Rolf Harris and the effect of Operation Yewtree

Is Operation Yewtree a witch-hunt? That is apparently what Terry Gilliam and Chris Tarrant think. Gilliam described it as "like something you'd expect to find in the former Soviet Union", and Tarrant said he "found what was happening terrifying".

There isn't any suggestion that Tarrant himself has anything to fear from the investigation.

Operation Yewtree's record is mixed. Freddie Starr, Jim Davidson and Jimmy Tarbuck were all arrested (Starr four times) before being told they would face no further action. Dave Lee Travis was tried on multiple counts and acquitted on most of them, the jury being unable to reach a decision on the others. Michael Le Vell and William Roache were acquitted. On the other hand both Max Clifford and Rolf Harris have been convicted and others are pending.

Is this, as an article in the Guardian suggests today, a "vindication" of Operation Yewtree?  Well, yes and no.  But mostly no.

Firstly, Yewtree is sometimes guilty of applying today's thou-shalt-not-touch standards to the very different social mores that applied in the 60s and 70s. Rape then would be rape now, but some of the other behaviour would have been regarded as boorish rather than criminal. One of Rolf Harris's victims complained that he had "groped her bottom". I'm afraid that's just what people did. Perhaps they shouldn't have, but as one of the people who complained about Dave Lee Travis said in court, at the time she did not regard his touching her as a sexual assault. That says everything you need to know about changing standards.

Secondly, although you'd expect prosecutions to have a failure rate, Yewtree's is rather high. It has left wreckage behind. And even leaving aside the trauma of an early morning arrest, the shame of the investigation and the crippling legal fees, once you are arrested for a sexual offence you never get your reputation back. People will always wonder, "Did he really do it after all?"

Thirdly, a long trial costs the state an awful lot of money. Does such a high failure rate justify the cost?

Fourthly, for the last 18 plus months rather a lot of Metropolitan Police officers have been tied up trying to find out what ageing celebrities did the last century. To say that these officers can't be in two places at once is not to minimise the misery and suffering of people who have lived with the memory of serious sexual assault for a long time. It's merely to acknowledge that other people are suffering now and serious criminals are walking free because Met Police officers are working on Operation Yewtree instead.

(Of course the police must love it, because they get to meet TV personalities and their cases are all over the papers. Much more glamorous than bringing your run-of-the-mill scrote up before the beak.)

As it happens I know a number of lawyers who've been involved in Yewtree cases, some on the prosecution side, some on the defence. There is a clear consensus. Other important police work - particularly in relation to gangs - is being neglected. The CPS are incompetent and badly prepared. Some of the prosecutions look desperately thin (one complainant said she had been in a car with the accused and thought something must have happened, but she couldn't remember what it was). And lastly, Operation Yewtree is happening because senior officals, under pressure from the commentariat, wanted to be seen to be doing something about sex crime.

So Operation Yewtree marches on.  But potting the elderly Rolf Harris is a poor sort of vindication.

Land and freedom

Sometimes reports appear in the press which, ostensibly unrelated, set off the car alarm in one's mind.

The first, which you can see here, suggests that Britain's population has been growing twice as fast as the rest of Europe for the last decade, gaining as many people as in the entire previous generation.

The Torygraph report today says that immigration accounts for "at least 60 per cent of the growth in the last decade . . . That does not include the knock-on effect of immigration on birth rates, with around a quarter of new babies in the UK being born to foreign mothers". In the year to mid 2013 the UK's population grew by about 400,000, adding "the equivalent of the population of Bristol in a single year".

The figures are from the Office for National Statistics, by the way.

Yesterday several papers ran a story about a report on the UK's food supply produced by the University of Cambridge.  The BBC's version is here.  Britain is apparently running out of land for food, and "faces a potential shortfall of two million hectares by 2030". The UK's population is expected to exceed 70 million by 2030, but already we run a food, feed and drink trade deficit of £18.6bn.

So there we are. Not enough land. Too many people.

Since this is a drum I've been banging for some time, I should be feeling quite smug.  And I would, if I didn't have three children myself.

Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and the press

The professional Yorkshireman Godfrey Bloom, it will be remembered, lost the UKIP party whip because he was recorded telling some party workers at a meeting that they were "sluts".

I am not an admirer of UKIP (an electoral phenomenon rather than a serious political party) or of Bloom (a man who makes the robustly outspoken Sir Geoffrey Boycott look mealy-mouthed), but I couldn't help but feel the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber was hard done by.

Mr Bloom was, according to the Torygraph, "challenged at a women's fringe event by Jane Collins, a former by-election candidate, who told him: "I have never cleaned behind my fridge". Bloom is reported to have replied, "This place is full of sluts", to general laughter.

Yet at this remark the media descended on Bloom like a pack of wolves and the whip was duly withdrawn by Nigel Farage. Actually, as Bloom tried to make clear, the word "slut" has two meanings - a promiscuous woman, or on the other hand a woman who is untidy and slovenly. It was clear from the context - the fridge, remember - that Bloom was using the word in the latter sense. And yet the press reported the story as if Bloom had uttered some dreadful insult.

I was reminded of this with reporting of the verdicts in the Rebekah Brooks / Andy Coulson trial yesterday. As I wrote at the time she was arrested, I was glad Ms Brooks had to face the law over her newspaper's phone hacking. She had overall responsibility for what happened on the paper, and there was a serious possibility that she had known about the hacking. Moreover for too long those close to the Murdoch empire had been looking over the Government's shoulder, and seemed to imagine that being wealthy and powerful they were above the law. Instilling the notion that they aren't is well worth the expense of the trial. Even, in Brooks' case, an unsuccessful one.

This morning the Guardian ran the story on the front page under the headline "Coulson: the criminal who had Cameron's confidence".  David Cameron, it will be remembered, employed Coulson as press adviser for rather under a year from May 2010. By this point Coulson hadn't been News of the World editor for three years, and anyway had always denied any personal involvement in the phone hacking saga. It must have seemed a reasonable call by Cameron at the time, but it now appears that Coulson was a liar.

Nevertheless, the Guardian's opening paragraph seems guilty of hyperbole. It reads, "Seven years of deceit by David Cameron's former director of communications were undone in the Old Bailey yesterday".

The paragraph would more accurately have read, "Seven years of deceit by Andy Coulson about his conduct before becoming David Cameron's director of communications . . ."; but when did a journalist ever make their reputation by underplaying a story?

And of course, it's not just the Graun. All the papers are at it. Even Nick Robinson at the BBC, a well-known Tory sympathiser, weighs in with his "apology . . . will not be enough to silence the questions David Cameron now faces".

What utter bollocks. The phone-hacking story is important, because it shows how a powerful media organisation abused its position (and suborned the police). But that is the real story. The David Cameron angle is just noise.

In the Godfrey Bloom affair, I couldn't understand why no journalist had the balls to write, "In shock news yesterday the nation's entire news media deliberately misunderstood the meaning of the word 'slut' in order to end a politician's career and have something to write about".

So here. Journalists pretend that something Andy Coulson did years before David Cameron employed him is a political problem for the Prime Minister. It isn't. It's a media problem. That's why Cameron has apologised.

Cameron has calculated that less damage would be sustained by saying sorry for the minor infraction of employing somebody who turned out to be a criminal, than would be the case if he pointed out that the criminality occurred some time before Coulson came to work for him.

It must be galling for him, but Cameron knows the press are shits and that he has to play the game.

So, curiously, a story which started with the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies, ends (or perhaps that should be continues) with, er, the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies.  Who would have thought?

Tony Blair and the real villains in Iraq

What to make of the extraordinary events in Iraq recently, as Al Qaida 2.0, in the form of ISIS nasties, advance with Blitzkrieg speed across the country, murdering and burning as they come?

Tony Blair's reappearance as lost prophet, advocating fresh intervention, grizzled and impassioned, has probably done his reputation no favours, and certainly for the Not In My Name brigade there's plenty of fresh ammunition.

I have an interest to declare here. I thought that, WMD or no WMD, Iraq would be better off facing an uncertain future without Saddam than a certain future with him, given that a future with the Butcher of Baghdad in charge was as near as we're going to get to the personification of Orwell's vision of a jackboot stamping on a human face, forever.

It has however been a lonely business pointing out the awkward truth about Iraq's former dictator, and it's cheering to find this article in the Torygraph by one of its foreign correspondents, Colin Freeman.

"Saddam Hussein", writes Freeman, "was just as brutal a killer as ISIS's thugs are, and had Saddam's men had i-phones around to record their atrocities, the results would have been just as horrific.  There would however have been one important difference. In Saddam's case, the footage of those toppling into mass graves wouldn't have just been a few dozen or hundred, but hundreds of thousands . . . It's estimated that Saddam killed around 300,000 people (in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991). . . one can't be certain that he would have done the same in the the event of an Arab Spring ten years later. But it does rather suggest he had it in him. . . Half a million people on either side perished in the eight year war that Saddam started with neighbouring Iran, a campaign of trench warfare far more brutal and senseless than anything in World War One. Another 100,000 were killed by the Allied armies as they repelled his equally foolhardy invasion of Kuwait in 1991. And this is before you take into account all those he tortured and killed in secret. . . if Saddam had already directed his armies to kill a million people in the course of . . . 20 years, he might well have done another few hundred thousand had he been left in power. And for that reason alone", Freeman concludes, "we should remember that it is him, not Tony Blair, that is the real villain alongside ISIS".

Amen to all that. And yet quite a lot of people genuinely think Tony Blair is a war criminal for getting rid of Saddam. Funny old world.

Thomas Piketty and the success of capitalism

The Guardian reports this morning that queues developed in London yesterday outside the lecture theatre where French economist Professor Thomas Piketty was booked to speak.  Most of them, according to vox pops the paper conducted, hadn't read Piketty's book Capital, and you can hardly blame them for preferring to get its message in an hour or so rather than wading through many hundreds of pages.

The success of Capital in capturing the imagination of the Left-leaning public probably tells us as much about the phenomenology of the media (and of collective hysteria) as it does about economics. A friend recently asked me what I thought of the book. "I haven't read it", I said. "Neither have I", he replied. "But I read a review of it".

So have I now. Several reviews. That doesn't make me an expert, but lack of expertise has never stopped a blogger from having an opinion.

Piketty's thesis is, essentially, that assets grow in value at a faster rate than economies do, so people who have assets get richer faster than people who don't. Hence ever rising inequality.

But in purporting to address the bigger picture (which is certainly what Piketty's supporters claim for him), he excludes what for the purposes of analogy you might call the picture frame. Which is to say that although we live in a world of inequality, it is actually a world in which most people are getting richer.

I like to imagine what George Orwell would have made of the affluence of our society. I think he would have been horrified at the vacuousness of consumer culture, but amazed and impressed at capitalism's capacity to create wealth. For capitalism does indeed make people richer. It just doesn't make them richer at the same rate.

What would Orwell have made of mobile phones? Here is a gadget that would have been utterly beyond his imaginings. Even Ian Fleming, writing in the technologically obsessed 1960s, never dared to get Q to present James Bond with anything so outrageous.  "Now look James, you can get the cricket score on it, and the weather forecast for Kuala Lumpur, and the chemical formula of cordite, and the latin name of the Ring Tailed Lemur. Clever eh?" "You're pulling my leg, Q". And yet fifty years later most people reading this will have one, all at the expense of a tenner or so a week.

The point of the mobile phone for Piketty's thesis lies in the whereabouts of its manufacture. These things are not made in Walsall or Frankfurt or Detroit. They're made in Thailand, or Taiwan or China.

Why are people willing to work in factories assembling chipsets instead of labouring in the paddy fields or herding the family's cows? It's because working in factories gives them a higher standard of living. The conditions may be rubbish and the pay exploitative by our standards, but it's still better than the alternative.

Of course the downside is that as jobs have leaked from the affluent West to the impoverished East, wages in Europe and America stagnated and even fell. That's capitalism in action too. But we are still living in societies in which the overwhelming majority of people have enough eat, get a free education and have a roof over their heads; whereas they are not.

Professor Piketty's fans are so concerned that they aren't getting rich as fast as the Duke of Westminster that they haven't noticed that in other parts of the world capitalism is slowly making genuinely poor people better off.

The Trojan Horse letter - British values and the limits of tolerance

In the wake of the Trojan Horse saga alleging a plot by fanatical Muslims to make state schools teach, er, according to Muslim principles, the government has decreed that teaching British values should be part of the curriculum.

This edict has been widely and understandably criticised by cultural relativists and wiseacres alike.  No-one knows what British values are so it is impossible to teach them, goes the argument.  And who is to say British values are better than Muslim ones, ask the relativists?

I am a passionate enemy of cultural relativism, but I think the Government's critics are half right. British culture and values are the complex sum total of our food, climate, literature, music, architecture, sport and landscape, to name but seven items of what surely is a much longer list of component parts. You can't do more than scratch the surface of that at school.

And that's the trouble. Young Muslims brought up in Muslim families in largely Muslim areas of Birmingham are always going to lead a somewhat schizophrenic existence. They watch British TV, walk around Britain's streets and go to Britain's schools, but even if there were no Islamification in the classroom, they would still spend an awful lot of time at home and in the mosque. Theirs is always going to be a double life.

A friend from Hackney, a woman of Afro-Caribbean extraction, told me that her split existence even extends to speaking a different version of English to family and West Indian friends. But for her no cultural barrier existed remotely as high or difficult as the one which separates devout Muslims from their post-Christian white and black contemporaries.

The subtext of the Government's critics is the demeaning if generally unstated one that there is no such thing as British culture.  This must be wrong, because if it were true we'd be just the same as other countries. And we're not.

Nevertheless hearing David Cameron struggling to define some of those British values, I was struck by his use of the word "tolerance". We're a tolerant people, he said. Well yes, in some respects we are. I would prefer to say that we're slow to get angry and willing to put up with a good deal.

But if we're so tolerant, why are we getting so cross about Islamification of British schools? Surely if we were really tolerant we'd just say, OK, you want to drop teaching of evolution and call white girls prostitutes?  Fine. We're tolerant. We don't care. Just get on with it.

The reality is that Islamic immigration has exposed the limits of our famous tolerance. We weren't asked if we wanted it; if we had been asked, we'd probably have uttered a polite "no thanks". But now it's here and we have to work out a way of living with it, we must stop pretending what a tolerant lot we are.

If Britain's going to carry on working reasonably well as a nation, we have to get Muslims to assimilate. And if that's going to happen the rest of us have to say, you can do this, and this, and this, but you can't do that. No to Islamification of the classroom. No to forced marriage. No to honour killings. No to FGM. We may be tolerant, but we're not that tolerant.

Roy Hodgson and the quarter finals

Having got the statutory whinge about the World Cup out of the way a few days ago (The World Cup is for the mentally negligible), it's time to pontificate about England's opening performance against Italy last night.

What is the aim of England football managers?  Answer, to get out of the group stage and on to the quarter finals. Why? Because they know that if we get to the quarters they'll keep their job. That results in the kind of pragmatic football which makes fans curse at the TV in frustration. Because of course eventually we come up against a better team. Time after time we have subordinated our natural head-banging desire to attack to dreary conservatism. We should long ago have learned that we'll never win a competition playing this way, and never have any fun in the process either. Because fun should be the object. We know we aren't the best team in the world, and what we really want is to see England playing the kind of football we can be proud of.

I realise this makes me look an idiot for taking football seriously, but there we are.

If I had to point to the acme of stupidity in this respect it would be Sven Goran Eriksson's selection of midfielder Trevor Sinclair to go to the World Cup in Japan in 2002. Sinclair was a decent club pro, not good enough to hold down a regular place in the first team, and he took the place of the maverick genius Steve McManaman. I remember fulminating about this at the time. Even if McManaman didn't get a start, I thought, he was exactly the kind of player you'd want to come on with 20 minutes to go when you were a goal down to Brazil and facing exit from the competition. He might just create something.

Unfortunately this scenario came to pass exactly on 21st June 2002 when, in the quarter finals against Brazil, England were a goal down thanks to Ronaldinho's miraculous lob over David Seaman. Eriksson looked along his subs bench for a player who could change the game. Not finding one, he instructed Trevor Sinclair to remove the tracksuit instead.  I hope that at this moment he realised the awfulness of his mistake. Steve McManaman, who, to be fair, might also have achieved as little as Sinclair, was watching at home. England lost 2-1.

Like most England fans, I would have liked to see Harry Redknapp get the job in the wake of Fabio Capello's dreary reign. But in one crucial respect Roy Hodgson has proved we doubters wrong. He has revealed himself to be a gambler rather than a pragmatist, a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead, and a romantic rather than a rationalist. He has stuffed his squad with the kind of rapid, fearless youthful attacking talent that seasoned, experienced defenders hate playing against. Raheem Sterling, Ross Barkley, Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Daniel Sturridge are exactly the kind of players England fans want to watch. I didn't like losing to Italy last night, but it was a game we could very well have won had things worked out very slightly differently, and it was a performance which will have made the world sit up and take notice. England actually aren't bad at football after all.

I hope Mr Hodgson does get us out of the group stage and into the quarters, but if he doesn't I hope the FA lets him keep the job. He's already shown that he understands more about football than any England manager since Terry Venables.