"Plebgate" and the Ethics of Policing. A Personal Account - when Law and Ethics Fail.

"Plebgate" is a peculiar UK controversy which has escalated out of all proportion... and for good reason! The initial cause was the allegation that a UK government minister, Andrew Mitchell MP, called officers in the Downing Street security cordon "plebs", the resulting publicity made it inevitable that the minister resigned his post. ("Pleb" is considered a patronising insult in the UK, while to call someone, its antonym, a "toff" for some reason passes without notice; but such is the reverse snobbery of public discourse in the UK).

As it turns out the Security TV footage does not accord with the police account and subsequent police inquiries have been fraught with mendacious self serving commentary. It turns out that Andrew Mitchell may be the victim of a police "fit up"!

Internet trolls have made the point that the ongoing inquiries and the cost incurred are merely the product of MPs seeking to protect their own but I believe these people miss the point entirely. If the police can "fit up" a government minister then how can any of us feel safe?

Regardless of the cost this incident needs to be investigated and if the police officers are found culpable they should be prosecuted. This particular incident comes on the back of the Hillsborough Inquiry, the mistaken shooting of Charles de Menezes in 2005, the police assault on, and subsequent death of, Ian Tomlinson etc etc etc. The fact is few police officers are ever called to account, the worst sanction often being that they resign on a full pension.

My opinions of the police were first formed a long time before any of these particular incidents. When I left school in 1976, aged 19, my first job was as a 'legal executive' in the criminal litigation department of a firm of solicitors in Bradford in the north of England. Over the course of the four years that I worked there preparing defence cases for hearing in the Crown Court (UK's superior criminal court) I moved from the naive opinion of 'if you can't trust the police who can you trust?' to one of deep scepticism. My role was to interview defence witnesses, brief the defending barrister and attend court as a note taker and adviser.

During my time at TI Clough & Co, solicitors, Market Street, Bradford, there were several cases where I was convinced the defendants had been "fitted up" by the police and in all of them, Thank God, they were acquitted. They were many less clear cut cases where the defendant was probably guilty and yet one suspected that the evidence produced by the police was concocted. Policing was then, and for all I know still is, about identifying a suspect and then finding the evidence to convict them. Let me explain why this procedure is flawed.

I had a case where a woman was being prosecuted for a serious assault on her infant. Her partner said she had done it and she herself had confessed to it. It seemed an open and shut case on the 'get the suspect and then collate the evidence'. But I sensed she was lying to protect her partner. The case came to trial at the Crown Court and fortunately the barrister felt as I did. Professionally speaking what we did next was totally unethical - even though we had been clearly instructed by our own client that she wanted to plead guilty, we cajoled her into making a 'Not Guilty' plea! As the trial unfolded we picked holes in the police case and we ignored her subsequent instructions that she wanted to plead guilty. We suspected her partner was continuing to pressurise her, but we fobbed off her instructions. The barrister spoke to me privately, "you do realise what we are doing is unethical?" I wish I had made some sort of noble comment at this point but I think I just laughed, "yeah, right!".

Our defendant, and the infant who was assaulted, were ill served by the police and the law; it is not cynical to say that the law is not the same as justice. It leaves me cold when I hear smug pundits in the media who seem to believe that the law provides Mankind with adequate notions of right and wrong, and put their trust in legal procedure. Humanists have misplaced faith in the fundamental goodness of Mankind. Human institutions are fallible and it is foolish to trust them so implicitly. I agree with King David who said, 'let us fall into the hands of the LORD, for his mercy is great; but do not let me fall into the hands of men!'

Realising that we could never get our client to give evidence in her own defence we set about destroying the police case before it ever got to that stage. And Thank God, by the end of the prosecution evidence we persuaded the judge to throw the case out! We got her off. Of course, having backed the wrong horse, the police could not now get a conviction on the real culprit. The leading police officer even asked our advice on the issue - I wasn't overly impressed by his intelligence I have to say.

The lesson of all this; there is much talk in the media about 'transparency' and 'ethics' in public life generally not just with regard to policing, but it seems to me that "transparency" is not a substitute for trust and "ethics" are no substitute for righteousness.

V for Vendetta, Moral Relativism and the Riots.
A few days ago I watched a movie called "V for Vendetta" about a superhero terrorist, called 'V', dressed in the guise of Guy Fawkes bringing down a future dystopian British state in an anarchist revolution. Directed by James McTeigue and based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore it was released in 2006,  reportedly having been delayed following the July 2005 bombings. The Guy Fawkes mask has since become an iconic image used in anti-government demonstrations.

'V' starts by blowing up the Old Bailey and acheives his apotheosis by destroying the Houses of Parliament. These buildings are naively described as mere "symbols" - no consideration is taken for anyone killed by these bombs - either by 'V' or incidentally by the director. The people surge out into the streets en masse in support, all dressed as 'V', to confront the police. The film ends by them all removing their Guy Fawkes masks; this is a revolution where everyone is free to be exactly what they want. The voice over as the credit rolls reveal that this is all about "Humanism". Clearly the state is viewed as crushing human freedom, it and its agents are to be opposed.

Given the recent riots I could not help reflecting on this movie and the moral solipsism it promotes, whereby everyone finds freedom by being a law unto themselves, accountable to no-one but themselves. In a relativistic age one creates ones own moral compass without reference to anyone or anything else. It seems odd to me that this should be considered such a revolutionary idea when in reality it is the natural default setting of all of us. Of course the movie is not responsible for these recent events but it does reflect a relativistic ambivalence to wrong-doing promoted as radical chic by those opinion makers who shape our culture. I would question whether this vision is as liberating as its promoters claim; what happens when one persons freedom impinges on the freedom of another? And don't freedoms also come with responsibilities? If the recent riots have a common theme perhaps it is that moral solipsism which says I am only accountable to myself - which is actually the logical conclusion of Humanism.

Perhaps the dystopian threat is not always from the state (which is an easy target) but also from the media which filter and channel public discourse. Taking the movie 'V for Vendetta' as an example it is no surprise that the film contrives to have an anti-christian theme. The Christians warped worldview has crushed Humanity by force and it is time for the tables to be turned or so the Vendetta propaganda goes. This particular revolution has Christians scapegoated as the anti-social element... what a perverse view of the world this is. Am I surprised? Not in the least, see John 15 v18!

I love this sign by the road side on the way to the Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi!

OSAMA BIN LADEN.

It feels unseemly to take satisfaction in the death of anyone... and anyway real justice will not be done until the Lord Jesus has the final word!

MYALGIC ENCEPHALOMYELITIS, also known as CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME (CFS).

In the course of my 30 year career, most of it in a critical care setting, I have never seen anyone admitted to hospital with ME, I have never seen anyone in Intensive Care with ME and I have certainly never seen anyone die of it.
Not until now that is; in a recent court case Kay Gildersdale was acquitted of murder after killing her daughter who suffered from ME. This case is deeply troubling; are we saying that it is okay to kill people with psycho-somatic illnesses?
The Euthanasia lobby have welcomed the outcome of this trial and it sets a very worrying precedent. When people demand physician assisted suicide for the pain they feel are we discussing physical pain (which can be alleviated with opiates if neccesary) or are we talking about existential angst? By which I mean the pain of living in a fallen world?

EGALITARIAN JUSTICE versus RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE. After the 2010 Soccer World Cup Final in which the Netherlands lost to Spain the manager of the losing team complained bitterly that they had been treated unfairly by the referee. Bert Van Marwijk pointed to the match statistics as proof of grotesquely biased decisions by the officials. The Netherlands had received 28 bookings compared to Spain's 19, and the Netherlands had been further penalised by having Heitinga sent off, meaning their team was reduced to ten men compared to Spain's eleven. Using statistics alone as a meaure of fairness that would indeed seem to indicate a heavy bias against the Dutch side. If we are to judge these things on an egalitarian basis one would expect the statistics to be evenly balanced at the end of the match and it is to this that Van Manwijk pointed. In an Egalitarian framework the penalties should have distributed evenly by the end point. In contrast a Retributive framework awards penalties according to infractions against an objective standard. The reality of that football match was that the Dutch team played an extremely dirty game involving some quite vicious fouls. Personally I think Marwijk's team was lucky not to have been down to nine men! It was thoroughly disgraceful behaviour on their part which led to the disproportionate number of bookings. But think about it, what if the referee had applied Egalitarian justice? That would have meant that the Spanish would have received an equal number of bookings. Think about the implications of that; in such a situation there is no incentive to play by the rules, in fact quite the opposite, you "may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb". There will inevitably be a deterioration in the standard of behaviour as perverse incentives are introduced by an Egalitarian/Statistical frame of justice. But let's face it you can't get more even-handed than condemning the innocent with the guilty!