Dead Right

In the good old days before the decline of Judaeo-Christian values, the British armed forces employed chaplains to ensure that soldiers didn't engage in illicit sexual goings-on by way of compensation for loving their enemies to death. A similar moral Britishness is on display from a group of parliamentary expenses claimants, who have nothing more important to do than recommend that the dehumanisation of living persons below a certain income bracket should be balanced by granting human rights to dead flesh. The group proposes the outlawing of the sale of human remains on the grounds that, unlike human resources, "they are not commercial objects," and proposes that bits and pieces of human tissue should be equated with human beings. Since the group is reporting in the wake of African protests at the looting of ancestral remains, and since give back what was stolen is clearly too unwieldy a concept, it's possible that the document is intended as a satirical reducto ad absurdum or a slippery-slope argument: once we start repatriating colonial plunder, how soon will it be before we have to beg the current representatives of the dynasties of ancient Egypt for permission to display the mummified persons of their predecessors?