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The statistics are shocking - and getting worse. The truth is that sexual assault in Britain has become a low-risk crime. In 1985 there was a 24 per cent conviction rate in rape trials. By 2003 it had fallen to 5 per cent. Here, in conjunction with Glamour magazine, we launch a campaign to highlight the frightening facts about rape. In this disturbing account of the way victims are treated, Miranda Sawyer argues that the judicial system has to change to protect women.

So says yesterday’s Observer without any apparent trace of irony; which is a little odd when you visit the website of Glamour magazine and notice that aside from the ubiquitous ‘celeb’ cover - Nicole Kidman (’on body hang-ups, craving intimacy and embarrassing her kids’) - you’re also invited to ‘Future-proof your (sic) SEX LIFE’, read ‘Celebrity Stress Diaries’ and ponder the burning questions of the day like ‘What will you weigh in a year?’ and ‘Can a one-night stand become (sic) The One?’. In other words just your average celebrity-obsessed women’s ‘lifestyle’ magazine whose strapline - “Celebrity chat, Hollywood glitz, beauty news and gossip galore - make this your new best friend” - really says it all.

The trigger for all this is the release of statistics for the offence of rape for 2003 about which as the article helpfully suggests that you should…

…be prepared for some shocking statistics. It’s estimated that in 2003 about 50,000 women were raped in the UK, although just 11,867 went to the police. Of those cases, 1,649 went to trial but, appallingly, only 629 resulted in successful prosecutions. If you reported a rape in 2003 you had a mere 5.3 per cent chance of getting your rapist convicted. Worse, the conviction rate for rape in the UK has been sliding for years. In the 1970s you had a 33 per cent chance of getting a conviction. In 1985 it was 24 per cent. The 2003 figures, the most recent, are the worst ever. The frightening fact is that, in 21st century Britain, rape is a low-risk crime.

…before going on to trot the same old hackneyed analysis we see every year after the publication of the latest crime statistics, the one where women are too stupid to realise they’ve been raped -

The experience of Glamour magazine readers bears this out. Louise was 17 when she was raped by a friendly, good-looking man she met on a girls’ night out in Wales. They chatted in a night club, and when they bumped into each other at the end of the evening he invited her and her mates to a party. Louise’s friends decided to get a cab home, and when Louise got to the ‘party’ she found just the man there. He raped her anally and vaginally, leaving her badly injured. Yet she found it hard to see what had happened to her as rape - ‘I felt I must have done something wrong’ - and didn’t report it to the police until days later.

And all because we have an ‘old-fashioned’ idea of what rape is…

The main problem, say experts, is our old-fashioned idea of what rape is. Professor Liz Kelly, who co-authored the report A Gap Or A Chasm? Attrition In Reported Rape Cases that revealed the low conviction rates, says: ‘Almost everyone still believes a stereotype of what I would call “real rape”: being attacked by a stranger, outside, who uses a weapon, plus the victim resists and reports it immediately to the police. But unfortunately many rapes don’t fall into that category.’ Statistics show most rapists are known to their victim, and can even be a current or ex-boyfriend. Often, they are acquaintances: a workmate or someone met at a club or party.

But because we find it hard to believe that a rapist can appear normal - handsome, even - or can hold down a responsible job, have a girlfriend or a family, we’re reluctant to believe a woman who says she has been raped by anyone other than a monster. Yet the 2005 report admits that ‘rape is a much more frequent and mundane crime than is conventionally believed’

Note the sweeping generalisation ‘Almost everyone still believes a stereotype of what I would call…’

…my pet theory; the one that pays a nice healthy research grant and sets me up as ‘rent-a-quote’ for magazines which would otherwise be stuck for anything to write about now its completely obvious that Angelina’s shagging Brad.

All rather strange as this ‘almost everyone’ doesn’t seem to include anyone I know.

One might also point out that Louise’s reaction, which is quoted specifically to support this persistent ‘real rape’ trope is more readily and realistically accounted for by the trauma of her experience. Its not that she didn’t expect the guy she met in the club to be a rapist so much that she didn’t expect to be raped at all and I doubt very much that before she was raped Louise would have made any particular distinction between the ‘classic’ stalker-in-the-alley type rapist and Mr ‘Having-a-party-at-my-place’ from the club - perhaps the worst you could say of her is that, like most people, she had a tendency to see crime as something that happened to other people and not herself, which is something that ‘almost everyone’ subscribes to before it happens to them, no matter what kind of crime we’re talking about.

Of course this is a launchpad for a general moan of about the legal system and its perceived failings when to comes to dealing with rape, so we’re told that:

Because of our mistaken beliefs about who rapists are, it is very difficult to get juries to convict. ‘When jurors are presented with a clean-cut young man in a nice suit, they can’t connect that with their idea of a rapist, so they believe him rather than the victim,’ says writer and campaigner Julie Bindel. ‘And if the victim was drunk, or dressed provocatively, or has had a healthy sex life, the chances of conviction drop even further.’

And, of course:

The problem is that, if the Crown Prosecution Service doesn’t want to pursue a rape case, there’s nothing practical a victim can do about it, as Jill found. CPS lawyers will take a case to court only if they believe there is a 51 per cent chance of winning.

Prosecution lawyers, too, may have the ‘real rape’ stereotype in their heads. ‘If the victim is a bit rough, was drunk and had a busy sex life, and the alleged rapist has a good job and looks respectable, they’ll say the case hasn’t a chance,’ says Bindel. One CPS lawyer told me of a 16-year-old girl who had agreed to have sex with one man but was then raped by his friends: the CPS didn’t take the case on because ’she’d had sex with the first one outside. She was the kind of girl who’d have sex in the bushes and that wouldn’t have played well in court’. Which begs the questions: where else can 16-year-olds have sex? And why does having sex once mean you have to have it again when you don’t want to?

Now I’m not going to deny that these kind of things don’t happen - they do and the article is quite right to point out that the Police are sometimes - and some might argue, often - unhelpful and even disinclined to investigate an allegation just as its it’s right to point out that the vast majority of cases are dropped before ever getting anywhere near a court, the statistics alone bear that out.

Where, however, the article gets it wrong, is that for it argues that the legal system is loaded against rape victims it fails to explain the real reason why, preferring instead to meander off into vague allusion of sexism and the male domination of the legal profession in the vain hope that they might something they can do to redress the balance.

And they’re absolutely wrong.

Why the system is loaded against women has nothing really to do with attitudes to rape - these are merely symptoms of a far more deep-seated and near insoluble problem which has to be acknowledged if we’re to make any real progress on this issue as a society. The real reason lies in a combination of the nature of the offence itself, and how it interacts with the fundamental basis of our legal system, the principle that you are innocent until proven guilty ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.

And therein lies the problem.

The majority of rape cases follow pretty much the same pattern: the assailant in known, even if only briefly, to the victim; the rape takes place with no witnesses and the degree to which physical force is used is relatively limited - the may be no actual violence if the threat of violence is sufficient to force the victim into compliance but if there is then forensic evidence left behind is often unrevealing, showing only that sex took place without offering anything that could reasonable distinguish between non-consensual rape and consensual ‘rough sex’.

That’s why the majority of rape cases that are reported never reach court, simply because when whatever evidence there is has been gathered and assessed, prosecutors are left with a case based solely on the victim’s word against that of their alleged assailant, leaving the assailant with a near unshakeable defence that the victim ‘consented’.

Remember in such cases, which make up the majority of those reported to the CPS, the prosecution is being asked to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the victim did not consent without any corroborating evidence to back up the story - the very best they could hope for is to put up a convincing character witness or two and hope to sway the jury by proving the victim to be of ‘good character’ but even that is of little or no value if the victim can be shown to have voluntarily placed themselves in the situation in which they were then raped - if she went back to his place then they may have intended to have sex with the guy and that ‘may have’ is sufficient to create reasonable doubt.

That’s also why it impossible to get away from the cross-examination of victims on their personal history background - if a case is predicated solely on the issue of consent then obvious defence in such a case is to try to show that its reasonable to believe that the victim may be the kind of person who would consent, based on their past actions and behaviour, or that its reasonable to believe that extenuating circumstances, such as the amount of alcohol consumed, might lead them to consent to sex even if that was generally out of character.

In such cases, placing restrictions on the right of cross-examination is actually a waste of time - you might get a few more convictions were defence lawyers banned outright from bringing the victims personal history into things, leaving juries to form an impression solely on a value judgement between the two people in front of them, but any such successes would be short-lived as any case which relies on such a judgement without evidence to corroborate the victims claim that she did not consent to having sex would inevitably get thrown out on appeal for lack of supporting evidence. Juries may well be swayed by courtroom oratory and how the victim ’scrubs up’ in court compared to their alleged assailant; Judges hearing cases on appeal without a jury aren’t - the look at the facts and if the facts don’t support a guilty verdict beyond reasonable doubt then out goes the case, and off the assailant goes having been fully exonerated and with a tidy bit of ‘compo’ in their back pocket for having been ‘wrongfully’ convicted.

In the meantime, the victim is left with nothing, not even the satisfaction that justice in done - if fact they have less than nothing as, in all but the most egregious cases, double jeopardy will mean that assailant cannot be tried against for their attack on the victim.

While it is the case that, as the article suggests, specialist rape centres and, in particular, special prosecutors can make a modest difference to conviction rates in rape trials the reality is that any such gains are going to be modest - a drop in the ocean given the estimated size of the problem at present.

I hate to be pessimistic but campaigns such as this one invariably offer little more than a series of false hopes. While we should certainly be funding specialist rape centres properly, making full use of special prosecutors who can really make the most of what little forensic evidence they usually is in these cases, and while we should do something to try to limit the trauma of cross-examination - personally I’d like to see the victims in rape cases permitted their own advocate and not just have to rely on the prosecutor, who’s mind will invariably be on matters other than the how the victim feels - it has to be realised that there are serious limitations on how effective suhc measures can or will ever be.

We have be realistic here and understand that nothing short of a reversal of the single most fundamental principle of the British system of justice, that you are innocent until proven guilty, will tip the balance in favour of the victim in rape cases and that is something I doubt any of us would willingly accept.

Tackling rape effectively means far more than simply tinkering with the legal system to get a few more convictions along the way - as Antonia Bance points out (see her post of 12/08/2005 ‘Women Can’t Stop Rape - sorry, for some reason I can’t link to it) in covering pretty much all the ground that Miranda Sawyer covers but with far more common sense and realism than anything that Glamour Magazine seem capable of offering. If only she were writing for this camapaign then maybe we might actually get somewhere.

Well we now have a list of the Safety Elephant’s plans for deporting foreigners alleged to have links with or be supporting terrorism - which, as usual, makes for pretty depressing reading: long on knee jerk rhetoric and extremely short on having thought things through properly as usual.

New grounds for deporting and excluding people from the UK - including fostering hatred or, advocating and justifying violence to further beliefs. The powers will cover statements already on record.

What, all statements on record?

How far back will this go?

Should anyone the UK who was a member of the ANC back in the days of apartheid be packing their bags?

As for the business deporting people for ‘advocating and justifying violence to further beliefs’, how far does that extend - would, for example, Iraqi dissidents who openly supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by military means get caught up in this.

Indeed how would this affect other dissidents from countries we would general consider to be in the hands of a dictatorial regmime who might call for, say, a popular revolution, or support a particular side in a civil war?

Are we going to be deporting them as well?

Agreements with other countries, such as Jordan, to ensure people can be deported to their nations of origin without being tortured or ill-treated

Such statement, as has already been pointed out, are completely worthless without independent monitoring and verification that these countries abide by such agreements - not that I suppose that bothers the Safety Elephant much as once someone is out of the country they’re safely out of sight and out of mind.

Of course, should someone who is deported under such an agreement and who is then tortured in breach of the agreement, manage to get back into the EU and in a position to bring a case before the European Court of Human Rights at any point in future then we’re going to be in deep shit over ECHR article 3.

Amend human rights laws, if necessary, to prevent legal obstacles to new deportation rules

I’ve already pointed out before that the only ‘obstacles’ to deportations in Human Rights law are article 6 - the right to a fair hearing - and article 3 - which prohbits torture and, by extension under the ruling in Chahal v The United Kingdom, the deportation of foreigners where it is likely to put them at risk of torture.

As was the case with the internment of alleged ‘terror suspects’ in Belmarsh, which was thrown out by the High Court, the real issue here is that the anti-discrimination clause in ECHR and HRA prohibits foreigners from being treated differently to UK citizens, other than for explicit provisions within the context of ‘freedom of thought, relgion and conscience’ which do allow for reasonable restrictions on the political activities of foreign nationals.

This means that for such changes to be legal they have to apply equally to UK citizens as well as foreign nationals - so its not just their rights on the line, but ours as well.

Home secretary automatically to consider deporting any foreigner involved in listed extremist bookshops, centres, organisations and websites

What? Just for working in a fucking bookshop?

I really do dislike this idea as somewhere in the peripheral vision I can’t help seeing the faint image of bonfires of burning books.

Make justifying or glorifying terrorism anywhere an offence

Again, same problem as before.

Where does this leave dissidents from countries that we would generally agree are under despotic rule and are we now saying that such dissidents are no longer permitted to comment on anything like a civil war in their homeland?

Also ‘justifying’ and ‘glorifying’ are two totally different things.

For example an academic could quite easily write a detailed analysis of, say, the creation of the Jewish State or the Mau Mau rebellion, which would end up justifying terrorism, as in both cases it certainly played a role in subsequent political events which lead to each becoming an independent nation state.

Would an publishing such an analysis of become a criminal offence under this new law?

Automatically refuse asylum to anyone with anything to do with terrorism anywhere

Oh well, that’s Pinochet excluded then so it can’t be all bad…

Consult on setting a maximum time limit for extraditions to other countries - Tony Blair has said it was unacceptable that Rashid Ramda, wanted for the Paris Metro bombing 10 years ago, was still in the UK

This sounds reasonable until you check up and find that the reason he hasn’t been extradited is that both the British and French government’s have failed to put up sufficient evidence to warrant his extradition.

It appears the sole piece of evidence linking Ramda to the bombing is a confession, naming Ramda, from one of the two men who were convicted of the bombing and who are now serving 10 years in a French prison.

However reports seem to suggest that Ramda’s treatement and safety may be at issue if extradited, hinting that this confession may have been beaten of the guy who gave it.

Not such a straightforward matter now, is it.

Oh, should mention that Ramda’s spent the entire 10 years he’s been here in prison awaiting a final decision on his extradition and that he’s alleged to be the ‘money man’ in the bombings, not an actual bomber - which means that based on time served he’s already done his full stint.

Examine calls for police to be able to hold terror suspects for longer before pressing charges

It will be interesting to see how this one pans out but I expected serious resistance to anything which extends such detentions beyond 28 days and would like to see a limit of 14 days, tops, without requiring that a judicial warrent be issued to extend dentention beyond that point.

There should also be independemt monitoring of any such detentions to ensure that we don;t go crossing the line into torture ourselves.

Use more control orders against British terror suspects, who cannot be deported

Oh goody - house arrest for everyone.

Increase the number of special judges hearing terror cases

And the return of ‘Diplock Courts’

Already announced were plans to ban the Hizb ut Tahrir and the successor organisation of Al-Muhajiroun - and look at whether the grounds for banning such groups need to be widened

Again, I’m uneasy both with the idea of banning groups but particularly with the idea of ‘widening the grounds’ on which they can be banned.

Aren’t we, again, on the slippery slope to repression.

Review the threshold for gaining British citizenship and establish, with the Muslim community, a commission to advise how to better integrate parts of the community “presently inadequately integrated”

Don’t tell that we’re going to be bringing in the ‘Tebbit Test’ for peoiple who want to naturalise.

The whole ‘citizenship ceremonies’ business is bad enough as it is - for some reason whenever its mentioned I can’t help recalling the cast of fawning comedy stereotype ‘foreigners’ that used to appears on the abysmal ‘Mind Your Language’ and imagining it all as being something like that.

Create a list of foreign preachers who will be kept out of the UK and consult on creating new powers to close places of worship used to foment extremism

Well, now you come to mention it, can I suggest you add good old Pat “why don’t we assassinate Chavez, it’s cheaper than a war” Robertson to the list for starters

Use biometric visas for those from designated countries and compiling a database so people whose views or activities pose a threat to UK security can be kept out of the country. They could only appeal against the decision from overseas.

Oh look, ID cards again… talk about as predictable as finding flies on shit…

Frankly I;m too sick of this bullshit to comment further at the moment.

It’s been a struggle trying to hold out for an incipient signs of common sense on the part of the British public in recent weeks, but just when it seems all hope is fading, up they pop and announce that two-thirds of them oppose the state funding of faith schools.

I’ve long argued that state schools have no business being in the business of indoctrinating children into a particular religious faith and that its time that the requirement that state schools have religious assemblies and mandatory religious education lessons was consigned to the dustbin of history.

Religion still has its place in the national curriculum of course, as one component of the overall ‘humanities’/’social sciences’ curriculum - I’ve no problem with kids being taught about religions and being encouraged to understand them as one strand of ideology amongst many but I draw a clear line between such teaching, which teaches about religion in a secular context, and actual religious instruction, which is what you get in many Faith schools.

It’s time that RE was booted of the curriculum in state schools once and for all to be replaced with…

…well, at primary level I’d advocate the teaching of basic philosophy, logic and critical thinking for starters - lets enough kids to think for themselves not force-feed them ideologies which actively discourage such thinking in favour of ‘blind faith’. There’s no need to go overboard, I’m not expecting 10 years olds to produce critiques of Plato or Decartes, but at least they can be taught the basic successfully - as happens in, certainly, some schools in France. Religion would play some part in this new curriculum but you’d be teaching kids about the works of Aquinas, Augustine and Geoffrey of Occam, not ramming parables down their throats.

Once we get to Secondary level, the subject matter can be broadened out to encompass a wider range of social sciences but with a stong focus, especially from 14-16 in teaching civics and government - if we’re so worried than young people are turning their backs on their key democratic rights, such as the right to vote, then surely the answer must be to teach them those rights and their value while they’re at school. I would have thought completely obvious.

That leave only the question of what to do about people who would still want access to religious instruction through the state school system - who want their kids brought up in a specific faith.

Well on that score I have no particular objection to the state providing funding for such teaching as long its takes place outside the main school day and it become a matter of choice for parents whether to the take up such schooling or not for their kids.

That, for me, means that you don’t fund faith schools at all, what you fund is faith-based out of school clubs in local communities where there is a clear demand for such activities. If a state school wishes to provide a local venue for such a club, then fine, no problem with that, but it could just as easily be based in a community centre, Church, Synagogue, Mosque, Gurdwara, etc. as well - its up to the local community to decide whether there is a need for such a club for their particular faith and where best to base it, and up to parents to decide whether to send their kids along to it or give it a miss.

Ooh, looky here… that would be a bit of ‘parental choice’ wouldn’t it.

Neil at the Brighton Regency Labour Party blog makes some interesting points on the subject of the relaxation of licencing laws and the ‘curse’ of ‘binge drinking’, questioning the current received wisdom that longer opening hours will inevitably lead to more problems.

While he makes some good points he, like the majority of commentators, seems to miss a key factor in the whole equation of copious-quantities-of-alcohol + young-people = breakdown-in-social-order and that’s the contribution made to the problem by the development of large-scale ‘entertainment districts’ in larger towns and cities and the demise of the local pub.

Binge drinking, alcohol-fueled violence and political concerns about its consequences are nothing new at all in Britain - check the history books for everything from the ‘rake’s clubs’ of the 18th Century, the most notorious of which was the Hellfire Club to the gin palaces which were a feature of city life, especially in the poor quarters of London, throughout most the 18th and 19th centuries.

This is not a new problem at all.

What is new, as I alluded to a couple of paragrpahs ago, is the development of large-scale ‘entertainments districts’ in many towns and cities - about 15-16 years ago I worked in a night club in Birmingham City Centre for just short of 12 months while I was at university - the classic student weekend job routine.

At that time, where I worked was pretty much what amounted to the main ‘entertainment district’ in the city - 3-4 bars, the same number of nightclubs, a casino and few pretty ropey fast-food restaurants.

That was the basic pattern of things in those days, pubs and club dotted around the city centre in very small clusters, limiting the number of people you’d find in any one area.

Today we have Broad Street - near enough a mile long drag of pubs, clubs and restaurants with odd hotel here and there - Birmingham’s premier Saturday night money pit which drags in people from across the whole city, gets them utterly shit-faced and then dumps them on out on the street together en masse.

You’ll find pretty much the same thing in any decent-sized town whereever you go, one or maybe two streets which, over the last ten years or so, has been turned over almost exclusively to the pursuit of the noble art a relieving young people of the money in return for copious quantities of alcohol and a free ride to A&E at the end of the night - and all with the connivance of the entertainment’s industry and local councils who were concerned only with maximising the amount of money sloshing around the ‘local economy’ on a Saturday night without any real thought for the consequences. In some places, like Birmingham, the council has even had ‘regeneration’ money from the government to set the whole thing up.

It’s not a difficult equation - take several thousand people, get them pissed out of their faces and then put them all in the same location and you’re guaranteed to have public order problems.

What did these people expect?

I’m not saying this is the only cause of such problems but it is one factor in this whole situation which seems to be largely ignored - its all very well seeing councillors popping up on the TV to complain that young people out on Saturday night in the centre of town are acting with all the decorum of Attila the Hun and lecturing bar owners on how they should shoulder some of the burden of the increased costs of policing and take responsibility for their customer’s behaviour, but lets not forget whose planning policies created these districts in the first place.

There’s more to this whole situation that simply bad behaviour by young people or too-liberal licencing laws which is why we shouldn’t allow this current debate to be used a cop out by those who’ve also played their part in creating this situation.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission will complete its report on the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by Christmas, an inquest has heard.

But the report will not be published until all legal and disciplinary proceedings in the case are complete.

In other words, we’ve more chance of getting to the truth by waiting for Ian Blair’s post-retirement memoires than we have from the IPCC’s deliberations.

Here’s how it goes:

The IPCC report will not be finished until the end of this year.

This will then go privately to the Met and the Home Office who will decide whether any matters should be referred to the CPS for possible criminal charges - add three months on for that decision.

If it is referred to the CPS, they will then need to instruct another Police Force to carry out a criminal investigation into the circumstances of the shooting - add another six months - after which the CPS will have to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to proceed to trial - another six months again.

Then there’s the trial itself - anything from six months to a year during which time the matter will be sub judice.

Only after all that - assuming they’re not out time by then - would the Menezes family have a shot at civil litigation - which would add another 6-12 months on anyway.

It’s also going to be the case that the Met will not start any serious disciplinary proceedings against officers until an criminal trial(s) are disposed of and quite how long such proceedings might take is anyone’s guess as, if things run true to form, anyone who might face a disciplinary will, by then, have developed some sort of ailment - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - which means they’ll be unfit to attend any such proceeding until…

…well, until they’ve had time to rack up enough in the way of additional pension contributions to make retirement from the Met on ‘medical grounds’ a viable option.

What we’ll be left with in, at best, a junior officer or two in the frame for a bollocking over minor mistakes while all the command officers, including Blair himself, will be safely out of the way and retired on nice fat pensions before the shit get anywhere near the fan, let alone hits it.

That’s modern day Britain for you - fuck justice, we have bureaucracy at its best.

On top of everything else, the management at Gate Gourmet are now claiming they may have go into administration within the next couple of days.

Now, before anyone gets any ideas about this having anything to do with current strike can I refer you to this:

“At the moment, Gate Gourmet is not a viable commercial organisation and so administration has to be a real probability,” said Mr Cook.

“As disappointing as it is, we’re faced with losing £25m a year, we’re faced with having no contract with British Airways that gives us commercial terms that we need and so we’ll end up in the situation of having absolutely no choice.”

Mr Cook added: “There is no way on this earth that anyone is going to support a business which isn’t making money and is in fact losing the amounts of money that we’re losing.”

Which translates to…

“We put in an unrealistically low tender in order to get the BA contract and now we’re screwed”

In short, this whole sorry mess is the fault of no one but the management and directors of Gate Gourmet themselves who’ve managed to shot themselves in the foot with the deal they negotiated with BA.

My sympathies here were always going to be with the striking workers anyway, this just confirms what I thought all along - management fouls up and the workers end up paying the price.

Gate Gourmet can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.

Late last week, Bloggers4Labour posted an extended piece on ‘Myth-making and Politics’ in two parts - I & II - which I drafted an one of a series of summer essays that B4L are kindly promoting - I will post this here in a few days after I tidy up a few grammatical bloopers I’ve since noticed - drawing a response from Neil Harding of Brighton Regency Labour Party which I’m going to respond to below.

Neil

It was very clever waxing lyrical about Machiavelli, Sophists and past Kings, and linking it to New Labour spin. All very interesting but I think your conclusions of where New Labour are and where they are going don’t quite tie in with the points you made.

Firstly, I don’t agree that ‘New Labour’ invented spin. You have fallen into the trap of believing the media on this.

Not at all - as I noted the age of modern image politics and the close symbiotic relationship between the media and the press really began in earnest during the 1960’s; although it can be argued that is extends back before that, to a lesser extent, to at least the Eisenhower presidency, as satirised by Phillip K Dick in his short story ‘The Mold of Yancy’

Spin has been around for ages and the Tories have been masters for a long time. What did change with ‘New Labour’ was that we now play the right wing press and the Tories at their own game.

Because of the domination of the Tory supporting press, Tory spin is not highlighted, e.g. they were stage managing their conferences well before us, yet Labour have been labelled the spinmeisters!

I’d agree that the Tory’s really kicked the whole business of ’spin’ into overdrive at the end of the 1970’s, not least by openly engaging the services of Saatchi and Saatchi, but I would argue that within the New Labour Project, the whole public profile of ’spin’ has increased markedly and its use (and abuse) has become very much more obvious and visible.

Alighting on the stage management of Tory conferences is not really a good example - yes, we know they were heavily stage-managed but then that was what people expected from them because they had no real history or tradition of internal democracy within the party. Add to that the fact that Sir Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary, always managed ot maintain the clear perception that he was the servant of the government and the Tory’s succeeded, for the most part, in keeping a bit of clear water between the way the conducted government and the way government was ’sold’ to the public.

That’s a line that’s become extremely blurred during the Blair years, thanks in the main to Mandelson and Campbell, leaving with public with the perception that the process of ’spin’ has become too closely associated with government to the point where its difficult to tell what is actual policy and what is just a ’sales pitch’.

That’s the point I was making, that over the last eight years we’ve become too obvious about the whole business.

I think that this whole emphasis by the media on spin rather than the spin itself is largely responsible for the drop in turnout. Look at how well spin served Thatcherism. Only when it was blindlingly obvious that we had a corrupt, incompetent government did voters desert them in droves.

The drop in turnout has been a generational thing not because past voters have stopped voting. These are people who have NEVER voted. To get these people to start voting is going to be a lot harder than winning over lapsed voters.

I think its a mistake to simply put the decline in turnout down to a generational thing. There is certainly an element of truth in it, young people don’t see voting as an ‘important public duty’ in the same way that older people do but that just means we have to work much harder, these days, to engage the interest of young people - we can no longer just rely on their having a sense that voting is the ‘right thing to do’ to get them into the polling booths.

I notice you steer clear of blaming the media or the electoral system for any of this low turnout. But these two issues are crucial. With reform in these two areas we could address a lot of the cynicism of politicians and politics in general. It is not always the politicians fault!

With a less overtly biased media, we could avoid the deliberate smearing of politicians (mostly Labour) that is largely uncalled for.

I think you may be over-estimating the influence of the unreconstructed Tory press - the Mail, Express and Telegraph in particular. I don’t see them as being so important as they are so obviously biased that all they can do these days in preach to the already converted - I doubt a single vote at the last election swung on the influence of any of those papers.

What has changed in the media is two things.

What swung quite a number of seats last time around was voters switching from Labour to the Lib Dems, giving the Tories a clear run though the middle as their support held up - if any parts of the media had an influence there it would have been the liberal/left-wing Independent and Guardian, not the Tory press.

Lets also remember that the Murdoch press has given it endorsement to New Labour at the last three elections as well. Murdoch is playing a different game to the rest these days. He may be, by nature, a conservative but what matters more to him is that his papers are seen to have backed the winning side. If you look at how Murdoch has operated both in the UK and US over the last eight years its obvious that he believes himself and his companies to be the ‘kingmaker’ - he’s unlikely to see himself as having much in common with Gordon Brown, for example, but if by the next election a Labout win looks on, he’ll still ensure that his companies are endorsing Labour so as to maintin the perception that elections are won and lost on his influence.

And with electoral reform, we can give more reason for people to vote. Especially those that support radical views outside the main party agenda that is currently ignored. This is why we get a ‘least worst’ option as government rather than a full representaion of what people want. It is because our electoral system presents most voters with the choice ‘least worst’ or ‘bust’. Most now choose ‘bust’!

But we have to recognise that if PR would make a difference then our failure to put it in place is very much the fault of the politicians. We ran on a reforming platform in 1997 then promptly forgot about it on attaining power because it no longer suited the interests of our own political elite.

But there’s no guarantee that PR would make much difference at the moment, precisely because the public has not just lost confidence in the electoral system but in politics and politicians.

What was Blair’s response to having Labour’s majority cut to 66?

‘We’ve listened and we’ve learned’

Where’s the evidence of that? In what respect has he shown that he’s done either? None that I can see.

That’s why I highlighted Tony McNulty’s comments about ID cards, because it sums up the attitude in government at the moment - if at first you don’t succeed, try a different sales pitch.

Lastly media and electoral reforms would free the Labour party to campaign on the issues you suggest rather than being stuck with sophistry. The reason we had to resort to spin was because ‘we didn’t get a fair press’ with which to get across our ideas.

How can we put across an argument (especially one that might be complex) with the current press that we have? A great example was how the press reported the governments tentative but highly laudable ideas on road pricing.

But what arguments did we actually put forward on road pricing? Certainly nothing of real substance.

Yet again, what we did was float a half-formed idea in the press to see what kind of reaction it got and then quickly back-pedalled when it went down badly - there was no detailed policy behind these proposals, no case that we could go out an argue, just a few vague notions of how it might work and a hope that it might fly with the public.

That’s the danger of constantly playing to the crowd and courting the popular vote - there are times that government’s have to take tough decisions and do what its right even if, at first, it may not be particularly popular and its on those occasions that you need to work hardest to win the public over by puting forward real solid, rigorous arguments.

If the parliament of the day had simply gone with the ‘popular vote’ at the time then both the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six would have been executed by the state - even though we know now they were all innocent men. Part of being a politican is sometimes being strong enough to tell the public, ‘No, this time you’ve got it wrong’…

… before the fact, not afterwards while desperately trying to cover your arse as has been the case over Iraq.

If Blair was so all fire keen on intervening in Iraq on humanitarian grounds, as he now claims, he should have said so from the outset. He should have said that he believed it was the right thing to do for that reason, even though that reason is illegal in International law, and then argued the case that it was international law and the UN which was out of step with the demands of the modern era. I would still have opposed the war for a range of other reasons but at least I could have respected his position, something I can’t so knowing that he basically lied in order to give the war a thin veneer of legality and then tried to cover his arse afterwards.

All he had to do when it became obvious that no WMDs were going to turn up was say ‘Look, we fucked up. We really believed he had WMDs and went in in good faith and now we’ve found out the intelligence was wrong and we’re left with a moral duty to sort thing out” and I think many people would have more respect for him than they do now.

Its that kind of thing, the weaselling out of responsibilities, that, more than anything, turns off voters.

Im also not so confident as you about winning the next election. All the psephology experts including John Curtice at Strathclyde University (who has got the last few elections spot on) think it will be a ‘hung parliament’.

With all this in mind, we should make these changes from a position of power rather than having a hand tied behind our backs by the Lib Dems, a party nobody understands, least of all themselves!

I’ve seen nothing, as yet, from either the Tories or the Lib Dems which suggests they can take power next time around. Boundary changes will make some small difference to way things pan out, I’m sure, but if the economy stays strong and with Blair out of way - notice that Gordon has quite clearly kept clear of anything too controversial - then are chances are pretty good.

The only real fly in the ointment could be a Tory ticket with Ken Clarke on board as he’s pretty much all they have left that’s capable of doing any real damage.

Couple of things of note from this blogs log of search engine referrals.

1. It seems my little topical homage to Tim Ireland’s ‘Backing Blair’ campaign, Backing[Ian}Blair has hit the top ten on Google for searches for Ian Blair in the UK, Canada, Belgium and Sweden - its currently sitting fifth in the UK behind his official bio and the Met, two reports from the BBC and one from the Mirror.

Oh well, that’s me on the Met’s shit list then…

2. On what seems likely to be a far more unsavoury note, since tonight’s Panorama report by John Ware on the Muslim Council of Britain - which I didn’t see, I might add - its seems there’s a considerable amount of interest in trying to establish whether John Ware is Jewish.

To anyone arriving here on the back of such a search, can I point out that:

a) I don’t know whether he’s Jewish or not, and

b) Whether he is or not seems to me entirely fucking immaterial when it comes to whatever appeared on Panorama tonight and if the best you can do to try and refute anything which appeared in that programme is to try to establish whether he’s Jewish or not then I really don’t want to hear what you might have to say as you’re obviously a completely pig ignorant tosser and you can take whatever halfwit conspiracy theory you’re trying to cook up and fuck right off!

A fair few bloggers have now called for the resignation of Metropolitan Police Chief, Sir Ian Blair, as a result of the information contained in the documents leaked, this week, to ITN…

…and some haven’t mentioned it all; not even a letter in the Grauniad from their number one bogeyman, George Galloway, castigating the Police for their failings has managed to drag a comment out of Harry’s Place.

With all due respect, the one thing I haven’t seen, as yet, is anyone fully articulate the case for Blair’s resignation. Feelings are, quite naturally running high at the moment, so there’s no criticism intended there, I merely note an omission from the debate which I intend, here, to try to correct.

Why, exactly, should Sir Ian Blair resign?

To understand the reasons in full we need to go back to the time-line of this incident and understand what happened and when, and then examine why certain things are likely to have played out in the way they have.

Jean Charles de Menezes (JCM) was shot dead on a stationary train in Stockwell Underground Station on the morning of the 22 July 2005.

Following this shooting a number of what were, supposedly, eyewitness reports appeared on the TV news, reports which contained a series of erroneous statements.

JCM was, so we were told, wearing a ‘heavy’ jacket which looked out of place on such a warm day.

JCM had ‘vaulted the ticket barrier’ on entering the station, while being chased by the Police.

JCM had run on to the train, tripping as he went through the doors, while being chased by three officers who then bundled him to floor, at which point he was shot several times in the head.

It was also alleged by one supposed eyewitness that wires had been seen protruding from his jacket.

We now know that almost all of this account of his final minutes was untrue.

JCM was wearing a standard Levi’s Denim Jacket not a heavy, unseasonal jacket at all.

JCM did not vault the ticket barrier, he went through the barrier as would any other passenger, using his Oyster card, stopped to pick up a free newspaper and walked to the platform. Only when he saw his train pull in did he run, and then only to catch the train - at no time was even aware that he was being followed let alone chased by armed Police.

JCM did not trip as he entered the train nor was he being chased, in the sense that was described to the media. He got on, looked both ways and then took his seat. Only after that was he ‘challenged’ by the Police, who called out only ‘Police!’ and gave no other instructions, a which point he got up an walked towards a surveillance office who, according to his testimony, grabbed in what was effectively a ‘bear hug’ and pushed him back into his seat - at which point he was shot be two other officers.

That, in a nutshell, is what actually happened and, in fact, some of the errors in the story put out be the media in the immediate aftermath of the shooting are easily accounted for.

The person seen wearing a heavy jacket and vaulting the station ticket barrier would have undoubtedly been a plain clothes police officer who was trying to catch up with JCM - this would have been a genuine mistake on the part of witnesses at the scene who would not have know who it was who actually jumped the barrier but who, on being told that a ‘terrorist suspect’ had been shot would have assumed the person they saw was JCM as what they saw would seem consistent with what they would expect from a suspect fleeing capture by the Police.

As for Mark Whitby’s story of JCM being chased on to the train, etc. the simple fact here is that he did not see the whole incident from the point where JCM entered the train - all Whitby saw was the last few seconds from the point where he was grabbed by the surveillance officer and has then filled in the blanks to account for what he ‘expects’ happened before that point.

The ‘protruding wires’ story is either a complete fabrication by someone who just assumed that the Police has shot a real terrorist who must, therefore, have had wires sticking out of his jacket or, its just as likely that if wires were seen they we merely the cables of a set of headphones - it has never been revealed whether JCM might have owned or worn a Walkman/MP3 player/IPod or something similar, a ‘hands-free’ kit for a mobile phone, perhaps.

Getting back to the time-line; at 4pm on that same day, Sir Ian Blair gave a press briefing, during the course of which he stated:

“This operation was directly linked to the ongoing terrorist investigation. Any death is deeply regrettable … as I understand the situation, the man was challenged and refused to obey police instructions.”

At this point in time, if the Police had not yet identified JCM then Blair may genuinely have believed this to be true as he would, in all probability, have been relying for his information, on second-hand reports from his operational commanders. It is possible, at this point, that he would have spoken directly to any of the officers involved in shooting or the surveillance operation inside the station.

However we also now know that Blair wrote to Charles Clarke, in an effort to prevent an investigation into the shooting by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), advocating, instead, that an internal inquiry be held instead, before this press conference.

The obvious question to ask here is that of what, exactly, did Blair know about the shooting at the point that letter was written? Were there already doubts as to whether they had actually shot a terrorist, or was Blair mere acting our of reflex - trying at the very least to buy time to allow him to get the full story before the IPCC got involved.

We may never find out and without evidence to the contrary, we have to give him the benefit of reasonable doubt and assume this to be a genuine mistake arising out of the incomplete information to hand at the time.

Moving to Saturday 23 July, at 5pm an anonymous spokeswoman makes the official announcement that the man shot on the previous day had no connection whatsoever to the terrorists the Police had been seeking and later on that evening idenitified him as JCM.

By this point, Blair must obviously know that something has gone badly wrong and even if, at this point, he had not been told the full truth then unless he was wholly derelict in his duties he would have ordered that full report be on his desk PDQ and would have, therefore, had a full and factual outline of the events leading to the shooting and the shooting itself, well in advance of the investigation being handed fully over to the IPCC on 27 July.

Blair would reasonably have known the full truth well in advance of the handover to the IPCC - if he didn’t at that point then he is clearly incompetent and unfit to carry out his job - there are no two ways about it.

At some point prior to 27 July, Blair has a clear choice.

With the IPCC taking over the investigation he can do one of two things; say nothing and allow the false media account of the shooting to stand uncorrected even though he knows it to be untrue in every significant detail; or he can issue a statement correcting as much of the erroneous story as possible without compromising the investigation.

A better man that Ian Blair might even have considered the diplomatic route out of this dilemma and, having made one or two corrections to the story, used the discrepancies as a basis to explain why the IPCC were being brought in to investigate the shooting.

As we know, he chose the first option and said nothing. In fact it appears that the Police decided to go along with the false story to the extent that the pathologist who carried out an autopsy on JCM on Wednesday 27th July was told:

“[Mr Menezes] was followed into Stockwell Tube station where he vaulted over the ticket barrier. He ran downstairs and onto a Tube train where it appears that he stumbled. The officers then immobilised him and a number of shots were fired.”

But could Blair reasonably have corrected any of the errors in the original media account of the shooting and the events leading to it without compromising the IPCC investigation?

I believe he could.

Clearly he would not have been at liberty to disclose the matter of the failure of the surveillance officer at JCM’s block of flats to make a positive identification because at the moment JCM left for work the officer was ‘relieving himself’. Nor, obviously, could he comment on the specifics of the actual shooting - the actual events that took place on the train after JCM entered it.

But he could have corrected two specific points without affecting the IPCC’s investigation; the matter of JCM’s jacket and, most critically of all, the false assertion that he had vaulted the ticket barrier while being chased by Police officers.

It is this last point, the matter of JCM’s passage through Stockwell Tube station which I believe explains both why Sir Ian Blair chose to say nothing and let a completely false account of the shooting continue to ‘do the rounds’ without correction and, most important of all, why he should now do the decent thing and tender his resignation.

This point is crucial because on it hinges the question of the whole decision-making process which led, eventually, to JCM being shot dead, who made that decision and the implications of that decision for the Police’s ’shoot-to-kill’ policy.

If the story of JCM vaulting the ticker barrier were true, which we now know it isn’t, then the whole incident would have moved at such a pace that the decision to shoot him could ONLY have come from the officers on the spot and only their judgement can be called in question - things, in this version of event, would have moved so fast that there would have been no time for the firearms officers who made the shooting to confirm their orders with the Met’s operational command and this whole tragedy comes down to the question of a judgement call made by officers on the scene.

The role of senior officers and the shoot-to-kill policy is completely moot in this scenario as it could have had only the most limited bearing on this decision.

However, we now know that JCM did not vault the barrier at all, he acted only as any other ordinary passenger would have done and even paused to take a free newspaper, giving the officers at the scene ample time to relay the situation back to the Met’s operation command and receive confirmation from that level of the order to shoot him.

In this scenario, which we know to be the true sequence of events, the role of the Met’s operational command, of two very senior officers, one an Assistant Commissioner, and their interpretation and application of the shoot-to-kill policy becomes a central issue in this whole scenario - their judgement as well as that of the officers on the scene is now called into question.

We now know that JCM was allowed to leave home; take a five minute walk to a bus stop and ride the bus to Stockwell Tube station - all without being stopped and challenged.

We know that, on alighting from the bus, he walked into the station etc., seemingly shadowed all the way by surveillance officers - how else would they have been on the train at the same time as him without alerting him to their presence.

This is, again, where the vaulting the barrier story become important in a very different way. As noted earlier, if someone in a heavy jacket was seen to vault the ticket barrier, the most likely explanation for this was that this was one of the firearms officers trying to catch up with JCM. In fact JCM must have had a fair head start over these officers as clearly he was able to walk through the station, running only on the platform to get the train, without noting any commotion of the kind that would be caused by someone vaulting a ticket barrier to run after him.

This suggests that the firearms officers were either late in arriving a Stockwell tube station - its conceivable that if they were following the bus they could have got caught up in traffic and delayed just enough to give JCM the start needed to make it to the platform without noticing them - or they did not enter the station immediately behind JCM but paused outside until ordered to follow, by which time it was necessary to run to catch up with him.

The timing of events at the station does not fit the idea that this was shooting carried out on snap judgement by officers on the scene, it is more in keeping with with the armed officers having paused for confirmation of orders from the Met’s operational command - that they waited until the point at which JCM actually started to run across the platform for the train until moving in.

This places the role of the command officers in very different light, making their actions central to the shooting and calls into question the whole shoot-to-kill policy and how it was applied in this case.

One cannot reasonably believe that Sir Ian Blair, the most senior Police officer in the UK, would not have understood this distinction or the the implications that the real events of 22 July would have had for his senior officers had they been made public, and if that is the case, then Blair’s failure to correct key elements of the false story of JCM’s death, when he had a clear opportunity to do so has to be seen in a very different light.

There is a clear parallel, here, between Blair’s actions, or rather lack of action, and that of former Defence Minister, Geoff Hoon and the MOD following the crucial Parliamentary debate which saw the government gain approval for the 2003 Iraq war, which were made public during the course of the Hutton Inquiry.

To give a quick recap, the single most contentious element in the Joint Intelligence Committee report given to Parliament was the now infamous ‘45 minute claim’ which suggested that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, either chemical or biological weapons, which could be deployed within 45 minutes.

This claim we now know to have been entirely false, however there was more to it than just the ‘45 minute’ question - there was also the question of exactly what sort of chemical or biological weapons the government were referring to in this claim.

What was actually being referred to, although this was not explicit in the report, were ‘battlefield’ weapons, basically artilliary shells with a very limited range and usage. Although there is no formal definition of what a WMD really is, the common understanding of the term refers to weapons which can fired over long distances at civilian populations, causing the eponymous ‘mass destruction’ - battlefield weapons, including tactical nuclear devices, are not usually considered WMDs.

What happened on the following day was that, as the government may well have wished, the press on reading this dossier put two and two together and came up with forty-four. What the intelligence community had identified originally as limited range battlefield weapons now became, in the eyes of the most histrionic elements of the press, extended range SCUDS with chemical/biological warheads. The Sun ran with a front page which claimed that Saddam could attack British troop based in Cyprus, the Mail and the Express ran similar stories claiming that Saddam had the ability to attack, in one of these papers, Israel, and in the other, unspecified targets in Europe.

Hutton was unable to establish that any of the main players in the drafting of the dossier; Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell or John Scarlett, understood this distinction; however, under tough cross-examination Hoon was forced to own up that both he and the MOD understood it very well and when pressed as to why they made no effort to correct the press’s erroneous assumptions, stated that it was felt to be ‘too much trouble’ to try and correct the error. I’ll leave you to decide whether ‘too much trouble’ in this case meant ‘too much trouble to issue a statement and arrange a press briefing’ or ‘too likely to undermine a central plank of the government’s case for war’.

What the Hutton Inquiry demonstrated was that while the government were not inclined to correct media errors that worked in their favour, when the media - Gilligan and the BBC - got it wrong and it went against them, then it was not trouble at all for them to demand a whole series of corrections, retractions and apologies.

With that in mind, there seems to be little or no difference between Sir Ian Blair’s actions on this occasion and those of Geoff Hoon, as revealed by the Hutton Inquiry - in the case of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the press’s erroneous claims as to the events which preceded the shooting clearly work in Blair’s favour by keeping his senior officers out of the firing line and limiting the scope for serious questioning of the shoot to kill policy and it seem entirely reasonable to conjecture that this may readily explain why Blair chose not to make any corrections to an account that he knew, certainly by the point that the IPCC got involved, was completely wrong.

And it is for that precise reason that Blair must resign.

He may not have deliberately lied to the public. He may well be correct is stating that there is no cover up - the leaked documents do show that the officers involved in this shooting appear to have been completely open and candid in their statement to the IPCC.

None of that, however, matters.

What matters here is that Blair has said nothing in the matter of the entirely false account of the JCM’s death which has appeared in the press all over the world and offered not single word of correction of an account of events which he has known to be entirely incorrect for almost the last four weeks.

He has put the interests of the Metropolitan Police and, in particular, of senior officers and close colleagues, ahead of not only his own officers - those who were directly involved in the operation - and, of course, the public interest but most unforgivably of all, he has put those interests ahead of the legitimate interests of the family of Jean Charles de Menezes who, up until today, have wanted to know only the truth of the circumstances which led to the tragic death of a loved one.

That, by any reasonable terms, is inhuman, cruel and despicable in the extreme and that is why Blair must go!

Update: Sunday 21 August

Today’s Observer adds more to the story.

“Senior sources in the Metropolitan Police have told The Observer that members of the surveillance team who followed de Menezes into Stockwell underground station in London felt that he was not about to detonate a bomb, was not armed and was not acting suspiciously. It was only when they were joined by armed officers that his threat was deemed so great that he was shot seven times.

A police source said: ‘There is no way those three guys would have been on the train carriage with him [de Menezes] if they believed he was carrying a bomb. Nothing he did gave the surveillance team the impression that he was carrying a device.’”

And…

“Members of the firearms unit are said to be furious that de Menezes was not properly identified when he left his flat, the first problem in the chain of events that led to the Brazilian’s death.

The Observer now understands that seconds before the firearms team entered the tube train carriage, a member of the surveillance squad using the codename Hotel 3 moved to the doorway and shouted: ‘He’s in here.’ De Menezes, in all likelihood alarmed by the activity, stood and moved towards the doorway. He was grabbed and pushed back to his seat. The first shots were then fired while Hotel 3 was holding him.”

This, again, raises questions about the role of the Met’s operational command officers in this whole incident - questions which, as I noted earlier, would have been avoided were it not for the leaked documents which called the whole account of the circumstances of JCM’s death into question.

It also seems to back up a suggestion I made in an previous post on this incident that the surveillance officer who tried to restrain JCM may have been trying to prevent him being shot by his colleagues from the firearms team, as why else would he - now identified as ‘Hotel 3′ - have effectively thrown himself bodily onto JCM.

The more we learn about what really happened on that day, the more the failure of the Met and of Ian Blair, in particular, to correct some of the erroneous stories which appeared in the press starts to stink to high heaven.

It still may not amount to a cover up - just, and only because the police appear not to have lied to the IPCC - but as outlined above, Blair has clearly tried to let things ride in terms of the public’s understanding of the incident, to suit his and the Met’s own interests.

Update(2): Sunday 21 August

Today we also learned that the Met has made an offer of £15,000 compensation to JCM’s family.

Forget the sum of money here - £15,000 is little more than they would receive from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board - the key thing to note is that the offer was made in full blown ‘legalese’ and, no doubt, drafted by a solicitor working for the Met.

We can, therefore, be almost certain that, at the very least, this offer would have had a few ’strings’ attached to it; a waiver of the family’s rights to seek compensation through civil litigation for certain and some kind of ‘gagging order’ as, preventing them from making any negative comments about the police once the compensation offer had been accepted which would, at least, have given the police a legal basis for an injunction to prevent further press coverage of the family’s views.

All this BEFORE the IPCC has full considered and reported on the circumstances of their son’s death.

Before this week’s leaks the Met was faced with three obvious ‘points of difficulty’ in getting out of this situation with the minimum damage possible - three things which could derail their damage limitation exercise.

One, obviously, is the IPCC’s report, which they would be desperately hoping would put the whole thing down to a tragic but understandable ‘accident’, avoiding the possiblity of criminal charges for negligence being laid against serving officers, thereby dragging out the whole situation for at least a further 6-12 months after the conclusion of their deliberations and ensuring that the Met could not simply take a bit of flak from the press and move on, effectively burying the whole incident with no more than, at worst, a careful chosen ‘retirement on medical grounds’ to cover their embarrassment.

The second potential ‘flashpoint’ will of course be the coroner’s inquest which could return a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ making it difficult, again, to avoid having officers face criminal charges. The Police, no doubt, will be pushing heavily for an ‘Open’ verdict or maybe on of accidental death to get them out of that particular hole - although one has to be very suspicious of the fact that the whole ‘jumping the barrier’ story turned up in the pathologist’s report on JCM, even thought the Police knew this to be false. This could be nothing more than simply them keeping to the media’s story to avoid a risk that the truth might emerge before the IPCC had finished its inquiry or, more worryingly, it could have gone on to form the basis of a ‘misadventure’ verdict at inquest which would ahve covered the Police’s collective backs even more effectively than either an open verdict or one of accidental death.

The third problem facing the police would be a civil claim against them by the Menezes family, which, due to the legal process of ‘discovery’ would drag the full story out into open court whether the police wanted it to or not. Had the family accepted the £15,000 offer and signed on the dotted line, this avenue might well have been closed to them completely and. again, most probably allowing the Police to ‘walk away’ from this whole situation having taken no more than a bit of short-lived flak and having ridden out the ’storm’.

Again, we seem to have the Met’s interests being put before those of JCM’s family and the public interest and, yet again, it is inconceviably to think that Ian Blair would not have known about and, indeed, have authorised this offer.

And, again, we have another reason why he should resign.