Ali Dizaei: when bad coppers are black
Police corruption might not appear to have much in common with guitar-based rock bands. But what is beyond dispute is that both were so much better in the 1970s.
Look at the Met’s Obscene Publications Squad, for instance. Those guys would not have stooped to fit up whatever back then constituted the equivalent of a website designer for a few hundred poxy quid. Why bother with stuff like that, when they were busy trousering millions in bribes from criminals like Jimmy Humphreys, the porn king of Soho?
When Commander Ken Drury went down for eight years in 1977, Mr Justice Mars-Jones was clear that he had headed a regime of “corruption on a scale which beggars description”, and the judge was not wrong on this one.
But Ali Dizaei is to his predecessors what the Noisettes are to the Pistols or Zep. His efforts to frame Waad al Baghdadi obviously brand him a boorish alpha male little bully. But the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad in its paddy-bashing hey-day would have laughed him off as an obvious lightweight.
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Where is that compassionate Conservatism now?
David Cameron is walking a tight rope between shedding the “nasty party” image while still holding on to the nasty bastards who only vote Tory for that reason.
So it shouldn’t be too surprising that lovely wuverly fluffy compassionate Conservative David Cameron said something so boneheaded on burglary in the wake of the jailing and subsequent release of Munir Hussein.
The moment a burglar steps over your threshold, and invades your property, with all the threat that gives to you, your family and your livelihood, I think they leave their human rights outside
At the time Sunny argued that he thought the law stood fine as it was but sympathised with Conservative attempts to strengthen it in favour of householders who have their house broken into. Ultimately he supported his friend’s mantra ‘If you don’t want your ass kicked then don’t break into my house.’
Luckily for Mr Hundal, his friend and all of us there is no human right which prevents your arse getting kicked if you break into someone’s house.
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New group to monitor police brutality
contribution by Kevin Blowe
With the police adopting an increasingly confrontational and often violent approach to maintaining ‘order’ at public protests, it has increasingly become essential for protesters to: have trained legal observers present, collect information that may be helpful in court and assist activists who are arrested or need medical attention.
With little confidence in public bodies like the Independent Police Complaints Commission and to try and ensure that attention remains focused on the policing of protest, four experienced organisations have set up the Police Monitoring Network to train and collate information from ‘police monitors’ at demonstrations around the country.
Members of the network include the legal team from Climate Camp, FITwatch (who monitoring oppressive surveillance by police ‘forward intelligence’ teams), the Legal Defence and Monitoring Group (who provide legal observers at demonstrations and grew out of the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign and Poll Tax Prisoners Support Group) and Newham Monitoring Project (an east London community organisation that has supported black communities to challenge police misconduct since 1980).
They are supported by the civil liberties organisation, the Campaign against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC), and by solicitors with expertise in civil actions against the police.
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What would the Tories say about this?
Yesterday it emerged that a former city worker living in a £500,000 home in East Sussex may have killed her own two children aged 2 and 3. They were found locked in the back of her Nissan and the post-mortem said they asphyxiated.
But the main point is this. According to the Daily Mail, Mrs Donnison and her husband had just split up. In fact, “the couple’s marriage had been falling apart for a long time”, adding extra strains on the woman.
No doubt if Iain Duncan Smith’s tax break for married couples had been already in place the two would still be together. Under the Tories’ proposals, with children under 3 the Donnisons would have been entitled to a tax allowance.
And surely an extra twenty or thirty quid extra a month would have helped them patch their differences and nipped family arguments in the bud.
Yesterday I wrote about a similarly disturbing case.
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The press and impossibility of legal highs
contribution by Left Outside
Last year a girl died following allegedly consuming a mixture of Ketamine and Mephedrone.
A following coroner’s report established that there were no drugs in her system and that she died of broncho-pneumonia following a streptococcal A infection.
The reporting of this at the time should have been described as scandalously irresponsible by any sensible definition of the term.
Graffiti attack on Stoke mosque before riot
I picked this up on the local TV news tonight, but it bears repeating for anyone who hasn’t seen it:
A mosque in Stoke-on-Trent was sprayed with graffiti referring to an upcoming English Defence League rally.
Mosque administrators discovered the daubed message at 0630 GMT on Saturday and had removed it within two hours.
Staffordshire Police said a criminal damage investigation was under way into the incident in the Normacot area.
A police spokesman said: “The community haven’t reacted to it, so it hasn’t achieved what the person who did it wanted to achieve.”
Whether the perpetrator is, in fact, associated with the EDL or linked to another far right group with a vested interest in stirring up trouble is anything but clear at this point.
What is clear, however, is that a deliberate attempt was made to draw the local Muslim community into a confrontation with EDL supporters; one that, fortunately, fell flat on its face.
In praise of Alan Duncan
I have no idea yet whether Alan Duncan is an asset or a liability to the cause of penal reform, but he certainly appears to be an ally, and is the author of two cracking soundbites:
Ms Crook wrote: ‘Alan Duncan said that the slogan “prison works” was repulsively simplistic. Anyone in politics should work to improve society and there was no more useful target than offenders.’
[...]
Ms Crook added: ‘He said, “Lock ’em up is Key Stage 1 politics.”’ Key Stage 1 is the first part of the primary-school curriculum studied by children as young as five.
To which the Mail has helpfully editorialised:
Suggesting that an old-style tough Tory approach to crime is worthy of a five-year-old will infuriate the party’s grassroots activists.
Well, if they’re going to act like five-year-olds…
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Desperately Seeking Bulger
Despite the snarky title, I don’t want to spend too much time raking over the obvious parallels between Cameron’s shameless attempt to gain political capital out of the ongoing trial of two young boys for what is, by any standards, a staggeringly brutal assault on two other children of the same age, and the actions of a certain former shadow Home Secretary who pulled much the same stunt 17 years ago.
The main lesson is all this, such as it is, is that politicians will happily say almost anything if they think there’s an extra vote or two in it.
That said, Cameron’s efforts to jump on this particular bandwagon do serve to reinforce the general impression that both he and his campaign team are desperately inattentive, woefully out of touch and only casually acquainted with real world.
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Goldsmith also goes for shameless pandering
If you thought the Tories’ ‘broken society’ meme was bit dystopic, this will really have you reaching for the bottle. According to Zac Goldsmith, Conservative candidate for Richmond Park and everyone’s favourite uber-green non-dom, we are no longer living in a civilised country. Can’t wait to see that on his election posters.
In a post which implicitly supports euthanasia, Goldsmith contrasts the seemingly lenient sentence given to a convicted paedophile with a seemingly harsh sentence for a woman who ended the life of her beloved but brain damaged son.
The problem, you see, is those pesky “sanctimonious liberal commentators” who “will argue that the mark of a civilised society is its willingness to apply justice in the face of public opinion. For them, this mother is a law-breaker, just like Sweeney, and she should be punished as such”.
Now, if I was going to write about how two court cases reveal what an uncivilised country we are, I’d probably think twice before accusing anyone else of sanctimony.
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Cameron shamelessly exploits crime for political gain
The Press Association today reports:
Tory leader David Cameron will warn that Britain is in a “social recession” even deeper than its economic one as he steps up pre-election campaigning. And the Tory leader will point to the torture of two young boys as an extreme symptom of what he dubs Labour’s “moral failure” as he launches a raft of social policies.
“When parents are rewarded for splitting up, when professionals are told that it’s better to follow rules than do what they think is best, when single parents find they take home less for working more, when young people learn that it pays not to get a job, when the kind-hearted are discouraged from doing good in their community, is it any wonder our society is broken? We can’t go on like this.”
Mr Cameron will point to the brutal attack on the nine and 11-year-old boys in Edlington, South Yorkshire, by brothers aged 10 and 11 to reinforce his case.
It’s beggars belief that Cameron thinks it is right for a party leader to shamelessly exploit such a brutal crime so he can simply take cheap political swipes. Does he plan to strengthen legislation and provision for domestic violence? Nope, nothing about that in here.
Perhaps he is advocating that every single family in the country is placed under supervision so nothing like this could ever happen? It’s a possibility but the details of any policies are still vague.
Oh wait, the murder of Jamie Bulger took place under a Conservative government. Perhaps that was the start of this “social recession”? I suppose under a Tory government there will no violent crime ever. Right?
Joking about rape isn’t funny
I disagreed with a whole heap of stuff in Ellie Levenson’s “The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism” when it came out last year (see my Mswoman comments under this CiF piece for specific examples).
But apart from her odious assertion that “we do women an injustice when we say that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. It is, after all, just a penis.” top of the list was her claim, repeated in the Independent, that in some contexts so-called rape ‘jokes’ can not only be deemed to be acceptable, but they can also in fact be funny.
Because they’re not. Ever. They never have been and they never will be. They’re not funny when Ricky Gervais tells them, and they’re not funny when a Tory Councillor tells them either.
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Shooting at immigrants: an Italian tragedy
Last week the Southern Italian region of Calabria (’the toe of the boot’) became the theatre of a depressing anti-immigrant witchhunt eerily reminiscent of last century’s Ku Klux Klan violence in the US.
First off, the background. Like in most of Europe, fruit-picking is carried out by immigrants, except that in the South of Italy, those are largely underpaid and illegal – under the ruthless watch of the local mafia (n’drangheta), one of the most powerful groups of organised crime in the country.
Reports suggest that up to twenty thousand illegal immigrants in the region are paid £20 for a 12 or 14-hour working day minus a £5 ‘fee’ handed to their gangmasters for transport and “protection”.
They live in appalling conditions, amassed in rat-infested warehouses with no light and poor sanitation and with nothing to do but work and sleep – effectively becoming profit fodder for the n’drangheta. Every morning they are rounded up together, packed into rusty trucks and driven to orange or olive groves.
Last month, a report by Italian daily la Repubblica highlighted a ticking bomb, comparing the migrants’ living conditions to concentration camps. “About seven hundred of them live jam-packed into a derelict paper mill”, wrote reporter Carlo Ciavoni.
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Taking apart Conservative party policies
contribution by reader ‘Donut Hinge Party’
Some time this month everyone’s expecting David Cameron to release his manifesto. The conventional narrative, “the Tories have no policies other than the inheritance tax one,” frankly isn’t true.
A quick skip over to conservatives.com will show a vast swathe of information about policy. Admittedly, much of it is woolly thinking about encouraging this and fostering that, but there are a few hard commitments, too.
I thought it might be interesting to fisk it and see how much actually makes its way to the final manifesto.
Now, I’m no partisan, so let me say here and there; not ALL of the policies are a load of rubbish. Although most of their ‘new’ policies are already in action: ensured support of those on Incapacity Benefit, minimum tariffs for crimes, councils publishing expenses online, flexible working hours for parents.
I like their energy ideas; get farmers to use their fallow land for wind turbines and biofuels. However, these are vastly outweighed by some of the ill conceived policies writ large.
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Thoughts on the Christmas terror attempt
The attempted terrorist attack on an airliner on Christmas Day has attracted so much international press that it’s difficult to ignore. However, my thoughts are mainly in a jumble about the whole thing so rather than take time might a cogent think piece I thought I’d make a list of ‘things what occur to me’.
1. Fail to blow up a plane, you get wall to wall coverage for your cause in every nation on Earth. Actually blow up dozens or even hundreds in Pakistan, Iraq or Afghanistan and you’re lucky if you get into the inside pages once let alone over and over again. It’s obviously news but the response feels disproportionate.
2. What would the world be like if we rewarded non-violent protest with this kind of media coverage? Does the international media actually, inadvertently, make violence more attractive than democratic avenues? The media’s approach is certainly what leads Al Quaida to see airplanes as their targets of choice over other possibilities.
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The top left-wing campaign organisations of 2009
2009 was the year that left-wing campaign groups independent of the Labour party found their voice and found the Internet.
There have been notable successes for the left blogosphere but in this I want to highlight and point to the top left campaign groups that have made a mark and will continue to grab the limelight in 2010.
Compass
2009 was the year that Compass threw off its shackles as an exclusively Labour-left group and embraced the idea of positioning itself as a broader, more plural left-wing pressure group. As Gordon Brown failed to live up to their expectations, Neal Lawson realised that trying to work just within the party and push from the left was useless when most people on the left were abandoning New Labour in droves.
The Left is much bigger than Labour and that is where Compass want & need to be. They got some stick for inviting Caroline Lucas to the conference rally but I think it was an important watershed.
Compass did well to tap into the anger over bankers bonuses and I hope they continue to develop left wing populism in 2010. They were the most high-profile left-wing campaign group of 2009.
(disclosure: I’m a member but didn’t part in any of the re-positioning discussions)
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How will this terrorist attempt affect liberties?
The attempted terrorist attack by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Eve presents some major policy headaches for President Obama just when he was beginning to grapple with them.
It’s a given that airport security will tighten further to near-ridiculous levels, even though some number-crunching by blogger Nate Silver shows that a person could board 20 flights a year and still have less chance of being caught in a terrorist attack than being hit lightning.
The attempted airborne attack will instead impact other issues too. For a start it will raise complications again about trialling terrorists in civil courts rather than military courts. President Obama attracted a storm of criticism from the right when his Attorney General announced that one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – will face a civil jury in New York.
That issue is likely to come to the forefront as the trial begins. But Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s capture will also raise questions on whether he should be charged in a civil court or by a military commission as KSM initially was.
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Chris Grayling u-turns again, on home defence
It seem to have worked out for the cerebral and shy Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling, treading gingerly into the high profile area of the right to self-defence this week.
Perhaps a tiny amount of over-reach? Indeed Melanie Phillips thought Grayling had gone well over the top in ‘endorsing mob rule‘. David Blackburn of The Spectator thought it was populism at its worst, and The Times was equally unimpressed.
The Shadow Home Secretary may well have been angling for a Daily Mail headline. But Tories’ licence to kill a burglar may have been a little stark even for Grayling.
Rather predictably, all this meant that the Shadow Home Secretary in effect reversed his position within 24 hours.
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The supposed criminality of black people
There’s a paradox raised by the reaction to “Rod” Liddle’s mostly incorrect claim that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community.”
The paradox is this. When it comes to tax, the right are keen to stress that people respond to incentives. And yet when it comes to crime they seem coy about incentives, and prefer to talk about “multiculturalism“ or genes.
The paradox is especially strong because economic theory is much clearer on the link between poverty and crime than between tax rates and tax revenue.
This is because in the case of taxes, the income and substitution effects work in opposite ways. The substitution effect causes people to prefer leisure over work when taxes rise, whilst the income effect causes them to want to work more to recoup lost income. However, with crime the two work in the same direction. The income effect causes a poor person to turn to crime to raise money, whilst the substitution effect means the unemployed have more time with which to commit crime, and lower penalties – no danger of losing one‘s job – for doing so.
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Laws matter; politicians don’t
IT news site The Register has spotted the first person ever to be sent to jail for refusing to give the police the keys to their encrypted files under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.
Unsurprisingly, he’s not an extremist or a terrorist or any kind (neither white supremacist nor Islamist fundamentalist) – he’s just mentally ill with an odd relationship with society:
With a deep-seated wariness of authorities, he did not trust his interviewers. He also claims a belief in the right to silence – a belief which would later allow him to be prosecuted under RIPA Part III.
Getting Labour’s prison record wrong
Having attacked Gordon Brown personally last week and came off the worst for it, this week the Sun seems to have decided to stand on surer ground, by attacking Labour on crime.
Problem is, it can’t seem to do so without telling some whopping great lies, as yesterday’s leader shows:
Prison policy, in particular, has become a joke. Early on, Labour decided not to build more jails and instead focus on alternatives to prison and early release for prisoners.
In 1997 the average prison population was 61,470 (page 4). The population last Friday was 84,593 (DOC), a rise in just 12 years of more than 20,300. I can’t seem to find any concrete figures on just what the total number of places available in 1997 was, but ministers themselves boast that they have created over 20,000 additional places, and the Prison Reform Trust agrees, noting in this year’s Bromley report that the number of places has increased by 33% since the party came to power (page 5).
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You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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