paid for it. But should we really expect anything different in a country where, over the past tweny five years we've seen public assets sold off to the highest bidders, hounours given to political donors and most recently (and shamefully) the education system effectively sold into the hands of entrepreneurs and religious freaks through Blair's lunatic 'City Acadamies' scheme? Everything's for sale folks! The car industry, the stock exchange, medical care, even our emotional traumas! What am I bid for my terrible tale of the half hour I once spent on an underground train between stations, trtapped in a carriage with an obese woman and a man with rampant BO? It was a personal tragedy that left me traumatised...