Once again I am Baffled of Cheadle. Ed Balls gave a speech yesterday in which he pledged to re-introduce the 50p tax rate.
As someone whose freedom to write music (and the occasional blog) depends partly on the efforts of a top-rate tax payer, I have a personal interest in this. I can only report what happened the last time Labour put up the marginal rate. It was that a close relative of mine went to her accountant and took certain (legal) measures to reduce her taxable income. The Inland Revenue ended up getting less money than they would have done if Labour had left things alone.
I have a pretty clear idea what will happen if the marginal rate goes up again. It is that my relative will put a load of money into her pension, the consequence of which will be not only that the government will get less tax, but that it will immediately have to pay several thousand quid into the fund itself.
Of course an incoming Labour government will probably do away with tax deductible pension contributions for top-rate tax payers, and maybe that's a good thing. But it won't be able to do it overnight.
To be clear, I am all for the rich (by which is actually meant the highest earners, but I'll let that pass) paying their "fair" share of tax. For what it's worth, the top 1% of earners already pay a whopping 30% of all UK income tax. That apparently isn't fair enough. How much would be? The problem for Labour is that the best paid also have a pretty clear idea of where fairness lies, and people who have never taken much interest in their tax arrangements will suddenly find the topic much more alluring.
To be clear also, all studies show that putting up the top rate didn't bring in vast sums of money last time. Some - the IFS for example - have suggested that it might even have lost the Revenue money; that's certainly been my experience. Given that Balls and Miliband undoubtedly know this as well, why on earth are they doing it?
The answer would seem to be that they think bashing "the rich" will be popular. And they may well be right. But popular with whom? A raft of recent policy announcements now show Labour under Miliband drifting well to the Left of the Blairite centre. Those policies make Miliband popular in his own party, but they may well not be so with the people in the middle ground whose votes Labour needs to get into 10 Downing Street.
It pains me to keep harping on this particular theme, but Miliband increasingly looks foolish as well as cynical. It's not an appealing combination.
PS In Ball's speech the Shadow Chancellor tried to position Labour as a business-friendly party. I have to say this claim made me laugh out loud. Straight away came a letter to the Torygraph signed by 24 business leaders which stated that Labour's policy would "kill investment and cost jobs". And, they might have added, damage the tax revenues on which public services depend.
Monday 27 January 2014
Friday 24 January 2014
Lord Rennard and the smugness of now
It's always been a source of embarrassment and perplexity to me that some of my favourite childhood cultural items betoken a degree of racism and sexism on behalf of their protagonists and creators. John Buchan's Portuguese Jews, if not actually waiting to biff Richard Hannay over the head, were certainly lurking in the background pulling the levers of finance; then there was Guy Gibson's dog in The Dambusters, awkwardly named for a remake, you might think; and reading The N-word of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad on the bus down to Notting Hill required a certain amount of discretion, if not the actual brown paper cover. Girls knew their place (although they were certainly sometimes "spirited") and Johnny Foreigner was always untrustworthy, unless he happened to be a loyal servant, perhaps in Kipling or John Masters.
("Loved by all", reads an inscription to a dead officer in the chapel at Sandhurst; underneath continuing, apparently without irony, "Killed by his servant").
As I have written many times here, people did things differently then. Attitudes were different. People behaved differently. Some of this phenomenon is visible in the multiple trials of celebs which are giving the courts something to do in these relatively crime-free times. To be clear, Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and some of the other 70s behemoths did things which would be inexcusable in Britain at any time in the last five hundred years; but we are also guilty now of judging past behaviour by current standards.
One of the women giving evidence against Dave Lee Travis said that when he came up behind her as she was on air and put his hands over her breasts, she did not at the time think of it as a sexual assault. At the time. Again and again we hear the words "The BBC did nothing about it". Those two things are connected. One of the reasons for pusillanimous management at the Corporation might just have been that, like the complainant, they did not at the time think that the type of behaviour she alleges (and which Travis denies) constituted a sexual assault. The entire culture of the 60s and 70s was predicated on the free-sex-let-it-all-hang-out premise which in practice merely resulted in a lot of women getting their bottoms felt. But no-one would have described being goosed in a lift a sexual assault. Not then. It was merely bad manners, and someone who did it was a nuisance or a boor.
We imagine in our smugness that future generations won't look at our conduct and point the accusing finger. But the values which look permanent to us are about as stable as a chocolate fireguard. They will shift again, and we will look as stupid and outdated as colonials urging one another to "play the white man".
What has any of this got to do with the Chris Rennard affair? Maybe not much. The conduct Lord Rennard is accused of is quite recent and is, so far as I can work out, much less serious than the awful things Jimmy Savile - probably - did. So Lord Rennard is supposed to have given the impression that a little bit of slap and tickle would lead to party advancement? Who could possibly have thought that a man in a position of power would do that? And thank goodness that women have always resisted the temptation to flutter eyelashes or to don high heels at a job interview.
I feel sorry for Chris Rennard for two reasons. One is that a substantial part of the vitality in this news story comes from the fact that Rennard is physically unattractive. He looks fat, complacent and venal. If he had occupied the corpus of Colin Firth I wonder whether we'd be hearing as much about him.
The second reason is that he has been subject to just about the most incompetent public witch trial by the Lib Dems it is possible to imagine. That Alastair Webster QC should have concluded that Rennard was not guilty beyond reasonable doubt, but then added the rider that the allegations were "broadly credible" defies belief.
The Lib Dems deserve every iota of contempt that is coming their way at present.
As for Nick Clegg's bizarre assertion that a man found not guilty under his own party's internal procedures should nevertheless apologise, this proves Clegg's unfitness to run so much as a petrol station, let alone the office of Deputy Prime Minister. Incidentally my sources tell me that Rennard is not the only senior member of the Lib Dem hierarchy who has the reputation of being a serial groper and adulterer. There is a whiff of hypocrisy here as well as incompetence.
Rennard may or may not be a loathsome creep. I don't know, and neither probably do you. But in fifty years I'm pretty sure observers will look back at our sex-obsessed society, where hardcore porn is available to all at the touch of a button, and marvel that although we turn a blind eye to teenage boys surfing for lesbian action on the net, touching someone's bottom will get you sent straight to prison.
("Loved by all", reads an inscription to a dead officer in the chapel at Sandhurst; underneath continuing, apparently without irony, "Killed by his servant").
As I have written many times here, people did things differently then. Attitudes were different. People behaved differently. Some of this phenomenon is visible in the multiple trials of celebs which are giving the courts something to do in these relatively crime-free times. To be clear, Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and some of the other 70s behemoths did things which would be inexcusable in Britain at any time in the last five hundred years; but we are also guilty now of judging past behaviour by current standards.
One of the women giving evidence against Dave Lee Travis said that when he came up behind her as she was on air and put his hands over her breasts, she did not at the time think of it as a sexual assault. At the time. Again and again we hear the words "The BBC did nothing about it". Those two things are connected. One of the reasons for pusillanimous management at the Corporation might just have been that, like the complainant, they did not at the time think that the type of behaviour she alleges (and which Travis denies) constituted a sexual assault. The entire culture of the 60s and 70s was predicated on the free-sex-let-it-all-hang-out premise which in practice merely resulted in a lot of women getting their bottoms felt. But no-one would have described being goosed in a lift a sexual assault. Not then. It was merely bad manners, and someone who did it was a nuisance or a boor.
We imagine in our smugness that future generations won't look at our conduct and point the accusing finger. But the values which look permanent to us are about as stable as a chocolate fireguard. They will shift again, and we will look as stupid and outdated as colonials urging one another to "play the white man".
What has any of this got to do with the Chris Rennard affair? Maybe not much. The conduct Lord Rennard is accused of is quite recent and is, so far as I can work out, much less serious than the awful things Jimmy Savile - probably - did. So Lord Rennard is supposed to have given the impression that a little bit of slap and tickle would lead to party advancement? Who could possibly have thought that a man in a position of power would do that? And thank goodness that women have always resisted the temptation to flutter eyelashes or to don high heels at a job interview.
I feel sorry for Chris Rennard for two reasons. One is that a substantial part of the vitality in this news story comes from the fact that Rennard is physically unattractive. He looks fat, complacent and venal. If he had occupied the corpus of Colin Firth I wonder whether we'd be hearing as much about him.
The second reason is that he has been subject to just about the most incompetent public witch trial by the Lib Dems it is possible to imagine. That Alastair Webster QC should have concluded that Rennard was not guilty beyond reasonable doubt, but then added the rider that the allegations were "broadly credible" defies belief.
The Lib Dems deserve every iota of contempt that is coming their way at present.
As for Nick Clegg's bizarre assertion that a man found not guilty under his own party's internal procedures should nevertheless apologise, this proves Clegg's unfitness to run so much as a petrol station, let alone the office of Deputy Prime Minister. Incidentally my sources tell me that Rennard is not the only senior member of the Lib Dem hierarchy who has the reputation of being a serial groper and adulterer. There is a whiff of hypocrisy here as well as incompetence.
Rennard may or may not be a loathsome creep. I don't know, and neither probably do you. But in fifty years I'm pretty sure observers will look back at our sex-obsessed society, where hardcore porn is available to all at the touch of a button, and marvel that although we turn a blind eye to teenage boys surfing for lesbian action on the net, touching someone's bottom will get you sent straight to prison.
Wednesday 22 January 2014
Ed Miliband - man of principle? #2
A couple of years ago Labour were telling us that there'd be no recovery under Osborne's Plan A. Then when it turned out there'd been no double dip recession (let alone a triple dip) and that the economy was growing strongly, Miliband told us we were having the wrong sort of recovery. Now when it turns out that Britain's economy is one of the fastest growing in the industrialised world, he is telling us there's a cost of living crisis because wages are low and stagnating.
Miliband is right about wages, and he's been right for quite a few years, certainly since well before the 2010 general election. He didn't seem quite so concerned about it then.
It must be rather galling for the Tories to hear this latest attack on its handling of the economy. During the Blair / Brown years Britain accepted about 800,000 migrants from Eastern Europe. The Government's own figures show that over 50% of new jobs created went to people born outside the UK. In London the figure is over 80%. Leaving aside the cost to the UK of these hard-working young people in terms of health, education, housing and general infrastructure (not to mention the cost of keeping on benefits the British people - many with brown skins - they displace from the labour market), there is also a cost in terms of wage levels.
If you increase the pool of available labour, the cost for employers of acquiring staff rises less quickly than it otherwise would have done. That's why the CBI is in favour of immigration. Businessmen know that, as with any commodity, you increase the supply and the cost tends to go down.
In other words Labour's decision to allow the citizens of new EU nations to work here in 2004 is partly responsible for lower wages, and therefore for the cost of living crisis for which they are now blaming the Tories.
Miliband's solution to this problem his party helped create is to urge companies to pay their staff more. But as many economists have pointed out, the only consequence of this would be fewer people in work. Companies become less competitive, they push their prices up, they sell fewer products and have to lay off staff. Thus the people who keep their jobs benefit, but others get pushed onto the dole, where the state has to pay for them. Increased wealth for some rather than for all hardly seems like a Labour policy.
Miliband's idea, like his plan for an energy price freeze, is economically illiterate. Which raises the question why he is saying these things. As I keep pointing out, the Labour leader is said to have taught economics at Harvard. I'm presuming then that he understands the mechanics of supply and demand. The only explanation I can think of for his pushing policies that defy economic credibility is that he is a cynical opportunist.
Undoubtedly most people don't know enough about economics to understand why wages might stagnate, and why it's so hard to get them to rise again when you are importing a work force at the same time. This looks like naked populism by Miliband - I suspect he knows these policies won't work, but he also knows that a lot of people like the sound of them.
I still believe that Labour will win the next election. But judging by the increasingly desperate implausibility of his policy initiatives, I'm not sure Ed Miliband does.
Miliband is right about wages, and he's been right for quite a few years, certainly since well before the 2010 general election. He didn't seem quite so concerned about it then.
It must be rather galling for the Tories to hear this latest attack on its handling of the economy. During the Blair / Brown years Britain accepted about 800,000 migrants from Eastern Europe. The Government's own figures show that over 50% of new jobs created went to people born outside the UK. In London the figure is over 80%. Leaving aside the cost to the UK of these hard-working young people in terms of health, education, housing and general infrastructure (not to mention the cost of keeping on benefits the British people - many with brown skins - they displace from the labour market), there is also a cost in terms of wage levels.
If you increase the pool of available labour, the cost for employers of acquiring staff rises less quickly than it otherwise would have done. That's why the CBI is in favour of immigration. Businessmen know that, as with any commodity, you increase the supply and the cost tends to go down.
In other words Labour's decision to allow the citizens of new EU nations to work here in 2004 is partly responsible for lower wages, and therefore for the cost of living crisis for which they are now blaming the Tories.
Miliband's solution to this problem his party helped create is to urge companies to pay their staff more. But as many economists have pointed out, the only consequence of this would be fewer people in work. Companies become less competitive, they push their prices up, they sell fewer products and have to lay off staff. Thus the people who keep their jobs benefit, but others get pushed onto the dole, where the state has to pay for them. Increased wealth for some rather than for all hardly seems like a Labour policy.
Miliband's idea, like his plan for an energy price freeze, is economically illiterate. Which raises the question why he is saying these things. As I keep pointing out, the Labour leader is said to have taught economics at Harvard. I'm presuming then that he understands the mechanics of supply and demand. The only explanation I can think of for his pushing policies that defy economic credibility is that he is a cynical opportunist.
Undoubtedly most people don't know enough about economics to understand why wages might stagnate, and why it's so hard to get them to rise again when you are importing a work force at the same time. This looks like naked populism by Miliband - I suspect he knows these policies won't work, but he also knows that a lot of people like the sound of them.
I still believe that Labour will win the next election. But judging by the increasingly desperate implausibility of his policy initiatives, I'm not sure Ed Miliband does.
War crimes, Syria and Tony Blair
The news that a young man recently tried to carry out a citizen's arrest on Tony Blair for war crimes, reported in the Grauniad this morning, is replete with ironies, coming as it does amidst the outrage over the 50,000 photographs smuggled out of Syria showing systematic torture by the government.
Last summer the UK Government tried to get Parliament to back the principle of intervention in Syria. Their attempt was unsuccessful, because there were enough Tory rebels who sided with Labour. At the time I quoted Lord Ashdown, who wrote, "MPs cheered last night. Assad and Putin this morning".
I realise that deciding to intervene in a foreign country is a difficult and problematic thing to do. There is an enormous amount of public anger still over our little Iraqi adventure. It's that anger that motivates people like the young man who tried to arrest Blair.
These people have forgotten however that Saddam Hussein killed a lot of his own citizens too, that his successors would certainly have carried on doing the same thing, and that without intervention they would still be doing it now. Iraq is not perfect, but it is a good deal better than it would have been if Saddam, then his sons, then some other Ba'ath party hard man, had been allowed to keep their foot on the neck of the Iraqi people.
And yet it is the wilful blindness and partiality of this section of the public which made President Obama and then British MPs hestitate last summer. It may be increasingly clear that events have proved them wrong, but they are still shouting the loudest. We have moved beyond denial but are still languishing in the anger stage.
However as I wrote at the time, even a decision to do nothing has its consequences. We are now seeing in Syria what those consequences are. They are written on the emaciated and disfigured bodies of those unfortunate enough to have fallen into the hands of President Assad's torture squads.
I'd like to see the chap who tried to arrest Blair in a London restaurant flick through those 50,000 images of the dead. It might teach him what war crimes really look like.
Last summer the UK Government tried to get Parliament to back the principle of intervention in Syria. Their attempt was unsuccessful, because there were enough Tory rebels who sided with Labour. At the time I quoted Lord Ashdown, who wrote, "MPs cheered last night. Assad and Putin this morning".
I realise that deciding to intervene in a foreign country is a difficult and problematic thing to do. There is an enormous amount of public anger still over our little Iraqi adventure. It's that anger that motivates people like the young man who tried to arrest Blair.
These people have forgotten however that Saddam Hussein killed a lot of his own citizens too, that his successors would certainly have carried on doing the same thing, and that without intervention they would still be doing it now. Iraq is not perfect, but it is a good deal better than it would have been if Saddam, then his sons, then some other Ba'ath party hard man, had been allowed to keep their foot on the neck of the Iraqi people.
And yet it is the wilful blindness and partiality of this section of the public which made President Obama and then British MPs hestitate last summer. It may be increasingly clear that events have proved them wrong, but they are still shouting the loudest. We have moved beyond denial but are still languishing in the anger stage.
However as I wrote at the time, even a decision to do nothing has its consequences. We are now seeing in Syria what those consequences are. They are written on the emaciated and disfigured bodies of those unfortunate enough to have fallen into the hands of President Assad's torture squads.
I'd like to see the chap who tried to arrest Blair in a London restaurant flick through those 50,000 images of the dead. It might teach him what war crimes really look like.
Thursday 16 January 2014
Francois Hollande, Paul Daniels and the weaker sexes
The fine mess into which French president Francois Hollande has got himself with a young actress (OK, she's 41, but from my lofty vantage point that's still young - she can probably climb the stairs without holding on to the rail), invites all sorts of thoughts about the stupidity of the middle-aged male.
But spare a thought for the stupidity of the woman. Of all the men with whom actress Julie Gayet could have elected to play the role of Other Woman, she goes for, what, a penguin with a face like a potato, beady eyes and dyed hair a la Berlusconi?
Would Ms Gayet have looked at Hollande twice if he'd been a dustman? Not on your life.
"So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?", Caroline Aherne asked Debbie McGee on live TV.
Unfortunately re-runs of Mrs Merton are not currently available in French.
But spare a thought for the stupidity of the woman. Of all the men with whom actress Julie Gayet could have elected to play the role of Other Woman, she goes for, what, a penguin with a face like a potato, beady eyes and dyed hair a la Berlusconi?
Would Ms Gayet have looked at Hollande twice if he'd been a dustman? Not on your life.
"So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?", Caroline Aherne asked Debbie McGee on live TV.
Unfortunately re-runs of Mrs Merton are not currently available in French.
Friday 10 January 2014
Mark Duggan - care in the community
I once made the mistake, in front of a friend who comes from Tottenham via Accra in Ghana, of referring to "the black community". I can still see him now, leaning back in his chair and laughing uproariously. "There ain't no such thing as the black community", he said. And of course when you think about it, it's true. Just as there's no such thing as "the angling community" or "the mountaineering community".
It's funny then how in the wake of the Mark Duggan inquest "community" is one word I think I've heard more than any other. That and "justice" perhaps. And with "community" comes the word "leader". "Community leaders" tend not to be elected people like parish councillors, but the self-appointed who like the sound of their own voices. They are often encouraged by government and local authorities, desperate to find some way of getting a purchase on the part of the population which doesn't have the same skin colour they do.
Usually "community leaders" are mediocre and self-serving people of the Bernie Grant or Jessie Jackson type who prefer the attention and money which being the link between authority and the huddled masses confers to a low wage job somewhere in the service industries. I guess you can't blame them.
Community leaders have been much in evidence in the last 48 hours. I heard one of them, Stafford Scott, say that the inquest verdict was a joke, that "everyone knows what's happening to this country" and that David Cameron was to blame. Really?
What you didn't hear community leaders saying was, "Mark Duggan was a bad man. He wasn't carrying a gun to hand it in to the police. The community is better off without him". Why is that? Well partly perhaps because their own status and position depends on articulating the fears and prejudices of their peers. Understandable, but not exactly leadership. But also because part of community leaders' function seems to be to perpetuate a narrative of victimhood.
I heard one poignant vox pop post-Duggan on Wednesday night. It was a young black man who said, "There ain't nothing up here. No jobs. Nothing". Now I lived in Hackney for four years and in London for sixteen. As I recall Tottenham Hale tube station is about seven stops from Oxford Circus. That's about fifteen or twenty minutes travel at the most.
Recent visits to London suggest the capital is booming. The people who serve you in pubs, restaurants and coffee shops are overwhelmingly from Europe or Eastern Europe, confirming anecdotally what figures show to be true, namely that we imported a workforce during the Blair / Brown years instead of getting British people, many of them with brown skins, off the dole.
But you can't just blame European immigration. "Community leaders" contribute to a narrative of helplessness. Complaints that no jobs are available a twenty minute tube ride away from the centre of the richest city on earth outside North America are utterly ridiculous. The truth is that jobs are there, but starting working life for little money in an unglamorous circumstances is at odds with "the community"'s self-mythology.
A culture which glamourises guns, violence and wealth, with the occasional detour denigrating women along the way, is not going to encourage young people to wait tables or serve behind a till. A culture which legitimises absent fathers is not going to give young men decent role models. The problems of places like Tottenham are complex, but they start from within.
It's funny then how in the wake of the Mark Duggan inquest "community" is one word I think I've heard more than any other. That and "justice" perhaps. And with "community" comes the word "leader". "Community leaders" tend not to be elected people like parish councillors, but the self-appointed who like the sound of their own voices. They are often encouraged by government and local authorities, desperate to find some way of getting a purchase on the part of the population which doesn't have the same skin colour they do.
Usually "community leaders" are mediocre and self-serving people of the Bernie Grant or Jessie Jackson type who prefer the attention and money which being the link between authority and the huddled masses confers to a low wage job somewhere in the service industries. I guess you can't blame them.
Community leaders have been much in evidence in the last 48 hours. I heard one of them, Stafford Scott, say that the inquest verdict was a joke, that "everyone knows what's happening to this country" and that David Cameron was to blame. Really?
What you didn't hear community leaders saying was, "Mark Duggan was a bad man. He wasn't carrying a gun to hand it in to the police. The community is better off without him". Why is that? Well partly perhaps because their own status and position depends on articulating the fears and prejudices of their peers. Understandable, but not exactly leadership. But also because part of community leaders' function seems to be to perpetuate a narrative of victimhood.
I heard one poignant vox pop post-Duggan on Wednesday night. It was a young black man who said, "There ain't nothing up here. No jobs. Nothing". Now I lived in Hackney for four years and in London for sixteen. As I recall Tottenham Hale tube station is about seven stops from Oxford Circus. That's about fifteen or twenty minutes travel at the most.
Recent visits to London suggest the capital is booming. The people who serve you in pubs, restaurants and coffee shops are overwhelmingly from Europe or Eastern Europe, confirming anecdotally what figures show to be true, namely that we imported a workforce during the Blair / Brown years instead of getting British people, many of them with brown skins, off the dole.
But you can't just blame European immigration. "Community leaders" contribute to a narrative of helplessness. Complaints that no jobs are available a twenty minute tube ride away from the centre of the richest city on earth outside North America are utterly ridiculous. The truth is that jobs are there, but starting working life for little money in an unglamorous circumstances is at odds with "the community"'s self-mythology.
A culture which glamourises guns, violence and wealth, with the occasional detour denigrating women along the way, is not going to encourage young people to wait tables or serve behind a till. A culture which legitimises absent fathers is not going to give young men decent role models. The problems of places like Tottenham are complex, but they start from within.
Wednesday 8 January 2014
Justice for Mark Duggan
A quick search through this blog would reveal that its author is not much impressed by the police. All my experience, as a former lawyer and as a citizen, is that when they are not corrupt, racist and dishonest, they are incompetent and lazy. The following remarks about tonight's verdict by the Mark Duggan inquest jury need to be read in that context.
I'm not at all surprised that the jury found Duggan to have been lawfully killed. Or that it found the gun discovered 20 feet away wrapped in a sock was thrown by Duggan before the police fired the fatal shots. If someone told me that the police had put the gun there to justify their actions that wouldn't surprise me either (although I'd be wondering why they chose not to put it in the taxi, which would have been the obvious place). I believe the police to be capable of pretty much anything.
And yet I think Mr Duggan's family and his lawyers are protesting too much.
It's not surprising that his family now like to portray Duggan as a good man, a pillar of the community rather than a violent and feared drug dealer. That would be the inevitable reaction of people who have lost someone they loved. But I'd like to ask them (from a safe distance), whether they believed Duggan had a gun with him in the taxi. If not, well, the evidence is against them. But if he was, what do they think he was doing with it? And do they not think that someone carrying a gun around with them can't have too many complaints if the police decide that person might just be carrying it to hurt someone else?
I was listening to Radio 5 when the news broke, and the station was clearly caught expecting an Unlawful Killing verdict, since it had prepared pre-recorded interviews with Duggan's mother and with a friend, and also played an actor-voiced exchange between Leslie Thomas, the family's barrister, and a witness who described seeing the killing and said it looked like an execution.
The station did not however re-enact cross-examination of the same witness, reported in the Guardian, in which it was put to him that he had changed his story since he first gave a statement. Why not? I'm guessing because it thought the jury would accept the witness's evidence. Instead it went live to a reporter in Tottenham who was presumably hoping something would kick off down there. It also broadcast part of a statement by Marcia Willis Stewart, the family's solicitor, who declared it was a "murder" of "an unarmed man", a remark that is libellous if false and inflammatory in any event. Radio 5 stopped broadcasting the statement after the "murder" remark. In the circumstances Ms Stewart may well have committed a public order offence. Certainly she brought her profession into disrepute.
The BBC's reporter, Danny Shaw I think, said that the crucial question was whether Duggan was holding the gun when he was shot. This statement, repeated later on PM, is wrong. In the context of the riots which started after Duggan's killing it's also irresponsible. The crucial question was whether the firearms officer reasonably believed Duggan to be carrying a gun. This distinction is crucial to understanding of the jury's verdict, and failure to understand it isn't just confined to the BBC. Diane Abbott has also declared herself baffled by the verdict. That's a shame, because in fact, whether right or not, it's clear and readily comprehensible to anyone of a modest intelligence.
The family complained essentially that the police had imposed their own version of justice on Duggan. But consider this. There is an inquest, held over two months at enormous public expense. Witnesses are compelled to come, and are cross-examined. The Coroner sums up. The jury goes out. There is a verdict. In damning the jury's verdict the Duggans are essentially saying, This isn't the kind of justice we wanted. It didn't give the result we wanted. Ironically, they are guilty of exactly the same thing they accuse the police of having done, which is to say demanding justice to suit their personal needs. But that isn't the way justice works. Justice stands outside the needs of the individual, be they police officers or drug dealers. It even stands, so far as possible, outside the needs of the state. A fair process fairly applied is all that can be asked of the justice system, and I haven't heard any suggestion, from Duggan's supporters or from anyone else, that this Inquest failed on either count. At least not until the jury delivered a verdict they didn't like.
It does not seem to have occurred to Duggan's family that he might have been a drug-dealing gang member who was carrying a gun at a time when he was shot down by a policeman (who knew such things might happen?) Or that, whatever their own devastating loss, the rest of us might be better off without him.
You may say that we don't want a society where people are shot down by the police in cold blood. On the whole I agree. But where the police are pretty sure those people have a gun on or about their person, I'm willing to make an exception.
I'm not at all surprised that the jury found Duggan to have been lawfully killed. Or that it found the gun discovered 20 feet away wrapped in a sock was thrown by Duggan before the police fired the fatal shots. If someone told me that the police had put the gun there to justify their actions that wouldn't surprise me either (although I'd be wondering why they chose not to put it in the taxi, which would have been the obvious place). I believe the police to be capable of pretty much anything.
And yet I think Mr Duggan's family and his lawyers are protesting too much.
It's not surprising that his family now like to portray Duggan as a good man, a pillar of the community rather than a violent and feared drug dealer. That would be the inevitable reaction of people who have lost someone they loved. But I'd like to ask them (from a safe distance), whether they believed Duggan had a gun with him in the taxi. If not, well, the evidence is against them. But if he was, what do they think he was doing with it? And do they not think that someone carrying a gun around with them can't have too many complaints if the police decide that person might just be carrying it to hurt someone else?
I was listening to Radio 5 when the news broke, and the station was clearly caught expecting an Unlawful Killing verdict, since it had prepared pre-recorded interviews with Duggan's mother and with a friend, and also played an actor-voiced exchange between Leslie Thomas, the family's barrister, and a witness who described seeing the killing and said it looked like an execution.
The station did not however re-enact cross-examination of the same witness, reported in the Guardian, in which it was put to him that he had changed his story since he first gave a statement. Why not? I'm guessing because it thought the jury would accept the witness's evidence. Instead it went live to a reporter in Tottenham who was presumably hoping something would kick off down there. It also broadcast part of a statement by Marcia Willis Stewart, the family's solicitor, who declared it was a "murder" of "an unarmed man", a remark that is libellous if false and inflammatory in any event. Radio 5 stopped broadcasting the statement after the "murder" remark. In the circumstances Ms Stewart may well have committed a public order offence. Certainly she brought her profession into disrepute.
The BBC's reporter, Danny Shaw I think, said that the crucial question was whether Duggan was holding the gun when he was shot. This statement, repeated later on PM, is wrong. In the context of the riots which started after Duggan's killing it's also irresponsible. The crucial question was whether the firearms officer reasonably believed Duggan to be carrying a gun. This distinction is crucial to understanding of the jury's verdict, and failure to understand it isn't just confined to the BBC. Diane Abbott has also declared herself baffled by the verdict. That's a shame, because in fact, whether right or not, it's clear and readily comprehensible to anyone of a modest intelligence.
The family complained essentially that the police had imposed their own version of justice on Duggan. But consider this. There is an inquest, held over two months at enormous public expense. Witnesses are compelled to come, and are cross-examined. The Coroner sums up. The jury goes out. There is a verdict. In damning the jury's verdict the Duggans are essentially saying, This isn't the kind of justice we wanted. It didn't give the result we wanted. Ironically, they are guilty of exactly the same thing they accuse the police of having done, which is to say demanding justice to suit their personal needs. But that isn't the way justice works. Justice stands outside the needs of the individual, be they police officers or drug dealers. It even stands, so far as possible, outside the needs of the state. A fair process fairly applied is all that can be asked of the justice system, and I haven't heard any suggestion, from Duggan's supporters or from anyone else, that this Inquest failed on either count. At least not until the jury delivered a verdict they didn't like.
It does not seem to have occurred to Duggan's family that he might have been a drug-dealing gang member who was carrying a gun at a time when he was shot down by a policeman (who knew such things might happen?) Or that, whatever their own devastating loss, the rest of us might be better off without him.
You may say that we don't want a society where people are shot down by the police in cold blood. On the whole I agree. But where the police are pretty sure those people have a gun on or about their person, I'm willing to make an exception.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)