I merely
point out that Mark Duggan was the nephew by marriage of Dessie Noonan
of Manchester, who until his murder in 2005 was the single most
powerful gangster in these Islands.
And that the Labour Movement is not
supposed to be some middle-aged version of the SWP.
As the black, Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, has explained, that area has seen four deaths in Police custody over the last four decades.
It is possible to be opposed to gang crime and also opposed to the shooting of unarmed people by police.
ReplyDeleteBeing related to a very bad person, even being a gun toter yourself, does not entitle the police to shoot you dead when you're unarmed.
Not even if you had a magic flying sock gun that the shooter was mesemrised by in your hand long after you'd thrown it over a fence where an apparently psychic officer knew where it was before anyone had looked.
The jury decision, for we must not forget that that was what it was, is here:
ReplyDeletehttp://dugganinquest.independent.gov.uk/docs/Jurys_Determination_and_Conclusion.pdf
Even by the standards of Northern Labour right wingers, you have always been shockingly close to the police.
ReplyDeleteJuries find it hard to criticise police. Not as hard as judges and magistrates, but hard nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteIan Tomlinson's inquest jury found he was killed by PC Harwood's baton strike but the trial jury, working to the same standard of proof, found he wasn't. One of them was wrong. The former was a finding about the dead man, the latter was potentially condemning a police officer.
Tomlinson had the advantage of being white and not having several minor convictions.
Let there be an attempt to bring a criminal prosecution, then, as is in the Tomlinson case, to which this is not in fact comparable at all.
ReplyDeleteBut better not.
The black and Irish communities will do themselves enormous harm if they make this man their great cause and its "supporters", as the BBC is calling them, their vanguard.
They won't. But the people who are determined to pretend that they have are still going to be all over the media. They already are.
Merrick writes:
ReplyDelete""It is possible to be opposed to gang crime and also opposed to the shooting of unarmed people by police.""
Not if you oppose capital punishment it isn't!
We never had any armed police in Britain until we abolished capital punishment-and decided (bizarrely) that Brazil-style street executions without judge or jury were infinitely better than British-style execution after a trial with due process.
Just like the 750 people who killed themselves in the last 10 years, rather than face horribly long prison sentences for murder (and the 10 people killed by newly-released murderers in the last decade )you abolitionists have this on your conscience.
To think the pro-prison suicide brigade have the temerity to call themselves "pro-life".
You replaced execution with far more inhumane 35-year death sentences, and armed cops.
What "armed cops"? When did you last see one? These units, which have always existed, comprise a tiny proportion of the Police.
ReplyDeleteUnlike in America. Where they have capital punishment. That is a mark of a more violent society. Such as Britain was in what you probably think was some Golden Age.
It was just that violence, even very extreme violence, among or against working-class people (the huge majority of the population at the time), or against women in the home, was not deemed to matter unless someone ended up dead.
If, quite often, even then.
Anonymous - presumably, then, anyone who favours prison sentences for any crime whatsoever has the suicides of prisoners serving non-life sentences on his conscience as well.
ReplyDeleteYour humanitarian argument overlooks the reality of capital punishment as it would exist in any system committed to avoiding miscarriages of justice: a protracted appeals process, and hence decades of agonising uncertainty. That is, of course, if you suppose that executing somebody can ever be humane.
The way to prevent murderers from re-offending is not to release them. The arming of the police, as David notes, has little obvious connection with the abolition of the death penalty.
I think the right verdict was probably reached. But this has also (again) highlighted the appalling reaction from the police when these things happen. Just tell the truth.
ReplyDeleteJoshua.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that 90 British lifers have taken their own lives since 1994 (rather than face the necessarily longer jail sentences that have replaced execution) is just one of the multiplicity of unarguable reasons we should reintroduce execution.
It simply shows that those who advocate abolition of execution (and thus lifelong sentences) are not, in fact, humane at all.
Crime in general, and armed crime in particular, was astonishingly low before we did away with execution.
The death penalty was suspended in Britain in 1948, and from August 1955 to March 1957, while Parliament debated (and rejected) its abolition.
Home Office statistics show a marked leap in violent and armed offences during 1948 (when it was suspended) followed by a return to the previous level, followed by another rise in 1956-57 (when it was again suspended) followed by a fall.
Following the abolition of the British death penalty, armed crime rose enormously, and has done ever since.
Offences in which guns were actually used stood at 552 a year in 1961. By 1971, they had leapt to 1,734... by 1981, 8,067, by 1991, 12,129 (Home Office figures for England and Wales).
In 1960-61, Britain's entire prison population was just 27,000.
It has soared skywards ever since abolition and is now at over 85,000.
As for the United States, stats show armed violence in North America rose since they long since ceased to employ the death penalty (the very few states that still have it on the books today, almost never use it).
In 2010 Gerald Bordelon became the first person executed in the whole state of Louisiana (murder rate; 500 a year) since 2002!
Imagine if, say, we imprisoned murderers at the same rate that Louisiana executes them (only one imprisoned for every 4,000 murders, and only after a 20-year appeal) would we call that a serious deterrent?
We'd be laughed out of town.
But it is the post-abolition assault on civil liberties that forms another powerful reason that we should reintroduce execution.
Abolishing execution-and weakening jail sentences- has provided the necessary conditions for British Governments to abolish the requirement for unanimous jury verdicts ( US states only still require unanimous jury verdicts in capital punishment cases) and, later, the vital protection against double jeopardy.
When a conviction can send a man to his death, it is politically impossible to do away with the vital protection against double jeopardy or the need for unanimous jury decisions.
The case against the death penalty simply doesn't stand up-either on humanitarian grounds, on civil liberties grounds, or on any other grounds.