A retrial?
No one could accuse me of being the biggest football fan. But if there is one thing that I know when I see it, then it is the bitterness of the lower middle classes in disappointed middle age.
Step forward, the Crown Prosecution Service.
Having subjected Louis Richardson to a malicious prosecution and a show trial for the crime of being young, rich and posh, it now proposes to subject Ched Evans to a second malicious prosecution and a second show trial for the crime of being young, rich and common.
The full cost of Louis's trial and of both of Evans's ought to be deducted from the pension entitlement of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
By primary legislation, if necessary.
The police have become just as bad. Wasting money chasing after dead Tory politicians and celebrities on ancient "historic child abuse" charges that couldn't possibly be proved, yet whenever an actual crime has been committed, especially in the rougher parts of town, they're nowhere to be seen, and far too busy filling out paperwork and suing each other for sexual harassment.
ReplyDeleteThey're not all middle aged either.
Leon Brittan was guilty. As are several people who are still alive. But Tories can get away with absolutely anything.
DeleteAin't that the truth? Liam Fox has just been on Question Time as if nothing ever happened. He committed treason for America and Israel while putting his adulterous male lover on the public payroll. Is it like the Clintons, nobody expects any better?
DeleteOf course Brittan was guilty, everybody always knew it. The miners used to say it in court when he was Home Secretary, it was as well known as that, but the whole thing is so big they have had to let it go.
Like the miners' strike in fact. Bercow has repeatedly refused to allow a debate on the fact we now know the miners were right all along, that is too enormous for the Establishment to contemplate.
The Hillsborough verdict is imminent. If the Police did not issue one of their "would have been arrested and charged if still alive" statements about Thatcher, then the question would arise of quite what the point of the Police was. If they did, though, then the dominoes really could start to fall.
DeleteRight in time for all those by-elections in the seats they stole, several of them in the North West.
DeleteDon't you love it when something really comes together?
DeleteNo he wasn't. In a country with presumption of innocence he was never proven guilty. The police's behaviour makes a mockery of that principle.
ReplyDeleteYou might as well say that Jack the Ripper wasn't guilty. He was never convicted, either. Brittan is now a subject for history rather than the law, and the judgement of history on him, among others, is inescapable.
DeleteI have to commend Peter Hitchens who has been invaluable in defending George Bell-and the principle of the presumption of innocence-against this disgraceful modern fashion for smearing dead people who can't defend themselves in court with ancient unprovable allegations for which there is no evidence and no witnesses.
ReplyDeleteThere is only one allegation against George Bell, and no one made it until long after his death. Everyone always knew about a staggering number of people with whom Thatcher was associated. Their proclivities even made it into mainstream, mass audience television such as House of Cards (written by a Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party) and Our Friends in the North (hardly the most Labour-friendly thing that the BBC has ever broadcast).
Delete"Everyone always knew" is not evidence in a country that believes in a presumption of innocence, due process, the requirement for the prosecution to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt and the requirement for accusers to be cross-examined by those they accuse.
ReplyDeleteImagine sending someone down for life on the admission that we don't have any actual evidence but, you know, "everyone knows." What dangerous nonsense!
The fashionable police pursuit of dead people shows that it's easy to use things like child abuse-which is by its nature very hard to prove when the alleged victims are adults and there's no corroborating evidence-in order to smear dead people.
He is dead. So this is history, not law. And common knowledge is certainly admissible as historical evidence.
DeleteThis was very common knowledge indeed. There were Private Eye jokes that presupposed universal public awareness of it, and everything.
With any luck, the Hillsborough verdict will open the floodgates where the Thatcher Government is concerned.
They are wide open in every way now that even the Tories are willing to renationalise steel. Hillsborough should be the point they lose the North for ever and that was where they went up from a hung Parliament to an overall majority.
DeleteNorthern Tories can be all right. It is what Southern-based Tory Governments do to the North that is the problem. And without a few Northern seats, there cannot be Southern-based Tory Governments.
DeleteIt's not enough evidence to say he's guilty of a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove when the victims wait till adulthood before making the allegations. With no witnesses, no video, no DNA and no nothing, there's simply no case.
ReplyDeleteChild abuse and rape-while incredibly damaging to the reputations of those accused of them-are very difficult to prove when they relate to events that happened decades ago, with only the word of the alleged victim to say they happened at all.
As I said, this is now history, not law.
DeleteAbolishing the age of consent was one of the main aims of the Thatcherites and the practised what they preached.
ReplyDelete