Some KFCs are quite opulent on the inside.

I’m hoping to acquire one of those official looking G4S-style jackets that parking inspectors wear, along with a peaked cap and mirror shades. The reason is, I live next to a school, and every morning the parking situation gets worse. The invention of the SUV has blurred the harsh boundaries of road, pavements and yellow lines and turned them into a mere probability distribution. There’s an Audi Q7 that behaves like a two tonne hippo, just setting itself down wherever it pleases. If I just stood outside, in my Parking jacket, maybe the madness would stop. Until I got arrested, anyway.

Parking properly is one of those skills, like cooking Yorkshire Pudding or wiring a plug, that 57% of people can’t do. Recently two surveys showed that modern school-leavers are no more literate than their grandparents were at the same age, and that they would lose a 100 metres race to their grandad. And that’s as he is now, aged 95, with advanced emphysema.

Surprisingly then, Britain, the country at the bottom of the skills league table, where only recent immigrants actually know how to do anything, introduced the Mental Capacity Act.

Luckily, like the parking outside the school, it is not enforced.

So called ‘mental capacity’ means that a person is able to make a decision. It depends to a large extent on how complicated the decision is as to whether the capacity is present or not. For instance a person could have mental capacity to choose breakfast, but not have capacity to make a will. In between these, somewhere, is capacity to have sex or get married, or both. If a person does not have capacity, they should first of all be suffering from a deficit of ‘mind or brain’. Then they must fail one or more of the following steps of decision making: Understanding the information, Retaining the information, Weighing the information up, and Communicating the decision.

Immediately obvious is the amount of greyness in the ‘weighing up’ part.

While the Mental Capacity Act makes it clear that making an unwise decision need not mean that the weighing up process is defective, it certainly leaves scope for an argument over the point where an unwise decision becomes irrational, and the point where irrational means lacking capacity.

Perhaps the intention of the mental capacity act was to give the illusion of clarity, while still leaving a huge judgement call to doctors or other professionals. The irony is that no professional person really understands the mental capacity act and certainly doesn’t retain it in his mind or communicate it well. The mental capacity act code of practice was written on the planet Zarg, in Zarg language, which is similar to Welsh.

So, only case law will reveal the dividing lines between unwise and irrational.  A series of judgements will set the goalposts for issues like leaving all your money to the scientologists, marrying your attractive but 70 years younger carer, buying a Porsche 911 to celebrate your 100th birthday etc.

For instance, last year, a judge ruled that an autistic woman with an IQ of 64 did not have mental capacity to have sex,

‘on the grounds she does not fully understand she could say no to such actions’.

Mr Justice Hedley said the 29-year-old lacked the mental capacity to consent to having sex, and made the order to protect her best interests.

He said she had to be protected from ‘potentially exploitative and damaging’ relations in the future, as she had already been involved in risky behaviour with people.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096472/Judge-bans-vulnerable-woman-having-sex-lacks-mental-capacity-consent.html#ixzz28nA227ia

Would scientists or doctors have come to the same decision as the judge? I suspect that scientists would tolerate fuzziness better than lawyers, simply accepting that the person had some mental capacity but not as much as most other people. But the legal system is black and white, not grey.

Whether a person can choose to have sex or not soon becomes a question about how the mind and body work together. And this in turn leads to an examination of how the Automatic part of the Mind interacts with the Reflective Part. It would be nice to think that sexual behaviour falls to the Reflective Mind, but its association with the older parts of the brain and the older types of intoxicant means that it probably doesn’t. Whatever the IQ.

So rather than being a Parking Officer, perhaps I could be a Mental Capacity Inspector. Outside the school, armed with my new jacket, the Mental Capacity Act Code and the Oxford Dictionary of Zarg, it’s time to Stand up for Sensible.

Firstly, do these errantly parking motorists suffer from a disorder of mind or brain? Most of them look absent minded and some are clearly in a trance like state. Some seem distressed, shouting at their children. At least two are using nicotine. One appears to be wearing a dressing gown and slippers. In fact, none of them seems entirely well.

Then, have they really decided where they want to park? Do they know what yellow lines mean? Can they weigh up the ethical trade off between blocking the traffic and parking on the pavement? Would they know that squashing cyclists can hurt them?

Enforcing Parking Capacity is just the start. Irrational behaviour is going on all over town, much of it in the context of mind / brain dysfunction, such as Special Brew Disorder.

Firstly, the National Lottery till at the newsagent. Anyone who doesn’t understand Probability – a GCSE in Pure Maths with Statistics will suffice – should be politely turned away in their own best interests.

Then Ladbrokes. Look at these other customers – do they look like rich people?

The tattoo shop – this sounds silly, but do you know that won’t wash off? And KFC. It’s chicken Jim, but not as we know it.

The mental capacity act can only do so much, since it respects unwise decisions, or any decision made by someone of sound mind. That’s why we still need the Style Police and the Fashion Police. It’s vital these functions don’t go to G4S, even if they have the jackets already.