Bold But Necessary?

An absolutely vital documentary about Britain's biggest mass poisoning establishes what everyone had always suspected, that it had had to be covered up and whitewashed or no one would have bought the water companies that the Government of the day was privatising. Might there be a case for charges of corporate manslaughter here, as are being considered in relation to the Post Office scandal? Oh, the comments that I used to have to reject when I mentioned that the Post Office had had to be cut out of the Royal Mail in 2011 so that the Royal Mail could be privatised, because the City had known, even then, about Horizon. On 24 May 2024, that was confirmed in open court.

Speaking of open court, how would any backlog be eased by requiring a judge, who would otherwise have moved on to hearing the next case while the jury considered its verdict, to retire to consider and compose a verdict, and then to return and read it out, since that is what judges do? Sitting alone, this case hardened employee and personification of the same State that had brought the prosecution would not only determine your guilt, but then be able to imprison you for anything up to three years, or sometimes even more, since the common people have been declared too stupid to understand fraud cases, just as they are too stupid to control their teenagers' social media use, too stupid to control either their own or their children's sugar intake, and so stupid as to need to be controlled by means of digital ID.

And breaches of those social media, sugar, and digital ID controls would no doubt be a matter for the magistrates, who would now be empowered to lock you up for 18 months, or for two years if that were deemed beneficial to easing the backlog. Deemed by whom? At least once a fortnight, some old political, ecclesiastical or academic associate, fully aware of my circumstances, will ask whether I was "on the Bench yet", or will just proceed from the assumption that I must be. Including very recently, they have known to offer to make it happen. It never will, of course. But that does seem to be my choice, if taking nothing on due to being as sick as a dog can be so described. Still, only ill health. Nothing else, apparently. One third of the vote to decide your guilt and then send you down for 18 or even 24 months. Think on.

Who will decide whether or not a charge was "likely to lead to a sentence of more than three years"? What switch in the brain will a judge be expected to press in order to erase the evidence that that same judge would hitherto have ruled inadmissible? Far from clearing a backlog, these changes would send vast numbers of additional people, many of whom would have been found not guilty by juries, to a prison system that was already at or beyond breaking point. All to create an American-style penal servitude class, providing politicians' corporate sponsors with prison slave labour and with a barely costlier pool of the otherwise unemployable who had nominally been freed.

The slave trade financed enclosure, so there has always been One Struggle. In the city that was built on that trade, ask the families of the Hillsborough victims. They ranked with the victims of Grenfell Tower, for which there has still been no prosecution after eight years, whereas 15 people have already been arrested for manslaughter in Hong Kong. David Lammy is a disgrace to the Middle Passage.