The Devil in the Detail

I'd really hoped to have a bit of a pop at the Met's much ridiculed boss, Sir Iain Blair, again. The problem is that the mainstream media appears to have let me down here, in it's coverage of the Metropolitan Police Authority's lukewarm vote of confidence in this arrogant buffoon.

Both Sky and the BBC web coverage of the outcome makes use of the same, or rather two rather similar quotes from Blair. Here we have the truth according to the the BBC:

[Blair] added: "I'm pleased to have the backing of the majority of the police authority. I don't in any way minimise the tragedy that is the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. "

Source: BBC News

OK, reasonable enough, though the nature of the make-up of the MPA doesn't exactly bear up to close scrutiny, as discussed over at The Croydonian, but in this case Blair, for all his faults would have been making a factually accurate statement, even if it did mean his was basking in immensely faint praise.

More worrying was the version over at Sky where the same quote comes out as:

"I am pleased to have the backing of the public. This does not in any way minimise the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. Now I am pleased I can get back to my job."

Source: Sky News

I've no real way of knowing which of the two statements is actually what Blair said, but somehow the Sky version seems to better fit the Blair we know and loathe.

It's bad enough that we have a serial incompetent in charge of the country's most important police force, but the growing signs that we in the capital may be being policed by someone who may well, if Sky version is to believed, completely delusional is even more worrying.

The comments I heard from a couple of PCs on the train recently on some Blair news in Metro would suggest that Blair's support even within the force isn't that solid beyond the managerial layer that immediately surrounds him, let alone amongst the public at large, unless I misheard the officers and they actually said 'anchor'.

Time to Go

Dead Man Walking

The general consensus seems to be that Iain Blair (I won't use an honorific that he seems so unworthy of) will continue to inspire diminishing confidence in the Metropolitan police.

As I've posted elsewhere I have more than a little sympathy for the Met on the specific issue of the health and safety prosecution; health and safety legislation and the defence of the realm against terrorism do not mix, period. Civil liberties must be balanced against the needs for terror legislation, health and safety is not worthy of the same consideration in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

I have no such sympathy for Blair. Watching him over the last few days I've seen a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde. When I hear him speak, I hear all the arrogance of his Labour masters, but when I look in his eyes and at his general demeanour I see a rabbit in the headlights, a man who knows he has blown it.

It has been truly appalling to hear Jacqui Smith's unsupported claims that Blair enjoys public support, while the best evidence available, the body elected to represent London has spoken otherwise. There's not much she could do I suspect, even if she was inclined to hang Blair out to dry. After all he is simply following Labour's new orthodoxy that acts of appalling mismanagement, far from being a a career limiting matters, should in fact offer job security under the mantra of the 'cleaning up your own mess' principle. It's understandable when you look at the fate of Smith's predecessors why she is so keen to endorse this line of thinking. Many heard the distinctive sound of the bottom of a barrel being scraped when she was appointed to her current post and let's be honest, the best spin you can put on her tenure so far is encapsulated in the famous acronym SNAFU.

The most offensive aspect of Smith's piss-poor handling of the whole affair is her petulant whinging about those who call for his resignation. Time and type she, and her acolytes make the claim of 'playing politics' with the fight against terrorism. Blair's appointment was one of the political to the police's top job in recent years and her defence of him, against all decency, is even more politically motivated. If incompetency is no bar to high office in the Labour party of today, hypocrisy never has been. Most of Blair's opponents have had issues about his suitability for the job for a long time and for Smith to expect them to turn a blind eye to his latest misdeeds, simply because there is a tenuous link to terrorism, is frankly ridiculous.

The only redeeming feature is that Blair and Smith now are to a significant extent political Siamese Twins. Smith must be a very nervous woman. Blair can't really afford to make any more mistakes, but on his track record the next cock-up can't be far away. When it comes, Smith knows she will be receiving the dreaded message of 'full confidence' from the Prime Minster that announces to the world that the remaining span of her ministerial career can now be measured in days.

But back to Blair, a phrase often heard these days, albeit about a different Blair. It is perhaps for other offences that need to be taken into consideration that I would like to see the back of Blair, but there is in the whole de Menezes affair one solitary fact that should in of itself mark the end of his time at the top, the issue of his obstruction of the IPCC investigation. As reported in the Guardian:

Just after the shooting on July 22 2005, Sir Ian wrote to the home secretary saying he feared an independent investigation could jeopardise lives. His plea was rejected as the law required the IPCC to investigate any police shooting.

Source: The Guardian

So, there it is, a requirement in law that the IPCC investigate any police shooting and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police attempted to incite the Home Secretary of the time to break that law. I always thought that incitement of another to break the law was itself an offence, even if it isn't, it is a profoundly unethical thing to do. As for Blair's reasoning for asking for the law he is bound to uphold to be broken, does it sound even vaguely plausible?

Either way Blair is unfit to be part of the police service, let alone to lead it. Almost everyone seems to agree that he is damaged and at times like this we cannot afford to have a damaged top cop. With stories such as those about potential ECJ action likely to run and run the damage will continue as long as he remains in post. I might enjoy the discomfort it causes to the current government, Brown, who seems to be pulling a bit of a Macavity on the issue, apart, but this is two important to wish to see the open wound undressed.

For God's sake, go. A tritely decent man would have done so a long time ago, even a moderately self-aware one would have done so yesterday.

Up in Smoke

In need of an update

Bonfire night hasn't ever had the same appeal since my father bought a dodgy batch of fireworks that fell of the back of a lorry a few years ago. Once you've seen an oversized rocket doing a mid air U-turn a couple of seconds after lift off and somehow fitting through the narrowest of re-entry windows (in this case a patio door opened only to a ventilation setting) and explode in the family lounge nothing else will quite match the excitement.

It's that whiff of gunpowder and controlled danger that I've always liked and I desperately hope the health and safety zealots fail in their annual whining for yet more draconian restrictions. They don't seem to publicise the annual injury toll on TV news outlets anymore, which is probably a sign that the numbers are becoming fairly small and un-newsworthy, but if true that would not deflect the zero risk brigade from their crusade.

There have also been the usual questions raised about the appropriateness of an annual celebration of Catholic burning from the usual suspects of political correctness as well as from more considered sources. I've got no particular views on Catholicism one way of the other, but I am inclined to believe that it is one area where perhaps we could include a little more diversity. A pub conversation last night covered some potential candidates to replace the historical Guido Fawkes, so I have now come up with my considered top 10. I've tried to stick to just a single victim from any given sphere or institution, otherwise I'd have just been able to cut and paste from a list of members of the current cabinet.

So here goes then…my top 10 for the bonfire kindled, of course with the entire print run (if that is sufficient) of The Independent, in effigy:

10 - Jonathan Davies
Davies is a fine rugby player in both codes of the codes, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of both games. That said, the Welsh accent can be a beautiful thing, but his isn't. If some digibox offers a 'mute Davies commentary' feature I will be out to buy one in a second.

9 - Jose Manuel Barroso
I was tempted to include two people from the commission so that, in EU style, it would be possible to satisfy the sensitivities of those both in Brussels and Strasbourg. In my opinion the more common hate figures of the Eurosceptic movement, such as Santer and Delors at least had a degree of honesty of what their ultimate goal was, even if they were not so open about how they were achieving it. Some may say that Barroso is just the EU village idiot and unworthy of the accolade, but I'd love to see him go up in his Napoleonic bicorn hat.

8 - The Poison Dwarf
Ok, a bit parochial. Those outside the Village will just have to trust me when I say that never before in the field of pub bores has so little knowledge been expounded so long and inaccurately to so many.

7 - Kate Moss
OK, it wouldn't add much to the blaze, but the Kate Moss effigy is there as a symbolic representation of British Tabloid culture at its worst. The mention of her name in the broadcast media used to be a cue that all the serious news had come to an end and you could switch off and go and do something else, now it's likely to somewhere up in the top three stories at some point in any given week.

6 - Quentin Davies MP
We have far too large a legislature for a country of our size so the back benchers must take their share of the cuts as well as the cabinet. Not only would Davies' oily bulk make up for Moss, but as people at least since the days of Dante have known, there is a special circle in hell reserved for traitorous scum. I suspect there are still plenty of his newfound colleagues that would help me drag his heavy effigy to the top of the bonfire.

5 - Richard Corbett MEP
The smug grin that the deputy leader of the Labour MEPs has worn since his wish to have the desires of the British People extinguished seems to have been granted is truly revolting. The stupefying dishonesty of his attempts to justify the most politically dishonest act of my lifetime are offensive in the extreme. His fervent hope that the gradual stripping away of real democratic control from the general public will continue is reason enough to give him a portent of what generally happens when self selecting elites scorn the people, in seeing his effigy meet the same kind of sticky end that ultimately befell many of his political forebears.

4 - Robert Mugabe
It's a rare person who can unite a vast swathe of the political spectrum in universal loathing. There are others whose leadership has turned their country into a complete mess, but so often it can be attributed to an obsession with failed and discredited ideologies. With Mugabe I'm not sure I could even credit a plea of insanity; I believe he knows what he is doing is wrong and where he is leading his nation but these issues are small beer to him in comparison to his desire for unfettered power and wealth for his friends and himself.

3 - Lord "I'll never accept a peerage" Kinnock
Kinnock becomes the peer for the pyre on many counts. At least seeing the Kinnock effigy burn would be a more upbeat experience than some of the others where the frustration that in a civilised society we cannot really burn the person depicted would be a bit of dampener. Just as traditional bonfire festivities celebrate, to an extent, an event that never came to pass, so too would the roasting of this trough pig's effigy be a celebration that he never actually became Prime Minister.

2 - Sir Ian Blair
Had this particular Blair done a job that had inspired confidence in anybody outside left wing political circles then I would have been defending him to the hilt over the recent ridiculous Health and Safety conviction for the Met. In truth though he has being doing an important job badly for several years now with an astonishing disregard to the damage he is doing to the image of his forceservice.

1 - Gordon Brown
Well, it had to be, didn't it? If I'm only going to burn one member of the cabinet in effigy it has to be the top man. I understand he has another in his series of books on courage about to hit the shelves. It's the only way he will ever see his name on the cover of a book on that subject. Utterly worthless.

I know there are so many other worthy candidates but it's a start and we do have to consider our carbon footprint.

Intelligent Policing

More Pointless Signs

I normally avoid the web offering from Sky News, even if it is only because of their annoying habit of pumping every story out through its news feed at least half a dozen times regardless of the story's merit. Sometime I almost delete the feed in frustration, but that would give undue prominence to the BBC coverage, which I wouldn't really want either.

One little story today did both amuse and irritate me.

Many of us will at times have questioned the effectiveness of some of the Police service's many poster campaigns. Most at least have tended to focus on either advice to people to avoid becoming the victims of crime, or on reminding people of offences that they may carelessly commit.

It seems though that the Hertfordshire constabulary has taken things one step further by pointing out the bloody obvious. In a story of how the Plain English Campaign has blasted the posters as an insult to the intelligence it transpires that:

"Don't Commit Crime" is stated on one of Hertfordshire Constabulary's posters - "All fuel must be paid for" has been added on posters at petrol stations.

Source: Sky News

There, doesn't that make you feel safer? No need for any more police on the street, now that the criminals of Hertfordshire know what they are doing is wrong.

A Question of Breeding

Not here Sedley, sorry.

Today's Telegraph shed's a little light on the ridiculous idea from appeal court judge Stephen Sedley, that every man woman and child should be placed on the national DNA database.

He includes the 32 million or more visitors to the country each year, who in the dreams of Sedley will now have a unique form of welcome to the country, by being swabbed and added to a database of potential criminals. He is apparently unaware that in some of the countries whose citizens choose to visit the UK, the concept of a presumption of innocence still holds the whip hand in determining the relative rights between the individual and the state.

It transpires that:

Unusually - perhaps uniquely for an Appeal Court judge - Lord Justice Sedley is a former member of the Communist Party.

Source: The Daily Telegraph

A little further digging reveals that his father, also in the legal profession, was a lifelong communist who died in 1985.

The understanding that even in the eighties, when the true evil nature of communist regimes was becoming understood, that Sedley was at the least still close to those who were supportive of the aims of the self same regimes that Regan and Thatcher were beginning to fight against, begins to explain his cavalier attitude to individual liberties. It helps us understand why he ruled that a twelve year old, profiled but ruled innocent of any crime, must have his DNA profile held on the national database for the rest of his life; for one of Sedley's background the simple claim of 'necessity' from the state would probably be enough to trump any right to individual dignity.

Supporters of the judge may point to his support for the Human Rights Act. Above and beyond the extra wealth the Act has brought to the legal profession, it should also be remembered that many of the communist states that he probably at one time supported also had similar declarations in their systems of law. The problem was that the simple act of enumerating these rights brought with it the scope to limit and place boundaries round them, and it is clear that in the minds of many from the left that a claim of 'necessity' by the state should carry significantly more weight than I find comfortable in considering the need to abrogate such rights.

On a more practical level, there have been a few back of a fag packet calculations floating around, about the cost of such a scheme, generally coming out at about an initial £10 billion, and then £3 billion per year thereafter. This probably goes some way to explain why our government, which has abandoned any real pretence about caring about our liberties, is only luke warm on another authoratarian measure that would normally be right up it's street.

It should be pointed out that these figures are based on the cost of about £70 to process each test, and would come on top of the already spiralling costs of the ID card and National Identity Register scheme.

As someone with a background in genetics I can't really imagine there would even be any significant scope for the benefit of the scale of Sedley's scheme seeing the £70 figure drop. The processes are already highly automated, and at several key stages rely on natural processes that will only ever happen in their own sweet time, regardless of ministerial exhortations to hit targets for faster processing.

What is more likely is that the cost per sample would increase with the inevitable vast scaling up of the bureaucracy that would certainly be entailed. Furthermore, it is likely that the reliability of, and thereby the confidence in the system would fall off with potentially disastrous results. One only has to look at the well meaning project increasing cancer screening, where the inability to maintain the high quality of those involved in the process, and the delegation of skilled tasks to basic technicians has led to some tragic misdiagnoses.

All in all, this proposal needs killing more firmly, and indeed the campaign to get rid of data on innocent people needs to get underway, now that Sedley has ignited the debate.

Yes, a few guilty people will escape detection, but the number of cases where the DNA of someone previously considered innocent of any crime will be much lower than the already quite small headline total figures on the number of cases solved using any DNA evidence.

This is clearly not a good thing, but the dignity of the individual and the right to live one's life with minimum of interference from the state comes first.

As for Sedley, I could never support McCarthyite purges of those whose political past have shown remarkably bad judgement from the bench, but it important sometimes that we try to understand their past, and concern ourselves with the motivations that may lay behind unacceptable proposals carefully wrapped in a tissue of reasonable sounding words.

Update 1:00AM: Having found broad agreement from the good burghers of the village on Sedley's position, an interesting point was raised over such political interventions by senior judges.

Should, God forbid, another case regarding the retention of DNA evidence ever come before Sedley again, is there any hope whatsoever of a fair trial? He's happy for an innocent 12 year old's DNA to reside on a state database for life, so what hope is there for anyone else?

Any decent, fair minded judge would clearly have to withdraw from such a case having made such a clearly partisan position public.

The big question is whether such concepts as fairness and decency really mean anything to authoritarian scum like Sedley, and perhaps that's the biggest worry of all.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

Deranged LunaticLord Justice Sedley

It was with deep revulsion I heard the vile ramblings of Lord Justice Sedley on the subject of the DNA database. The attitudes of some whose role place our fundamental freedoms at the heart of their thinking is becoming extremely troubling to say the least, and once again raises questions over how the judiciary can enter into a public debate without the slightest semblance of accountability.

For those who missed the deranged justice's ramblings, a precis of his theory is as follows.

• DNA evidence makes it possible to convict more criminals, which is a good thing, but...


• There are a disproportionate number of black males on the database, which is a bad thing, therefore...


• Every man, woman and child in the country, including those on even the shortest of visits should be recorded, to make it 'fair' and destigmatise being on the database.

His reasoning for recording everyone's DNA is a logical absurdity of course. Pretty much anyone who gets arrested these days has a DNA sample taken and thereupon end up on the database in perpetuity. If proportionately more black males are on the database than white males this must be because more black men proportionately are being arrested; this may represent an unacceptable state of affairs or it may reflect valid police actions, but it matters not when it comes to rubbishing Sedley's perverted ideas.

As for the stigmatising aspect, yes I would agree there is a stigma attached to being on the database. If you have been convicted of a crime you deserve the stigma. If you are an innocent person against whom no case in law has been proved you do not, and you should be removed from the database. Simply making sure that every person in the country is on the database does not remove the stigma of being treated by the state as a potential criminal in the making.

What next? Going to prison stigmatises, so shall we make everyone spend a token day in prison (if we had the space) to remove that stigma so those that have served their time may have a chance for an easier fresh start?

The government has rejected the idea, however not in the most reassuring of manners, the BBC reports:

Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said there were no plans to introduce DNA profiling for everyone in the UK, but "no-one ever says never".

"We're broadly sympathetic to the thrust of what he is saying. [The idea] has logic to it, but I think he's underestimating the practical issues, logistics, civil and ethical issues that surround it," he said.

Source: BBC News

There are 'practical issues, logistics, civil and ethical issues' that surround ID cards and the National Identity Register, and the new NHS IT systems, but this has not dampened this authoritarian governments enthusiasm for treating us all as little more than state property, even if, especially in the case of the former, the benefits of their expensive schemes are limited in the extreme.

There is also an unhelpful contribution from an Association of Black Police Officers spokesman supporting Sedley's brainless position, equally devoid of any serious analysis of the situation he calls 'unacceptable'.

North of the border, the SNP led government, my attitude toward which swings from admiration to disgust on an almost daily basis, is on this subject on the side of the angels, as is often the case when it comes to individual liberties. Again, the BBC reports:

A spokesman for the Scottish Government said: "On 26 June, the justice secretary Kenny MacAskill announced a review of DNA retention in Scotland.

"In announcing the review, Mr MacAskill said that blanket retention was unacceptable in the relationship between the citizen and state.

"The review is expected to begin very shortly."

Source: BBC News

In Scotland, DNA samples taken when people are arrested must be destroyed where no conviction is obtained or no charges laid, with a very limited exception for certain violent crimes. This is a much more satisfactory system, one where people will feel happy to volunteer samples when it may be appropriate in the course of a criminal investigation, knowing that their genetic blueprint will not become state property for ever and all time.

Leaving aside the consideration of whether a true presumption of innocence can exist once a DNA match is made, rightly or wrongly with an individual, does more DNA data mean for a safer society anyway? Have speed cameras made the roads significantly safer? The evidence is equivocal at best. I'm not convinced that having yet more police officers trawling computer databases is the way we want to go, when the day to day crime that blights peoples lives needs more officers on the street to address.

Lord Justice Sedley should take a moment to look at some of the magnificent declaration of his predecessors in defending the rights of the individual against the state, and pause to consider whether he is fit to stand in their shoes. Then, perhaps if he finds himself in an empty room with a shotgun, he could do the decent thing, and make his own personal contribution to the liberty of the British people.

Update 6:00PM: I was surprised nobody had really sunk their teeth into Sedley's suggestion, but it looks like my news feed was just a little delayed, as Thunder Dragon is breathing fire. In his post he highlights the following positive statement from David Davis, the shadow home secretary:

"The erratic nature of this database means that some criminals have escaped having their DNA recorded whilst a third of those people on the database - over a million people - have never been convicted of a crime...

"It is long past time that the Government answered our calls for a Parliamentary debate about this database and to put it on a statutory basis."

Source: The Daily Telegraph

David Davis once again proves that is possible to have a tough attitude to crime, while maintaining a genuine concern for the liberties of the individual.

An Issue of Trust

Jackart, at A Very British Dude has come across a clip which highlights one of the many things going wrong with the police forceservice today:



I quite liked the exhortation in the original posting to "watch this simian thug and the slack-jawed chavette of a sidekick with her hands in her pockets, and tell me the police are the servants of the people". On further reflection though I'm not sure that monkeyboy and chavette are entirely to blame for their stupid mistake of making up fictitious law as they go along. Sadly there does seem to be a change in the attitudes of the police that goes all the way to the top, and it's not entirely surprising that some less able officers at the coalface take their queues from them.

There have been a succession of demands from the police for sweeping new powers, calls that the current government, with its penchant for control freakery, tend to be sympathetic to. Calls for extended powers of detention without trial have been made in a fairly public way, for example. I feel on these type of issues organisations like the Association of Chief Police officers have crossed the line into politics far too often, but at least the debate has been in the public domain. More insidious have been the subtle changes that were lobbied for, and incorporated at the last minute into Acts such as various Criminal Justice Acts, and legislation such as that for ID cards, once the general Media spotlight had dimmed.

A case in point would be the ability of the police to trawl the National Identity Register for fingerprints. In its original form this power was substantially restricted to only case of the direst need; by the time the act was passed most meaningful control had been removed. It followed a similar path down which the regulation of the collection of DNA samples passed some time ago. You can only take samples from those accused of serious arrestable offences? No problem, just wait a while and make nearly all offences arrestable.

Good policing depends on the trust and faith of those being policed. It's a lesson current senior members of the police service have forgotten, other than in the case of specific minority groups. The increasing crass handling of the concerns of people outside of these groups could come at a very heavy price.

When I was in my late twenties I would generally say that most of my peers generally had a great deal of respect for the police, other than the odd bit of frustration over the occasional motoring offence. A decade later, probably at an age where people in times gone by would have been putting aside any youthful distrust of the police, the same kind of reasonable people seem as a whole to have an ever increasing distrust of the service.

A few weeks ago I met a group of friends who were chatting to an off duty police officer in one of the local pubs. He was of our age, and seemed a decent enough bloke, but the feeling of 'them and us' was palpable, even in a midst of as middle a class, law abiding, middle of the road group as you are likely to find anywhere. After he left, the use of certain epithets for his profession that I've always tried to avoid became the norm.

The police need to start to see themselves as others see them, and it's the people at the top who need to open their eyes first, otherwise they will end up with more generations of the type of officer the video clip showed.