Trial Date Watch: Day 38

More than seven weeks after I had again been due to stand trial, I now no longer have a trial date, even though it is rightly a criminal offence to fail to attend one's trial.

Had I been tried, as expected, on 6th December, then, even had I been convicted, I would already have been released, since I would by now have served three months even of a wildly improbable six month sentence.

The legal persecution of me, which has been going on for over a year, was initiated only in order to deter me from seeking public office or to prevent my election to it, and its continuation is only to one or both of those ends. Amnesty International is on the case.

Until there is anything to add to it, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

Libel Watch: Day 93

The Leader of Durham County Council, Simon Henig, was so afraid that I was going to be elected to that authority, that he faked a death threat against himself and dozens of other Councillors.

Despite the complete lack of evidence, that matter is still being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of the attempt by the sacked Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, to secure a Labour seat in one or other House of Parliament.

If I am wrong, then let Henig and Saunders sue me. Until they do, then this post will appear here every day that the post is delivered.

The War On Cash

"Following last nights shutdown of Visa’s payment system across large parts of Europe, we thought this would be good time to revisit the topic of money. Cold hard cash is on the way out, following a sustained global effort to undermine its usage. Is that a good thing? Does the Visa crash exemplify just how little power the consumer wields in a world of universally digital payments? James Corbett has been running his Open Source Investigation into the “War on Cash” since 2016, here we post some of the more concerning findings. Feel free to contribute BTL if there are any further developments, or get in touch with The Corbett Report directly here."

To Stop The Exposure

Of course the hitman is still alive, although he might not be for very much longer. Meanwhile, Geoffrey Robertson writes:

As the BBC TV dramatisation of the Thorpe scandal reaches its denouement this Sunday, millions will ask: why was Jeremy Thorpe acquitted of conspiring to kill Norman Scott? Because the judge was biased in his favour; because of the skill of his barrister, George Carman; or because he was innocent? 

None of the above. He was acquitted because of the dirtiest deal in media history, made by a rightwing newspaper. The significance of this deal was revealed by a jury member in the New Statesman, which was then itself prosecuted by the Thatcher government for contempt of court.

The magazine’s victory for free speech was reversed when that government passed a law that today remains the only legacy of the Thorpe trial: creating the very British crime of refusing to cover up wrongdoing, at least when it takes place in the jury room. That, along with the verve and panache of the TV show, should now be central to our debate. 

After the acquittal came the questions “how?” and “why?” Twelve people knew the answer, and one was so dismayed at the ineptitude of the prosecution that he wanted to provide it – free of charge, to the Guardian. Reporters David Leigh and Peter Chippindale were told by a juror that all 12 were agreed there had been a conspiracy to intimidate Scott; yet they were angry that they could not convict because this crime had not been charged.

Whether it was a conspiracy to murder depended on the evidence of Thorpe’s parliamentary colleague, Peter Bessell, and the judge had told them they could not rely on his evidence because of a deal he’d struck with the Sunday Telegraph, whereby he would be paid double by the newspaper (£50,000, equivalent to £250,000 today), if Thorpe was found guilty.

The jury were annoyed, because they felt they had been obliged to acquit guilty men; they wanted to expose the incompetence of the director of public prosecutions and demand that parliament outlaw deals with witnesses of the kind the newspaper had struck with Bessell.

It was a scoop, but the Guardian’s editor, Peter Preston, had moral qualms about publishing it. The system of jury trial had determined Thorpe not guilty and it would not be seemly for the Guardian to spoil the acquittal by revealing what the jury really thought.

Preston recognised that other editors might think differently, and over at the New Statesman, editor Bruce Page thought that the public interest in publishing the secrets of the Thorpe jury room was overwhelming.

He asked me, the magazine’s lawyer, whether there was any legal danger in doing so. I advised that we publish. Almost immediately after the article, Thorpe’s Trial: How the Jury Saw It, appeared, Margaret Thatcher’s attorney general prosecuted us for contempt of court.

This was an ill-defined judge-made law by which the legal establishment could punish actions that tended to pervert justice – although the only action that had perverted justice in the Thorpe trial was that of the Sunday Telegraph.

The case was heard by Lord Widgery, the fearsome chief justice. He was, by 1980, suffering from dementia – another fact that the legal establishment covered up. He read his law books upside down, asking me several hours into the case, “Who is Mr Bruce Page?” Fortunately the colleague who covered for him was a good, principled common lawyer, who accepted my argument. The Statesman was acquitted.

At the time, the decision appeared a great victory for freedom of speech. But the government rushed through a new criminal law – section 8 of the 1981 Contempt of Court Act, still on the statute book – which threatens jurors and journalists with up to two years’ imprisonment should they disclose “any particulars of statements made, opinions expressed, arguments advanced or votes cast” in the course of jury deliberations.

It was feared that the jury system would not survive if subject to rational investigation. Section 8 has in the years since prevented exposure of miscarriages of justice, and stopped research into (for example) whether complex fraud cases are suitable for jury trial.

Americans cannot understand the British obsession with secrecy – for them, jury service is a public duty, of obvious public interest if anything goes wrong in the jury room, or even if it doesn’t. Jurors can write books about their experience. In Britain, as if for fear of letting daylight into a system that may or may not be working, we jail those who blow the whistle.

If you do jury service and your fellow jurors decide the case on the toss of a coin, or by reference to racist or homophobic comments about the defendant, you will go to prison if you tell the media. It might be acceptable to ban disclosure of the names of fellow jurors, or to prevent the identification of the trial itself unless there were a public interest in doing so (as with the Thorpe case).

But a blanket ban on jurors disclosing, or journalists publishing, details of justice miscarriages shows the length to which the British will go to stop the exposure of scandals about our beloved institutions.

Ban The Miliband

"David Miliband declines to rule out a return to British politics," Martha Kearney practically exploded with glee. As if it were up to him. As if he could just come back as and when he pleased. 

Even Roy Jenkins lost the first by-election of his attempted comeback. He fought on, but that would crush Miliband, who has the bigger ego of a smaller man.

Jenkins had been away running the European Commission, not some fairly dodgy charity for New York socialites. And he had signalled his intention to return in a Dimbleby Lecture, not in a rabble-rousing excuse for an interview at the Hay Festival.

Miliband was a joke during his brief period as Foreign Secretary a decade ago. If people remember anything about him, then it is something to do with a banana. But that has succeeded in distracting attention from his complicity in torture.

That complicity ought to preclude his adoption as a Labour candidate, and the Labour Party ought to say so in precisely those words, just as it ought to withdraw the whip from Chuka Umunna.

Brexit may or may not serve the interests that the Labour Movement exists to serve. In private, both views on that question are forcefully represented at the very heart of the Corbyn Project. But torture is flatly contrary to those interests themselves. As is the use of unpaid interns.

In any case, on 6th March, Umunna registered a donation of £45,000 towards "funding the salaries and expenses of staff working in my office". Wherever did that money go?

To return, if we must, to Miliband, this is a job for the man who did eventually remove Jenkins from the House of Commons.

This is George Galloway's "Put Up or Shut Up" moment. He needs to state, without ambiguity, that he will contest any seat that is contested by David Miliband, or else that he will never again stand for the House of Commons.

Umanna, meanwhile, looks like a job for Marc Wadsworth. Who wants a "British Obama", anyway? Although even Obama has never sided with a lynch mob. Nor is he a slave-driver.

One of the Greatest Human Rights Outrages of British History

My friend Dave Smith has been going on about this for years. And now, Conrad Landin writes:

It’s not true across the board that all publicity is good publicity. But in the case of the undercover policing scandal — or #spycops as it’s known on Twitter, it probably is. 

The deception of female activists into relationships with police spies is one of the greatest human rights outrages of British history. Yet very few are even aware this happened. The saga has attracted scandalously little coverage from the media — with the exceptions of the Morning Star and the Guardian.

So I too was shocked — albeit very pleased — to see soap chain Lush mount displays across its British stores highlighting the scandal. Shop windows are displaying police tape exclaiming “POLICE HAVE CROSSED THE LINE” alongside messages such as “#SPYCOPS INQUIRY: TRUTH OR COVER UP?” 

The inquiry was announced by then home secretary Theresa May in March 2015. As well as the covert relationships, its remit includes looking at how elite undercover units passed on intelligence to an illegal blacklist of construction workers. Thousands of union activists were denied work over decades for crimes including raising safety concerns in one of Britain’s most dangerous industries.

I’d already been covering the blacklisting saga, so the undercover policing inquiry was assigned to me as the Star’s industrial correspondent. Naively, I assumed I’d be reporting on it throughout its lifetime. In fact, when I moved to Glasgow several months ago and handed on the beat to our talented courts reporter Sam Tobin, the inquiry had yet to start hearing evidence — and it still hasn’t.

Activists who were targeted by the police spies have given the inquiry more guidance than it deserves to get it right. But its successive chairs — the late Christopher Pitchford and now John Mitting — have instead caved to the Metropolitan Police’s delay and obfuscation tactics. 

In March the spying victims walked out of an inquiry preliminary hearing. The victims’ lawyer Philippa Kaufmann QC said Mitting was “the usual white upper-middle-class elderly gentleman whose life experiences are a million miles away from those who were spied upon.” She asked Mitting to either resign or sit with an independent panel like the one that presided over the Hillsborough probe. 

The inquiry also only covers England and Wales — in spite of strong evidence that the same undercover officers being investigated also operated in Scotland and Northern Ireland. On June 23, a public meeting in Glasgow will hear calls for the Scottish government to set up its own inquiry if the Home Office continues to refuse to extend Mitting’s remit.

“We know that undercover police officers operated illegally and immorally in Scotland,” Labour MSP Neil Findlay, who is addressing the meeting and has campaigned on the issue, told me today. “Some had intimate relationships with women — which has been referred to as ‘state rape.’ Yet victims in Scotland do not have any access to the UK public inquiry, and the Scottish government have point-blank refused to have a parallel inquiry here. This is a gross injustice.”

Lush’s campaign, organised in conjunction with the inspiring Police Spies Out of Lives group, not only shines a spotlight on the scandal but addresses these serious questions about the inquiry. Most of the coverage — from the Telegraph to the Mirror via the BBC — has focused on the criticism of the cosmetics giant by a bunch of pro-police keyboard warriors.

The Twitter account @UKCopHumour, displaying a fitting lack of humour for a band of peelers, accused the chain of showing “contempt.” Others questioned why the campaign’s graphics showed half of a policeman’s helmet as well as half of a scruffier, bearded face.

Lush responded by saying that it was not “an anti-police campaign.” Rightly so. But the image of the police as respectable, benevolent guardians of civil society is key to the fact many react with sheer disbelief to the spycops revelations.

The chain may well end up dropping the displays, and that would only be a logical outcome of high-street capitalism. Lush deserves credit if it holds firm. But when I received a press notice yesterday which read as a beginners’ guide for journalists covering the debacle, I knew this had worked. There’s no soft-soaping this one: #spycops has gone mainstream.

Don't Think Fatally

"Fatal foetal abnormality." What a charming phrase. And that was what every "foetal abnormality" was. Until it wasn't. That is what every "foetal abnormality" is. Until it isn't. Likewise, every illness was terminal. Until it wasn't. Every illness is terminal. Until it isn't.

Just as the British have given popular consent in principle to legislation to withdraw from the EU, but they have certainly not, and could not have, required MPs to vote for any specific piece of such legislation, so the Irish have given popular consent in principle to legislation to permit abortion, but they have certainly not, and could not have, required TDs to vote for any specific piece of such legislation.

It is sadly true that, just as the pro-Brexit Right has no idea what to do with Britain after Brexit, and is in fact committed overall to precisely the economic project that was roundly rejected by those whose votes determined the referendum for Leave, so the right-wing opponents abortion often have little interest in either the mother or the child once the child has been born, nor in addressing the circumstances that give rise to abortion in the first place.

But just as the pro-Brexit Left does indeed have a very specific idea of what post-Brexit Britain could and should be like, in line with the views of those votes determined the referendum for Leave, so the fully pro-life position that would place anyone who held it firmly on the Left in the present climate, if only at the virulent insistence of those who speak for the Right, does indeed take the utmost interest both in the mother and in the child once the child has been born, and in addressing the circumstances that give rise to abortion in the first place.

All in all, it is no wonder that both the pro-Brexit Left and the fully pro-life position find it so difficult to obtain any kind of platform. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.