The Ministry Of Truth

Cock it.

I agree with Marcel Berlins.

I cannot remember the last time there has been such hysteria over something so relatively minor as the Damian Green affair. Rarely can so many normally reasonable people have lost so many of their marbles.

Marcel clearly must have missed Manuelgate…

The political and media reaction has been stunningly excessive and mostly misguided. The band of columnists and so-called expert commentators fearing the demise of parliamentary democracy - as absurd a slippery slope argument as I’ve heard - or worrying about the decline in our civil liberties, have taken the concept of disproportion to a new level. If I were to look for evidence of our traditional liberties being diminished, it is there in abundance in the laws passed by parliament over the past few years.

Let us look at the reality of what has happened. We don’t know all the facts; indeed, we can be sure of very few. But even accepting a worst-case-scenario speculation, there has been a quite extraordinary over-reaction. I’m not saying everyone involved has behaved perfectly. Mistakes appear to have been made all round. But they do not justify the response that has occurred…

After a flurry of inquiries and furrowed brows, whatever wrongs were committed this time won’t happen again. The Speaker won’t be as accommodating in letting the police into parliament, the police will learn to be more subtle when investigating certain kinds of crime, and the home secretary may learn not to look quite so shifty and terrified each time she appears on television. The unnecessary panic and the suicidally gloomy prognostications will be laid to rest.

What I fear, though, is that this relatively unserious incident will be used to rearrange the relationship between police, politicians and government. This would be damaging.

I’m going to have to kill myself.

On Saturday I was dispirited to read on the front page of Times Online a small article by David Leppard headlined ‘Sneak’ plan for mandatory ID cards.

Being the saddo I am I wanted to look at the bill to which the article referred, so I just did a search for the article using the Times Online website’s own search facility.

No sign of it under searches for ‘ID cards’, ‘identity cards’ or ‘David Leppard’.

Yet it’s still there (via Google News) or if you know the direct URL, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5162669.ece

How curious.

Surely The Thunderer isn’t censoring itself, having inadvertently drawn attention to a matter on which the Tories remain curiously silent when not openly schizophrenic…?

Anyway, one more time in full for those with a tendency towards depression:

‘Sneak’ plan for mandatory ID cards
David Leppard

Ministers have been accused of trying to introduce compulsory identity cards through the back door, despite promises that people will not have to carry them.

Lawyers at Liberty, the civil liberties group, say that little noticed clauses in the draft immigration and citizenship bill introduce new powers to make people produce identity documents or face arrest. The bill is expected to be in the Queen’s speech next month.

At issue is a clause in the bill which says that anyone who is to be examined by an immigration officer “must produce a valid identity document if required to do so”. Failure to produce an identity card or otherwise prove identity will become a criminal offence. At present, producing a passport counts as proof of identity.

It had been thought the clauses applied only to people entering the UK at ports.

But Liberty says a separate clause in the bill extends powers of examination to new categories of people. They include anyone in the UK — whether a British citizen or not — who has ever left the country.

Isabella Sankey, Liberty’s policy officer, said: “Immigration law is being used as a cloak to introduce measures that would effectively compel us all to carry ID cards. Under these paranoid proposals if you have ever set foot outside the UK you could be required, at any time, to prove your identity and nationality.”

The Home Office disputed Liberty’s reading of the bill. A spokesman said: “The bill does not contain legislation that will require UK citizens to be issued with compulsory ID cards. It clearly states that valid identity documents must be produced on request to maintain effective immigration control.”

Launch of the ID cards scheme begins next week when marriage visa holders and non-European Union students will be the first recipients.

Airside workers at some airports will then be issued with cards — a move opposed by pilots’ unions and related groups.

The cards were proposed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America. Opponents say they are expensive, unnecessary and infringe on human rights.

Cards will carry a picture and security chip containing biometric data.

The normally fairly sensible Dominic Fifield makes one of the most risible ever comments in today’s Guardian football pages:

Abramovich… has been patient in the past, most notably in allowing Claudio Ranieri a season to prove his credentials, but he will be far from happy if this campaign ends trophy-less.

Patience is not sacking a manager four weeks into a season after he’s won you four trophies in three years, including back-to-back league titles.

Patience is not spending over half a billion pounds and employing three managers in four years.  (And he didn’t give Ranieri a season to prove his credentials - he gave him three months, after which he was a dead man walking.)

Patience is doing what Matt Busby, Jock Stein and Bill Shankly did at Manchester United, Celtic and Liverpool - creating scouting networks, developing homegrown young talent and building dynasties that dominated for decades.

Does anybody genuinely believe that Chelsea will survive as one of the “top four” for more than a couple of years after Roman and his wallet do one?

Meanwhile, and on a wholly unrelated topic (but prompted by yesterday’s earthquake that almost caused me to soil the bed) did you know that the theory of plate tectonics is barely older than The Minister, gaining widespread acceptance in geological circles only in the late 1960s?

I don’t profess to understand it at all, but it is something that has “always been there” in my life and taken for granted: there are tectonic plates, the plates move, when they collide earthquakes happen and when they split volcanoes erupt.

If you don’t believe me it’s all on Wikipedia, so it must be true.

To everyone I know, the theory of plate tectonics is a given - it’s the orthodoxy.  To retired geologists, however, it’s probably heresy (or at least it was to them when it emerged).

The topic was discussed on an unusually-interesting recent edition of In Our Time on Radio 4 and it was (apparently) a very controversial theory in the 1960s and initially strongly resisted by the geological establishment: to this day there remains a small rump of geologists who do not subscribe.

I’m not entirely sure of the point I’m trying to make, but I wonder whether we someimtes set too much stall in science as a way of “proving” or “disproving” things that are not necessarily provable.  Little is black or white, after all, and our standards of proof are only based on what we know at any given point in time.

Some people, as Bearded Baby recently pointed out, do not subscribe to the theory of evolution.  I disagree with them because there is - now - a raft of evidence to back the theory up.  But that wasn’t always the case and theories are - and always should be - open to challenge.

That I consider creationists to be borderline certifiable is based only on the prevailing orthodoxy of our times.  Darwinism became the gold standard, but Darwin was initially pilloried for his views.  Who is to say that another Darwin won’t be able convincingly to disprove evolution theory in a few years’ time?

I’m no scientist but I’ll stick with science unless and until something else comes along that makes more sense.  But it can’t be entirely healthy to close one’s mind entirely to scientific development and theoretical discourse.  It’s only because of mavericks swimming against the tide that our species has evolved at all.

Perhaps if our political leaders realised that they wouldn’t be so keen for thoughtcrime to be a legislative reality…

Presenting the first item on the BBC Six o’Clock News this evening, George Alagiah began his introduction with the words, “The police are not normally known for their militancy.”

He’s clearly not been in many town/city centres at about 1am on a Saturday morning recently.

It was as grimly fitting as it is profoundly depressing that news of the BBC’s decision to scrap its Rough Justice series after 27 years should emerge on the same day that a man was convicted of the 1975 murder of 11-year-old Lesley Molseed in West Yorkshire, hopefully closing the book on perhaps the most heartbreaking miscarriage of justice these islands have known.  “Hopefully”, because Ronald Castree, the man sentenced to serve a minimum of 30 years in prison for the crime, claims he too has been wrongly convicted.

A day later, the Court of Appeal yesterday began hearing the appeal of another dubious conviction, that of Barri White for the murder in 2000 of Rachel Manning, highlighted by Rough Justice – one of 32 such cases featured by the programme since it was first broadcast in 1980, and which has seen 15 convictions overturned, a remarkable strike rate of 50%.

And today the Court of Appeal has ordered a retrial of Barry George, convicted on the most risible of evidence of the murder of Jill Dando in 1999.  This appeal – George’s second – was partly initiated because of a Rough Justice-style Channel 4 documentary putting pressure on the Criminal Cases Review Commission (established in 1997 at least partially because of the public pressure brought to bear on the criminal justice system by outlets such as Rough Justice) to re-open the case.

I took Criminal Law in the first year of my degree, when I was still vaguely interested in my studies (something that changed when I realised most lecturers were as clueless as me) and legal matters (something that quickly passes with any exposure to legal practice).

Having grown up being forced to watch the local news programmes for Yorkshire (despite not living in that bloody county and trying hard never to set foot in it), I was already aware of the Molseed murder, the conviction of Stefan Kiszko and the campaign protesting his innocence waged single-handedly by his mother Charlotte.  (The case was not featured by Rough Justice itself.)

Kiszko had what are today called “learning difficulties”.  He lived quietly with his mother, worked as a junior clerk in the local tax office and had never been in trouble with the police.

Under massive pressure to bring Molseed’s killer to justice, the West Yorkshire Constabulary – at the time also trying to deal with Peter Sutcliffe’s earliest attacks – seemed to fixate on Kiszko to the exclusion of all other lines of enquiry.

The police interviewed Kiszko without cautioning him, refused his request to see his mother and failed to advise him of his right to consult a solicitor.  After two days of intimidating solitary questioning, Kiszko signed a ‘confession’ that the police produced to him, telling him that if he signed he would be allowed to see his mother.

The police charged Kiszko on the basis of that ‘confession’, because of claims by some local girls that Kiszko had exposed himself to them, and because Kiszko had jotted down in a notebook the registration number of a car seen in the area around the time Lesley Molseed disappeared.

At trial, Kiszko’s defence team made a series of mistakes.  First, they failed to request an adjournment when the Crown produced thousands of pages of additional evidence on the morning of the murder trial.  They also ran a defence of diminished responsibility (that Kiszko did not authorise) caused by medicine Kiszko was receiving for a hormonal complain that was both factually incorrect and in respect of which they failed to produce any medical evidence.  Further, they failed to call medical evidence in respect of a ankle fracture shortly before Molseed disappeared that would have made it all but impossible for the grossly overweight Kiszko to scale the hillside to the spot where Lesley Molseed was killed.

Meanwhile, the prosecution team failed to disclose to Kiszko’s lawyers that the semen sample given by Kiszko contained no sperm (a result of his hormonal condition), while the semen stains recovered by forensic pathologist Ronald Outteridge from Molseed’s underwear contained normal sperm levels.  Tragically, the defence team would have had a cast-iron case had they correctly presented the defence of Kiszko’s hormonal problems, as Kiszko’s endocrinologist would have pointed out his patient was infertile.

The jury at Leeds Crown Court did not believe Kiszko’s claim that the police had bullied him and convicted him of murder by a 10-2 majority.  During sentencing, Mr Justice Park described Kiszko as a “monster” and praised the “brave and honesty” testimony of the girls who claimed to have been the victims of Kiszko’s indecent exposure.  There were widespread calls, including from Lesley Molseed’s family, for Kiszko to be executed.

Kiszko’s first appeal, in 1978, was rejected out of hand.  A convicted child killer, Kiszko was attacked repeatedly while in prison, where he developed schizophrenia.  His refusal to admit his guilt to the Molseed murder meant that he was ineligible for parole; this refusal was itself decided by prison doctors to be a consequence of his mental illness, further rendering Kiszko unfit for release.

Throughout the 1980s the increasingly frail Charlotte Kiszko campaigned ceaselessly for her son’s release.  On 26 October 1989, Charlotte Kiszko and her son’s new legal team presented a petition to the new Home Secretary, the pro-capital punishment Tory MP David Waddington – appointed that same day – for an investigation into his conviction.

It was not until March 1991, by which time Waddington had been replaced as Home Secretary and taken up a peerage, that the Home Office reopened the Kiszko case.  The enquiry discovered the prosecution’s suppression of Kiszko’s medical evidence, uncovered two witnesses who placed Kiszko miles from the scene of the crime at the time it was committed and established that the teenage girls has lied about the indecent exposure incident “for a laugh”.  In light of these findings, Home Secretary Kenneth Baker ordered an appeal, but Kiszko’s mental health deteriorated and he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in December 1991.

Stefan Kiszko’s conviction for the murder of Lesley Molseed was overturned on 18 February 2002, the second day of his appeal hearing.  In quashing Kiszko’s conviction, Lord Chief Justice Lane said:

“It has been shown that this man cannot produce sperm. This man cannot have been the person responsible for ejaculating over the girl’s knickers and skirt, and consequently cannot have been the murderer”.

The trial judge and the Molseed family publicly apologised for Kiszko’s wrongful conviction and their comments about him.  The three girls (now adults) who had admitted to making the false indecent exposure allegations against Kiszko, West Yorkshire Constabulary and Mr. Outteridge refused to follow suit.

Though technically a “free” man, Kiszko’s mental and emotional vulnerability was such that he was unable to leave hospital fully for a further nine months.  But the damage was in any event too great: a destroyed man, Kiszko suffered a heart attack and died on 23 December 1993, 18 years to the day after he signed the ‘confession’ that incarcerated him.  He was just 41 years old.  Charlotte Kiszko died four months later.

Upon his release, the Home Office had announced Kiszko would receive £500,000 in compensation for the 16 years he wrongly spent in prison.  He received an interim payment but neither Kiszko nor his mother received the full amount.

In 1994 the senior officer in charge of the Molseed murder investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Dick Holland (also a prominent detective in the Yorkshire Ripper investigation), and the now-retired Ronald Outteridge were charged with perverting the course of justice for their alleged suppression of evidence against Kiszko.  On 1 May 1995 the case against the two men was dismissed on the morbidly ironic grounds that the passage of time had made a fair trial impossible.   Holland died earlier this year; Outteridge gave evidence in the trial of Ronald Castree.

Stefan Kiszko’s defence barrister at his original trial was David Waddington QC, the same man who as Home Secretary sat on Kiszko’s appeal petition for 18 months.  He would go on to become Lord Privy Seal and the Governor of Bermuda.  He has never acknowledged any culpability in his conduct of Kiszko’s defence.

On the day after Kiszko’s conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal, the barrister originally prosecuting Kiszko, Peter Taylor QC, was appointed the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.  He died in 1997 and also never acknowledged any fault in the case.

The publicity Rough Justice brought to the cause of convictions as unsafe and unsatisfactory as that of Stefan Kiszko has been utterly invaluable, the service it has provided immense.  The BBC’s claims that it will still investigate such matters as part of its discredited, revamped and risibly sensationalist Panorama provide little comfort.

British justice remains unwell.  But British public service broadcasting is dying.

My intention was to get down on paper another vitriolic state of the nation tirade before I jetted off on a week’s holiday to the glamorous Suffolk coast but, in the best line John Lennon ever wrote, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

Before I leave, however, I feel I should point out that a fine of £175,000 for shooting somebody seven times in the head and once more in the shoulder, at point blank range, while he was being held down by someone else, in a public place, in a manner that contravened the nation’s laws, amounts to £21,875 a bullet.  (There’s a management consultant somewhere who’ll tell you that’s a reasonable commercial risk to assume…)

It is also a full £55,000 less than Metropolitan Police Commissioner “Sir” Ian Blair earns in a year.

With each day that passes before somebody finally prises “Sir” Ian’s fingers open to prevent him from clinging to his office any longer, he earns more than £630.

Most electricians, I suspect, earn less than £630 a week.

Assuming they’re still alive to ply their trade, that is.

If you need any more proof that this country has become a morally bankrupt Chancer’s Paradise where nobody is accountable for ANYTHING, it is that “Sir” Ian Blair remains in employment today.

And with that I’m off, meaning that the Ministry is likely to be quiet for the next week or so - though I welcome all contributions, SMIPs and general abuse in my absence - and look forward to catching up with you all soon.

In between a lot of sleeping, eating, drinking and watching DVDs, I’m hoping to fit in a bit of writing while I’m away (including a few SMIPs for future publication) so I may come back with all guns blazing in the run up to the Ministry’s first anniversary on 28 November.  (You never know, I might even get round to putting a new lick of paint on the place to mark a year’s existence.)

A toute a l’heure.

Gordon Brown, you arrogant, incompetent cunt.

Right, now I’ve got that out of my system, can I raise for debate whether Gordon Brown has a fucking clue about what he’s doing or not.

I’d like to say it was a recent dip in form, but his lack of political/management ability has been apparent from the very off.

Firstly, on the very day he was confirmed as leader of the Labour Party he announces that the winner of the Deputy Leader would also be Chair of the party.  This is not merely a slight resuffle, it is a funamental change to the organisation of the party.  Did he not think it might be nice to inform the members who were voting that that was his intention, or had he assumed that the party was his game now so he could make the rules up.

He then announced that the decision of the House of Commons which he disagreed with regarding the Supercasino would be set aside.  Whilst something had to be done about this decison, this anti-spinning PM had the gall to say that “all options would be looked at” whilst senior sources were saying it was “dead in the water”.  Well which is it?  And if you are going to not spin things, can you not try and do it a bit better, because that looks for all the world that you were spinning a decision you’d already taken.

 Then the farce of a Foreign Officer minister saying that the UK and the US would no longer be “joined at the hip” (playing to anti-war people and Europhiles), but then GB saying that the US is “our closest bilateral partner” (cue cheers from Atlanticists and war supporters).

 Then the own goal of the election that never was.  It is hard to believe that Tony Blair would have managed to turn a record lead for Labour in the polls in to a record lead for the Tories in just two short weeks.  But that was because, despite all his faults, Tony Blair (and his advisors) were much more skilfull politicians.

Now, with the Metropolitan Police found guilty of organisational failings that led to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, neither he, nor the Home Secretary, nor indeed any Home Office Minister is made available to comment on the verdict.  Given that they will have worked out strategies for the verdict going either way, it is shameful that the best they can do is do nothing.  I can’t imagine he would have buried his head in the sand had the police been acquitted.

 This issue is not a matter that he, or his government, can ignore.  It has affected Britain at an international level and has done a lot of damage to the reputation of the police in this country.  Gordon Brown should really be ashamed of himself.

I have heard two comments that sum up Brown well.  One from Michael Portillo on This Week, who said that Blair’s government, for all the accusations of being Presidential was not a one man show.  There was always Gordon Brown to offer opposition, plus other heavyweights such as Mo Mowlam, Robin Cook, David Blunkett, and Charles Clark.  Most of them finished their career in various states of ignominy, but they were never scared of the argument.  Sadly, Portillo correctly observed, this is now a one man show.

 A more pithy summary came from a friend.  Gordon Brown is a Chief Exec.  He’s not a Chairman of the Board.

I was told this morning by breathless news readers that we would have it confirmed that civilization was about to collapse, and it was all down to all that nasty gambling that’s been going on.

Well I happened to be lucky enough to see the 9.30 news conference where the Gambling Commission announced that most people are normal, and have a normal ability to resist spunking their hard-earned away.  That said, he also said some people do not fit in to that bracket, and we should be conscious of the temptations in their way.

This certainly fitted in to my own recent experience when I went in to a casino for the first time.  All dreams of suavely breaking the house whilst ordering Martinis went out the window with the words, “fuck that for a game of marbles” when I saw that it was a fiver a hand.  If I was going to waste that kind of money on idle recreation, I’d go down the lapdancing clubs where, quite interestingly, it is also “a fiver a hand.”

I loved this press conference because you could almost hear the journalists’ disappointment as they realised that they were going to have to think up a whole new demon all on their own.   He started by saying the first “big message” was that overall gambling had gone down (this was measured by counting the number of people who had gambled in any form in the last year).  If you remove the National Lottery, gambling had gone up slightly from 46% to 48% of the population.  But what was brilliant was his point that problem gambling had moved from 0.8% to 0.9% of all gamblers. So his second “big message” (he was big on big messages) was that there had been no statistically significant change in problem gambling in the UK in the last seven years.

Better still he went on to say that 99.9% of the population had a perfectly healthy relationship with gambling, and there was no reason to worry about them.

As if to ram the point home he then went on to say that Britain isn’t too bad, with only two countries having lower rates of problem gambling, six approximately similar and five that were worse.

What amuses me (but also really annoys me) is that if the results had gone any other way it would be all over the news.  I’ve had News 24 on in the background for an hour now, and it doesn’t even feature.  I even had to nose around on the BBC website a bit to find the story.

This isn’t a rant about “why is there never any good news on the tellybox?”  After all, a fairly dry statistical analysis about gambling habits is never going to be a jolly read whatever it says.  But why hasn’t it been reported that actually gambling isn’t the demon it’s been painted to be.  Nor was the minimum wage, or trade union recognition, the Human Rights Act or extended drinking hours.  And I don’t recall one million refugees turning up on the day and date predicted by the Daily Mail a couple of years ago.  Thousands of column inches have been wasted on how each one of these would cause the sky to fall in, yet when that doesn’t happen, no-one gets to challenge the media about it.

Perhaps this is where blogs come in.  Perhaps I’m beginning to see the democratizing effect of them, beyond just giving me an opportunity to sound off (and invariably use the word “cunt” at some time in my piece.  I will try to do one without the word sooner or later).

So a) what is it about this country that makes us so self-hating that we only enjoy it when we can beat ourselves up about how generally shit we are.  An English friend who has lived in the Netherlands, San Diego and Berlin in the last five years says it is a peculiarly British trait that now drives him bonkers.  This attitude seems to pervade any discussion from gambling to the weather, via drugs and public services.  Jules, being demi-Francais, what is your view?

and b) can we have our supercasino back, Mr Brown?  Or are you going to continue to be the duplicitous and opportunistic little cunt you have already demonstrated yourself to be about this and at least two other major issues I can think of.  After all, my little son of the Manse, it’s what the Commons voted for.

Would that he were clean enough to spit upon, the tottering pox-marked baggage that is the former home secretary “Dr” John Reid, a disease that must be cut away, appeared on Radio 5 Live this morning demanding the right to lock people up for even longer, riduculing the ECHR and accusing appellate judges such as Lord Hoffman as peddling “rubbish”.

“Dr” Reid, a weasel has not such a deal of spleen as you are toss’d with. Methink’st thou art a general offence and every man should beat thee. For you to be put in a cauldron of lead and usurer’s grease, amongst a whole million of cutpurses, and there boil like a gammon of bacon, that will never be enough. But for now, I beg, away you bottle-ale rascal, you filthy lung. Away!

[with thanks to William Shakespeare, because quite frankly, I just can't find the words...]

The open carriage at the rear of the Blaeneau Ffestiniog railway is a beautiful place, and perhaps not the most obvious place to come up with a new political idea.  But that is how it happened for me.

It all started in the fresh air.  The guard locked us behind the gates, and myself and Mrs Baby settled down to enjoy the ride.  Then someone in an unmistakeably savvern accent started up as he tucked his Daily Mail away.  “Well I agree.  Sort all the louts out.  National Service.  They should bring it back”.  At that point I suddenly wondered if my fellow travellers in our carriage were to be treated to an hour and twenty minute no-holds-barred cage fight, but then it struck me.  Perhaps he was right.

 After all, we can’t deny that there are many people who are the scourge of society, people who do perhaps need a change of environment to adjust their attitudes.  Louts who are criminals.

 So this is my idea: national service for racists.

 Well I don’t actually mean National Service in the Army.  It seems like they’ve got enough problems with racists as it is.  But what if someone who was convicted of a racially aggravated offence was given the option of working for charities in Darfur, Somalia, Pakistan, India etc as an alternative to prison.  It would be a lot cheaper (cost of a flight and some minimal living expenses), some good would be done, and who knows, they may come back with a different world view.  Maybe by seeing the situation at first hand, they might have greater empathy with people who have chosen to leave their home and come to the UK.

 Perhaps it could be spread to homophobic crime - convicts could perhaps work for gay charities in Muslim countries.  They could perhaps do work for AIDS charities in Africa, which might make them realise HIV/AIDS is not just a gay issue.

 So I throw the matter over to the floor.  What we need, if we are to change the politics of this country, is not refined ideas about supply-side economics, but to subvert right wing totems, converting them in to simple policies that even the Daily Mail (and  that git I was in the carriage with) would have difficulty opposing. 

“National service for racists” is my new policy.  What’s yours? (in four words or less).