Comments on: Rule of Law

By: Political umpire

Political umpire — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 11:17:03 +0000

Boris, I blogged in response to your post on this. In short, the case of Mr Bhatt and his bat is a good example of one argument for the jury system. Assuming the facts are you report, there’s every chance twelve good men and women true will let him off.

But your unflattering comparison between the prosecutorial zeal with which the kiosk owner is being pursued and the dramatic cessation of the police investigation into bribery with the Saudis is quite weak. It is either remarkable naivety from a seasoned politician and hack or very cheap point scoring – classic opposition behaviour. You know fine well how international relations of that nature work – a bung here, a bit of information there and the Saudis stay on message regarding Al Qaeda (though much funding for terrorism seems to come from that country). Meanwhile the Saudis sell us oil and keep British people in work by purchasing fighter jets.

It is called realpolitik. If you want to put it in legal terms, call it comity – co-operation between nations. I don’t like it in principle any more than you. But I’m not so absurdly unrealistic as to assume that anyone can or would be able to change the system anytime soon.

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By: k

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 22:42:46 +0000

Well, next time the police try to fob me off I will refuse to accept it and make an official complaint if need be. The more people who do that the more the police will have to reform themselves.

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By: Neil Craig

Neil Craig — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 16:55:15 +0000

Think of it from the Police’s point of view. If you put a mugging or extortion by unidentified drunks/hoodies into your crime reports all you get is a lower clear up rate. If you stick to investigating crimes by harmless identifiable persons of definitely fixed abode you will have a high clear up rate.

There are a number of cases which fit this pattern.

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By: raincoaster

raincoaster — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 09:02:13 +0000

Baseball bat you say?

Not cricket.

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By: Auntie Flo'

Auntie Flo' — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 01:54:40 +0000

My experience of the police in recent years is not a good one. One example:

After clipping wing mirrors with a car full of Iranians (no damage done to either car) the other car, which had been on my side of the road, screached to a halt, blocking my car’s exit.

The occupants of the other car then swarmed all over mine. One lady lay on my car’s bonnet, arms outstretched, screeching abuse and grimacing at me through my windscreen, while her friends tried to wrench off my car’s door handles and hammered on my car, screaming that I must get out of the car.

Did I get out? You bet I didn’t. I locked my car doors and sat tight. The occupants of the other car called the police – to have me arrested, they shouted.

When the police arrived, it transpired that the driver of the other car had a police record and had been banned from driving. Yet the police told me that since the only witnesses were the other car’s occupants – who claimed the driver had not driven the car and that I had been at fault
- the police were going to let me off! The police had witnessed the occupants of the other car swarming on my car and attempting to drag me out of it, yet it seems that they regard this as quite acceptable behaviour in today’s UK.

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By: Andrew Milner

Andrew Milner — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 14:14:36 +0000

Thugs and yobs are Labour’s Brown Shirts. So what does that make the police? The Gestapo, perhaps? Personal friend of the Honourable member for Henley get beaten to death outside the Police Station in the High Street and the police stay inside. Here in Japan you have police actually standing outside Police Stations. How much of a not so gentle hint do you risk-adverse need to fly the coop? Or to put it another way, how long are you going to keep taking it in the ass from those bastards? Life’s too short for misguided patriotism to get in the way of looking after No.1.

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By: Malcolm Knott

Malcolm Knott — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 10:10:33 +0000

Not one of these posts supports the police. Yet twenty years ago the middle classes, by and large were supportive of the police, who were seen as being “on our side”. What has gone wrong?

Perhaps it is an accumulation of small episodes, like those set out above, which bring home the dismal failure of the police, week in and week out, to discriminate and exercise intelligent judgment in their work.

Sadly, my own experience seems to be typical. My daughter’s car, a rather snazzy little Figaro, was vandalised in Brighton. The police caught the vandal in the act. He was ripping off the trim, causing damage to the value of about £800. He was a young man, in work, who had been drinking. Was he prosecuted? Was he hell! He was let off with a caution because “he was a first offender and the police wanted to keep him out of the criminal justice system.”

But when I got my first speeding ticket (38 mph in a 30 mph limit) after forty years of driving was I let off with a caution as a first offender? No, I was not. So an essentially law-abiding citizen gets punished and a criminal goes free.

This has got to stop. We need police officers with a single-minded commitment to catching real criminals, judges and magistrates to lock them up, and governments to build the prisons which will be needed to hold them.

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By: Robin

Robin — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 15:18:26 +0000

Reading articles like this bring on a severe attack of depression. We know that the justice system as such has come apart at the seams, where the straight decent member of the public is an easy target, but what has happened to common sense? Is it part of police training to delete this from every new entrants brain, surely there is more satisfaction in taking the bad guy in than the good guy, even if it makes a bit more paperwork.
Could I ask Boris to let us know what happens in court on the 23rd as I think it should be thrown out with costs against the police (that’s us of course)

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By: arachnophile

arachnophile — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 10:08:34 +0000

What a sad commentary on like in Britain today.

It is so much easier for the system to side with the criminal, who demands every last right and will not obey any sanction imposed, than the virtuous citizen who will even accept injustice out of respect, even when our mutated system deserves none.

Such instances only bring our whole legal and moral system into disrepute.

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By: idlex

idlex — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 00:26:43 +0000

At the rate things are going, I for one won’t be at all surprised if everyone starts going round with baseball bats. This is what happens when law and order break down.

In this particular case, it would seem that part of the cause of the appearance of violent junkies is the criminalisation of a great many drugs circa 1920, when the great and the good decided that people shouldn’t be allowed to use opium, cocaine, and a variety of other drugs, although they do not seem to have created overmuch of a problem in prior centuries when they were perfectly legal (most public campaigns of the time were against alcohol). It would appear that making something illegal, on purely moral grounds, so as to make us all ‘better people’ almost invariably has the opposite effect, in that it creates an illegal, underground market in which drugs of dubious quality, mixed with all sorts of lethal additives, are sold on the streets at the highest possible prices, with gang warfare ensuring the monopolies that maintain high price levels. If, for example, the sale of milk was made illegal (because unkind and oppressive to cows), we would soon be hearing of milk-related deaths of milk ‘junkies’ buying adulterated milk.

In the meantime, some people may be interested in supporting a judicial review of one of the latest bits of idealistic but equally destructive government legislation (courtesy of turkey twizzler).

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