Melanie Phillips is Wrong. Please sign this petition now.

I am puzzled by the poor response (still only about 23,000 signatures) to this petition, which needs 100,000 to trigger a Parliamentary debate and probably rather more to bring about legislation.

 

It is easy to sign. It is clearly a good cause. Yet, while some causes garner tens of thousands in hours, this is only slowly crawling towards the 100,000 minimum it needs to be taken seriously, despite a well-publicised launch by Sir Cliff Richard.

 

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/247912

 

It calls very simply for these outcomes;

���To protect the reputations of all innocent suspects, whether well-known or not, from the lasting stigma of a false sexual allegation.

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To provide balance in the criminal justice system since complainants have anonymity for life. 
To prevent the suspects becoming targets of opportunist and deluded claimants. 
To prevent police searches of the homes of suspects who have not been charged being publicised.���

 

The feebleness of the response so far will mainly come because otherwise intelligent people don���t realise how important the matter is, or because they imagine that they themselves could suddenly be sucked into the quicksand of false or mistaken accusation.

Well, that is the whole point. Nobody is immune from this sort of thing. With police, prosecutors, media and public in their present febrile state, anybody could be dragged under, without warning or mercy. That is the whole point. If any charge must be believed, and the police have not, in my opinion, weaned themselves off this belief in reality, then it could be you, tonight, or next year. At least, if you have signed this petition, you will not need to reproach yourself, when this disaster happens, for having done absolutely two parts of nothing to prevent it. Think of signing this petition as an insurance policy. It is not very likely that a tree will fall upon your house, say. But if one does, and you have insured your house, then that is one thing you needn���t feel stupid about not having done.

 

 

The most bizarre response to this has come from Melanie Phillips, in ���The Times��� (of London) . I believe she repeated these points on BBC Radio 4���s Moral Maze but have not yet had time to listen.

 

In ���The Times���, she said : ��� ���this petition is the wrong response. After all, where would this end? Why restrict anonymity to those suspected of sexual offences? At the petition's launch yesterday, Richard (surely ���Sir Cliff���?, PH) said that he thought anonymity for suspects should be extended further. That is surely the inescapable implication of this proposal. True, there's a particular odium attached to sexual offences. Yet people falsely accused of murder, assault or other crimes may similarly suffer from a taint that is never totally expunged.

���The implications don't stop there. If suspects are granted anonymity before charge, it surely follows that it should be extended to those who actually have been charged.���

 

I simply don���t follow this (I think I have given a fair extract here ��� the whole article is behind a pay wall and I cannot reproduce or link to the whole thing, alas).

 

Why does it ���surely follow[s] that it should be extended to those who actually have been charged��� ?

 

On the contrary. I doubt whether one in 100 of those supporting Sir Cliff���s petition would support such a move. This is solely about the police losing the power to destroy people against whom there is not even a case.

 

We will be very lucky if this protection is ever given to those who have merely been arrested, on an untested suspicion. Any such protection will be wrung, in tiny spoonfuls, from a justice system which has almost no interest at all in maintaining the presumption of innocence in practice?  Doesn���t Melanie know that majority verdicts have ripped the guts out of jury trial already, and that accused persons are at the mercy of a jury selected from the electoral roll, which may well soon consist partly of 16-year-olds?

 

Has she not noticed the increasing resort, by prosecutors who have no actual evidence to emotive speeches, and the failure eof judges to halt trials where evidence against the accuse dis scanty to the point of non-existence?

 

The old safeguards, skeptical, cautious police officers, fair-minded unpoliticised prosecutors, crusty, independent-minded judges ready to stop dud prosecutions,  experienced jurors who were required to produce a *unanimous* verdict, have vanished, in many cases decades ago.

 

No, our Ministry of ���Justice��� is only interested in granting anonymity to *accusers*, an astonishing development which far too many people regard as normal and unexceptionable, when it is a shocking development.

 

This proposal is a very small brake on a huge and dangerous juggernaut of People���s Justice. Everyone interested in justice, and that includes you, Melanie, should support its introduction.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/247912