Ex-Soldier facing jail for handing in shotgun
From the file marked ‘sometimes the law is a complete and utter ass‘…
A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”.
Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.
The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon.
Unfortunately for Mr Clarke the weapon, which had been dumped over a fence into his garden in a black plastic bag, was a sawn-off shotgun, the possession or handling of which was made a strict liability offence with a minimum penalty of five years imprisonment by amendments to section 5 of the Firearms Act 1968 contained in the Criminal Justice Act 2003.
And so, simply by handing it in to a local police station, Paul Clarke left himself wide open to arrest, conviction and, when sentenced on December 11th, to a minimum five year prison sentence.
An alternative explanation for the likely circumstances of Clarke’s arrest is given here by ‘Brit Cop’ which seems plausible enough as an explanation of how and why Clarke finds himself in his current predicament.
It does, however, take the view the law is the law and must be obeyed without making any attempt to address the question of whether this prosecution, and likely sentence, is just and proportionate response to Clarke’s apparent offence, which appears to amount to not much more than that of being a bit of an idiot.
Jack of Kent is now covering this story in his usual incisive fashion.
But will do the Met police do something?
Friday last week the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) convened a new panel to talk about policing in the aftermath of the G20 protests fiasco.
We received three accounts of the meeting and are publishing excerpts from each.
Helen Lambert — Police State UK
“Today is all about listening to you – we’re not here to speak for the Met, nor to defend them,” said Victoria Borwick, chair of the MPA’s newly convened Civil Liberties Panel, opening this morning’s open meeting.
The scope of the meeting – an evidence gathering session on public order policing, and more specifically the G20 demonstrations in April – had been unclear to some. Many people had brought questions demanding immediate answers, but instead their concerns have been ‘noted’, with no clear idea if answers will be forthcoming.
It may seem late in the day for a data-gathering session on the policing of G20. Photos, video footage, eyewitness accounts and the Climate Camp Legal report have been publically available for months.
But did this morning achieve anything more than a collective airing of grievances? The reach of the Civil Liberties Panel remains unclear. All this evidence will inform a report on public order policing to be released at the end of this year. The Panel seems largely sympathetic to the experiences of protestors, but the whole MPA has to approve its recommendations. Even the MPA are not involved with day-to-day or disciplinary policing issues, and can only advise on the overall framework of policy. Implementing change is a slow and frustrating process, each stage of representation more distanced than the last.
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A Whiff of the Branding Iron
Perhaps the most perceptive commentary I’ve ever read on the subject of public school education came not from an educationalist or politician but from what I suppose could be called a ’socialite’. She said, in an otherwise typically fatuous interview, that the problem she had with public schoolboys was that their education gave them such a ‘gloss’ on their character that it could take ten years to realise just how stupendously thick they really were.
I’ve had my suspicions about the Tory’s Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, for some time. Since, in fact, the publication in the Telegraph of a commentary on the always fractious subject of crime statistics in which he claimed that:
The BCS is a poor measure of violent crime. It does not count homicides, rapes and multiple assaults and excludes some of the most vulnerable victims of violence, including the homeless, elderly people in care homes, students in digs and until this year children.
Much of what he had to say is, of course, untrue.
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Prof. Nutt: Death by a bar chart
News update: Two govt advisors have now resigned in protest. Others considering the same ‘en masse’
* * * * * *
I don’t suppose there are many dignified ways of being sacked by your employer, but ‘Death By Bar Chart’ must be one of the least savoury ways to go. In his lecture to the Centre for Crime & Justice Studies, Professor David Nutt included this rather inconvenient illustration of the level of harm caused by a range of dangerous substances:
As you can see, Nutt’s table had alcohol and tobacco ranked as more harmful than a whole host of intoxicants, including cannabis, LSD and ecstacy. From this little illustration, a sprawl of tabloid stories was spawned and the government’s chief adviser on drugs had unconsciously secured his own sacking.
Given his stormy relationship with the Home Office, the sacking itself had an eye-rolling inevitability to it, but when you read the careful, methodical and rather unremarkable content of Nutt’s lecture, you’re really left wondering what all the bloody fuss was about.
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They hate our prosperity
The Legatum Prosperity Index is a free market think tank which ranks 104 countries according to nine different measures of prosperity.
There are some predictable results – four of the top five countries are in Scandinavia, and Zimbabwe is last, just behind Sudan. But it is interesting to see what they say about the UK.
The Daily Mail writes on a daily basis about a UK where business is stifled by regulation, the economy is burdened by a bloated public sector, we are run by a corrupt politicial elite, terrorists and violent criminals menace the law abiding public, the traditional family is under assault, ancient freedoms have been taken away, our universities teach ‘mickey mouse degrees’ and our health service is inefficient.
The research suggests that every single one of these are right-wing myths.
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A challenge for Tom Harris MP
A while ago Tom Harris MP wrote on his blog that:
Most organisations involved in this area [working with teenage parents] will concede that it’s about lack of self-esteem and a perception that the independence that follows childbirth – havings one’s own flat and independent income through benefits, etc – is an individual’s only route out of their current situation.
I asked him whether he could cite any evidence to support this claim, and he had a lot of links about low self-esteem and correlation between socio-economic deprivation and teenage pregnancy, but nothing to support the idea that getting a flat and benefits specifically was a major reason why teenagers got pregnant.
He said that he thought he had seen some research by the Scottish Executive which supported this case, but couldn’t find it.
This is an issue which I know that Tom is very interested in, so I would like to propose a charity bet. If, by the end of this month, Tom can provide examples of five charities who concede that many teenagers get pregnant to get a flat and benefits, or three pieces of peer-reviewed academic research which find that this is a major motivation for teenage parents, then I will give ten pounds to a charity of his choice.
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Homophobia, misogyny and hypocrisy
The death of gay popstar Stephen Gately from pulmonary oedema this week was “unnatural”, not by virtue of foul play but because of his sexuality, according to frothing baghack Jan Moir of the Daily Mail .
More unnatural than the death of 38-year old Siobhan Kearney, whose former husband this week lost his appeal to be acquitted of her murder.
The judge confirmed that in 2006, Brian Kearney strangled Siobhan in her room then used a Dyson Vacuum cleaner flex as a ligature before trying to hoist her over the en-suite door in her bedroom in an attempt to make it look like a suicide. He then left the house, leaving their three-year-old son alone downstairs whilst his mother’s body slowly cooled.
More unnatural than the death of Kate Ellerbeck, who rowed with her mutually unfaithful husband and asked for a divorce, attacking him in a rage when he refused.
HSBC investment banker Neil Ellerbeck, who was this week convicted of manslaughter, told police that restrained his wife “forcefully”, pinning her to the ground with his entire 15stone bulk until she stopped “wriggling and kicking”, and left her corpse in the hallway. He then texted his lover, bought a lottery ticket, and went to pick up the couple’s ten-year-old daughter from school, telling her “Mummy’s not here because she’s gone shopping”.
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A prison scandal we uncovered
contribution by Phil Chamberlain
More than three years ago I thought I’d ask the prison service a relatively simple question. What kind of contracts do individual prisons hold with private companies for inmates to carry out work?
Not so simple apparently, as it took a ruling from the Information Commissioner to force them to answer.
This week the Guardian published the first fruits of our investigation sparked by that question, and the digging of myself and my colleague Richard Cookson.
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Megrahi vs Myra: who dies in jail?
There are prisoners, there are political prisoners and then there are politicised prisoners. In the latter category, we must place those whose crimes, real or alleged, attain such notoriety that the quotidian standards of the law are somehow suspended.
But if what you have done gets you on the front page of The Sun, forget about it. If you’re Ian Huntley or Levi Bellfield or Ipswich serial killer Steve Wright, the cry will go up that ‘life must mean life’. No home secretary – and frighteningly, we haven’t had a liberal in the post since Kenneth Clarke – is going to take the tabloid rap for letting you go.
Two prisoners to which the ‘they should die in jail’ argument has been applied are alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi and indisputably guilty Moors Murderer Myra Hindley. They are both, in their separate ways, emblematic of the popular characterisation of something called wickedness.
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Welfare handouts, idle people and Michael Portillo
On August 30, former Tory MP Michael Portillo penned a Sunday Times article carrying the headline ‘Idle young should be entitled to nothing‘, a celebration of the ideology and beliefs of controversial American libertarian Charles Murray, a bloke who gained fame in the 1980s and 1990s for his statements about “the underclass” and the alleged link between ethnicity and intelligence (see here for an overview).
Particularly surprising is the fact that the champion of such ideas is Michael Portillo, the man who, a few years ahead of David Cameron, called for a Tory makeover that would disentangle the party from the deepest right-wing morass it was stuck in. Compare in fact Portillo’s mid-90s ‘SAS speech’ with the cuddly toy TV personality currently hopping from one settee to another on Andrew Neil’s This Week.
In any case, Portillo is guilty of superficially rehashing ideas that don’t have a leg to stand on now any more than they did back in the Eighties. Notions that go back and forth like a tennis ball between Daily Mail columnists and neo-Conservative politicians to the point that they’ve grown into their default ideological background.
One phrase in particular struck me for its staggering degree of superficiality.
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Al-Megrahi and right-wing hypocrisy
Why is everyone in such a tizz over the release of Al-Megrahi? As has been documented time and time again by Private Eye, a question mark hung over his conviction anyway – and the man had cancer.
We do tend to release the terminally ill on compassionate grounds, in this country, and it probably saved the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds in continued appeals anyway – not to mention the cost of keeping the man prisoner. So what is the furore about?
Then I read these two articles by Cllr Piper. Iain Dale, Newmania and the other Tory trolls are involved; suddenly all becomes clear. Despite the Westminster government having nothing to do with the release – beyond Bill Rammell saying that he and his colleagues hoped al-Megrahi wouldn’t die in prison – the issue has become a stick with which to beat Gordon Brown.
Presumably it never occurred to the SNP, a party with no love for Labour – who are the main Opposition in Scotland, to tell London to stuff it up their jumpers. Tory blogger Iain Dale predicates his claim of pressure on the fact that three Ministers sent letters to the Scottish executive outlining the position of the UK government on the issue. Dale dismisses, of course, that in each of these letters the outlining of position is counterbalanced by acknowledgement that the matter is one for the Scottish government entirely – and so it is.
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Why Tories should actually watch The Wire
I want to focus on something specific about what The Wire achieves amidst those more general assesments. Namely, a sublime exposition of the importance of uncontrolled arbitrariness in life. The Tories would do well to pay attention.
The Wire is unambiguously engaged in the same exploration of issues of arbitrariness and luck in determining socioeconomic distributions, and the attitudes we attach to them. In particular, it brings out beautifully the way in which one’s birth – over which one has no control – determines so much.
Take, for example, the character of D’Angelo in Series 1 and 2. Most viewers probably start out disliking D’Angelo: he is a murder, a drug dealer, and a man who conducts a long-running affair behind the back of the mother of his child. As clear a cut case of a conventional “bad guy” as you could ask for? Not at all. For one of the best aspects of the first two series of The Wire is the manner in which the D’Angelo is gradually humanised to the audience: he turns out to be a man of great integrity, loyalty, intelligence and honour.
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We know Grayling’s Wire argument is ‘piffle’
Since Chris Grayling’s agenda is to get the Tory ‘broken society’ argument back up, somebody might tell David Simon (who wrote The Wire) that the correct British expression for Grayling’s speech is the rather politer piffle, as Boris Johnson previously said of his party’s broken society argument.
So it is certainly to be hoped that the Mayor of London will be pointing out why Grayling’s inaccurate stigmatising of “many parts of Britain’s cities’ is dangerous too.
Grayling’s pose is progressive – “when the Wire comes to Britain, it is the poor who suffer” – but the analysis is not: he has little to say about the causes of social breakdown.
Why are these problems greater in the United States of America? Why, in his view, are we witnesssing “cultural changes going back a generation or more”? David Willetts tells us the Conservatives are now convinced by Richard Wilkinson’s evidence about the importance of inequality in explaining the scale of social problems. There is no sense that Grayling has read it: there is not even a nod in the direction.
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Can the Met police change its stripes?
contribution by Helen
Last August, thousands of people camped out at Kingsnorth power station to protest against the continued use of coal power in the UK. There were eye-witness reports and video evidence that police abused stop and search powers, removed their badge numbers, employed sleep deprivation tactics, harassed journalists, arrested any protesters who tried to demand their legal rights, and engaged in unprovoked violence against peaceful protesters and their private property.
But the police were not meaningfully challenged by anyone with the authority to do so. In fact, it wasn’t until after events were repeated at the G20 protests in April 2009 that official questions were asked about the policing of dissent in the UK.
Early this year, cyber-liberties activist Cory Doctorow covered all this in the Guardian about Kingsnorth camp.
Ironically, the article was delayed due to an administrative error, resulting in its publication shortly after the G20 protests. It was already true, even before the same mistakes were made all over again: and in April, it could just as easily have been talking about the events earlier that month.
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The police and their tasers
The latest figures released on the use of tasers by police forces across the country are starting to look concerning. While the jump from 187 uses between October to December 2008 to 250 during January to March this year can be explained by how the Home Office allowed Chief Officers to decide when “specially-trained” units can be deployed with the weapons, it doesn’t explain why different forces are using them far more readily than others.
The most startling are the number of uses by Northumbria police, which since April 2004 has used tasers in one way or another on 704 occasions, 4 more than even the Met has. This is an astounding number, especially when compared to another force of similar size and with a similar urban environment, Merseyside, who also took part in the same trial as Northumbria and which has used them just 76 times in total.
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This is your war on drugs
On 16th February 2002, Valentina Rosendo Cantú was washing her clothes in a stream near her home in Caxitepec, Mexico, when six soldiers approached. Seemingly too busy for pleasantries, the men started barking questions at her: Who was she? Where was she from? Had she seen the people they were looking for? Did she recognise the names on the list they thrust in front of her?
Her answers weren’t good enough, so one soldier pulled a gun and threatened to shoot. Another punched her so hard that she passed out. When she came to, two men tore off her underwear and raped her, one after the other. She was sixteen years old.
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MI6 and collusion over torture
One of the more cutting criticisms made by the Joint Committee on Human Rights last week was that while the head of MI5 had no problems in talking to the media, he seemed to regard it as an unacceptable chore to have to appear in front of a few jumped-up parliamentarians.
This week the head of MI6, “Sir” John Scarlett appeared on a Radio 4 documentary into the Secret Intelligence Service, where he naturally denied that MI6 had ever so much as hurt a hair on anyone’s head, or more or less the equivalent, as Spy Blog sets out.
This would of course be the same MI6 that passed on information to the CIA regarding Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna which resulted in their arrest in Gambia and subsequent rendition to Guantanamo Bay, and indeed the same MI6 which along with MI5 interviewed Binyam Mohamed while he was being detained in Pakistan, where we now know he was being tortured.
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We need to tolerate the extremists
David Cameron packed what he himself described as ‘a really trashy novel’ for his 10-day holiday in France. By contrast, my choice to read on Brighton beach last week was rather more serious.
Ed Husain’s ‘The Islamist’ is controversial autobiographical account of the author’s involvement with the Islamist far right in Britain, and ends with a call for some of the organisations at that end of that spectrum to be subject to suppression by the state. Tony Blair is berated for offering such a pledge in 2005 and then not making good on it.
That line of thinking probably appeals to quite a wide range of opinion. It is unlikely that the English Defence League and Casuals United – the self-professed football hooligans who staged a demonstration against Muslim extremism in Birmingham on Saturday – have drafted anything resembling a detailed statement of coherent political philosophy. But no doubt they would favour a ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroon.
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Exploitation right under our noses
Last Thursday’s Newsnight was a stunning piece of investigative journalism. Hotelcare, one of the leading agencies for hotel cleaners in the country, was caught red-handed with serious exploitation of foreign workers at some of London’s top hotels.
To say that the revelations were a surprise would be on a par with feigning shock at the recent MPs’ expenses scandal. The rumours that some London hotels are paying less than the minium wage had been circulating for a while. Indeed, back in 2005 hospitality website Caterersearch was already pointing the finger at Hotelcare’s dubious employment practices but failed to cause the stir that it should have.
Taking advantage of the foreign workers’ poor grasp of English and the fact that they’re often unaware of their rights, those workers are led to believe that they would only earn the minimum wage (£5.73 an hour) if they clean two and a half rooms per hour.
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“Killed by a tawdry dream”
Amy Barnes, the young model recently murdered by her ex-boyfriend, was in fact “killed by a tawdry dream”. It’s the Daily Mail’s latest verdict, according to an article by Paul Bracchi.
“How the obsession to become a WAG“, the headline goes, “led this beautiful girl into the arms of a violent psychopath“, with the conclusion that “had she not been sucked into the tawdry world of nightclubs and footballers – she would probably have never met [her killer Ricardo Morrison]“.
Sure enough, according to our Mail churno, Amy Barnes’ Facebook memorial page is “the subplot to this tragedy”, as it contains a flurry of pictures of girls -including Amy- in revealing outfits, cleavages, panties and stilettos.
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» 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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