Lots of ground to cover here so I’ll straight down to business.

First up Tim Worstall notes an interesting statistical claim from Julie Bindel in today’s Grauniad, which he files under the category ‘idiotarians’:

Violence against women is the cause of more deaths and disability around the world in 15- to 44-year-olds than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war.

Tim would like to know where the evidence is the for this, which as good question as figures from the World Health Organisation put deaths from cancer at 7 miiion a year (12.5% of all deaths) and malaria at around 1 million and year while traffic accidents rack up 1.2 million deaths and anything from 20-50 million injuries/disabilities each year.

Given the scale of the problem that Bindel claims exists, you might expect this to be mentioned by the WHO in their new ‘landmark’ study on domestic violence around the world - yet neither the summary report nor the full report makes any such claims - in fact the WHO report, in calling for more research, explicitly notes that:

In some places few [sic] data on violence against women are available. More research on the magnitude and nature of the problem of violence against women, and its costs, in given countries or settings is therefore urgently needed to provide a stronger basis for advocacy and action.

Which seems to confirm that Bindel’s figure derive from that time-honoured journalistic tradition more commonly refered to as ‘pulling numbers out of your ass’.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International’s survey on attitudes toward rapes, reported here by the Times, has been rattling around the blogosphere and spawning much interesting commentary.

As things go, Andrew at Non-trivial Solutions, with a bit of an assist from Jarndyce in the comments, has pretty much the right kind of take on things in noting that ‘blame’ and ‘responsibility’ are very different things and that there seems to be a fair bit of public confusion between notions of responsibility and risk within the survey answers which is reflected in some of the commentary on this study.

I think the sensible thing for Amnesty to do is commission a follow-up study to unpick this whole blame-responsibility-risk issue and provide a more nuanced assessment of public attitudes.

My main practical criticism of this study, however, is reserved for its seeking to draw conclusions about the public’s understanding of rape and the issues it raises - which is ’sold’ as ‘public ignorance’ - from their apparent lack of awareness of current crime statistics and conviction rates. Andrew rightly points out that aspects of the survey’s design will tend to introduce a degree of cognitive bias into the results.

What the survey and many of those commenting on it fail to address, however, is the question of why its assumed that the public should possess an encyclopedic knowledge of crime statistics and conviction rates for rape, or any other offence for that matter, in the first place?

I think it a near certainty that the same kind of survey questions, if applied to other types of criminal offence, would turn up much the same the results - i.e. that the public don’t really know but about half of them are willing to take a guess based on the multiple-choice options put in front of them.

As it happens, had I been one of those surveys, I would have got the questions on rape statistics and conviction rates pretty much right - but only because I’ve had cause - for professional reasons - to look these things up and have, in any case, read something in a newspaper on just this subject fairly recently.

Ask me the same questions about fraud, street robbery or pretty much any other crime and I really couldn’t tell you what the figures are, not because I’m ignorant but simply because I’ve had no particular reason to look them up. If I should find myself needing to know the numbers, well the I do know where to look for them and can track them down pretty quickly if and when I need them.

All of which makes me wonder whether, if I rang a few journalists and asked them to tell me, off the top of their heads and without looking it up, the gross domestic product of Lesotho and the countries per capita expenditure on toilet paper and then stuck out a press release claiming that journalists know nothing about Africa, would that get me an op-ed piece in the Grauniad?

Still, this is an issue which looks set to rumble on for a bit, not least courtesy of the High Court judge who ruled that consent given when pissed is still consent, at the conclusion of a rape trial which ended with the judge instructing the jury to render an acquittal.

This has sparked something of a controversy as the alleged victim claims to have been unconscious at the time the rape took place, making it appear that the judge has overturned both part of the recent Sexual Offences Act 2003 and a hundred year-old principle in common law that consent cannot be given - quite obviously - when unconscious, even though the law professor drafted in by the times to comment on this ruling notes that:

“If a woman has sex with a man just because she is drunk, and with whom she would not have had sex otherwise, then she cannot say she did not really consent because she was under the influence of drink.â€?

She added than any case where a woman was proved to be unconscious would be a long way down the line from that.

All of which explains why the judge directed the jury as he did when you not the operative phrase “any case where a woman was proved to be unconscious” - and its also worth noting that he made his comments in response to a request from Huw Rees, the prosecution barrister, that the case be abandoned “in light of the evidence revealed in cross-examinationâ€?.

Essentially what happened here is that the prosecution were unable to establish with corroborating evidence and beyond reasonable doubt that the alleged victim was actually unconscious and, therefore, incapable of giving consent, which - whether you like it not - means an acquittal.

So, the reality here is that the judge isn’t overturning either the Sexual Offences Act 2003 or common law after all as without proof that the ‘victim’ was unconscious, the question of consent become entirely moot.

All of whcih bring me to the last post I want to reference, which is this one from Gendergeek, and specifically this from Emmy’s actual post:

Amnesty’s Kate Allen believes that the government must take action to combat this ‘blame culture’ and publicise the true prevalence of rape and its appalling conviction rate in the UK. The results of this opinion poll indicate that current policy approaches are not working.

And this comment from Emma in the comments:

Your confidence in the British public is not borne out by the attrition rate for rape complaints. Only 4% are converted into convictions in Scotland.

Yes, it certainly is true that headline conviction rates are appalling low in rape cases - 5.6% overall being the figure most often quoted of late.

Except that this has very little to do with public attitudes to rape or ‘ignorance’ of crime statistics, as this recent Home Office report ‘A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases‘ clearly demonstrates.

The 5.6% conviction rate that is widely reported is the headline rate for all reported rape cases. By way of contrast the actual conviction rate in cases which make it to the courtroom is actually 60% - 24% due to the defendant entering a plea of guilty and another 36% where a trial leads to a conviction on a guilty verdict - which amounts to 48% of all cases where a full jury trial takes place leading to convictions.

The real problem here lies in getting cases to court - only 14% of reported rapes result in trial proceedings but:

9% of reported rapes are designated false during investigations; the majority of which comprise reports from women in the 16-25 age group.

A full third of all reported rapes fail to proceed past the investigation stage due to ‘evidence issues’ – in many cases the issue here is one of ‘victim credibility’.

Another third are lost when the victim withdraws from the case, either for fear of being disbelieved or of the criminal justice system and court process.

So you tell me, where’s the problem here?

You can’t really blame ‘public attitudes’ when so few cases go to court in the first place, a jury trial being the only situation where such attitudes - as opposed to the victim’s own perception of what public attitudes may be or the attitudes their encounter from the police and CPS - are really put the the test.

All things being equal, a 48% conviction rate in trials is still pretty much on the low side compared to most other offences but even then, without studying and evaluating what goes in jury room in cases which result in an acquittal its still impossible to say how much of factor public attitudes are as opposed to the quality of evidence, despite the fact that the evidence from the US, where for example Alameda County, California (which includes Berkely and Oakland) has a conviction rate at trial of 90%, shows that the use of specialist rape investigation and prosecution teams increase the conviction rate in rape cases at trial to around 85%.

This all brings us back to a particular pernicious and disreputable subtext to the current law and order debate, one which masquerades as concern for ‘victim’s right’ but which is actually a coded argument in favour of articificially inflating conviction rates by the quick-fix method of denuding the fundamental principles of justice, the presumption of innocence and the requirement for ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’.

Put simply, what the evidence says is that the way to improve conviction rates in rape and many other offences is through the use of highly-skilled specialist teams who can generate quality evidence - this is certainly true in the US in rape cases and equally true in the UK where the introduction of a specialist unit to tackle serious and complex fraud cases has successfully upped the conviction rate from around 63£ to 85%, albeit that this unit has also had the odd spectaclur and extremely expensive failure.

The trouble with this approach as that, politically-speaking, it requires both a significant cash investment to put such units together and takes time to deliver concrete results - if government were to make such an investement today it could take anything from three to five years for such units to start to make a significant dent in conviction rates - allowing both for the time it takes to get units set up, trained and resoourced and the time it takes to investigate cases, get them to trial and see their outcomes reflected in official statistics.

As is the case with many things, doing the job properly can be an expensive and time-consuming proposition, even if that’s the right way to go.

Unfortunately, politicians have a second option; tinkering around the edges of the law to create the impression that they’re doing something, which comes considerably cheaper and is more ‘immediate’ in political terms as it appears to generate results - new and amended laws - the actual effectiveness of which can be nigh on impossible to evaluate for several years.

For politicians this can all too easily appear a win-win strategy. you tweak the law so that, in theory, it should make getting a conviction bit easier and dish out stiffer and more punitive sentences - all of which plays well with the likes of the Sun, Mail and Express - and then a few years down the line when it turns out to have made little or no difference at all you’ll either be out of office and out of the firing line or you can just pass the buck and blame judges for not interprting the law the way you wanted them to, tell everyone that ‘public opinion’ supports more changes to the law and start the whole dumb process all over again.

This is where the supporter of this current campaign to tackle violence against women, and women’s groups in particular, need just to be a touch careful and not lose sight of the nuances of the debate.

What we should all be demanding is that government tackle the difficult things here, the things that require long-term and sustained investment in education - to try and change attitudes, particularly amongst men - in better policing and specialist investigation teams and prosecutors and in the co-ordinated provision of support and after-care services for women who are victims of rape, domestic violence and violent attacks in general.

What needs to be avioded, though, is falling into the trap laid by the notional idea of ‘victim’s rights’ and that, somehow, changing the law in ways which, so the government claims, rebalances the system towards the victim but which, in reality, eat away at the fundamental principles of Britis justice, which seems to promise much but invariably delivers very little.

We should avoid the easy option here, the one which takes away more and more of our precious rights and freedoms not just because its wrong in principle - although it is - but because if offers the least effective solution here adn if we genuinely want a first-class response from government on this issue we should make it clear from the outset that we’re not going to be suckered into taking second, third or fourth best just to cover their collective arses with a quick fix before the next election.

Update: It turns out the statistics that Bindel uses (badly) in her article are taken from 1993 World Development Report, which is produced by the World Bank and, as Jo Salmon has pointed out in comments, is in widespread use by both Oxfam and the US Congress.

None of which validates the manner in which these statistics are used in the article.

For one thing the statistics in question relate to morbidity not mortality, which is assessed in terms of an estimate of the years of healthy life (1 in 5) lost to women due to violence - which is not an assessment of cause at all but an indication of the extent to which such violence is a significant contributory factor in women’s health problems.

This notional idea of ‘healthy years lost’ due to the effects of violence would certainly include situations where there is a direct causal link, where the violence results in death or injury, but also many more indirect effects, for example those arising from drug or alcohol dependancy which can certainly be linked to violence but cannot definitively be said to be caused by violence as there are a wide range of other factors which must be taken into account.

In addition, the actual WDR estimates being cited place healthy years lost due to violence above those lost to either breast cancer or cervical cancer but make no claim at all in relation to all cancers - in fact breast and cervical cancers combined make up about a third of all cancers in women in this particular age group.

In essence there’s nothing particularly wrong with the statistics themselves but the manner in which they’re being used here is problematic and their significance is overplayed - as is all too often the case when sucvh things turn up in newspaper articles.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about my former employer, Sandwell Council of Voluntary Organisation, however a call I received tonight suggests things are getting too entertaining at the moment not to give them a mention.

It seems that open hostilities have broken out between SCVO and another local organisation, Murray Hall Community Trust, over some pretty robust - and entirely justified criticism that Murray Hall’s manager has made of SCVO and his management of late, particular regarding SCVO’s Deputy Chief Executive, Michael Anderson.

This has now culminated in SCVO issuing a letter to Murray Hall - as soon as I see a copy I’ll let you know exactly what it says - demanding an apology and, presumably, the retraction of a number of critical comments on threat of legal action against the trust - to which the Trust has responded simply ‘bring it on’.

This all seems to have started a couple of month ago after SCVO were asked by Sandwell Children’s Trust to prepare a paper outlining the kind of support that local voluntary organisations working with children would need in order to meet the statndards required by the government’s ‘Every Child Matters’.

What appears to have happened next is that Michael took it on himself to interpret this request for information as an invitation for SCVO to try to submit a bid for funding to the Children’s Trust, SCVO having unilaterally decided that what the voluntary sector needs is more people working for them without actually bothering to ask the sector what it thinks - of course, the fact that this bid includes management costs which would contribute towards paying Michael’s own salary had no influence whatsoever on this decision.

Murray Hall were, quite naturally, a little perturbed to find that SCVO had decide it was going to tell the Children’s Trust that what the children’s organisations in Sandwell needed was for the Trust to give SCVO money without even a by your leave to those organisations, not least because SCVO have no track record at all in children’s services while Murray Hall manage a local Surestart and their chairman is also chiar of the local Children’s Fund and, as a result, have made their feelings known on the subject of this bid, which Michael has been hawking around anyone who might possibly listen for the couple of months with no success whatsoever.

This all comes at a bit of tricky time for SCVO as they’ve only just discovered that a government-funded project they’ve been running for the last four years and getting shedloads of money for - 90 grand in management fees alone last years - has just been evaluated and found to be nowhere near being fit for purpose, the upshot of which is likely to be anything from 6-8 redundancies by March next year and a fair-sized hole in their finances which comes from relying on reaming that project for management fees to pay a quarter of the salaries of both its Chief and Deputy-Chief Executives.

Coming only just over 12 months after another project - Black Country Global Grants, was taken off them after only a year due to their inability to adequately manage the fund, this is naturally a pretty embarrassing situation for SCVO - not least as its managers were all given a 19.2% pay rise earlier this year. In fact the words ’shit’, ‘creek’ and ‘who lost the fucking paddle?’ come readily to mind.

In case you’re wondering, the staff who actually do the work there got 2.9% - corpulent felines or what!

So what’s actually going on here?

Well, something that Ian Hislop, of Private Eye and ‘Have I Got News for You’ fame would recognise straight away having been on the wrong end of the same treatment from good old Cap’n Bob - that’s Robert Maxwell if you’re too young to remember.

It’s called ‘threatening your critics with litigation in order to try to shut them up’.

Of course, SCVO being a charity, there is the little matter of their needing the permission of the Charity Commission (under S.33 of the Charities Act 1992) before using charitable funds to pursue litigation - and let’s be clear here on the back of what they’re moaning about their chances of getting permission to sue and somewhat less than fuck all.

But then why let a little matter like charity law get in the way of a good threat, even if the only reply you get is ’so sue me’.

I suspect that fact alone says more about this situation than anything else - if you have to resort to empty threats in order to try to silence your critics then it seems to me you’re on pretty shaky ground already, the kind of ground that doesn’t stand up to too close scrutiny.

After all, rub people up the wrong way like this as they may start asking a few awkward questions like:

How is it that between 2002 and early 2005, the African-Caribbean community in West Bromwich, which makes up about 4.3% of the town’s population were awarded 26% of the total grant funding, from two small grants programmes managed by SCVO, that went into the town - that’s just under £71,000 out of around £290,000 that went into West Bromwich in total.

It also happens to be 62% or thereabouts of the total amount of funding given the Black and Minority Ethnic groups in the town over the same period - the town’s Indian community which is twice the size, population-wise, got just less that half as much funding as the African Caribbean community and of that only around £8,500 went to local Sikh organisations despite their being, in terms of population, the largest local minority community.

Of course SCVO wouldn’t know any of this having recently responded to a request for this kind of breakdown of grant funding from these small grants programmes by telling the person who asked that such a breakdown can’t be done because they don’t monitor these grants fully by ethnicity only whether they go to BME organisation or not.

Thing is, the trouble with questions like that is that the answers you get spawn other questions like:

How is it that out of that £71,000 or so that went to African Caribbean organisations in West Bromwich, £49,000 went to organisations in which three of SCVO’s directors hold notifiable personal interests - in the case of one director nearly £30,000 has gone to organisations in which either they or an immediate family member have a direct interest as an employee or member of the management committee of the organisation receiving the funding.

Of course these interests were all declared when SCVO’s board met to approve the recommendations of the grants panel that made these awards - of which this same director is also a member, as are two other SCVO board members and the organisation’s Chief Executive.

Weren’t they?

Again this seems to something that SCVO don’t know because they don’t appear to monitor such things - even this is all information that can be pulled together with just a little effort and the information they have to hand.

The range of political opinion emerging [in the] British blogosphere subculture is emphatically not representative of public opinion in this country: bloggers from left to right have a liberal (or libertarian) streak that leads to a broad oppositional consensus to things like ID cards and 90-day detention without charge.

Not so the British public as a whole, which is much more sympathetic to the more populist and authoritarian view of the Sun and New Labour.

Or so Martin Stabe contends in commenting on Doctor Vee’s observation that British bloggers of all political persuasions possess something of a marked libertarian streak in the face of government policy on ID cards and detaining suspected terrorists for 90 days without charge; one which puts the bloggerati at odds with ‘public opinion’…

…but does that really matter?

Within this whole question of the relationship between bloggers and ‘public opinion’ we find echoes of this wonderful description of the British dead-tree press by Jim Hacker in ‘Yes Prime Minister’:

The Times is read by the people who run the country.
The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country.
The Guardian is read by the people who think they ought to run the country.
The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country.
The Independent is read by people who don’t know who runs the country but are sure they’re doing it wrong.
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country.
The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country.
The Daily Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run as it used to be run.
The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who still think it is their country.
And The Sun’s readers don’t care who runs the country providing she has big tits.

In other words, this is hardly a new argument at all but merely the translation of an old debate to a new arena; one in which one could readily replace Martin’s reference to the ‘British blogosphere subculture’ with the title of any one of the newspapers from the ‘quality’ end of the market - The Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph or FT - and still make pretty much the same point.

In terms of simple demographics I’d strongly suspect that the contention that bloggers are ‘unrepresentative’ of the British public as a whole is as near as damn it a tautology. A ‘lifestyle survey’ of the bloggerati would almost certainly show us to be above average in terms of education, employment and all the usual things which go into making arbitrary definitions of social class. Indeed you’d be hard pressed to find much in the way of significant differences between a demographic profile of British bloggers and the target demographics of upmarket newspapers. Unrepresentative we may be but no more so that the combined readership of the Guardian, Independent, Times and Telegraph, so why is it such a big deal that we don’t appear to reflect the presumed opinions of Sun readers?

Is that really to be the sum total of our aspirations for society - government by dictat of Rupert Murdoch based on the opinions of a newspaper where articles are pitched to an effective reading age of seven so as to not make things too difficult for some its readership?

I may be edge towards the realms of intellectual snobbery here but can’t we at least aspire to something a little better than the lowest common denominator.

None of this, however, addresses the fundamental question of how useful or reliable is this idea of “public opinion” in the first place or whether, indeed, being out of touch with it actually matters that much?

Framing this question we have two very interesting but very different political debates, on ID cards and the time period for which terrorist suspects can be held for questioning without being charged and, perhaps, the most telling contribution when it comes to where public opinion might sit on this issues is this one from Antonia Bance:

At this point, I’ll be clear: despite my Labour membership, I wasn’t happy about the plan for 90 days’ detention, and at best I’m agnostic on ID cards. But I’m not going to write about them, because frankly, I find them boring. That’s not to say that they’re not important, or that I don’t give a shit, just that if you want to talk about the war / Iraq / terrorism / ID cards / security, and for that matter, Europe / PR / voting reform, go and find some other blogger.

If you were to ask me what public opinion really is on these two issues then I think Antonia’s comments pretty much sum put things in a nutshell - the vast majority of people in the UK simply don’t find these issues interesting enough or see them as important enough to hold any particularly strong opinions on them either way. These debates, like so many others, are of limited interest to all but a minority of people who do take a serious interest in them.

Like bloggers.

The reality here is that very few political issues impinge on people’s everyday lives to the extent that the majority of people will hold some sort of firm opinion on them and most of these tend to resolve back, in on way or another, to the adage that ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. The things that concern most people are those that have the most direct and obvious impact on their daily lives and especially their standard of living and quality of life - get that right and, as a politician you’re on to a winner.

All of which means that on a wide range of issues what passes for public opinion tend to be ill-informed and based on the sketchiest possible understand of what the debate is really about, making public opinion infinitely malleable and susceptible to influence, something both press and politicians know all too well. After all, if you’re faced with a complex issue (ID cards) that you don’t understand and particularly care about then why bother thinking it through yourself with the politicians and media can do you thinking for you?

Being out of touch with public opionion, far from being a weakness amongst bloggers, as some seem to imply, is actually one of the blogosphere’s greatest strengths and assets.

Look closely at the recent debates on ID cards and 90-day detentions and it rapidly becomes apparent that only in the quality press and amongst bloggers has there actually been a substantive debate, especially on ID cards where bloggers have carried the debate to an extent that even the MSM have been unable to match. On that basis alone it’s certainly not pious to suggest that on these issues bloggers have a set of informed opinions that the public lack - that is merely an inievitable consequence of a situation where public opinion is being wield by government not as part of a wider debate but in place of that debate.

And that, really, is the nub of the issue. Not only do I not care about whether I am out of touch with ‘public opinion’ but I don’t much trust it anyway - mainly because the people who put the most emphasis on the importance of public opinion are also the same people to spend the time and energies on trying to influence it in the first place.

Well whaddya know, for once dear old Polly Pot has managed to write something which makes a bit of sense.

Admittedly the subject of state funding for faith schools is one of those rare topics in which she’s both consistent in her views and entirely correct in both opposing the overt influence of religion in state education and noting that most of the reputation that faith schools have for supposedly delivering higher standards comes at the price of using selection on the basis of faith as a backdoor means of cherry-picking better students - those that don’t use thier admissions policy in this way perform no better than the local comprehensive.

Ok, so this is Polly and that means that inevitably she manages to drift off the plot a little towards the end in talking about ‘charismatic’ leaders and some of the general wing-nuttery you can all too easily get at the margins of religious orthodoxy but her basic point is sound - we should be permitting religious groups to run schools within the state education system.

As I recall I’ve posted my full views on this before but as Polly brings the subject up I think it worth restating them.

First, not only should the state not fund faith school within the main state education system but the current legislation which requires schools to hold ‘broadly Christian faith-based’ assemblies and include religious education in the curriculum should also be repealed.

Anything which smacks of religious instruction should come right off the school menu.

In its place we should introduce a broad-based programme of social education with a strong focus on citizenship. This would certainly include some elements of religious education in terms of learning about different religions and comparative religious studies but that would only be one small component of a curriculum which would start, at seven, with very basic philosophy (the basics of logic and critical thinking) and work its way through a range of disciplines including; politics, philosophy, sociology, social/political history, basic economics and a bit of psychology, perhaps, before picking up a clear focus, from 14 onwards, on democracy, civics and government.

I have this simple idea, here, that if you want children to grow up with a clear understanding the importance of citizenship and democracy, of their rights and responsibilities as citizens and, most importantly of all from my point of view, of the value of being able to think critically and formulate your own idea, then that’s what you need to teach them in school.

Unlike Polly I’ve no fundamental objection to the state providing some small degree of funding to faith groups who want to offer parents the choice of having their child receive specific religious instruction providing that take place outside the state education system. Fund faith groups to run out-of-school clubs and religious study groups by all means, just get religious instruction out of state schools - it has no place being there and the time it takes up can be much better spent educating children in understanding the society in which they live and will be living as adults.

Anyway, before anyone gets an attack of the vapour and need to lie down at the though of Polly talking sense, let me direct you to posts from Tim Worstall, Devil’s Kitchen (here and here) and Chris Dillow which more than adequately show her on more usual form.

There little I can add to what’s already been said other than to note that a general distrust of politicians is an absolutely essential facet of a healthy democratic society. Distrust leads citizens to ask questions and demand that politicians provide evidence to back up their pronouncement - all essential elements of democratic accountability.

And with thjat in mind I’ll hand the last word over to Theodore Roosevelt, who’s word I can heartily endorse:

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

Via the estimable Mr Worstall, purveyor of the ever excellent Britblg Roundup (now at #40) and editor of this year’s must have Christmas gift; 2005: Blogged, in which your humble chronicler gets a mention - buy the book and have all the fun of RSS feeds in the bath without the risk of electrocution (that’s enough shilling for now) - we fine that PC Copperfield is back (Yay!)and in fine form with this quiz on the rivetting subject topic of inane Police slogans. Surely a candidate for a Mastermind specialist subject if ever there was one.

All of which puts me in mind of an email I received a couple of years back, in my previous job, from the local Fire Service, which happily informed me that they were in the process of trying to come up with a new mission statement and could I, therefore, send then a copy of my employers mission statement and any ideas I might have to help them with this monumentally important task.

The truth is, I never did get around to replying [how remiss of me] not because my employer didn’t have a mission ststement - it did, although ironically, for those who know about such things, our mission statement was actually a vision statement while our vision statement actually set out our mission (not that management could ever figure that one out) - or because I was lacking in ideas but because I really couldn’t think of a way to respond which didn’t involve pointing out that whatever they came up with, if it didn’t start out by mentioning the importance of putting out fires then I for one would not be coughing up for that portion of my council tax bill which paid the wages of the idiots writing the mission statement.

Maybe I’m being rather too prosaic here but ‘We put out fires’ seems to be a pretty fair mission statement for a Fire Brigade in much the same way as ‘We catch criminals’ works for me when it comes to the matter of a mission statement for the local constabulary - anything else they might want to add to that would be fine if a touch extraneous, but I think both capture the basics of the public’s legitimate expectations of their emergency services.

Being a firm believer in the principle of ‘less is more’ there are one or two other professions where such a plain-speaking approach would be refreshing, for instance:

Accountancy - We hide your money from the Taxman
Inland Revenue - We take your money and prosecute your accountant
Solicitors/Barristers - Win or lose, we always get paid

I’m sure you can think of others…

Well, if this week’s anything to go by then the future of the Child Support Agency looks set to join the long list of other things (drugs, terrorism, etc.) where its close to impossible to engage in a sensible, meaningful debate.

Of course the doyen of foot-in-mouth op-ed comment, Polly Toynbee, has to put herself at the centre of proceedings as usual; and to the usual effect of demonstrating that she’s big on opinions and short on understanding what she’s talking about.

Ok, so she starts this particular flap-ed piece well enough by noting that:

The prime minister was stumped when pressed in the Commons. He admitted that the Child Support Agency is a disaster and no one knows what to do. He said the CSA has a “fundamental problem”. Indeed it does.

The trouble is that as you read on you find that she has no more idea of what to do about the CSA as Tony Blair. Oh, sure she has opinions - it’s all the fault of stereotypical deadbeat dads in batman pyjamas and they should all be automatically fined 15% of their income for daring not to live in the family home - all seemingly plausible but all in their own way as bad as anything to emanate from the CSA itself in the now 11 year course of its misbegotten existance.

In other words, the usual load of bollocks.

The CSA has been a failure from day one for the simple yet fundamental reason that it exists as a effort to reduce the complex series of siutations and interaction which occur when a relationship breaks down into a set of rules and formulae simple enough to administered by a bunch of scutters in an office.

That’s the Alpha and Omega of the CSA and its problems. It’s an ill-conceived attempt to apply the managerialist principles of a bureaucratic state to an all-to-complex set of human problems which defy categorisation into a simple set of rules that an office clerk can follow. So it’s no surprise whtsoever to find Blair et al stumped by the question of what to do about the CSA; of course he’s in a bind on this issue, its the very philosophy which lies at the heart of his approach to government which is both the cause of the problem and yet is also fundamentally incapable of offering up a solution.

There is a serious and sensible debate to be had here, not just on the issue of fathers paying for the upkeep of their children but on how we, as a society, deal with a wide range of complex issues which arise from relationship breakdowns where there are children involved; and that means putting away all the stereotypes; from the embattled (and embittered?) single mum to the loser-in-batman-suit deadbeat dads - part of the irony of this debate, to date, is that many of those making most use of negative male stereotypes are the same people who would be first in the queue to complain at the first sign of the use of female stereotypes in talking about lone parents.

The power of stereotypes lies in their invariably containing a grain or two of truth amongst the sweeping generalisations. So, yes, when you come to look at the issue of absent fathers you will encounter all the old favourites: the ineffectual sad loser, Mr Mid-Life Crisis with his teenage, pregnant girlfriend in tow, the It-Was-Only-When-I-Was-Pissed wife-beater and, of course, that staple of the mid-morning talkshow, the pig-ignorant juvenile pikey wide-boy - and if that sounds like a roll call of Fathers4Justice well then that just shows what a lousy advert for father’s rights that particular group was/is. But just because they’re a lousy advert for the rights of non-residential parents doesn’t mean the underlying principles on which they’ve campaigned aren’t real and shouldn’t be taken seriously. F4J are just the idiot tip of a much larger iceberg of people, on both sides of this issue, who are getting shafted by the system.

But this is far from being the totality of absent fatherhood. Relationships fail for all manner of reasons, many of which don’t make for the kind of headlines that The Sun and Daily Mail specialise in and the fact is that there’s been no real substantive research into the experiences of non-resident parents (male or female) following a relationship breakdown - as the Guardian, itself, reported only twelve months ago. Beyond that there’s a government-funded organisation, Fathers Direct, and a self-identified ‘independent think-tank’, Child Support Analysis, and then not much else - note, I’ve not been through these sites in detail so make no endorsement of the views of either.

I can, therefore, speak only from experience of working with, in various capacities, people who have gone through relationship breakdowns and of some of the things I’ve seen - and yes there are certainly the losers, deadbeats, wifebeaters and wide-boys out there ducking their responsibilities, but there are also many decent fathers out there who would wish for nothing more than to have the chance to act as a father to their children.

I’ve seen lone parents, of both genders, struggling to make ends meet and living pretty much hand to mouth - and non-resident parents, mostly men, living the same kind of existance while trying to rebuild their own lives under system which affords them little or no help at all - its easy to forget than men can just as easily lose out financially when a relationship breaks down as, frequently, its their former partner who retains the family home and most of the material possession acquired during the course of the relationship.

To give just one example of how the system can be loaded against men, I’ve been to DSS offices with both men and women looking for help after a relationship breakdown - women, with or without children in tow, are treated by the system as vulnerable and given priority, especially if there are kids involved, which means you can expect the DSS to make an effort to find them accommodation, even if only a hostel place - and try and fast track a claim. Go to the same office with a newly-single man in the same situation and, if you’re lucky, you may come away with a contact for the nearest Sally Army soup kitchen - and I’m not kidding here, I’ve seen that happen first-hand.

Yes, there are women who end up leaving the family home to escape an abusive relationship - there are also women who will claim, falsely, to have just left an abusive relationship because that pushes them up the list of priorities for help. I know this for a fact because I’ve advised women to do exactly that in the past when faced with a DSS officer in a less than helpful mood.

I’ve situations - too many situations - where the kids have become a weapon in a relationship breakdown, a stick for one parent to beat the other with. I’ve seen women refuse, rightly, to comply with access orders granted to abusive fathers - I’ve also seen father’s excluded from their kids lives only to discover afterwards that they’ve been kept away in order to hide the fact that their kids are being abused by a parent, step-parent or other family member - those kinds of cases, however they arise, you never get used to.

I’ve even had lone parents ask for help in avoiding revealing the whereabouts of their former partner to the CSA - behind all the stories of non-payment through official channels there exists a thriving ‘black economy’ in child support payments and ad-hoc arrangements, absent fathers who pick up the tab whenever their kids need clothes, shoes, etc, all of which take place well away from the CSA and a system which strips out any benefits paid to lone parents from maintenance payments before it hands over the cash.

Morally wrong? Yeah, sure - but when you work with people living in genuine poverty then morals tend to be the first thing to go out of window and you do what you can to help even if it means ‘working the system’. When I was working full-time doing welfare benefits advice I know the system well enough to pretty much guarantee someone a social fund loan of £300-400 without any difficulties and regardless of what they wanted/needed the money for. This is a few years back, admittedly, but back then the checks that the DSS did on applications were so poor that you could work the system every time - in fact, I’ll let you on the secret which was simply that no matter what the client actually wanted you always put on the form that they wanted £450 for a new gas fire and cooker because their existing ones had been condemned by an inspector. The DSS never bothered to check this story out; didn’t even as for the inspector’s report, just processed the application and paid over the giro - I put in applications for clients living in fully furnished accomodation, even all-electric council flats, and got them the money every time. All you did was agree to whatever repayment they wanted when you filled in the forms, then appealed the amount once your client had got the money and got the repayments cut to minimum possible, which used to be £2.20-2.40 a week.

If you learn one thing doing that kind of work its that for all you see the same things and the same issues over and over again, no two situations are every entirely the same - a one size solution not only doesn’t fit all but it rarely fits anybody.

To talk in terms of using the Inland Revenue to collect child support payments or deducting a fixed percentage from the income of non-resident parents is to entirely miss the point of this debate - that you’re dealing with real people in real and all-too-complex situations, things which can’t be reduced to a simple rulebook and a formula or two. The system which existed before the CSA came into being, in which maintenace payments were dealt with through the family courts may have been far from perfect but it had one redeeming virtue - each case was heard on an individual basis and dealt with on its indivdual merits. Sure its an expensive way of doing things, but then dealing with people as individuals always is and cheaper is not always better - in fact where the CSA’s concern cheaper is not even cheaper given the huge sums of money that have been pissed down the drain due to its abject failure. It takes a very special kind of stupidity to come with a system from which no one benefits, yet that’s exactly what’s happened with the CSA.

Where does all this leave us?

Well for starters its far too soon to be talking about solutions here. Not only is there more to this issue that just the CSA; failure though it is; one needs to look at the whole range of issue that arise from family breakdowns including the role of the courts in dealing with custody and access issues, second families and how they fit into and impact on these issues and a whole host of other things besides.

The problem here is that we’ve not yet managed to define the problem. We need to understand the reality of what happens when relationships break down and how that affects everyone involved, the financial, personal and emotional costs of such a situation and how it affects both parents - resident and non-resident - and, of course, children. And that means both investing in detailed research to allow us to understand what the real issues are and how best to approach dealing with them and putting away the stereotypes and remembering that we’re dealing with real people in real situations. Yes, even the loser in the Batman suit and the libidinous pikey with tattoos and a tooth on Trisha are people too - just about…

Forget deadbeat dads, the real deadbeats here are the people who designed a child support system where no one wins - forget Father4Justice, Mothers4Justice or even Kids4Justice, what’s needed here is just plain old justice for everyone.

Nosemonkey’s back from nuptuals in the Land of the Rising Sun/Credit Card Bill/Overdraft [best not speculate on other possible ‘risings’ here] and clearly full of his usual vim, vigour and vitriol.

Getting both barrels today is the newly elected Labour MP for Burnley, Heather Graham look-a-like, and the only current Member of Parliament to be named after a bit of Victorian music hall slang for ‘lesbian’*, Kitty Ussher.

Kitty has, of course, worked her way up through party ranks to become an MP via the now traditional New Labour route; she was previously a special policy advisor at the Department of Trade and Industry and former Chief Economist with the Britain in Europe group having been educated at at Birkbeck College, London and Balliol College, Oxford - although she does admit to having harboured childhood dreams of becoming a traffic warden…

… then again, she also claims to be a supporter of Burnley Football Club despite being born in Aylesbury, educated in London and Oxford and serving as a local councillor in that well known enclave of flat caps and whippets - Lambeth.

Traffic warden? Economist? Burnley supporter? You’d have thought personal popularity pretty low on Kitty’s list of priorities with that kind of CV. But no, nothing could be further from the truth.

[By the way - if you’re reading this having found your way here after searching Google for ‘Heather Graham’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘traffic warden’ then I’d try somewhere else - I doubt anything that follows is really going to be of much interest!]

You see, as Nosemonkey points out, Kitty’s desperately keen to remind everyone that next time there’s a terrorist attack in the UK it absolutely, postively not her fault!

But if that’s not convinced you already then maybe this will help:

I myself am precisely the type of liberal, Guardian-reading lefty who is instinctively concerned at the power of the police. [Remember, that’s the kind of liberal, Guardian-reading lefty niece of junior Tory minister (Peter Bottomley) who was educated at Birkbeck and Balliol before going on to become a special policy advisor at the DTI and is hotly tipped to be on the fast track to a ministerial position in her first term] I went into politics to sort out health and education, [Nosemonkey has this one taped, voted only three times of health & welfare issues compared 42 votes on other issues] not to strengthen the long hand of the law [That’s the long arm of the law, Kitty]. But, let’s face it: the police are far better placed to judge what type of legislation we need to combat the terrorist threat than I am. [So you’ll immediately be resigning your seat in the House of Commons in favour of the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police I take it? Didn’t think so.]

Of course the real problem here is this last statement which suggests that the police are better placed that she is to judge the legislative needs of the nation - MPs training obviously isn’t what it used to be or Kitty would understand just how unconstitutional her argument is.

The next three paragraphs, as she lays out her Damascene conversion from sceptic to true believer in the Gospel according to Sir Ian Blair, has to be about the least convincing performance I’ve since Gazza did Top of the Pops with Lindisfarne.

Suitably convinced of the need for action, the arguments then turned to the motives of the police. says Kitty the Crony as if she was writing a 6th form essay on ‘Pride and Prejudice’ as if the readers of the Grauniad might just be dumb enough to genuine believe that she ever gave a moment’s thought to doing anything but follow Blair into the ‘aye’ lobby when the vote on 90 days was called.

It all gets even better when we get to this passage:

And so the debate began in earnest. Some people argued that, because they were lawyers in a previous life, they couldn’t tolerate such a change to the way our legal system worked. I’m sorry, but you’re not working as lawyers any more. You’re leaders. And you need to exercise that leadership in the security interests of the country as a whole.

Remember, this the same MP who a mere three paragraphs earlier said:

But, let’s face it: the police are far better placed to judge what type of legislation we need to combat the terrorist threat than I am.

Better to have MPs who can’t quite shake their experience of being lawyer than former policy advisors who can’t get to grips with what it means to be an MP.

It will be interesting, though, to see whether in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary the definition of leadership is expanded to include:

lead·er·ship (ldr-shp) n.

1. The position or office of a leader: ascended to the leadership of the party.
2. Capacity or ability to lead: showed strong leadership during her first term in office.
3. A group of leaders: met with the leadership of the nation’s top unions.
4. Guidance; direction: The business prospered under the leadership of the new president.
5. Doing whatever the police tell you to do because they know best.

Which brings us, at last, to Miss Kitty’s closing gambit.

Tories and Liberals voted to make the country a more dangerous place in order to score a cheap political point over the prime minister. A small minority of our own side - for whatever spurious reason - did the same. So, as I said at the outset, in the horrific event of a crisis that I hope will never happen, it’ll be their fault, not mine.

All of which sounds very much like the parliamentary equivalent of an exasperated parent yelling at their hyperactive offspring:

Now, don’t you come running to me if you break both your legs.

But rest assured, Kitty. If we do find ourserves faced with the nightmare scenario of suspected terrorist being released after 28 days due to lack of evidence only for them to commit a suicide-bombing on the following day then no, I won’t be holding you personally responsible…

I will, of course, want to know quite what MI5 were up to and what the fuck we’re paying them for, should that happen, as its completely inconceivable that someone released from custody in such circumstances would simply be shoved out of the front door of a police station, bundled into a taxi and told to fuck off home without someone from the security services maybe thinking to look in on them for a few days just to keep an eye on things and make sure they don’t make a detour round the local B&Q, on the way home, for couple of bags of weedkiller and some batteries.

As a final note, Nosemonkey’s updated his original post to include a reference to this post from D-Notice, who lives in Burnley, detailing the response he received from a fagio in Kitty’s office which includes this statement:

However given poll after poll after poll showed the public overwhelmingly supported the measure, which side of the argument would you have her take other than the one supported by the police, the public and the party under which she was elected? It is also a fact that today we have had at least 10 to 1 people ring or contact us irate that the measure did not pass.

Far be it from me to intrude into a citizen’s personal correspondence with his MP but I would hope that D-Notice might consider replying to Kitty’s underling to ask which polls, exactly, he believes demonstrate that the public overwhelmingly supported the measure - surely he’s not referring to the hopelessly biased YouGov poll commissioned by Sky News which has already been more than adequately discredited.

One might also note that it’s hardly surprising, in a town where more than 4,000 people voted BNP at the last election, to find people phoning up to complain that the police aren’t going to be able to intern Muslims for 90 days at a time without charge, not that I suppose that occured to the constituency office muppet who replied to D-Notice.

*I am joking about the music hall slang bit… just my warped sense of humour.

I’m pleased to say that last week’s great parliamentary mystery - just what exactly did Bob Marshall-Andrews actually say to Jim Dowd to cause this altercation - has now been solved courtesy of Bruce Anderson, writing in today’s Indy.

It seems Bob did not, as has been suggested, refer to his parliamentary colleague as a ‘faggot’ but as a fagio - a term apparently used in Mafia circles for a ‘gopher’ and indicative of nothing more than a general contempt for Dowd’s slavish adherance to the party line.

There that’s cleared up.

One thing that’s bothered me throughout the whole debate around extending the period for which terrorist suspects can be held before being charged is that I’ve never quite seen what the police would actually get out of such an extension to their statutory powers.

Obviously I’ve read Andy Hayman’s letter to Charles Clarke setting out the police’s case for a maximum 90 day detention period and taken some time to digest and think over the detail of his arguments, which I find completely unconvincing.

And that’s what’s been bugging me for the last day or two. The fact is that if you strip away the [deliberately] ominous references to chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, attacks on parliament, etc - annd the obvious scare stories - then what you’re left with, the supposedly substantive arguments he puts forward just don’t add up at all.

For a senior police officer Hayman puts up what can only be described as a piss poor case; one that’s both easily rebutted on point after point - as Spyblog so ably demonstrates in the article linked to above - and which doesn’t really demonstrate quite what the police would actually gain from having extended powers of detention without charge.

This leaves only two possibilities; either their case genuinely is that bad but they’ve sussed that Blair has such a consistant track record of being overly impressed by the arguments of ‘professionals’ - to the point of utter gullibility - and so decided it’s worth trying it on on that basis alone, or there’s something more to this situation that the police aren’t telling us - something missing from the picture.

I should break off at this point to note that I’m strangely indebted to Birmingham’s very own Libinidous Democrat, John Hemming, for accidentally suggesting this line of inquiry with this post on his personal blog which points out that he managed to ask a couple of questions during yesterday’s third reading debate on the Terrorism Bill.

Such things would, ordinarily, be of minimal interest were it not for the fact that John’s understanding of legal matters is notoriously shaky - hence his two failed attempts to obtain permission for a judicial review of postal voting regulations - which means that even such tenous leads as this are worth following up as there’s always a good chance of finding that he’s got something embarrasingly wrong and made a complete prat of himself.

And Ok. It turns out John was, indeed, living up to his usual form; asking two questions:

If evidence is put before a High Court judge and is sufficient to warrant someone’s detention, why is that evidence not sufficient for someone to be charged and remanded in custody?

And:

The argument used for detention pre-charge is that questioning cannot occur after charge. What is there in law to prevent that?

Neither of which got an answer because neither is anything like as good a question as John would like to think.

Nevertheless it is this last question, on the legal impediments to further questioning of suspects after they’ve been charged which did set me off on a particular line of inquiry which, I think, may well explain just what it is that is so attractive to police about the power to detain terrorist suspects for up to 90 days without charge.

The simple answer to John’s question is that regulations under which suspects are detained and questioned are derived from powers granted to the Home Secretary by the Police and Criminal Evidnce Act 1984.

This requires the Home Secretary to publish Code of Practice (called PACE Code) which govern the operation practices of the police in conducting investigations and gathering evidence and while these are not [quite] hard and fast rules, courts still have final discretion where questions of the admissibility of evidence arise, a general rule of thumb would be that a failure by a police officer to follow a relevant PACE code would by highly likely to result in evidence being ruled inadmissible in court.

Now, as John does point out, one of the key contentions of the police has been that a maximum detention period of fourteen days without charge may not give sufficient time in some terrorist cases for them to complete their questioning and gather sufficient evidence to warrant a charge under anti-terrorism legislation.

The counter-argument to this has been that, especially with the introduction of new offences such as that of engaging in ‘act preparatory to terrorism’ in this same bill, there is plenty of scope for holding suspects beyond fourteen days on lesser charges while the police complete their enquiries - to which the argument has seemingly come back from Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, that the PACE code inhibits their ability to question suspects once charges have been laid.

Now here things get a little tricky.

Publicly, the police argument against trying to hold terrorist suspects on lesser charges has been that this would result in them getting bail and then skipping the country; even though the only alleged example of this they’ve been able to give has been the case of Mohamed Mergueba during the now infamous ‘no ricin’ plot. This is, however a rather unfortunate example to choose as Mergueba was held for only two days before being released on police bail without ever seeing the inside of court or being charged with a criminal offence.

I may be wrong, but I would think that the fact that someone is under investigation for involvement in terrorist offences and a potential flight-risk would carry considerable weight in the mind of Judge considering an application for bail, even were the individual charged with a lesser offence.

The other argument, that PACE inhibits the police’s ability to question suspects once they’ve been charged, is rather more difficult to track down, although it was referred to directly Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael in his speech during the debate on the detention period clause and attributed directly to Ian Blair as follows:

I attended the Press Gallery lunch yesterday and heard the Metropolitan Police Commissioner address it. He talked about how it was necessary to question a suspect, often on forensic or other evidence, especially after a charge. His position was that the police would be barred from doing so. I accept that that is difficult under the laws of evidence as they stand, but on the basis of my understanding of the law of England and Wales, I must say that it is not already impossible.

Now this is where things get very interesting.

Carmichael claims that Blair told MP’s at a Press Gallery lunch that PACE effectively bars the police from questioning suspects on forensic or other evidence once they’ve been charged, but notes as well that this is not, in fact, impossible.

Turning to PACE Code C itself, we find the rules on questioning suspects after charge are as these:

A detainee may not be interviewed about an offence after they have been charged with, or informed they may be prosecuted for it, unless the interview is necessary:

• to prevent or minimise harm or loss to some other person, or the public

• to clear up an ambiguity in a previous answer or statement

• in the interests of justice for the detainee to have put to them, and have an opportunity to comment on, information concerning the offence which has come to light since they were charged or informed they might be prosecuted

Now to my, admittedly, untrained eye nothing in that clause would serve to prevent further questioning on evidence which came to light after a suspect had been charged and certainly nothing which would preclude questioning a suspect on forensic evidence, encrypted data or mobile phone records which were not available at the time of charge - three of example classes of evidence that Andy Hayman claims would be problematic, not least is the case study of Operation 2004 which includes this passage:

After their arrest in August 2004, a vast amount of material was recovered in searches, including some 90 hard drives, much of the content of which was encrypted. The sheer weight of material to be analysed and the number of suspects in custody meant that it was impossible, within the 14 days, to complete a fuller investigation. There were many key pieces of evidence which police were unable to put to the suspects in interview because they were not discovered until after the detention period had elapsed.

Now I’m no lawyer but it does seem to me that if the police did, in this case, discover many key pieces of evidence after the detention period had elapsed then it must surely be “in the interests of justice for the detainee[s] to have put to them, and have an opportunity to comment on, information concerning the offence which has come to light since they were charged or informed they might be prosecuted” - this being precisely one of the situations in which the PACE code clearly and obviously does permit suspects to be re-interviewed after being charged.

If PACE was a problem in this case then either evidence to which Hayman refers is not quite as critical to the case as he suggests or there is some problem in the interpretation of PACE by either the police, the CPS or the courts (or conceivably all three) which needs to be corrected and which, indeed, could be corrected without even the need for political intervention as the final arbiter of the admissibility of evidence in trial proceedings - which is what is basically at issue here - is of course the judiciary and not the PACE code itself.

I might also observe that this is an issue which would not arise in the US justice system as it makes use of a pre-trial hearing before a judge which enables questions of the admissibility of evidence to be dealt with in chambers before the case comes to full trial, a system which has the strength of permitting rulings on admissibility to be appealled by either side right up to the Supreme Court, if necessary, before the trial proceeds to its full hearing.

The idea of introducting such a system in the UK for complex cases in which questions as to the admissibility of evidence may be crucial to the outcome of the trial is one which has, in my view, considerable merit and would offer a purely judicial solution to the problem that Hayman appears to be raising. It might also, as a footnote, prove a useful alternative to the proposal that the right to a jury trial should be curtailed in complex fraud cases - rather than omit the jury entirely one could deal with the questions of the admissibility and relevance of evidence at a pre-trial hearing before a judge before moving on to a jury trial, the evidence having first been sifted to remove the dross from the case. Yes, this would result in a judge deciding what evidence the jury does - and does not - see during a trial; which happens anyway as juries are excluded any while legal submissions are made during trials in the UK, but any risk of undue from such a practice can, again, be mitigated against the fact that such a system allows for judicial decisions on the inclusion or exclusion of evidence to be appealled before the trial takes place.

But I’ve digressed here, so getting back to the main thread of the argument…

In fact, the only significant ‘line of inquiry’ this clause would appear to preclude is one in which the sole purpose of re-interviewing the suspect was for trying to extract a confession from them; something which, quite rightly, should not permitted.

So the question is…

If PACE is not the impediment to further questioning that the police would appear to want us to believe, just what is it that is different about interviews conducted before and after charges have been laid that confers on them the advantage they are clearly looking for in such cases. What is that makes pre-charge interviews more attractive to the police than those carried out after a suspect has been charged?

And there is one very significant difference here which has certainly not been mentioned publicly by either the police or the government in their arguments for a 90-day detention period and which is not obviouslly apparent unless you go digging around in PACE Code C.

This is the caution given to suspects on arrest but before they are charged:

‘You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention now something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

I must say here that I really don’t like this caution. I opposed it introduction and think it both unsound and prejudical in allowing inferences to be drawn from suspect having exercised their right to remain silent while being questioned by police should they go on, at trial, to give answers to those same questions.

Whether this is actually prejudical in practice I really don’t know. I would suspect only a practising defense counsel would be in a position to answer that question.

After a suspect has been charged, however, the caution reverts to that which was used before the introduction of this notion that things can be inferred from a refusal to cooperate with the police during questioning and reads as follows:

‘You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

Once charges have been laid, the old-style - and much better - right to remain silent comes back into effect and nothing can therefore be inferred from a refusal by the suspect to answer police questions.

This is, so far as I can see, the only substantive difference between the situation the police face in questioning a terrorist suspect before they are charged as opposed to questioning them afterwards other than in the matter of their inability to go full tilt after a confession. All they really lose is the threat that ‘if you don’t talk now, it’ll go against you in court’.

How much of a difference this may make in terrorist cases is anyone’s guess but as one of Hayman’s case studies (Operation 2004) specifically cites that:

The silence of the suspects, encouraged by current custody time limits, shed no light on the intention or capabilities of the terrorist network.

One has to strongly suspect that in the opinion of the police this difference between the caution given at time of arrest and that given once charges have been laid must be felt, by the police, to make a difference significant enough to warrant their pushing so hard and so openly for an extension of the maximum detention period to 90 days.

If that is the case then it seems a pretty marginal advantage on which to put you authority and reputation on the line, as [Tony] Blair has and one based on what I would consider the fundmentally unsound premise of seeking deliberately to make the fact that terrorist suspects are notiorously uncooperative at interview work against them - after all innocent men and women may be equally uncooperative as well.

A conviction based on inferences from a suspect’s choice to exercise their right to silence can in no way be thought as sound as one based on solid evidence.

UPDATE:

In the comments, WTWU from Spyblog points this out:

In her Third Reading summary, Hazel Blears, the Minister of State (Policing, Security and Community Safety) at the Home Office said:

“Many hon. Members have asked whether post-charge questioning could be a useful additional tool in minimising the period of detention or even obviate the need for extending periods of detention. It would not fulfil the latter aim. If anything, post-charge questioning would be an additional tool, but it would not mean that all our problems with lengthier investigations had gone away.

When it is in the interests of justice for detainees to have put to them—and have an opportunity to comment on—information about the offence that has come to light since they were charged or informed that they might be prosecuted, one can question post charge, but the defendant must agree to be interviewed. No hon. Members mentioned that fairly large caveat to post-charge questioning.“

But…

There is still nothing in section 16.5 of PACE Code C, which deals with interviewing suspects after they’ve been charged which explicity requires a suspect to agree to an interview if they are to be interviewed after they’ve been charges.

That’s not to say that such a requirement could, or does, not exist - it may be one derived from case law and precedent or from guidance from the CPS - but Blears’ contention that suspect must specifically agree to be interviewed is not contained in PACE Code C.

The idea that suspects must agree to be questioned after they’ve been charged seems, therefore, to be a matter of convention derived from the nature of the caution in use in post-charge interviews - where a suspect ‘refuses’ to be interviewed this is taken as having the same effect as if they had been interviewed but exercise their absolute right to silence but is, obviously, lesst time consuming.

Again this looks more to be a question of resources than any real impediment to post-charge questioning but what seems clear to me is that the wording in PACE does not support Blears’ assertion that suspects must agree to be interviewed.

The wording in PACE Code C is also critical in that is specifies that:

A detainee may not be interviewed about an offence after they have been charged with, or informed they may be prosecuted for it

A statement that any competent prosecutor should surely be able to drive a coach and horses through as it seems clear to indicate that matters on which a suspect has been chrged or has been told they may be charged with may be off limits - as long as the police don’t overplay their hand at the time that charges are laid in what they charge the suspect with or tell them about what they may be chartged with as the investigation continues then where evidence of new offences/charges arises after the fact of the charge on which a suspect is on remand, there would appear to be nothing to prevent the suspect being re-arrested in prision and interviewed on the new charges under the caution which permits inferences to be drawn from their exercising the right to silence.

Both police and government seem to be pushing an understanding of PACE Code C which may seem accurate to the layman but which is far from accurate when one examines the detail of the code.

Royal Dutch Shell - third quarter (2004) net profits £4.123 billion

City watchdog drops action against ex-Shell chairman Watts

The main City watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, ignored the advice of its own specialist enforcement staff yesterday by announcing that no further action would be taken against Sir Philip Watts, the disgraced ex-chairman of Shell, over the oil giant’s reserves reporting scandal.

Sir Philip was fired along with Mr Van de Vijver and Shell’s former finance director Judy Boynton, but still received a pay-off of more than £1m.

Software company AIT - profits (2003) £6.8 million

Former AIT chairman and chief executive Carl Rigby, 43, and former chief financial officer Gareth Bailey, 36, were disqualified from their company directorships and sentenced to three and a half years and two years in prison respectively.

‘Directors can expect to be held personally responsible for the announcements they make to the market, as these convictions have shown,’ said Margaret Cole, director of enforcement at the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which prosecuted the pair.

“Directors can expect to be held personally responsible for the announcements they make to the market”… but not Chairmen of Multinational oil companies it seems.