BRITAIN is collapsing. The rottenness of the British state is seen in the ever-swifter decay of its once vaunted institutions – in particular its supposedly impartial legal system. We have had numerous examples of proof in recent days. On Friday, junior Minister Chloe Smith announced the Tory Government was going to strip the independent Electoral Commission of its power to take corrupt politicians to court. The move will prevent the electoral watchdog from prosecuting politicians and parties over secret donations and illegal campaigning methods.
The reason behind this move is outrageously transparent: the Electoral Commission is interfering with the ability of Tory politicians to game the political system. The Electoral Commission had the temerity to expose illegal money laundering by the Vote Leave campaign during the Brexit referendum. Now it is investigating the Prime Minister over the refurbishment of the Downing Street flat that he shares with Carrie Symonds. In the new British banana republic, such independent regulation of the political class cannot be tolerated.
The rot has also spread to the police. Last week, the London Metropolitan force was branded as institutionally corrupt by an independent panel tasked with investigating the axe murder of private detective Daniel Morgan, back in 1987. The eight-year inquiry, ordered by Theresa May when she was home secretary and costing £16 million, found the original murder investigation was riddled with mistakes and dogged by corruption – which the Met attempted to hide.
Met Commissioner Cressida Dick (above) – the highest-ranking police officer in the UK – was among the senior officers accused of placing “hurdles” in the way of the probe, leading to the accusation that the force is corrupt as an institution.
This is the same Met that launched a heavy-handed attack on female protesters attending a legal vigil to mark the murder of Sarah Everard, last March. A serving Met officer has pleaded guilty to Everard’s kidnapping and rape.
The Met is a past master at covering its tracks. For instance, in 2009 it hired former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis as its media adviser and paid him £24,000 per annum for his two-days-per-week consultancy. To the Met’s embarrassment, Wallis was subsequently prosecuted (though found not guilty) on phone-hacking charges.
The reason the Met stays unreformed is that it is ultimately responsible to the home secretary. And successive home secretaries need the compliance of the Met high command in order to run their continuous political campaigns against scapegoats such as immigrants, black people and the Muslim community.
The institutional corruption in the Met goes all the way to the office of the home secretary. The politician now directly overseeing the force is Kit Malthouse MP, Minister of State at the Home Office. Malthouse has form. He served as deputy mayor for policing during Boris Johnson’s time as London mayor. As Boris’s link with the Met, Malthouse came under fire for claiming that too many police resources were being allocated to the investigation into … er, press phone hacking.
In Scotland, we should not think we are free of the stench of decay in British legal institutions. I need to explain this because there is a view north of the Border that all we need to do to create a modern, democratic state is cut the ties with Westminster. Not so. Scottish legal institutions are as much in need of root-and-branch reform as in the rest of the UK. Since 1707, Scotland has been run for the Union by a self-perpetuating oligarchy of local judges and lawyers. If this oligarchy has recently started to cut loose from the Union, it is only to save its own political skin.
The 1998 Scotland Act in theory put the Scottish legal system under Holyrood but in practice left the new, devolved Scottish political system at the mercy of the old Scots legal oligarchy. And no wonder.
THE legal architects of the 1998 legislation were Scottish-trained lawyers such as Donald Dewar and Derry Irvine. Devolution was engineered to protect the power of the Scots judicial class, with the unelected Lord Advocate and Solicitor General sitting in Cabinet and the Holyrood chamber.
As the power of the UK state wanes, the Scottish legal oligarchy has been flexing its own political muscles – and not always for the good. One result was the now-admitted malicious prosecution by the Crown of David Whitehouse and Paul Clark, the administrators appointed to oversee Rangers when the club went into administration in 2012. Subsequent litigation could cost the Scottish taxpayer upwards of £100m.
Then there is the fall-out from the failed prosecution of Alex Salmond on various sex charges. For obvious reasons I will be careful what I say here. But we need to note the arrest and subsequent prosecution of respected journalist Mark Hirst, allegedly for “acting in a threatening or abusive manner” as a result of a YouTube video he posted about the trial.
Hirst had his electronic equipment impounded by Police Scotland. However, when he came to trial, the judge summarily dismissed the case. I would hazard that the baseless prosecution of journalists is a scandal – wherever it takes place.
Then there is the successful prosecution of former British ambassador Craig Murray, for contempt of court resulting from his blog coverage of the Salmond trial. Murray has been sentenced to eight months in prison by Lady Leeona Dorrian, who also oversaw the Salmond trial. Murray (below) intends to appeal his conviction to the UK Supreme Court. The essence of the case against Murray is that it is possible to identify the anonymous complainants in the Salmond trial by “jigsawing” his reports.
As far as I can determine, no mainstream journalist has been jailed for contempt for 40 years – fines are the modern norm. So Murray’s jailing – right or wrong - is a landmark legal event concerning the rights of journalists. Except that Lady Dorrian’s judgment queries whether Murray is in fact a journalist. She argues that mainstream media (a vague term surely) are “regulated” but bloggers are not. Hence the need for an exemplary sentence.
Leave aside whether Murray is guilty. In fact, I found it instantly easy to identify some of the complainants from mainstream broadcast and print reports, which raises the question why the Crown did not pursue other journalists for contempt. Perhaps because putting “mainstream” journos in jail would be too embarrassing politically?
The point here is that the state has chosen to pick on a blogger. Actually, a responsible, well-meaning blogger at that.
These developments concern me. First, the Scots judiciary is seeking to expand its powers. Lady Dorrian oversaw a group which is looking to pilot trial by judge and not jury in sex cases.
Secondly, it is not up to the judiciary to define a hierarchy of what is, or is not, “mainstream” journalism. If this were a decision of a court in eastern Europe, the Scottish liberal centre would be up in arms. As it is, because of the opprobrium surrounding the Salmond case, a major contraction of free speech has been perpetrated by the Scottish judiciary – with hardly a splutter from the liberal media.
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