Hell Hath no Fury like Jemima Scorned

“He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathers not with me scatters abroad”, so says the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.  It’s a sentiment that finds fulsome echo in the Gospel according to Saint Julian.  You know who I’m talking about, surely you do?  It’s our very own Saint Julian Assange of Wiki; our own – worse luck – because he’s still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. 

Apparently Jemima Khan, a former acolyte, recently went to Utah’s Sundance Film Festival, the showcase for independent film makers.  She was there to see the launch of We Steal Secrets, a documentary about WikiLeaks.  Much to her chagrin, Saint Julian of Wiki denounced it without having seen it (Perhaps it came to him in a vision?).  He didn’t like the title, you see, tweeting that it was “unethical and biased...in the context of pending criminal trials.  It is the prosecution’s claim and it is false.”

Jemima was just a bit miffed.  Stealing Secrets is her baby; she executive produced it into life.  The title, as she pointed out to the Holy One, is actually an observation by Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, that it was the US government that was in the business of stealing secrets from other countries.  To this He replied “If it’s a fair film, it will be pro-Julian Assange.”  Yes, yes; always beware those whose egos have grown to third person grandeur!

Hell hath no fury like a Jemina scorned.  An executive editor of the New Statesman, she took to its pages last week in a major exercise in apostasy and iconoclasm.  Oh, how are the mighty fallen in the midst of leaking!  From a prophet of new age honesty, Julian has degenerated into an Australian version of L Ron Hubbard, he of scientology fame, who spread the gospel of abject devotion...or else. 

How the scales have fallen from the Khan eyes.  She once stood bail for Assange after he was arrested on allegations of sexual assault in 2010.  It was all a fabrication, she was convinced, all a conspiracy, a plot by the Pharisees and the Sadducees to bring down the new Christ.  Now she’s not so sure; now the Swedish women who raised accusations of sexual assault against Assange actually may be worth a hearing.  Most important of all, she concludes, there is no evidence that extradition to Sweden would automatically be followed by on onward extradition to the United States, a narrative that does not fit the Assange script at all. 

I was never a disciple, so I was wise before the event.  I always saw this man as a self-publicising, egotistical fraud, who’s only objective was the greater glory of Julian.  It amused me to see all those leftist guardians of moral rectitude and women’s rights, all the Jemima Khans of this world, lining themselves up behind their prophet.  Oh, no; he could not possibly be guilty of sex crime; the women in question were obviously lying, rape fantasies, no doubt.  Or at the most Julian’s forced and unwelcome attentions were, in the words of George Galloway, no more than “bad sexual etiquette.” 

Last summer the Saint, fleeing those who would crucify him, or send him to Sweden, took sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy.  At the time I asked, why Ecuador?  I suppose the reason might be that this banana republic – are there bananas? – is a bastion of truth, justice, human rights and panama hats. Or it might be that Rafael Correa, its leftist president, is almost as childish a narcissist as Assange himself, a little man who wants to cut a figure on a bigger stage.  

About this time Jemima asked Julian to respond to the view of the New Statesman’s legal correspondent that he was no more in danger of extradition to the US from Sweden than he was in England.  Answer came there none.  That’s not quite true; answer, of a sort, came from one Mark Stephens, speaking as Assange’s lawyer, saying that Sweden was “one of those lickspittle states which used its resources and its facilities for rendition flights" - that is, sending suspected terrorists to bad places where they got worse treatment.  Actually, says Jemima, the lickspittle state stopped rendition flights in 2006, a fact inconveniently pointed out by WikiLeaks itself.

My pity always went to the poor women who had the temerity to accuse Saint Julian of rape.  At once his wretched army of left-wing disciples got to work, naming and defaming them on the internet.  If they hadn’t been raped they were now threatened with rape.  Pictures of them were also posted with bull’s-eyes through their faces. 

As I say, Jemima now thinks there may be a case to answer.  I always thought that there was a case to answer. Assange, as I wrote last year, is fleeing from Swedish justice, O. J. Simpson style, which I take to be a measure of his innocence. Quite right, too. Sweden is notorious for its lack of democratic accountability, its biased system of law and its atrocious abuse of human rights. Then there is Correa’s Ecuador, the victim of another campaign of spite and misinformation. It’s simply not true that the country has no culture of human rights and freedom, not true that dissidents are jailed on trumped up charges, not true that journalists are arrested and TV stations shut down for daring to criticise El Presidente. Assange really would be at home there.

Jemima doesn’t regret, she writes, putting up bail for Assange.  Oh, yes, she does!  “WikiLeaks – whose mission statement was 'to produce ... a more just society ... based upon truth' – has been guilty of the same obfuscation and misinformation as those it sought to expose, while its supporters are expected to follow, unquestioningly, in blinkered, cultish devotion".  That sounds like regret to me. 

Hmm, I might be charitable enough to say that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents and so on and so forth, but I won’t!  Assange was never more than an L Ron Hubbard manqué and she was a simple-minded devotee.  I’m minded to quote Kaiser Bill, of all people.  He, in his wisdom, said that stupidity was also a gift of God, but one musn’t misuse it.  Jemima, I fear, is overdrawn at this particular bank.  

Oh, the scorpion simply can’t resist one final sting.  Jemima, the poor little rich girl, writes for the New Statesman, that ancient castle of left-wing rectitude.  This is a publication graced in the past by such lions of English letters as Cyril Connolly, H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestly and George Orwell.  Now, aside from Ms Puddle-Duck, it's a showcase for the likes of John Pilger, Will Self, Mehdi Hasan and, best of all, somebody called Laurie Penny. 

The latter is especially noteworthy.  If ever there is a museum of bad prose and political idiocy Penny Red – her stamp on the world - will be a cherished exhibit; I feel sure she will. Formerly shortlisted for the Orwell prize (poor George!), she was apparently included on a Tatler list last year of the top 100 people ‘who matter.’  My; is Penny what matters? It seems to me that she would be best placed on a list of fashion victims and ugly women.  Alas, this truly is the age of Asses, Pennies and tiresome mediocrity.  

Laughing at Dinosaurs

No Joke

The Art of Donald McGill is one of George Orwell’s most brilliant and perceptive essays.  It’s a dissertation on the naughty British seaside postcard – now I think a thing of the past -, on forms of ribald humour that most likely escape people who are not native to these islands.  Towards the end he makes the following observation;

I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of fuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal.

When the author was writing the common people may very well have responded to the pompous and the high-minded in the fashion described.  They may also have done so in their millions, but if they did they did it, by and large, privately and in isolation from one another, especially if their destinies were governed by despots. 

Now it’s different; now we have Twitter, millions of raspberries blown in the face of the latest absurdity from those formerly used to public reverence.  It’s a form of freedom that manages to transcend the limits imposed on everyday expressions of dissent.  Even those who live in authoritarian states, at least where tweeting is allowed, can express a view reasonably free from detection. 

I was thinking of this on reading about the latest absurdity by Saudi Arabia’s morality police.  Yes, the country has a morality police, bearded auxiliaries employed by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.  They are more familiarly known to Saudis as Hayaa.  In Damam on the Kingdom’s Gulf Coast they recently marched into an education exhibition featuring models of dinosaurs, turned off the lights and ordered everyone out.

The reason for this heavy-handedness is unknown.  Perhaps because it was being held in a shopping mall, one of the few places that Saudis of both sexes are able to mix publicly, something that’s bound to attract the attention of these absurd guardians of rectitude.  But no sooner had the exhibition been closed a new Arabic Twitter hashtag, @Damam-Hayaa-Closes-Dinosaur-Show, appeared.  Before long it was attracting dozens of theories, many of them hilarious, some of them ribald.

Perhaps, one went, there is a danger that people will start worshipping dinosaurs instead of God.  No, said another, it’s only a temporary measure until such time as the male and female dinosaurs have been separated.  The real problem, said a third, was that a female dinosaur had been caught in public without a male guardian. 

Some Twitters saw it in political terms – “It’s not as if we don’t see dinosaurs in newspapers and on TV in the government every day.” Another suggested that it would be better to go after the dinosaurs in gilt-trimmed cloaks, a form of dress favoured by senior sheiks.

For still more it was all about sex.  One of the exhibits depicting a dinosaur riding on the back of another was declared to be sexually suggestive, an obvious example of a Westernising influence.  “I confess”, one penitent declared, “I saw a naked dinosaur thigh and felt aroused.”  Another attempted to enlighten the Hayaa – “No, no, that long thing is a tail.” 

A great many challenged the real dinosaurs – the religious police themselves.  “They worried that people would find the dinosaurs more highly evolved than themselves.”  Another wrote, “Hello Stone Age.  We have some of your people – can you please come and collect them.” 

How true it is that laughter is the best weapon against the killjoys, the moralists and the dogmatists of this life, all those who take themselves so seriously that they simply can’t be taken seriously. 

Damming Daming

What, no job?

I began this year by writing about the rape, mutilation and murder of a young woman in Delhi. Last year I wrote about Amina Filali, a sixteen-year-old Moroccan girl who was forced to marry her rapist as a way of preserving her family’s ‘honour.’ Subject to continuing abuse, she killed herself in a particularly horrible way – she swallowed rat poison.

Rape is a dreadful crime, even when it isn’t accompanied by additional acts of brutalisation and violence. It is an act based not on desire but on hatred, on the worst forms of human depravity. Women everywhere deserve the protection of the law. Potential rapists need to understand that, if caught and convicted, they face the severest of penalties. Instead the law, as in Morocco, simply adds to the crime, often by stupid insensitivity on the part of judges and senior legal officials.

The whole world was shocked by the savagery of the Delhi attack, which saw the victim disembowelled. One would have thought that a new sobriety would have descended, at least for a time. Alas, the whole world did not include Indonesia, or at least it did not include Judge Muhammad Daming Sanusi.

Daming, a judge for twenty-four years, serves as head of the South Sumatra High Court. Earlier this month he was in Jakarta, the capital, being interviewed by the House Commission for a possible place on the country’s Supreme Court. This is clearly a serious position for serious people, and who could possibly be more serious than a senior lawyer? After all, they are the guardians and upholders of the law, the protectors of the innocent. Who could possibly be more serious than Daming? Well, the answer has to be, just about anybody.

During the course of the interview he was asked whether the death penalty in rape cases was a necessary change to the law, which at present carries a maximum sentence of twelve years imprisonment. "Both the victims and the rapist", he responded, "might have enjoyed their intercourse together, so we should think twice before handing down the death sentence." Apparently, after a moment’s silence, the panel laughed. It was all a great joke, a joke that just happened to have been made not long after an eleven-year-old girl died after being gang raped in broad daylight in the streets of Jakarta.

Unfortunately the ordinary people of the land, those without sound legal sense, or a sense of humour, failed to see the joke. Thousands took to Facebook and Twitter. The condemnation of Daming was damming. Those who previously laughed discovered, on reflection, that it wasn’t so funny after all. Politicians from the country’s main parties said that they would not support his candidature. He himself, in a contrite and tearful public statement, said that his remark was merely intended to ‘ease the tension’.

"I have three adolescent daughters", he said, ‘and one of them told me that she is very embarrassed and that she felt as if she did not know me at all." He knows her, though; he knows that she might enjoy being forced to have sex. Oh, but wait a minute; it’s never one’s own that are the subject of such observations; it’s the children of others, those who do not matter.

Commenting on his words, the Indonesian Child Protection Agency said;

Has Daming felt what it’s like to be a rape victim or a member of the victim’s family? It’s extremely inappropriate for a Supreme Court judge hopeful to joke about the suffering of people and their feelings.

The sad thing is that this is not the first time that a senior public official has been responsible for such crass insensitivity. Rape is a crime, you see, where the victim is at fault. Last year Fauzi Bowo, the governor of Jakarta, advised women against wearing ‘provocative clothes’ while using public transport just to avoid being raped. This came in the wake of a series of sexual attacks on public minivans, including that of a university student who was subsequently murdered.

Apologies, tears and family disapproval notwithstanding, it’s all too late for Daming. On Wednesday the House Commission appointed eight new justices. He received not a single vote. But the matter does not stop there. On Friday the Judicial Commission, Indonesia’s highest legal authority, recommended that he be dismissed from his existing post. Imam Ashori Saleh, the Commission’s deputy chairman, said that Daming should be removed because his rape remarks breached the judicial code of ethics. The Supreme Court now has fourteen days to decide his fate.

The fact of the matter is that he has become a political embarrassment. Personally speaking, I have little doubt that if this business had been confined to Indonesia’s old boy network of lawyers and politicians the whole thing would have passed without repercussion. It just a little levity, after all, no need to let some casual words detain us unnecessarily - Judge away, Judge Daming. Alas, the levity made an ass of the law and a laughing stock of the victims of crime. Sometimes, just sometimes, ordinary people can make a difference, if their voice is joined in common purpose.

China’s Ancien Régime

Last August, in China’s Hunan province, a woman by the name of Tang Hui was sent to a labour camp, sentenced to eighteen months‘ re-education’ for “seriously disturbing the social order and exerting a negative impact on society.”  Why, you may wonder, what was her crime?  Simply that she had repeatedly petitioned officials, saying that the sentences passed against the men who had kidnapped, raped and forced her eleven-year-old daughter into prostitution should have been more severe. 

Times have changed, even in China.  In times past Tang Hui would simply have vanished into night and fog.  In times present thousands went online to protest on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, which really is turning into the true voice of the people, protesting against the corruption and complacency of the country’s communist oligarchy.  She was released but the protests against the obvious injustice of the legal system have not gone away.

It was Mao Zedong, one of history’s most revolting tyrants, who set up China’s ‘reform through labour’ system, known as laojiao, in 1957.  It was a way of dealing with people who had offended the communist authorities, all the better since it did not involve the inconvenience of any form of due process. 

People can be locked up for four years simply on the whim of some petty official or other; in the past because they were supposedly ‘counter-revolutionaries’, in the present because they are perceived to be a nuisance.  At a conservative estimate some 160,000 are said to be languishing in laojiao labour camps. 

The paradox of Chinese communism is that it reproduces, in its own unique way, the abuses of the Ancien Régime.  Yes, indeed.  Those of you have read Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities may recall the fate of Dr. Manette, imprisoned in the Bastille by means of a lettre de cachet.  These documents, often issued blank, with a name to be added later, were used by the powerful to imprison people without trial or an opportunity for defence.  Laojiao is possible the closest thing the modern world has to lettre de cachet.  But the various Bastilles it supports are far fuller than they ever were in the good old bad old days in France. 

Things move slowly in China when they move at all; politically they move with all the urgency of a glacier.  Earlier this month a senior legal journalist claimed in a microblog that the government was getting ready to abandon the whole system.  Soon after laojiao consigned his tweets to silence.  Instead Xinhau, the official news agency, said that the government would “advance reforms” this year.  Yes, well, I think we all know exactly what that means. 

Soon after the release of Tang Hui a poll of some 20,000 internet users recorded a 98% verdict in favour of abolition.  I can’t be certain, of course, but I imagine the 2% who voted in favour are placemen and stooges of one kind or another.  No matter; for the poll was deleted, causing some to remark that it too had been sent to a labour camp. 

Tang Hui was lucky; her case attracted public attention, too many people to be sent comfortably off for ‘re-education through labour.’  But there are many thousands still languishing in camps, fellow petitioners, House-church Christians and others who have attracted the eye of disapproval.  It’s simply a way of silencing any form of dissent by those who don’t really qualify for the big Dissident label.  No, these are the petty people, the little people who can be incarcerated often just to settle a local vendetta. 

Just imagine a legal system where you can be picked up by the police because the local sheriff does not like your face.  Just imagine being used as slave labour by camp officials for their own personal profit.  Just imagine injustice.  Just imagine China.   

Your Horse is Gay!

Homosexuality is just so gay.  I could be prosecuted in England for writing that.  Why?  Because someone or other might conclude that there’s a wounding intent in my words; someone or other might feel ‘insulted’ by my – alleged – inference.  Someone or other might inform the police, who might very well arrest me for a breach of the Public Order Act.

This is just too, too absurd, I can almost hear you thinking.  No reasonable plod would consider such a thing.  A policeman’s lot may not be a happy one, but policemen, by and large are not a stupid lot.  Well, then, let me offer you a different view.

Sam Brown, an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, was out with friends celebrating the end of his exams.  Passing a mounted policeman, he asked in jocular high spirits “Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?”  What happened next was not at all gay.  Oxford’s underemployed police people arrested Brown for his ‘homophobic’ remark. 

He was handcuffed and bundled off to the local Bastille for a breach of section five of the 1986 Public Order Act, which outlaws ‘insulting words or behaviour.’  Once inside, the Keystone Cops tried to extort an £80.00 ($130) fixed penalty notice.  He quite rightly refused to pay.  Locked up overnight, he was taken to court the following day, where prosecutors – not quite as dim as Oxford’s finest – immediately dropped the case. 

It’s laughable, I know, but it actually gets worse.  Have you ever said boo to a goose?  Just be careful if you do, because a sixteen year old boy from Newcastle in the north-east of England was arrested for saying ‘woof’ to a dog.  This was within the earshot of local police.  He was fined £50 ($80) with £150 ($240) costs for ‘threatening behaviour’ a decision later overturned on appeal by a jury.  The whole silly affair was no joke on taxpayers, because it allegedly cost them £8000 ($12800).   

Another case concerns a boy who held up a placard saying “Scientology is a dangerous cult”, fair comment, in my view, unless you are a scientologist, in which case it’s an ‘insult.’  His offence was reported and he was arrested. 

It’s impossible to make this sort of thing up, and I can assure you I did not.  It would be risible, a massive laugh at the expense of a stupid and literal-minded police force if it did not present genuine dangers to free speech.  No-one likes to be insulted but in a free society no-one has a right to expect not to be insulted. 

For some time now campaigners including David Davis, a former government minister, and Rowan Atkinson, the comedian, have been urging a change in the law.  Atkinson has attacked what he calls a “creeping culture of censoriousness.”  I would go further and attack a creeping culture of mind-numbing stupidity, especially on the part of the police. 

The little light of sanity has at last broken through the fog.  Tomorrow Geoffrey Dear, a former Chief Constable who now sits in the House of Lords, the venerable branch of the British Parliament, will table a motion calling for an amendment to the Act.  This, if passed, and accepted by the government, will remove the word ‘insulting’ from the legislation.  The measure is apparently backed now by the Crown Prosecution Service.

Actually I wonder if the legislation is the problem.  It’s really just a symptom, not the disease.  The disease is stupidity coupled with the growth of thin-skinned sensitivity.  I’m sure that in the past, even in the time when the legislation was first put on the statute book, people would never have imagined that public order measures could be put to such facile use.  There have always been those who are prepared to take offence at the least thing.  For the law to give support to each and every silly ass who can’t take a joke is, quite frankly, beyond a joke.  

Publish and be Damned

The law is an ass, an idiot, so said Charles Dickens’ Mister Bumble the Beadle in Oliver Twist.  I think we can maybe refine that just a little: it’s not the law that is an ass and an idiot but Lord Justice Leveson, who last week produced his report recommending, as anticipated, statutory regulation of the press. 

His conclusion has been welcomed by other asses, not least of whom is Nick Clegg, the Limp Dumb Deputy Prime Minister, a man who could play Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with no need for the ears. 

David Cameron, now twisting on the horns of yet another dilemma, only has himself to blame for his discomfort.  There was no need, as I have said, for this expensive farce in the first place. Breaches of the law by journalists in News International should have been dealt with as breaches of the law, nothing more.  Instead we have this stupid lawyer and his equally stupid acolytes mounting a challenge to press freedom, a freedom upon which all others might be said to hang. 

What irony there is here.  Our democracy is dying anyway, hurried along to extinction by the European politburo in Brussels.  Now if Leveson has his way we can forget about Milton and Wilkes and Orwell; we can forget about all those who defended a free press as an essential adjutant to free speech.  State regulation is the beginning of the end. 

It’s gratifying to see that not all in the present government are as terminally stupid as the insufferable Corporal Clegg.  William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, warned Cameron that statutory press regulation would be warmly welcomed by Vladimir Putin and other petty tyrants around the globe.  According to one insider, Hague said that “…Britain demonstrating that we have a free press is part of our ability to say that we believe in democracy…if we announced statutory regulation this would be used by the Russians to justify all sorts of behaviour.  It is a fundamental part of British foreign policy to have a free press.”

It’s a point of view echoed by Jethro Goko of the Daily News, Zimbabwe’s biggest independent newspaper.  He said that the rest of the world looked to Britain as a model of press freedom and that the phone hacking scandal should not be used as an excuse for government interference.  If Leveson has his way it will be “manna from heaven” for the likes of Robert Mugabe and his kind.  Goko should know.  His own paper was shut down for seven years and only publishes now under state licence.

Here the Spectator, my favourite political weekly, has openly announced in the latest issue that it will not cooperate with any regulatory structure mandated by the state.  Fraser Nelson, the editor, writes that the publication will not attend meetings, pay fines or heed menaces. 

“To do so would be to betray everything The Spectator has stood for since 1828.”  So far as he is concerned Leveson is a no-brainer.  “…our archives [show] how we have been implacably opposed to the principle of state regulation of the press – not because it protects the press, but because it protects the public.” He added that the magazine has a long history of standing up to politicians who want to restrict freedom of speech.

When I think of Leveson I think of one of those antediluvian fossils, the old judges who sit on the bench regularly having to seek enlightenment as lawyers present their cases because there is some aspect of modern life that they do not understand, from Wi-Fi to iPhones.  Leveson does not understand the internet.  A mere twelve of his almost two thousand page tome is devoted to its place in modern life. 

His is a scheme that is effectively twenty years or so out of date, completely ignoring the fact that more and more people get their news from the net, not from newspapers.  The Sun pointed out the absurdity here, saying that it and other papers could be stopped from publishing stories and pictures already seen by millions online. 

A gagged press is a dead press.  With circulation already in sharp decline I’m guessing that in twenty years or so we will no longer have published newspapers, the so-called ‘qualities’ like the Guardian being the first dinosaurs into Jurassic extinction.  Let its ridiculous editor reflect on that as defends Leveson’s attempt to “ensure decent standards.” 

Publish and be damned.  Be damned to state control of the press; be damned to Lord Leveson

Ignorance is Strength

 What should happen, do you think, when a crime has been committed?  For me the answer is simple: the offenders should be brought to account; justice should be done and be seen to be done; the law should be applied.  No, that’s wrong; if the law is broken it’s far better to spend heaps of money thinking up new laws, legislating for more legislation, laying rules upon rules.  That’s the way to do it; that’s the British way.

We’re having a Public Inquiry here at the moment into the ethics of the press.  Headed by Lord Justice Leveson, it was set up in a panic by Prime Minister David Cameron last year in the wake of the News International phone hacking scandal.  Panic, I say, because it was a way of distancing himself from people with whom he was altogether too cosy. 

Oh, how we love Public Inquiries in this country.  It’s a way of ensuring that resources are well spent, not on the trivialities of life like decent public services but on truly important things like legal fees.  So far Leveson has soaked up £5.6million, that’s about $8.9million. Just think of all the golf club bashes that will cover.  

Some people think it might have been possible to short-circuit this legal circus.  After all, the various crimes of the less savoury hacks are all covered by existing law: phone hacking is illegal; prejudicing issues to be tested in the courts is illegal; publishing unfounded accusations against the innocent is covered by the law of libel.  Forget all that nonsense; let Leveson dance. 

The issue itself is unsavoury enough.  No grand principle of freedom was being defended.  The hacking hacks at News International were not looking into issues of great public interest.  There was no Woodward and Bernstein fearlessly exposing political corruption.  No; there was a lot of slimy slugs breaking into the private conversations of celebrities and crime victims, a practice that gives muckraking an altogether new meaning.  The law would have done well to follow its natural course.

Instead we have the Leveson sledgehammer bashing a few nuts; instead we are likely to get new regulators challenging the freedom of the press.  We may very well be about to see a process of even more intimidation by those powerful enough to have genuine matters of public interest hidden from the public.  In the baleful atmosphere created by Leveson it’s already happening.  I note that one journalist even received a complaint from a foreign despot, the King of Bahrain, irritated by her coverage of the death of forty of his benighted subjects in anti-government protests.

I have no interest at all in knowing that a seedy and sordid little man like Max Mosley, one of the driving forces behind the move to gag the press, likes to have his bare backside spanked by prostitutes dressed as Nazis.  But I do have an interest in defending free expression; so surely do all of us who blog and tweet, all of us journalists in a sense, all threatened by regulation and intimidation. 

Are we really going to have to re-fight battles that we thought won in ages past because of few untypical arses were interested in celebrity arses?  We may soon have occasion to feel the full truth of William Wordsworth’s poem London, 1802, which opens with some particularly memorable lines;

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. 

If Leveson follows the anticipated trajectory into statutory press regulation then the pen will indeed be stagnant.  We may have need of a new John Milton precisely because he was the first great defender of a free press.  In Areopagitica, a pamphlet published in 1644 during the height of the English Civil War, he argued for free expression and against licensing and censorship.  “Give me the liberty”, he wrote, “to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

I also call to mind John Wilkes, another champion of press freedom, who over two centuries ago argued in North Britain that “The liberty of the press is the birthright of a Briton, and is justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country.” 

But my favourite quote about press freedom is an observation by George Orwell: “Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.”  It’s a bit like two plus two equals four: if that is granted all else follows. But we may about to find that a Ministry of Truth has emerged post-Leveson, with powers of regulation and interference far in excess of anything that exists at present. 

Between Leveson and Freedom there is no third way.  David Cameron would do well to be mindful of that simple truth.  But for some Ignorance is Strength.  

Tolerating the Intolerable

The smirk on his face tells all one needs to know.  Abu Qatada, a notorious hate preacher and terrorist suspect, has been released on bail.  This follows a successful appeal against deportation to Jordan, where he stands accused of various terrorism offences. 

I’m sure you’ve heard the script before – he will not get a fair trial, say the liberal old judges sitting on the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, proving once again that an ass is far too intelligent an animal to be compared to the law.    It’s not justice denied, it’s not justice delayed; it’s justice mocked.  More than that: we as a nation are mocked, a refuge for every murderous fanatic who knows how to manipulate the system.

Apparently David Cameron, our benighted Prime Minister, shares the nation’s ‘frustration’ at this latest development.  Nick Clegg, his Deputy, says that the government is still “absolutely determined” to deport Qatada. 

Now, here’s a question for you: what does Cameron’s ‘frustration’ and Clegg’s ‘determination’ amount to?  Oh, I know, the answer is just too, too simple.  They amount to precisely nothing, because nothing is what we shall get.  Oh, sorry, that’s not true: we shall get years and years of Abu Qatada. 

I personally would send Qatada off on the next plane to Amman.  No, I don’t care about the asinine judges and I don’t care about the European Convention of Human Rights, adopted wholesale into our own legal system without consideration or reflection by Tony Blair and his toy town government.  I don’t care if the evidence to be used against Qatada in Jordon is based on confessions obtained by torture, the chief objection of the judges.  I don’t even care if he is tortured himself; I just want rid of him; I do not want this appalling man to breathe English air.  I really do not care if he breathes any air at all. 

This is too, too awful of me, don’t you agree?  Taking a more than usually pompous tone in the Telegraph yesterday, Dan Hodges writes that the calls for the immediate deportation of Qatada will rightly receive short shrift –“Once we start simply ignoring the laws of the land, Abu Qatada has won.  Nor do we want politicians muscling aside our independent judiciary.”

Frustrated Dave and Determined Nick most assuredly won’t do that, or anything else, for that matter.  Once the law of the land starts to offer shelter and protection to the enemies of the land then it is worse than useless.  Fine, I’m happy to let Qatada have the victory, just so long as he smirks about it in Jordan.  What I want is a politician less ‘frustrated’ and less ‘determined’; I want a politician with the character of Alexander, one who acts, not talks, one who has the courage to cut through the Gordian Knot and to hell with the consequences.

In essence what I want is to see the loathsome Abu Qatada smirk on the other side of his face.  As it is he is likely to spend years amongst us, all at huge public expense, smiling away at the stupidity of our judges, our law, our politicians and our country, a country that can tolerate the intolerable.  

A Warrant for Lawlessness

Rimsha Masihi is of uncertain age.  According to her parents she is only eleven.  According to a report submitted to a court in Islamabad in Pakistan she is ‘about’ fourteen.  In a way her age is irrelevant; eleven or fourteen, she is a juvenile under the law.  But that did not stop her from being held in a maximum security jail, all the while in solitary confinement.  It would be traumatic for anyone.  It was all the more traumatic for this underage girl because, according to some accounts, she has Down’s syndrome.

The present riots across much of the Islamic world over an insult to the Prophet Mohammed show how seriously people take their faith, and how seriously they react to any perceived offence.  It’s particularly serious in Pakistan, a country where the vast majority of people are Muslim, a country where blasphemy is punishable by life imprisonment or even by death. 

There is a paradox here.  Pakistan, as the Economist noted in a recent report, takes its religion seriously, yes, but it’s also a country where the Quran is routinely desecrated and the Prophet insulted.  Or at least it is judging by the number of cases brought before the courts under the blasphemy legislation. 

Rimsha is one such accused.  Vulnerable, educationally sub-normal and illiterate, she was accused of blasphemy in August after a neighbour and a local imam claimed that she had burned pages of the holy book.  Given that little girl is a Christian, part of the country’s tiny and cowed minority, the alleged offence was all the worse. 

She is the most unlikely and yet the most likely victim imaginable.  No sooner had the accusation been raised than a mob gathered outside her home in a slum district of Islamabad, threatening to burn her family to death.  The whole Christian community had to flee in terror of reprisals, as the girl was taken into custody.

The threat against Rimsha and her family was real enough.  In 2009 accusations of blasphemy against Christians living in Gojira in Punjab province saw eight people being burned alive by a mob.  More recently, a mentally disturbed Muslim man, arrested for blasphemy in the city of Bahawalpur, was dragged out of prison by a 2000-strong lynch mob and set on fire. 

In a recent article for BrooWaha detailing the plight of elderly women in Ghana accused of witchcraft (No Country for Old Women, 6 September) I made the point that there was some similarity in these cases with older forms of persecution in Europe and America.  Superstition is only part of the explanation; the rest is made up of more venal motives, often centring on personal or material factors

A similar process seems to be at work in Pakistan, where false accusations made under the blasphemy laws are used to settle personal scores or to lay claim to property.  In the case of Rimsha it gives all the appearance of pure sectarian intolerance, a convenient way of clearing out all of the local Christian families in the area where she lived.

She has now been released on bail.  Not only is the case against her weak in the extreme but her treatment also provoked an international outcry over the treatment of minorities in Pakistan.  More than that, two weeks after Rimsha was detained, Mohammad Khalid Chisti, the local imam and her chief accuser, was arrested after his deputy at the mosque claimed that he himself had secretly planted the pages of the Quran in her bag to make it seem that she had burnt them. 

But the case has acquired implications going beyond Pakistan’s borders. For some questions of innocence or guilt are clearly irrelevant.  There are those in the Muslim community prepared to speak up for Rimsha.  There are others, like a university student quoted in a recent Times report who said that the bail decision was wrong and against Islam – “As Muslims our goal should be to please God and not the US”, he said, “This decision may force people to take the law into their own hands.”  The threat could not be clearer. 

There have to be questions raised about the mentality and the morality of people who find injustice and persecution ‘pleasing to God.’  There have to be questions about a country that allows blasphemy law to be used as a tool of repression and mob violence.  It’s certainly true that there are those in the ruling Pakistan People’s Party who recognise the problem but they raise objections at their own peril.  Last year two of the party’s leaders were gunned down after criticising the law. 

In the end I think the case against Rimsha will be dropped, after the present national and international fires have damped down.  But no matter what the outcome she and her family are unlikely ever to return to their former lives.  For them there is never likely to be justice, just law that acts as a warrant for lawlessness.  

Let's Kill All the Lawyers

Henry the Sixth is probably the least memorable of Shakespeare's history cycle of plays.  It contains a particularly memorable line, though, delivered by one of the minor characters.  It comes in Part Two, Act Four, where Dick the Butcher, in responding to a speech by Jack Cade, the rebel leader, says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

You may very well know these words; a lot of people do.  I'm sure they struck a cord which the playwright's audience when it was first performed; people all too well aware of the frustrations and failures of interminable legal process, of the law's delays and of the insolence of office.  

They've crossed my mind more than once, particularly on reading about some legal idiocy or other.  They came to mind most recently on hearing William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, pontificate last month about the value of our new legal world order.  "The British government", he announced, "will redouble our calls on all states to co-operate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and apprehend those it has indicted.  There should be no hiding place or sanctuary for people indicted for crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide."

Do you think politicians ever think?  Do you think that they pause for a moment's reflection before coming out with high-sounding and meretricious nonsense?  Oh, for the days of Machiavelli, days when political life was so much simpler, when states acted in their own best interests and not out of bogus moralising claptrap.

Now, please do not jump to conclusions.  I do not for a moment approve of crimes against humanity, war crimes and acts of genocide; I do not approve of leaders and states that are capable of such things.  But there are fundamental questions here, questions that clearly have never crossed the mind of vague Hague about The Hague.  Has International Justice - I feel compelled to write that in Olympian caps - done anything to deter dictators and perpetrators of genocide?  Has it not, in fact, made matters worse?  Is it not simply - what heresy! - a charter for lawyers? 

The whole issue is addressed by Douglas Murray in the latest edition of the Spectator.  All I can say is that it's about time this was taken seriously.  There was Gaddafi, hanging on to the bitter end, at goodness knows what human cost.  There is Assad, hanging on to the bitterest of ends, at goodness knows what human cost.  What alternative is there, when the examples of Serbia's Slobodan Milošević and Liberia's Charles Taylor are there to see?  The ICC, in other words, encourages a bunker mentality. 

The sensible thing, as Murray says, would be to allow Assad to retire to a villa in Tehran or a bungalow in Vladivostok, a punishment, some might feel, befitting the crimes.  But, no; he has no hiding place: it's either swinging from a lamppost in Damascus or sitting on a bench in The Hague...indefinitely.  So, on we go - "By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good, all causes shall give way: I am in blood stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er."

The ICC has done nothing to stop genocide.  That's not really the issue.  Does it really want to stop genocide?  That is the issue.  After all, what function would it have in the absence of crimes against humanity?  Dictators and tyrants murder; that's their business.  The ICC produces genocide experts of all sorts; that's its business.  Universities are now apparently offering 'genocide degrees', so people clearly see a future in this growth industry. Murray puts it persuasively:

Such people need jobs to graduate to, and there is now a growing professional class for whom the year is always 1939, the enemy is always Nazi and the answer is always Nuremberg.  Distrustful of armies, but endlessly reliant on lawyers, our national and international institutions now swarm with people who actively need accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity to stay in work.  Surrounded as they tend to be by unfettered praise, the actual effectiveness of these bodies goes almost unquestioned.  Even to resist the claims to supernational authority of the ICC - as the US government has done - is to leave yourself open to accusations that you must be pro-genocide. 

Yes, the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.  Oops, I better be careful, least I find myself indicted in The Hague, there to suffer from interminable boredom, a punishment before than punishment that must surely qualify as cruel and unusual.   

Restraint of Appeals

Following my recent piece on the European Court of Human Right’s ruling that England should be a refuge for the huddled masses of foreign terrorist, yearning to breathe havoc, I read Following in Henry’s Footsteps?, a thought-provoking article by Stephen Cooper in the January issue of History Today.

We, as a nation, are the plaything of a supra-national power, a new Roman conglomerate, if you will. But this is not unique in our history; we have been here before, subject to the decrees and laws of an old Roman conglomerate.

David Cameron has talked in general terms about the repatriation of powers from Europe. Henry VIII, suffering from a little local marriage difficulty, did not just talk; he acted. He wanted a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his first queen, but in such matters the Vatican acted as the Supreme Court. Pope Clement VII was not inclined to go along with the royal wishes; he was not ‘simpatico to the direction of change’, as Tony Blair would doubtless express the point.

So, with the aid of Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister, the king cut the umbilical cord, the age-old link between the English and the Universal Church. He repatriated all legal powers to England in the 1533 Act of Restraint of Appeals. This had the effect of ending all appeals to Rome, allowing matters to be settled on the spot, declaring to the world that England was an empire, not subject to the rule of a foreign princes or courts. How wonderful!

The thing is, you see, up to that point England effectively had two legal systems; it had ever since the Norman Conquest. There was the common law of the land and there was canon law, the law of the Church. Two sets of laws meant two sets of courts, with the ultimate arbiter in all matters affecting canon law being the Vatican. This included all family law, issues pertaining to wills and, of course, marriage. This was the basis of Papal power in England, which by the early middle ages was considerable.

Papal interference got so bad that, in a deeply anti-clerical mood, Parliament enacted the Statute of Provisors and Praemunire in the reign of Edward III, which attempted to curb papal interference. But the two systems still remained in place until Henry’s marriage problems saw not just a break with the Roman Church but an amalgamation of law, or, if you prefer, the repatriation of law.

The Act of Restraint of Appeals had great significance in English history, far beyond offering Henry, as head on an independent English Church, a way of ending the Roman logjam. It was a declaration of political sovereignty, an Act of Parliament rather than a royal proclamation.

The danger in this usurpation of canon powers is that Rome would place the country under an interdict, as it had in the time of Innocent III, the great medieval pontiff, which put a rebellious King John firmly in his place – the papal pocket. To prevent this, the Act allowed for imprisonment of any priest who refused to perform the sacraments. More than that, the provisions of the fourteenth century Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire was brought to bear, threatening those who invoked the authority of the Pope with confiscation of property.

The Act was so successful that even during the Catholic reaction of Henry’s daughter, Mary, it was never repealed. For all her orthodoxy Mary remained Supreme Head of the Church, effectively the Pope in England. There were no more appeals to the Papal Curia, no more foreign laws.

If only we could have a new of repatriation, an Act of Restraint of Foreign Legal Stupidity, one that would serve the same purpose, one that would end the diktats of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights.

We were warned, but too few were prepared to listen, warned of the approaching flood of alien law, set to drown our own inherited traditions. In 1975 the people in this country were deceived, deliberately so. They thought they were voting for an economic union, but the small print contained so much more.

The year before the referendum on membership of what was then the European Economic Community, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, in Bulmer v Bollinger observed –“When it comes to matters with a European element the Treaty is like an incoming tide. It flows into estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back.”

History has been reversed. We are far more in thrall to the new Roman power than we ever were to the old. How I admire the audacity of Bluff King Hal. Henry! Thou should be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.

History in a Charter

There is a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indian Jones, in a bluff, threatens to blow up the Ark of the Covenant, captured by the Nazis. The bluff is called by Dr René Belloq, a French archaeologist in the pay of the Germans, who says “Yes, blow it up! Blow it back to God. All your life has been spent in search of archaeological relics. Inside the Ark are treasures beyond your wildest aspirations. You want to see it open as well as I. Indiana, we are simply passing through history. This...this is history.”

I remembered this on reading that the City of London’s copy of Magna Carta was recently returned to the Guildhall from the Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell, where it has been resting for the past five years while the strong-room in which it is normally kept was being renovated. We are simply passing through history; Magna Carta is history.

London’s copy is not one of the four extant originals signed by a reluctant King John at Runnymede in the summer of 1215. It’s a later version, authorised by Edward I, John’s grandson, in 1297, though it has the distinction of being the best preserved, the one that is consulted by Parliament when its clauses become relevant.

According to an article I read in the Times it’s valued at £20million, an entirely nominal figure because it will never be sold, could never be sold. Magna Carta is literally priceless. At the Guildhall itself it is not normally on view, being kept secure behind fire doors with an eight hour resistance. The only other danger it faces is from insects, which could consume the thirteenth century vellum. To guard against this those who care for it carry out regular ‘bug hunts’, to use their own expression.

Magna Carta itself is better known for its principles than its contents, a good bit of which is concerned with the property-rights of the thirteenth century aristocracy. Unlike, say, the American Declaration of Independence, which takes it as one of its cues, the language is dry and legalistic rather than poetic and inspirational.

Dry it may be but it is still the basis of so much that we have come to value as central to our liberties. It was the first serious attempt to limit the power of the executive, the first attempt to determine that monarchs were also subject to the law. Most important of all, though this was never the intent, it is a kind of constitution, a prototype for all that followed across the Anglo-Saxon world.

Take chapter 29, still the best known and by far the most relevant: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [deprived of property] or exiled or in any way destroyed…except by lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.” In these few words, as the historian David Starkey wrote, lies the kernel of the three great legal freedoms: the rule of law, the security of property and the right to trial by jury.

There is also something even more fundamental in elementary notions of political freedom, a balance of rights and duties. In the reissue of the Charter by Henry III in 1225 it is recorded that the liberties had been given by the crown in return for a grant of taxation. Such grants were to become the prerogative of Parliament, the basis for still further compromises and concessions.

No taxation without representation, the political battle-cry of the American Revolution, stems from the principles that Magna Carta introduced to the world. It is a document that should be cherished, one that shows the enlightenment of medieval barons compared with the thugs and tyrants who control so much of the modern world, individuals and oligarchs who are governed by no law but their own.

Justice in the European Style

Let me paint a picture for you, a sketch for a possible future. The countries of North and South America have joined together to form a more perfect, transnational union. This is not just about trade, oh, no; there are directives and ukase of one kind or another, coming from the American Union’s (AU) headquarters in, say, Mexico City.

You are at home, perhaps somewhere in the mid-West. You are a citizen of a free country, one whose legal system draws on the tradition of English common law, going all the way back to Magna Carta. The Constitution is your greatest protection, guaranteeing your civil liberties. Do not be so sure.

Listen; someone is at the door. You answer. There are two officers from the local police force, who promptly arrest you on a warrant issued in Guatemala. You are held prior to deportation. There is no point in sending for your lawyer; for you have been detained under an AU Arrest Warrant. No evidence need be produced and no court, not even the Supreme Court itself, has the power to stop its execution.

The thing is, you see, judges have to assume that all jurisdictions in the AU operate the same standards; that all are equally fair; that from Terra del Fuego to Baffin Island justice is done and seen to be done. So off you go to Guatemala, to an uncertain future, to a country with completely alien legal traditions. Your government has failed in its most fundamental duty – protecting the rights and liberties of its own citizens.

This is a fantasy, you think, some dreadful fictional dystopia. Yes, for you it is; for those of us living in the European Union it’s a reality; it has been since 2004. This Sunday Andrew Gilligan writing in the Telegraph reported on the case of Andrew Symeou, a student of previously unblemished character, arrested at his north London home in the summer of 2009 before being packed off to Greece on a charge of manslaughter.

I don’t want to go into the details of the case other than to say that the evidence against Mister Symeou looks highly suspect, confessions, that’s all, obtained by the kind of methods favoured by the Greek police, from witnesses who have since retracted their statements. But the truly shocking think is the procedures involved, the primitive and backward nature of the Greek legal system, which means that the last thing this man is getting is fair, effective and, above all, speedy justice. The worst thing of all is that he can’t even understand what’s being said in court.

What, there are no translators? Oh, yes, there are translators alright, one of whom concluded her account of a legal argument with the words “Or something like that”, another who translated Symeou’s ‘No’ as a ‘Yes.’ Badly educated and underpaid, these are the people that the accused is relying upon to make sense of the whole bewildering process.

This man has now spent almost two years in Greece, nine months in a maximum security prison and a further year unable to leave the country, waiting for some kind of justice. We are in the world of Josef K, straight out of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. After almost two years and three postponements, Andrew S (oh, why not?) finally got a chance to test the evidence against him last Thursday, when the trial finally opened. Yes, it opened and just as quickly closed again. Proceedings lasted all of forty-five minutes, before the judge adjourned, accepting an objection to the latest incompetent translator. As Greek courts seemingly come and go as they please (they don’t even sit on consecutive days), Andrew S has no idea when his nightmare may end.

"Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

The asses of the law

Earlier this month I mentioned that the European Court of Human Rights had issued ukase to the effect that prisoners in British jails should be given the right to vote contrary to a principle long established in English law (Time for an English Tea Party). This caused so much anger that Parliament recently voted to reject this undemocratic diktat by unelected judges.

The problem is that in nursing the passage of the Human Rights Act, the last government not only allowed foreigners leverage in our constitution but gave judges a direct political role, allowing them to interfere with the will of Parliament. We’ve had some truly absurd judgements on human rights, including the right of prisoners to have access to pornography.

The rejection of the vote edict was a positive first step in reasserting Parliamentary sovereignty. The danger, as I said in my previous blog, is that defiance of the law gives prisoners the technical right to begin proceedings for compensation, potentially costing the country millions and proving that crime does pay.

We are so used to judges becoming objects of derision, so used to the law as a braying ass, that it’s a refreshing surprise when one manages to do the right thing. The one in question is the High Court’s Mister Justice Langstaff, who at the end of last week not only rejected a class action brought by almost six hundred criminals under an earlier European ruling, but ordered each of them to pay £76 in costs, which I understand amounts to almost two months wages inside. So, boys and old lags, you will have to do without the snout for a while! I wonder if anyone really believes that these jail birds were ever interested in voting in the first place. No, the compensation, the easy money, is the thing.

The press here have reported the judge’s decision as a “rare victory for common sense.” But it’s more than that; for Justice Langstaff has recognised one of the core principles of our constitution, something beyond the wit of the European mafia, namely that foreign judgements should never be allowed to trump laws passed at Westminster. His ruling not only keeps thieves and murderers from having an input into our political process, it’s also a sound box in the ears to the seedy legal shysters who pushed this action in the first place.

Apparently Jean-Paul Costa, the president of the European Court of Human rights, reacted to Britain’s defiance of the Strasbourg ruling by likening the country to Greece under the rule of the colonels, which makes me think that the poor old junta must at least be worth an honourable mention. Meanwhile this laughable little man’s circus dances on, ruling that paedophiles have the right to ask that their names be removed from the sex offenders register. What next, I wonder? It would not surprise me if sending people to prison in the first place amounted to a breach of human rights.

What worries me is that, bit by bit, ruling by ruling, I’m beginning to react to the very expression ‘human rights’ with contempt, beginning to think that the whole thing is nothing beyond the latest risible notions of political correctness. But there are places in the world where there are real breaches of natural justice, where people are persecuted on the flimsiest pretext. It’s as well to remember this next time the underemployed asses in Strasbourg issue yet another piece of comic absurdity.

Time for an English Tea Party

Imagine, if you will, living in a socialist super state. Imagine your democracy as a charade; imagine your national independence as an illusion. In the end it does not really matter who you vote for or what you vote for, because policy, matters affecting the fundamental interests of your country, will be decided elsewhere, by unelected officials or by unelected judges. Imagine yourself as a citizen of the European Union.

For years we have seen our independence in England being eroded, powers taken by or freely given to the socialist oligarchy in Brussels. The previous government signed up to a Human Rights Act, allowing judges to intrude into politics, not in the way that the Supreme Court does in the United States, interpreting and upholding the Constitution, but challenging and subverting the will of Parliament, the sovereign political body in the land; in effect subverting the Constitution.

The European Court of Human Rights, a worthless set of placemen in Strasbourg, people who know nothing of the legal traditions of this country, nothing of our tradition of common law, has decreed that prisoners in British jails should be given the right to vote. It does not really matter what Parliament thinks because Parliament has no say in the matter; the people have no say in the matter.

When is enough enough? Why, when it’s far too much. Pushed and pushed back into a corner its time to turn and face the enemy. I make no apology for using that word: so far as I am concerned the European Union is the enemy, European judges are the enemy, these supine individuals whose tradition is all one of decrees, diktats and duces. I have absolute contempt for the very concept of ‘human rights’ defined by these types.

Yes, its time to turn and fight. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, rather than giving way to Strasbourg, has responded to the anger of Parliament and his party, allowing his own MPs a free vote on the issue when the matter comes before the House next week. Conservative MPs have decided that a “line has to be drawn in the sand” after decades of kow-towing to the European courts. It is, perhaps, the most important test of Parliamentary sovereignty in our recent history. The government is looking for the moral authority – that’s all it has – to go back to Strasbourg and argue that the will of Parliament should prevail.

Will it? Personally I’m not confident. This country is bound by laws that did not emerge as an act of the popular will. Power surrendered is power almost impossible to regain. Defiance of the courts means that thousands of prisoners will acquire the technical right to begin legal proceedings for compensation, thus proving beyond reasonable doubt that crime does pay in our Brave New Socialist World that has such people in it. The only way to regain out freedom is to get out of Europe. It’s time for a tea party here, time for a declaration of independence.

Rough Justice for Noriega

It’s my usual practice to carry out as much background research as I can before visiting a place. I did so for the various countries of Central America, an altogether fascinating exercise. I now know a reasonable amount about the politics and history of Panama and Costa Rica, to add to what I already knew about those of Guatemala and Honduras.

There is one story I would like to highlight here, one case I would like to highlight, that leaves me with a considerable amount of unease over the example set in the exercise of international power politics; perhaps bullying and arrogance would be better words to use. It concerns Manuel Noriega, the one-time military dictator of Panama, a man who has spent the past twenty years in jail, first in the United States and now in France.

I should say at the outset that, if you do not know anything of his life, Noriega was not a very pleasant human being. Not only was his rule in Panama brutal but he was also involved in various criminal activities, including drug smuggling, racketeering and money laundering. It was on the basis of this that he was subsequently charged and convicted. I have no doubt at all that the accusations were fair.

What was neither fair nor just was the way in which his conviction came about. There are so many questions here, unanswered questions, about America’s role in the world, about the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, about the nature of new forms of bullying imperialism.

By what right did the United States, I have to ask, invade Panama, killing an unknown number of people in the process, and then carrying off a head of state to try him under an alien jurisdiction? Where is the legality here? It seems to be an exercise in nothing more than pure power, in duplicity and in treachery, one that set a dangerous precedent for future actions. It was done because it could be done, not because it was right.

Let me sketch some background details, just to put matters in context. It should be borne in mind that Noriega was not only a leading figure in Panamanian political and military circles he was also an important source of support for US intelligence operations in the Americas. During the Regan administration he had helped channel money and arms to the Contras, the guerrillas fighting the Marxist dictatorship in Nicaragua. He was useful enough for the CIA to overlook the covert relationship he was also building up with Colombian drug cartels.

However, once these contacts became public in the late 1980s Noriega became more of an embarrassment than an asset. In 1987 the American government began a campaign to drive him from power, though why he should have been subject to such singular action remains a mystery when there were other dictators, just as venal, just as corrupt.

In December 1989 then President George Bush, a former director of the CIA, launched Operation Just Cause, in which close of thirty-thousand US troops invaded Panama, a sovereign country, a member of the United Nations. It was the biggest, most murderous ‘arrest warrant’ in history, all to bring a foreign politician and soldier before the American courts. A formidable battery of weaponry was brought to bear, including helicopter gunships and stealth bombers, against a country that had no air defences. In Panama City, El Chorillo, one of the poorest districts in the capital, was heavily bombarded. In the subsequent fires some fifteen thousand people were left homeless.

We will never know exactly how many people died in this first ‘Bush War’ though estimates go as high as ten thousand, nothing compared, I suppose, with the war of Bush fils in Iraq. But still, so many dead in what was little more than a personal vendetta is sickeningly disproportionate.

Bush’s actions had no legality whatsoever, merely part of a bullying relationship the United States had with Panama going right back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the country was created out of Colombia, specifically so that the Americans could take control of the Canal. His action was condemned by both the United Nations and the Organisation of American States, which demanded an immediate withdrawal.

Among the reasons Bush gave for the invasion was that he was “defending democracy” in Panama and “combating drug trafficking”. The odd thing is that these had never been issues in the past. When he was director of the CIA Bush had in fact increased payments to Noriega, knowing full well of his involvement in drug trafficking. Indeed after the invasion the flow of cocaine through Panama got steadily worse.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Noriega was no loss to Panama and most people were glad to see the back of him. But much anger remained over the heavy-handed use of force, about the national humiliation involved, nothing new, as I have said, in American-Panamanian relations.

The simple fact is that Noriega was client who was no longer useful. A small precedent had been set with future dreadful consequences. I simply cannot escape the conclusion that Panama’s former strongman has been subject to an appalling injustice. There was no international tribunal here, no suggestion of war crimes. In his American trial he wasn’t even allowed to raise his CIA contacts in case it “confused” the jury. If it was necessary to try him for previously condoned crimes it should have been under the law of Panama, not the United States or France.