Update: see bottom of piece for an eloquent explanation of why mostly we wouldn’t feel sympathy ourselves for Moat (HT: Slater)
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So David Cameron says “there should be no sympathy” for Raoul Moat as thousands of people join a Facebook group dedicated to the recently-deceased killer.
“It is absolutely clear that Raoul Moat was a callous murderer, full stop, end of story. I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be sympathy for his victims and the havoc he wreaked in that community. There should be no sympathy for him.”
Well excuse me, but people are free to have their own feelings about things, actually – and no-one, not even the Prime Minister – has a duty or a right to tell people how they ‘should’ be feeling. Sometimes people have feelings that are abhorrent to lots of other people. And for sure, people connected with someone like Moat are certain to have sympathy with him.
He had family and friends and a whole hinterland of people who, for whatever reason, recognise something of his story in themselves. Life’s like that you know – a series of messy, often contradictory emotional responses to things. Mothers who still love their sons even when they’re sent away for murder. Friends who stay loyal to someone despite a heinous crime.
We don’t know Moat or how he arrived where he did. But he wasn’t a friendless loner.
By interjecting so clumsily into this area, Cameron exposes himself in a way that I was hoping he wouldn’t – another politician who sees every news story and public event as something into which he has somehow has a moral right to intervene. It was also naive of him to think that he held any sway with Facebook, who are a private business with an agenda of their own.
As an ex-PR man, Cameron should have been able to guess which way Zuckerberg would play this.
As it is, Facebook have squashed his appeal pretty comprehensively, saying:
Raoul Moat has dominated public debate over the last week and it is clear that there are lots of different and opposing opinions, both about Moat himself and about the investigation which surrounds him. These debates are being held in newspapers, online across the Internet, between people in the pub, on the phone and at work.
Facebook is a place where people can express their views and discuss things in an open way as they can and do in many other places, and as such we sometimes find people discussing topics others may find distasteful, however that is not a reason in itself to stop a debate from happening. We have 26 million people on Facebook in the UK, each of which has their own opinion, and they are entitled to express their views on Facebook as long as their comments do not violate our terms. We believe that enabling people to have these different opinions and debate about a topic can help bring together lots of different views for a healthy discussion.
Further, and in contrast to the pub or the phone, Facebook offers tools for people to report material easily, so that we can quickly review and remove from the service anything that is against our terms.
Facebook (rightly) come in for stick for their attitude to the web-as-business and people’s privacy, but in standing firm against a simplistic piece of moralistic posturing they are doing us all a favour.
Update
I would like to make it clear that I don’t have any sympathy with Moat myself – Inspector Gadget put it best:
“We know that during their nine-year relationship, Raoul Moat throttled Marissa Reid until she passed out, smashed a baseball bat into her spine, whipped her with a belt before raping her while she was tied to a bed, kneed her in the face and punched her repeatedly.
Politicians, journalists and ordinary people seem bewildered and shocked by the huge support shown to him by the north-eastern criminal underclass. The flowers at his council house and at the death scene, the cards “mate, you are a legend” and the thousands of ‘friends’ on his Facebook tribute page. The support he received while on the run. I’m not.”
The problem is, ultimately, that a persistent criminal underclass continues to be left undealt with. It is dealing with this most recalcitrant and damaging part of society that should be the focus of the political establishment – not criticising their use of Facebook. That’s just simplistically playing to the peanut gallery and does not address the real problems that people like Moat pose.
Here here Carps, I’m in total agreement. The only final thing I’d like to say on the matter is…
ball spoons, utter ball spoons.
I think some of the news that’s come out since Raoul’s death casts him in a different light than the cold hard killer the news portrayed him as whilst the man hunt was still ongoing.
What the media and politicians can’t appear to understand is that people can have both sympathy for the killer and the victims, especially in this case as it is becoming apparent that Raoul was a victim of his own circumstances.
No one will ever be able to justify his actions but stuff like the Facebook group allow people to debate this stuff without the spin of politicians and the media. It’s an odd concept but Facebook has luckily remembered we still have the right to free speech.