It was on June 9th 1954, during the course of a US Senate hearing into allegations of lax security at top secret US Army facility, that the political career of US Senator Joseph McCarthy effectively came to an end, destroyed by those same six words which are the title of this article.

In front of stunned television audience, McCarthy launched into what had, by then, become an all too familiar line of attack, charging that one of the attorneys working for Boston lawyer, Joseph Welch, who was representing the US army, had ties to a communist organisation.

Welch replied to this attack with the immortal words:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…”

…and when McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily responded:

“Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Have you no sense of decency?

It’s a question that I want to address, today, to each and every one of the members of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

Well, have you?

Why do I ask this? Well, in part its because of this story, the latest chapter in the sad tale of the death Jean Charles de Menezes.

Much has already written today about this case and about the leaked documents which show just how badly wrong the Police were at every step leading up to his being shot eight times on a stationary train in Stockwell Tube station; but that’s not - directly, at least - the issue which prompted this question. Rather it is the matter of his family’s call for an independent public inquiry into the circumstances of his death which moves me to anger on this occasion.

Why would I be angry about this, you might wonder? Does his family not deserve such an inquiry, in fact don’t we all have a legitimate interest in just such an inquiry as central to this whole issue is the question of the conduct of the Police?

Of course this matter merits a public enquiry, that should be self-evident. It’s not the call for a public enquiry that angers me but the knowledge that no such inquiry is possible. Oh don’t get me wrong, there may still be things, from time to time, that the government might refer to as ‘public inquiries’, they may even have the nerve to refer to them as ‘independent’ but, to all intents and purposed, since June 7th, this year, the public inquiry as knew, understood and valued it, ceased to exist.

How could this possibly have happened?

It happened because on June 7th, the Inquiries Act 2005 came into operation, having completed it passage through Parliament on April 7th 2005 - remember that date, I’ll be coming back to it in a short while.

The Inquiries Act changes, in several fundamental ways, the process by which public and other governmental inquiries are convened, conducted and, ultimately, reported on, not a single one of which serves the public interest.

It does this by taking away from the independent chair of such an enquiry and from Parliament itself, a whole series of rights which have been in place since the 1920’s, rights which the government has now, through its ministers, reserved solely and exclusive to itself.

Faced with calls for a public inquiry, a Minister now has the sole and exclusive right to:

1. Decide whether there should be an inquiry.

2. Set its terms of reference.

3. Amend its terms of reference - at any time before or during its proceedings.

4. Appoint its members.

5. Restrict public access to inquiries - at any time before or even during its proceedings.

6. Prevent the publication of evidence placed before an inquiry

7. Prevent the publication of the inquiry’s report - all inquiry reports are now to be submitted to the Minister who then decides whether to submit it to Parliament. Previously inquiry reports were automatically submitted to Parliament, Minister had the right only to access in advance of any debate on the inquiry’s findings.

8. Suspend or terminate an inquiry.

9. Withhold the costs of any part of an inquiry which strays beyond the terms of reference set by the Minister.

Does that sound to you like the basis of an independent public inquiry? No, me neither.

There is a first class summary and critique of the Act, in full,
to be found here, which I would recommend you take the time to read, but I will pick out on passage of the critique with of obvious and particular relevance to today’s events:

“Where Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (which protects the right to life) is engaged, the Inquiries Act is at variance with the United Nations’ Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions. Indeed, we doubt that the Inquiries Act can deliver an effective investigation in compliance with Article 2. The Minister’s powers to interfere in every important aspect of an inquiry robs it of any independence. Even if a Minister were to refrain from exercising those powers that are discretionary, s/he still has absolute power over whether there should be an inquiry at all and over its terms of reference. There is no scope for victims to be involved in or even consulted about the process.”

You might well wonder, as I did, who the hell voted for this bill on its passage through Parliament?

Would you be shocked if I said ‘no one”?

This is where the date, April 7th 2005, I mentioned earlier, become important.

This bill passed through Parliament and into law without ever being subjected to a vote in the House of Commons. Believe me, I’ve looked. I’ve checked with both Hansard and with ‘The Public Whip’ and can find no record of a division on this particular bill either on its second reading, on March 15th 2005, or on it completing it passage through the Commons on the 7th of April - in fact I can’t even find a third-reading debate on the bill.

That’s because, if you cast you mind back, April 7th 2005 was the final sitting of Parliament before it dissolved in order for the General Election to take place. The Inquiries Act, as it now is, was one of several bills which made it through Parliament on the back of agreements with the opposition that they would not oppose or delay its passage.

There was no third-reading debate and no divisions because the leaders of the respective political parties put their heads together and cut a deal which allowed it through without challenge. This is no mere case of a government using its crushing majority to force the bill through, in this case our supine political opposition colluded with the government to sell some of our fundamental rights, rights which previously enabled us to hold both the government and the state to account, down the river.

Why has this happened?

Well unless you’ve been living on another planet for the last couple of years then the government’s motives here should be perfectly apparent. They can be summed up in only two words - Hutton Inquiry.

The government may well have been effectively exonerated or any substantive wrongdoing by this inquiry but during its proceedings what we actually saw of the way the government goes about its business became rather embarrassing for [their] comfort - and can there be any more effective means of preventing anything like that happening again that by an Act of Parliament which give Ministers absolute control and authority over any future inquiries into the conduct of the government and its servants.

But what of the opposition, in this? Surely their best interests lie in preserving the old system, given that it could, and often would, cause massive embarrassment to the government of the day.

Well I can’t speak for the Lib-Dems on this but in the case of the Tories there’s an all too obvious reason why that would back this bill - remember the Scott Inquiry? Robin Cook’s finest hour and the single greatest parliamentary speech in living memory?

That was 1996 and still, I would suspect, fresh - in political terms - in the minds of the Tories, especially those like Michael Howard, who were members of the actual government that was on the receiving end of the glorious savaging administered by Robin Cook during that debate.

What was it that he said that day?

“This is not just a government that does not know how to accept blame - this is a government that knows no shame.

One might well say the same of our current crop of parliamentarians on reading the Inquiries Act.

This is, by farm the most shamelessly misbegotten, self-interested, self-justifying piece of legislation to pass in law since..

… well, I suspect you’d have to go back to the era of ‘rotten boroughs’ to find anything so blatantly against the public interest.

It is a travesty and fundamental betrayal of the public trust, an act of nothing more than sheer contempt for the British people; and so I must ask again:

Have you no sense of decency?

… and invite any current or former member of parliament to answer, if they dare - as always, the comments box is open.

Interesting split in today’s blogosphere.

Tracking through my regular run of RSS feeds using the Sage plug-in for Mozilla, its noticable what while a significant number of blogs that I know to be, by varying degrees, either opposed to the Iraq war or at least sceptical of the direction things are going have plenty to say on the subject of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, but when it comes to the markedly pro-war blogs… almost nothing.

With one honourable exception, if your daily blogging diet takes in only those who slavishly promote the interventionist line on Iraq, and more pertinantly, the ‘moral agency’ stance on terrorism then you might come to think that this had simply not happened and there was not possibility that this man could possibly be a liar - after all who would want to think that the most senior police officer in the UK was a liar - not me, I tend to be careful when it comes to calling someone a liar in case I make a mistake and they turn out not to be a liar after all.

I wonder, have they not seen the news today? Or would be safer to assume that we have apologists for extra-judicial killings amongst us.

Some things just have to be done, don’t they…

Full size image here…

Oh, must just say, feel free to use the images from this post as you like.

Oh, and then there’s this, courtesy of Neil from B3TA…

And one more of my own - it’s subtle so look closely…

On the BBC website we have the following headline:

Britain ‘needs stronger identity’

A headline which, once you find out the stry refers to Michael Howard talking about ‘Britishness’ on the Today programme could just as easily read:

Son of Romanian Jew lectures Britain on its sense of national identity

I point that out not to be offensive or racist in any way or to take issue with Michael Howard’s ancestry but simply because the mere fact that Howard in the son of Eastern European immigrant and a Jew actually says quite a lot about what it is to be British.

The fact is whatever else Howard may think of himself as, he probably doesn’t seem himself as particularly Romanian or Slavic I don’t suppose but would almost certain still identify strongly with his ‘Jewishness’ not of that matters in the slightest or make any difference to his being British; if his personal sense of identity incorporates elements of his non-British ethnic or cultural background, so what. It doesn’t make him any less British than anyone else who lives in this country, or any more that his being the current leader of the Conservative Party would make him any more British than anyone else.

I set out my own view of what is to be British in this post - in essence I see Britishness as being whatever it is whenever its needed, its not something I think can be defined, taught or inculcated, as Howard suggests, its something that people kind of acquire over time as a result of living in this particular society and culture, almost as if by osmosis.

Still, I had to wonder whether maybe there really was some sort of definitive idea of what is Britishness - Howard, you’ll note - doesn’t actually say what he thinks it is - maybe somewhere out there there’s a comment or quotation from a noted public figure which captures the essence of Britishness; and when I say ‘public figure I don’t mean a modern politican, what I have is mind someone more akin to a Churchill, Dickens or Dr Johnson, someone who we might think epitomises what it is to be British.

All of which turned out to be a complete fruitless search, even using Google, although I did turn up this modern selection of musings on Britishness which, oddly enough, comes from a website of resources for teachers of the English Language (and British Studies) working in Poland - something which is, in itself, quite fascinating as what we have here is an idea of what people who are planning to migrate to Britain are being taught about ‘Britishness’ before they ever arrive on our shores.

I’ll pick out a small number of personal favorites, although what should be obvious from the whole list is, yet again, a complete absence of consensus on what Britishness really is, starting with the wonderful thoughts of Terry Jones…

I suppose an essential aspect of being British is not liking others very much. We are set apart by our lack of French-ness, German-ness or Italian-ness. Still Britain is one of the few places left in the world which still has real beer.

Malcolm McLaren also gets down to the point with…

Being British is about singing Karaoke in Bars, eating Chinese noodles and Japanese sushi, drinking fresh wine, wearing Prada and Nike, dancing to Italian house music, listening to Cher, using an Apple Mac, holidaying in Florida and Ibiza and buying a house in Spain. Shepherds pie and going on holiday to Hastings went out about 50 years ago and the only people you’ll see wearing a Union Jack are French movie stars or Kate Moss.

Although Lib-Dem peer Shirley Williams seems to have forgotten the little matter of the English Civil War in her piece…

Britishness is the countryside, individual liberty, unbroken tradition, and no revolutions. For the British countryside I would pick out the West Highlands, the Lake District and the West Country. There is a strange mistiness alight, such as Turner picked up on so brilliantly. It is a country of poetry.

Most intriguing of all, however, is this quote from, of all people, William Hague, speaking when leader of the Conservative Party…

[Conservatives must embrace] the Britain of big industrial cities and housing estates, the Britain proud of its world class designers and good restaurants, the Britain where hundreds of thousands go to the Notting Hill Carnival and the Eisteddfod, the Britain which watches MTV and Changing Rooms, and which is fascinated by Ricky and Bianca’s ups and downs, the Britain which turns to the sports pages before the political news, where more people go on holiday to Florida than Butlins, the Britain, in other words, that has always been Britain too: urban, ambitious, sporty, fashion-conscious, multi-ethnic, brassy, self-confident and international.

But I’ll leave the last word to the ‘white-suit man’ Martin Bell who noted…

It’s tolerance, decency and a determination to talk about the weather on all occasions and a tendency, when a stranger stands on one’s foot, to apologise.

…which I particularly like if only because its exactly the kind of thing that Arthur Dent would have said had he - or his creator, Douglas Adams - ever been asked the same question.

Not content with pitching the idea of a cyber-war on terrorism, Charles the Safety Elephant now turns his attention to violent pornography on the strength of ’shock, horror’ one case in which a violent sex offender was allegedly ‘addicted’ to sexually violent internet porn.

The suggestion seems to be, as with alleged terrorist websites that the government would like some sort of Chinese-style controlled national gateway to the internet to prevent UK citizens being corrupted and depraved by pornography which is illegal in the UK, but otherwise perfectly legal in other countries, plus all the usual array of intrusive monitoring of whatever people might be getting up to in the privacy of their own homes - building, apparently, on the government’s experience of the fight against child pormography.

Unfortunately, whether or not some of this kind of porn is what floats your personal ‘boat’, the fact is that, unlike child porn, things are much less clear cut when it comes to some of things that the Safety Elephant appears to want banned.

Child pornography is, more or less, a clear cut thing - either the unfortunate participant is under the age of 16 - in which case its illegal, or they’re not and they just look under age in which case you might find it all a bit distasteful, but its certain not, of itself, illegal under UK law.

When you get down to the question of what Clarke now appears to want to ban; necrophilia, rape, strangulation, torture seem to be the list being touted around the press, things start to get altogether less clear.

In the case of necrophila and rape, the question has to be how can we be sure that what’s being accessed is actually real and not a simulation - is the corpse really a corpse, or just someone made up to look like a corpse - you might be able to spot the telltale signs of breathing if your delaing with video footage but if its a still image then there’s little or no way to be sure one way or another.

What do we do here, do we ban outright the depiction of necrophilia - an outright act of censorship which could easily inhibit legitimate artistic expression - yeah, seriously, like anything else with the parameters of human experience one cam explore our ideas and conceptions of necrophilia within the context of art without engaging in the act itself.

Perhaps we take a best guess and prosecute on the basis that a particular website claims that its image are real and, therefore, that the offender must reasonably have believed they were looking at real pictures of necrophilia - but how do we know that that is, in fact, what they really believed at the time of viewing - is it not simply case that claim the images are real is nothing more than reinforcing the fantasy, part of the process of promoting the suspension of disbelief in the viewer.

What happen if we prosecute, only for the ‘corpse’ to turn up a few months later, live and shagging on another website? If, in such a case, it transpires that its was a fake to begin with and no illegal act has been committed in generating the images which put someone in jail, have we not then committed a miscarriage of justice - after all all they’ve actually viewed is standard porn with added make-up not actual necrophilia.

The same arguments apply when it comes to depictions of rape and are even more marked in relation to torture and stangulation - can we be sure, beyond reasonable doubt, that what is being accessed is the real thing or a fantasy being acted out be consenting adults?

What we’re talking about here are things which as fantasies and when acted out between consenting adults are well within the ‘normal’ parameters of human sexual behaviour, things which become problematic only when the occur in the absence of consent. They may not be to your own, or my own, personal tastes but so longs as they remain in a realm of personal fantasy or are acted out between consenting adults then no real harm is done and what people get up to in their own bedrooms is none of either ours or the government’s business.

While I’m certainly not suggesting that its wrong to take action against websites which contain images of real necrophilia or rape and of torture and strangulation which is carried out without consent - most BDSM is fully consensual and very carefully controlled, as I understand it - I’m really not sure that anything other than very minimal changes to UK law are necessary and any such changes need to be confined to dealing with access to and posession of images which are real, and not simulated or faked. In that sense, the situation is very different from that which exists in law in relation to child pornography, which does cover ‘pseudo-photographs’ which I presume to images which have be deliberately manipulated in order to create the appearance that the subject is under age. This is really an international issue, one of tracking the perpetrators in their own country and cutting off the supply of such images at source.

What I am clear about is that the one thing that isn’t justified is this idea of ‘blocking access’ to offending websites which, as with the idea of blocking access to information about terrorism, sets a very dangerous precedent and a licence for further unwarrented snooping into the private lives of citizens.

This is more ill-thought out knee-jerk crap from the Home Office. Horrific as the murder of Jane Longhurst undoubtedly was, her murderer’s tastes in pornography were not the cause of this murder, merely a reflection of his character which led him to act as he did - his tastes in pornography are merely a side-issue and have little real bearing on the case, itself.

Far from jumping on a yet another victim-led bandwagon, the government should think this through properly and use this an opportunity for reform of a truly abysmal piece of legislation, the Obscene Publications Act.

As we’re in the area of sex and sexuality its worth noting the constrast between this particular Act of Parliment, from the late 1950’s and the more recent Sexual Offences Act 2003.

The former, which regulates pornography in the UK, defines obscenity in purely vague and subjective terms - something is obscene if it considered to the likely to ‘deprave and corrupt’ the reader/viewer. It is a badly written and prudish - in the manne of its drafting - piece of legislation.

By complete contrast the Sexual Offences Act is an extremely well-drafted piece of legislation, one that is clear, concise and precise in its terminolgy -read this act and you can be in no doubt at all what each offence it covers is and what the burden of evidence is in each case.

If we are to look at trying outlaw violent pornography then it needs to be done properly on the basis of the complete replacement of the Obscene Publications Act with an new act which deals with pornography with the same degree of precision and rigor as the Sexual Offences Act deals with sex offences, its should be drafted in the very same clear, precise and matter of fact way.

Sadly, I doubt that’s what we’ll get.

“Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,”
Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

So it now transpires that not one single ‘fact’ in the account of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube Station on July 22 was actually a fact at all. On every single substantive point, the account which was hawked around the press with seemingly the full backing of the Metropolitan Police was actually true.

There was no positive identification of de Menezes as a suspect - the surveillance officer was taking a piss at the time he left his block of flats on his final, fateful journey, and could at best have caught sight only the back of his head.

There was no vaulting the ticket barrier at Stockwell Tube Station - he used a pass to get through the ticket barrier like any other commuter and even stopped to pick up a free newspaper on the way.

There was no unusual attore, no padded jacket - without or without wires sticking out of the top - and no suicide belt. He was wearing nothing more unusual than a nornal denim jacket. Here - see for yourself…

He wasn’t chased onto the train by the police - he ran for the train as it pulled into the station as would any other commuter on any other day.

He wasn’t wrestled to the ground at the end of a chase and then shot - he was approached by a surveillance officer having taken his seat on the train without the remost thought that he was being followed. On being challenged, so it seems, only in the sense that this officer called out ‘Police’ to his, he stood up and walked towards the officer, no doubt wondering what the hell was going on, and was then seemingly wrestled back into his seat by this officer only for armed officers from CO19, who’d just entered the train, to go up to him and ‘cap’ him under orders that they should shoot to kill, if necessary.

It’s also been reported elsewhere that the CCTV cameras in Stockwell Tube station ‘may not have been working’, yet the documents leaked to ITV show statements making direct reference to CCTV footage of the whole incident.

What are we to make of all this?

ITV’s line was to focus solely on the catalogue of errors which led to this tragic incident, a case our own Keystone Kops on the trail of the ‘Keystone Kaliphate’ - a term coined by the Honourable Fiend to descibe the failed bombers of the day before. One or two bloggers, meanwhile, are already talking in terms of anything from an extra-judical killing to a cold-blooded execution. The Independent Police Complaints Commission and the government, of course, are saying nothing and treating the matter as sub-judice, although I’m sure investigations into the leaking of these documents are already proceeding apace, not least as the mere fact of this leak suggests that someone with access to these documents already suspects that the ‘fix’ may be in at that the supposedly independent inquiry was already heading down the road of a cover-up.

Certain aspects of the false account of the incident given to the press are clearly readily explained - the person seen wearing a heavy, padded, jacket and vaulting the barrier at Stockwell Tube station, if not de Menezes can only have been one of the plain-clothes firearms officers racing to catch up with him, the padded jacket being necessary to cover his firearm which would have been kep in a shoulder holster.

Other elements of this whole thing are much less clear.

I may have misheard, but ITV’s report seemed to suggest that de Menezes had been identified as an ‘IC2 Male’ which ITV seemed to think meant tht officer thought he was of African appearance - IC2 is actually the police code for an individual of Southern European appearance, a description which does fit de Menezes but not any of the terrorist suspects being sought from the day before.

Is that simply a minor mistake on ITV’s part or was he identified be the police as an IC2 Male, a description which would rule him out as a possible suspect? And if that is the case, why was it reported to ‘Gold Command’ that a positive identification had been made, resulting in authorisation being given to shoot de Menezes without challenge.

The account of what happened on the train, itself, also raises a serious question.

The statement given by the surveillance officer who restrained de Menezes just before he was shot reads:-

“I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side,â€?

“I then pushed him back on to the seat where he had been previously sitting . . . I heard a gunshot very close to my left ear and was dragged away on to the floor of the carriage.�

Whatever else this may be, the officer’s actions as described do not tally with any normal restraint technique used by the Police. Police officers are not trained to restrain suspects in this manner with very good reason - if the suspect has a knife that you haven’t seen then the only thing you’ll achieve by trying to restrain him in this way is to get yourself stabbed in the stomach.

So what was this officer doing here? Did he use such an unorthodox method of restraint because he suspected de Menezes might be a suicide bomber and would trigger an explosion were his arms not pinned to his side?

It seems unlikely as the officer’s stated actions would not have prevented a bomb being triggered if the trigger were already in de Meneze’s hand and, given the unstable nature od the bombs which appear to have been used in the real attacks, could just as easily have triggered the bomb as prevented it beign set off.

Was this, instead, an instinctive act of bravery - an officer throwing himself onto the suspect bomber in the hope that his own body might take the brunt of the blast and spare a life or two as a result. Such self acts are not entire unknown - more than a few soldiers have died in wartime throwing themselves bodily onto hand grenades to try to protect their comrades.

But then that doesn’t fit with the rest of the account, de Menezes got up out his seat and walked towards the officer on a well lit train - the officer would have has several seconds to assess the situation and, most importantly of all, a good clear look at de Menezes’s face…

…and as surveillance officer who must have been briefed thoroughly as to the appearance of the real suspects, he must surely have recognised at that point that they’d got the wrong man.

Looked at this statement, does it not appear that this officer may not have acting to restrain a suspect at all, but trying instead to restrain what he had just identified as an innocent man in the knowledge just behind him were a number of armed police officers with instructions to shoot to kill without giving a challenge? I’m speculating, of course, but this officer’s actions do appear more in keeping with trying to protect de Menezes from his colleagues than trying to restrain a terrorist who may be carrying a bomb.

I wonder if this is, perhaps, the most tragic aspect of this whole case, that in trying to prevent de Menezes being seen as a threat by his colleagues, this officer may have inadvertantly caused his death, his actions being misinterpreted by his colleagues as an effort to prevent a bomb being triggered, causing them to shoot.

I may be right. I may be wrong. I’m speculating here, but that fact that there is room for this kind of speculation suggests that this matter is far from closed, and certainly won’t be closed by whatever finding the Police Complaints Commission arrive at.

Such a catlogue of obvious errors requires a full public enquiry, not least into the circumstances in which a complete and disparagingly fictional account of the death of Jean Charles de Menezes was allowed to stand as ‘fact’ when on every substantive point it was completely innaccurate.