Tuesday 16 October 2012

Such Has Been The Patient Sufferance

No one, not even Abu Hamza or Babar Ahmad, and still less Gary McKinnon, should ever be extradited from the United Kingdom to any jurisdiction with less than equal reciprocation. One Nation, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation. Inextricably bound up with which is British justice, with an equal emphasis on the British and on the justice. It is too funny for words, at least in this case which they have lost, to watch the allegedly conservative, patriotic and even Tory Israel First, America Second, Britain Nowhere brigade going bananas over this.

This is the opportunity for Ed Miliband to distinguish himself from that tendency, such as there still is of it, in his own party. Someone like Alan Johnson is in any case highly unlikely to contest the next General Election. Miliband must insist on the repeal of one-sided extradition arrangements, together with the removal of any foreign military presence from British soil, waters and airspace, and together with the complete operational independence of our Armed Forces under the Crown in Parliament, subject to no foreign command whatever.

Miliband must insist on legislation with five simple clauses. First, the restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law, and its use to repatriate agricultural policy and to restore our historic fishing rights (200 miles, or to the median line) in accordance with international law. Secondly, the requirement that, in order to have any effect in the United Kingdom, all EU law pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them. Thirdly, the requirement that British Ministers adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until such time as the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard. Fourthly, the disapplication in the United Kingdom of any ruling of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights unless confirmed by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament.

And fifthly, the disapplication in the United Kingdom of anything passed by the European Parliament but not by the majority of those MEPs certified as politically acceptable by one or more seat-taking members of the House of Commons. Thus, we would no longer subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe’s kleptomaniac nomenklatura, neoconservatives such as now run Germany and until lately ran France, people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, or Dutch ultra-Calvinists who will not have women candidates. Soon to be joined by Turkey’s Islamists, secular ultranationalists, and violent Kurdish Marxist separatists. Any provision for a referendum on EU membership must be only the sixth clause of what would therefore become this six-clause Bill, the other five clauses of which would come into effect regardless of the outcome of any such referendum.

More broadly, light sentences and lax prison discipline are both expressions of the perfectly well-founded view that large numbers of those convicted, vastly in excess of the numbers that have always existed at any given time, are in fact innocent. We need to return to a free country’s minimum requirements for conviction, above all by reversing the erosion of the right to silence and of trial by jury, and by repealing the monstrous provisions for anonymous evidence and for conviction by majority verdict. And we need to return to proper policing. Then we could and should return to proper sentencing, and to proper regimes in prison, with no suggestion that prisoners should have the vote. But only then.

We need to return to preventative policing based on foot patrols, with budgetary sanctions against recalcitrant Chief Constables. We need police forces at least no larger than at present, and subject to local democratic accountability though police authorities composed predominantly of councillors, not by means of elected sheriffs, which, like directly elected mayors, have no place in a parliamentary rather than a presidential res publica, and are wholly incompatible with the defence, restoration and extension of the powers of jurors, magistrates and parliamentarians.

We need to restore the pre-1968 committal powers of the magistracy, restore the pre-1985 prosecution powers of the police, and restore the network of police stations and police houses placing the police at the very heart of their communities. We need each offence to carry a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or of 15 years for life. And we need a single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on.

We need to abandon the existing erosion of trial by jury and of the right to silence, the existing reversals of the burden of proof, conviction by majority verdict (which, by definition, provides for conviction even where there is reasonable doubt), the admission of anonymous evidence other than from undercover police officers, conviction on anonymous evidence alone, both pre-trial convictions and pre-trial acquittals by the Crown Prosecution Service, the secrecy of the family courts, the anonymity of adult accusers in rape cases, identity cards or any thought of them, control orders or anything like them, police confiscation of assets without a conviction, stipendiary magistrates, Thatcher’s Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Civil Contingencies Act, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act, and the Official Secrets Acts.

We need to raise the minimum age for jurors at least to 21. We need to extend to the rest of the United Kingdom the successful Scottish extension of the right to serve on a jury without compromising its restriction to those with a tangible stake in society. We need to repeal the provision for “no win, no fee” litigation, while at the same time protecting, restoring and extending Legal Aid. We need the current judicially imposed arrangement on privacy to be enacted into the Statute Law, but with the burden of proof in libel actions placed on the plaintiff.

We must insist on a return to the situation whereby a Bill which ran out of parliamentary time was lost at the end of that session. On the restoration of the power of a simple majority of the House of Commons to require a General Election, whether by rejecting a motion of confidence or by approving a motion of no confidence. On the restoration of the supremacy of British over EU law. On the requirement that EU law apply in the United Kingdom only once it has passed through both Houses of Parliament exactly as if it had originated in one or other of them. On the requirement of a resolution of the House of Commons before any ruling of the European Court of Justice, or of the European Court of Human Rights, or of the Supreme Court, or pursuant to the Human Rights Act, can have any effect in the United Kingdom. And on the coroner’s inquest that has mysteriously never been held into the death of Dr David Kelly.

And there must be an extension to Scotland of the historic liberties, largely as set out above, which have never applied in that far more oligarchic country, where middle-class institutions and upper-middle-class power have been defined as the esse of national identity, a situation which has been made even worse by devolution’s weakening of the Labour Movement. While this might have been a factor contributing to the retention of more rigorous minimum qualifications for jurors in Scotland, criteria which should be applied nationwide as surely as should be the Scots Law requirement of corroboration of evidence, nevertheless it means that, while there is an automatic right to trial by jury for serious offences in Scotland, the decision on which way to proceed in an ‘each-way’ case lies with the prosecution rather than with the defence. The police have no power to caution, and they proceed entirely under the direction of the locally unaccountable Procurator Fiscal, who does not prosecute unless it is in the public interest to do so, which it is for the prosecution alone to decide and for which it does not have to give any explanation. It is extremely difficult to bring a private prosecution, far in excess of the necessary restrictions on that practice which rightly exist elsewhere. These profoundly illiberal arrangements must change.

That would be a start, anyway.

Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas, over to you. As much as anything else, what would the Daily Mail, which to its great credit has done so much in support of Gary McKinnon then say? If not “Vote Labour”, then why not? All that Blair managed was The Sun, always a floating voter. Bagging the Daily Mail would put Miliband in a different league altogether. Like winning 60 per cent of the vote in Southern villages that Labour had not contested since the 1970s or earlier, in fact. Or winning Chipping Norton. Both of which he has already pulled off.

12 comments:

  1. Valdor of the Adeptus Custodes16 October 2012 at 21:19

    "It is too funny for words, at least in this case which they have lost, to watch the allegedly conservative, patriotic and even Tory Israel First, America Second, Britain Nowhere brigade going bananas over this."

    Actually most Tories seem rather happy that he's been spared the ordeal of being sent.

    "Miliband must insist on the repeal of one-sided extradition arrangements, together with the removal of any foreign military presence from British soil, waters and airspace"

    Edward will do nothing of the sort though. Please stop deluding yourself.

    "complete operational independence of our Armed Forces under the Crown in Parliament, subject to no foreign command whatever."

    In a multi-nation army, there will always be one overall commander. Stop displaying your ignorance of military affairs.

    "Thus, we would no longer subject to the legislative will of Stalinists and Trotskyists, neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe’s kleptomaniac nomenklatura"

    Well, you have expressed your support for Serbia and other Balkan nations in the past so I would have thought you'd be quite at home with them making decisions.

    "And we need a single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on."

    More control freakism. You do fit the bill of a Socialist Catholic very well. Understand something Lindsay, there will be a liberty in this country one day and the crime of possession of drugs will no long exist.(thanks be to holy Sanguinius).

    "Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas, over to you."

    You're doing the same thing so many Tories did with Shameron. Putting faith where it is undeserved.

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  2. If you can't see that the whole point is that we shouldn't be in a multinational army, then there is no point engaging with you.

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  3. When was War Plan Red, for America to wage war on Britain, declassified? It doesn't say in your book, only that it was retained in 1939. Wikipedia says 1974, but you are not Wikipedia, you are the man himself, David Lindsay.

    What do you think that Miliband could do practically to distance himself from Treason Tendency behind him?

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  4. Yes, 1974 is right. Say it over and over again: America still had a plan on file for war against Britain (and Canada) all the way up to 1974. One of the endorsers of my book asked for that to be taken out. Friend of mine though he is, I wish now that I had had the courage to say no. It will appear in any new edition in the future.

    Just as Attlee expelled Soviet agents, who then briefly constituted themselves as a separate party on the floor of the House of Commons, so Milibnad might at least withdraw the Whip from Alan Johnson for his profession of an overriding allegiance to a foreign power. Denis MacShane seems to have them to no fewer than three: the US, the EU, and Israel.

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  5. Valdor of the Adeptus Custodes16 October 2012 at 21:42

    "If you can't see that the whole point is that we shouldn't be in a multinational army, then there is no point engaging with you."

    D-Day says hello.

    Supreme Commander? Eisenhower maybe? Schwarzkopf?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Allied_Commander
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_of_the_Unified_Armed_Forces_of_the_Warsaw_Treaty_Organization

    Perhaps now you see the point I was making.

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  6. No. Except perhaps that you have ever heard of it. Not, I admit, something that could have been taken for granted in your case.

    Today really does feel like a watershed. We really might be beginning to tell the Americans where to go. But too much of the Conservative Party will never go along with it. Whereas only a tiny, if rather noisy, faction of has-beens want to do anything else in the Labour Party these days.

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  7. D-Day? We weren't in it if you believe Hollywood, We weren't in the War at all according to American popular entertainment in a culture that does not distinguish it from factual content or serious analysis.

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  8. In 1906, Edward VII conferred the Order of Merit on two Japanese princes who had been instrumental in setting up the Imperial Army, and on the legendary Admiral Tōgō, “the Nelson of the East”. But that was before America had foisted on us the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, under which we granted her the naval parity that we had just fought a World War more than anything in order to avoid granting to any other country. America thus destroyed our naval alliance with Japan, with all that followed from that destruction.

    Up to and including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were anti-British no less than anti-Japanese acts, designed to prevent the War from instead being ended by the British re-conquest of the Empire in Asia and the Pacific. To that end, the British Pacific Fleet had been cheered into Sydney Harbour because it was not the American one that had been expected to turn up and require that Australia and New Zealand cut all trading and migration ties to Britain, abolish the monarchy, adopt American spelling, teach American rather than British history in schools, and so on. Those remain key American objectives.

    America entered both World Wars for her own reasons, and on her own strictly businesslike terms with us. Nothing wrong with that. But it gives the lie to the popular fantasy of a “special relationship”, a term which no American has ever used. America subjected us to Lend-Lease, not paid off until 29th December 2006, though paid off on that date, so that no debt from the War can any longer be said to exist. America required us to decolonise far too quickly, with disastrous consequences for numerous of the countries that we were forced to leave.

    America spent decades arming and directing our terrorist enemies (who “haven’t gone away, you know”) in order to bring about a United Ireland within NATO and the EU, up to and including more than complicity in the murders of at least three British parliamentarians, one of them a member of the Royal Family; America was funding and arming the IRA at exactly the same time as Gaddafi’s Libya was doing so, and the most uncritically pro-American Prime Minister until Tony Blair mysteriously “escaped” from what was supposedly an IRA attempt to assassinate her.

    No, not a few people in New York and Boston: it was common knowledge that NORAID was financially dependent on the CIA, as its own publications made clear. In fact, one of the places where the Cold War was hotly fought by proxy was within that subculture in Northern Ireland which still professed allegiance to the 32-County Republic of 1916. Two superpowers equally, and equally violently, opposed to the existence of the United Kingdom, fighting it out on the streets of the United Kingdom: that was the reality of the Cold War as it impacted on the United Kingdom.

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  9. Valdor of the Adeptus Custodes16 October 2012 at 21:56

    So why don't you answer the other points I raised then?

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  10. Valdor of the Adeptus Custodes16 October 2012 at 22:14

    You're joking aren't you?

    Like your ridiculous "solution" to the drugs problem? Or your lie about Tories being upset over the McKinnon case?

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  11. Well, I don't see many Labour supporters over on Coffee House or Telegraph Blogs, for example. You can imagine what the Cameron front bench's reaction would have been if a Labour Government had done this. I have not looked at the Murdoch titles and I don't intend to, but I am sure that we can all imagine.

    As for drugs, you'll see. Another idea whose time will very soon come. A Prime Minister who was a geek at school might be just what we need on this and a whole host of other issues.

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