Thoughts on the Thought Police

If you want to say something important, but don’t want anyone to notice,  mention it in a speech in the House of Commons in the late evening.  It will be set down in Hansard, the daily verbatim record of what is said in Parliament, but nobody will report it.  On the other hand , if challenged, you can always point to the Hansard account and say that you did in fact raise the matter, presciently, years before.

 

Something similar is true of stories which appear in the newspapers on Saturday mornings.  In this case it’s usually not intentional. For instance, I am sure that Sir Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, wanted or expected his interview with the Guardian last week to disappear without trace by this Monday.

 

But it has. It was followed by a couple of rival unpopular newspapers on Saturday morning, but that seems to be that so far.

 

The news cycle is an odd thing, which kills off most stories on Saturday night, and renews itself each Sunday morning. Only themes which have a specially strong wind behind them, such as the unrelenting concerted effort to destroy Ed Miliband, can keep going through it.

 

Anyway, I think Sir Peter , whose words were reported here,

 

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/05/peter-fahy-police-state-warning

said something very interesting.  He’s quite wrong, in my view, to swallow the grotesquely exaggerated state-sponsored nonsense about the threat of ‘extremism’ in the first place.  All of us are in much more danger from badly-driven motor-cars, and probably from people driven mad by drugs (though we lack figures on this and must guess).

 

 But he’s quite right to notice that, once you have accepted that there is such a thing as ‘extremism’, which means only that there are no some opinions which authority and conventional wisdom deem so wicked as to be dangerous, you have created a thought police system.

 

I think the key passage is this:

‘If these issues [defining extremism] are left to securocrats then there is a danger of a drift to a police state”. He added: “I am a securocrat, it’s people like me, in the security services, people with a narrow responsibility for counter-terrorism. It is better for that to be defined by wider society and not securocrats.”

Fahy said officers were also having to decide issues such as when do anti-gay or anti-women’s rights sentiments cross the line, as well as when radical Islam veers into extremism: ‘There is a danger of us being turned into a thought police,’ he said. ‘This securocrat says we do not want to be in the space of policing thought or police defining what is extremism.’

Fahy cited the example of protests this summer outside a Manchester beauty shop which sells Israeli products. It was targeted during protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza, where many civilians were killed. The shop complained after pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters gathered outside to vent their passionately held views. Fahy said police ended up trying to decide in the midst of protests what was extremist: ‘It is better for others in society to have that debate and not to have public order commanders decide that on the street, outside a shop.’

However, the chief constable also said universities and colleges had to improve their efforts identifying extremist speakers on campuses, to spare police having to decide: ‘If schools and universities do not step up, it leaves a gap, where police are asked to intervene. Institutions should have policies in place identifying who is vulnerable, to keep the police out of schools and education.’

Fahy said concerns about academic freedom should not stop schools and colleges playing their part to counter extremism.’

 

This is not, alas, a plea for sanity on the part of the state, or for a retreat from Mrs Theresa May’s terrifying belief that there is a definable thing called ‘extremism’ which must be discouraged by the state.  It is just a plea for clearer instructions from on high as to who the state wants him to arrest and watch.

 

How dispiriting, that a person of such experience and power should not understand the principles of free speech, that the expression of any opinion is permissible, unless it takes the form of an actual incitement to violence –whereupon the normal criminal law on such incitements applies. A newly-sworn constable should be able to make that decision, without having to consult Mrs May’s ‘Guide to Extremism’, which will no doubt be printed on a (rather large)  shiny yellow card (perhaps a bit like a menu) and distributed to all police officers, pub landlords, social workers,  head teachers, traffic wardens and supermarket checkout operators before we are all much older.

 

 

I have been trying to work out for some time why I nowadays feel a creeping sense of generalised unease about the reliability of justice which used not to trouble me, at least when I was in this country.

 

It’s what you might call the Departure from Objectivity.

 

Political Correctness, so called, is actually a complex speech code enforced not by police and courts but through real and direct threats to job security. It has just grown and grown until it is no longer possible for anyone to be sure that what he or she says in a public place will not be deliberately misinterpreted and sued to destroy him. The growth of Twitter and its ability to conjure an electronic mob into being, is part of this.

 

It simply did not exist as a major force 20 years ago. Now it does. Readers here will know that I have always said that PC is successful because it appeals to our desire to be kind and polite. But it goes far further than that.

 

And since the passage of the Harman/May Equality Act (which had a very fair wind from Mrs May in opposition) , ‘Equality and Diversity’, which are the essence of PC, have been encoded in Law and enforceable in any place of public employment. What’s more, Equality and Diversity are enforceable in private employment as well, as almost all private companies have dealings with the public sector and so must conform.

 

There is a small space, maintained by newspapers and some parts of broadcasting, in which rather more freedom is allowed to prominent individuals. But by contrast there is less space for free thought in the very place where it is supposed to be most highly valued, the universities.

 

The other thing which has worried me has been vaguer, but is symbolized by the current fuss over the ‘Dickens Dossier’ and the unending series of inquiries into past cases of alleged sexual abuse.

 

The difficulty here lies in the fact that anyone who is worried by the *methods* of such inquiries is in a fix. He will be (falsely) suspected by others of objecting to the *aim*, namely the prosecution of a serious and grievous criminal offence. Remember, this is a country in which the home of a paediatrican was attacked , almost certainly by people who thought she was a ‘paedophile’

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/901723.stm

 

and

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.society

 

Yet there is surely a grave difficulty in pursuing long-ago cases in which there is simply no testable material evidence, just the conflicting recollections of two people, made harder to judge by the natural repulsion we all feel for anyone who has even been accused of child-molesting.

 

I know from personal experience how unreliable my memory can be . Here’s an example. I once managed to move, in my memory,  an entire Moscow metro station  (Akademicheskaya) 200 yards. I lived for more than a year close to that station, used it frequently , often several times a day. But when after a gap of 12 years or so I went back to look at my old home, I found that the station had in fact not moved to where I thought it was, but  had remained where it had been all along. This could be objectively established. What other things do I believe, with the same complete confidence, about the past which are equally inaccurate but can never be checked? This sort of thing makes me think that there really needs to be a statute of limitations on accusation based purely upon uncorroborated recollection.

 

How can a jury test such claims, or decide between guilt and innocence?

Like the politicians who rage against (perfectly legal) tax avoidance, there’s something a bit lawless about this incessant pursuit of allegations about the past. The law is supposed to punish crime, not to be a way of pursuing people who we do not actually *know* have committed any crime.  Yet, as is increasingly clear, even an accusation of an offence can blight the accused person’s life forever, even if he or she is subsequently acquitted or not even charged.

 

I personally find it worrying when prosecutions open with long and gruelling recitations of the horrors of a particular crime (something that’s increasingly common). The trial is not actually about this. It is the horror of the crime that has caused the prosecution to be brought. The trial is about whether the accused person actually did the crime. If he or she didn't, the horror has no bearing on the matetr at all. But often it seems that this is no longer the case.  In a couple of recent cases the seems to have been no hard evidence – just the undoubted horror of the crime and the pretty undoubted nastiness of the accused person in the dock. I’m amazed when judges don’t simply stop such trials. For most of my life, I like to think they would have done.

 

I also dislike the habit of investigating officers of giving press conferences after trials ends, in which they resort to all kinds of red-top sentiments about the crime and the criminal. It’s not their job. Thye deliver to the court the evidence the jury must judge, without prejudice or animosity. They should be praised for doing so, but should maintain their detachment. Their job is not to put people in prison, but to catch the right person and ensure that proper evidence is found against him. This means tat thye should be equally dedicated to not prosecuting the wrong person. They shouldd always be dispassionate enough that they can pull back when they realise that they are chasing the wrong person. That is why they shoudl *remain* dispasionate *after the case* as well as during it. 

I think all such officers should keep at the backs of their minds the possibility that, some years hence, the convicted person will be standing on the steps of the High Court welcoming his release after a long campaign, or aftr the discovery or examination of previously-ignored DNA evidence,  has established his undoubted innocence. These things happen.

 

Why have we become like this? Am I right in thinking it’s new?  It’s alarming enough when Sir Peter Fahy worries openly about the police being required to supervise our opinions (a danger I’ve been uselessly drawing attention to for years now). But it seems to me to be only a part of a deepening flight from rationality, and an abdication, by the governing classes, of their responsibility towards strict lawfulness, even when it’s unpopular.  The world just feels darker as a result.