Whilst the weekend papers were regurgitating the ‘revelations’ in Cherie Blair’s autobiography (did you know Gordon & Tony don’t really get on? Yeah, I was stunned too!), the former Prime Minister’s wife was plotting to make an even more audacious attack on his successor. Why, you might ask, didn’t this feature prominently on Andrew Marr’s Sunday show or get plastered across the tabloids as a ‘Bollocking For Beleaguered Brown’? Well, probably because she was attacking him on a matter of substance.

A cell in Borstal, taken by Flickr user Flipsy (Creative Commons)
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Not long after I moved to Hackney, I witnessed an armed robbery. From a range of about three feet, the fact that the robber was a crackhead was as obvious as the hammer and kitchen knife he was waving about.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. Continue reading…

[Note: This article has been updated and revised to reflect ongoing legal action by comedian Johnny Vegas against the Guardian about this incident]

What a day - Mayday protests, an election and now I discover my own profession is being brought in to disrepute with those who care about women’s rights (lets hope that’s pretty much everyone).

I’m talking about Johnny Vegas’s behaviour towards an audience member during the show hosted by Stewart Lee at the Bloomsbury Theatre last Friday. I wasn’t at the show myself so I can only comment on reports from those who were. One audience member James Williams, posting on the NOTBBC forums said the following - and I apologise for the long quote but it is quite hard to locate the original post on the forums so easier to read it here, also I don’t want to quote pieces out of context without the disclaimers James himself includes:
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Back in the meatspace I’m now a journalism student, and I learnt something very interesting at hack school today:

You do not mess with the police.

No, really.
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The election broadcasts for all candidates were launched last night.

Ken and Brian have their videos on YouTube while Sian Berry’s website has no such interactivity - a huge shame. And I can’t be bothered to promote Boris. So here they are:
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Let’s say it nice and loud, people - IMMIGRANTS DO NOT COME TO THIS FAIR NATION TO TAKE THE PISS. It is simply inhumane to create a society where there is no safety net for those in need - even those who weren’t born here.

Kitchen worker Vanildo Fernandas, 29, was waiting for a bus on Fulham Palace Road late one night after work in October 2006 when two complete strangers walked up to him and tried to kill him with a couple of knives. He still isn’t sure why they did that; maybe for for the hell of it?

“Maybe for a robbery?” Vanildo’s wife Claudia, 37, asks a couple of times. She doesn’t really buy the robbery theory, though.
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Iraq has become the elephant in the room in some discussions of international relations amongst a certain section of liberal-left opinion. David Miliband opened his recent speech about democracy by saying that it had ‘clouded the debate’ about how to promote this, but the main lesson he seemed to draw from it is that future ‘interventions in other countries must be more subtle, better planned, and if possible undertaken with the agreement of multilateral institutions.’

The speech was actually more thoughtful than this extract suggests, but by failing to make it clear the exact circumstances in which the British government would use military force, the Foreign Secretary tied himself to a policy which by every measurable standard has been a complete disaster.

The invasion of Iraq was illegal.
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David Nowak – a 16-year old kid with the street name ‘Turk’ or ‘TK’ – fell victim to a knife killing in the playground across the road from my apartment block shortly before Christmas. Another teenage gang fight, apparently. Same thing happened to some other boy a couple of blocks away only a few months previously. Shrugs shoulders.

Three young men in the same age group - pictured right - were yesterday jailed for life for the murder of Garry Newlove, kicked to death outside his Warrington home in August last year after remonstrating with them for damaging his wife’s car. They were drunk and spliffed up at the time of the crime; Teenage Kicks, 2007 remix.

Meanwhile, one of today’s top stories in the British media is the controversy over ‘the Mosquito’, a device that prevents young people congregating in public places by emitting a high-pitched noise audible only to those aged under 25. The Children’s Commissioner for England and human rights group Liberty want it banned.

Violent or otherwise unruly behaviour on the part of youth is a real issue for working class communities, in inner cities and smaller towns alike. It is also one that many on the left – I’ll include myself here – feel instinctively uncertain about tackling.

The difficulty is avoiding the twin dangers of coming on like either a ‘Gee, Officer Krupke‘ parody or some deranged love child of David Blunkett and Melanie Phillips, manically demanding the return of the birch.

Yes, we can always advance a standard radical sociology critique. Of course these kids – socially formed under Labour governments, let us underline – are both products of the society around us and obviously deeply alienated from it.

Yes, some of the blame for teenage binge drinking surely lies with the directors of the giant booze companies that endlessly seek out new ways to encourage young people to guzzle their products, from ever-tackier sugar-filled alcopops to expensive advertising and promotional giveaway campaigns.

And no, the iniquities of ASBOs and the de facto return of the sus law – to which I was regularly subjected as a council estate teenager myself – don’t seem to have solved the problem, either.

I can’t honestly say that I know the answers. But if socialists ever want to be taken seriously be the people at the sharp end of this one, we need either to put forward some joined-up social policy thinking or risk leaving the field to the demagogues of all parties. After all, it’s not kids in Belgravia or the posh bits of Cheshire and Surrey that are doing the dying.
* Cross-posted from Dave’s Part

The government’s plans for super ‘Titan’ jails holding up to 2,500 prisoners haven’t gone down well, it seems. Ann Owers, Chief Inspector of Prisons, said:

[I]f we look across the Channel we see the French who built one of these kinds of prisons in the 1980s and have never done so again.

Jack Straw dithered, Gordon Brown didn’t.

It occurs to me that the next step would be to wall in a town like they do in Escape From New York. Look out for it being announced soon as the parties try to outdo each other in the run up to the next general election.

One of the concerns about Titan jails is that all the money is spent on building the things and funding for other programmes could be lost. Programmes to cut the unbelievably high levels of re-offending for example.

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A new coalition to put forward a feminist perspective against prostitution is to launch on Monday 11 February. The launch is a public event, with the invite extended to “all those who believe in real women’s-rights rather than men’s right to buy women”.

The meeting is at 6.30pm in the Amnesty UK Human Rights Action Centre in New Inn Yard, nearest tube Old St.

Of course, watchers of UK politics will be aware that the launch comes at a time when ministers are putting serious thought into a shake up the prostitution law along the lines of the Swedish model, to make the act of buying sex explicitly illegal - so women will not be charged for selling sex, but the men who buy their bodies will face prosecution. Today we learn that 52% of Britons agree with this approach and 65% agree that buying sex is an act with exploits women.

The Swedish government pioneered this legislation in 1999 and, although the move has not been without controversy, it has apparently produced a drop off in the number of prostitutes on the street, and perhaps on the numbers of women trafficked into the country.
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The Democratic Governor of New Jersey, Jon Corzine, has just signed a bill abolishing the state’s death penalty. It is the first state to do so since the USA reintroduced capital punishment in the 1970s. (h/t Tyra).

It’s a matter of only twenty-four hours on from Alistair Darling’s statement on the apparent loss of two CDs containing personal information, including NI numbers and bank account information, relating to 7.25 million families who claim child benefit (an estimated 25 million people in total) and yet it seems that an injection of common sense into this situation is already long overdue.

(Especially in view of the amount of overheated nonsense currently being spouted by blogging ‘expert’, Iain Dale, who really should have learned, by now, the folly of stepping outside the limits of your own technical knowledge and understanding. By contrast, Dizzy - who does know his [technical stuff] has some observations that are well worth reading)

Let’s start with the what - what has actually happened? - for which we’ll turn to this summary provided by the BBC:
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As so many people have already pointed out, the loss of the UK’s child benefit database is a disaster for the government. The incompetence beggars belief. This data is so important it should be treated like the launch codes for a nuclear weapon - there is nothing indicating that people were taking it anything like that seriously.

Until the discs are recovered (if they ever are), it seems to me there will be little way of knowing whether they are or have been used for fradulent purposes, who has copied the information, where it might have been sent to, in what new formats. Of the 25 million people who have been put at risk, some are bound to be victims of identity fraud, by sheer law of averages. Each time one of them is it will make another negative headline - whether they were actually connected to these lost CDs or not. Iain Dale has also pointed out that some or all of the people exposed could, theoretically, sue the government (though they would, in effect, be suing themselves). The amount of negative publicity could be endless.

Let us assume, then, that this Labour government is toast, and that we can expect a Conservative government in 2010 at the latest. What does it mean for ID cards?
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Still, on the plus side, another 25 million people have just realised that ID cards are what’s known in the trade as a Very Bad Idea.

The Metropolitan Police Authority meets this Thursday 22nd November to discuss Sir Ian Blair’s case on the shooting of Charles De Menezes. Paul Linford earlier concluded that Sir Ian Blair should not be backed by liberal-lefties because of the lack of transparency in the way the Met Police conducted this operation. I agree with him.
So, can we put any pressure on this case?

Blogger Yorkshire Ranter has helpfully compiled a list:

- 5 declared Labour members.
- 1 Green, Jenny Jones, still hanging on for the decentralised, human-scale virtues of ecologically plugging random electricians on the tube. But we’re getting in touch…
- 7 Tories and Liberals.
- Cindy Butts, Faith Boardman, and Richard Sumray, who are all for various reasons parti pris for the Government.
- Damien Hockney is voting no confidence in Sir Ian Blair.
- Karim Murji, I’m informed, is voting the Government ticket.

That’s 10 members of the Glock 17 caucus to 8 in the Axis of Reason. Who’s left?

Looks like MPA e-mail addresses are firstname.lastname@mpa.gov.uk.

- Aneeta Prem, media@aneeta.com, webform; “has the top electrical consultants to build your home’s intelligent lighting system,” apparently.
- Reshard Auladin: Has “a keen interest in British Muslim affairs” according to the MPA. reshard.auladin@mpa.gov.uk
- Rachel Whittaker; rachel.whittaker@mpa.gov.uk, 020 7202 0223. Not this one.
- Kirsten Hearn “Wishes to describe herself as a stroppy, blind dyke, and proud of it”, apparently, not to mention a professional troublemaker. Surely, surely, surely this woman cannot be planning to vote in favour of the cops randomly shooting people? (E-mail kirsten@flotowers.freeserve.co.uk).
- John Roberts. Has “14 years of experience of working with London’s hard to reach communities”, apparently. john.roberts@mpa.gov.uk
- And Peter Herbert of the Society of Black Lawyers, we think, is sound.

If you have any spare time this week at all, and especially if you live in London; can you please take the time to contact one of these people? And if you’ve got a blog, can you please reproduce this? Remember that in a two-horse race like this, every swinger counts double; not just a vote for our side, but one less for them. We’re now 10-9, with 5 votes in play; play up, play up, and play the game.

YR has some more info on the committee here too.
If you are going to email any of these people and explain why they should vote against Ian Blair, please be curteous.

Yesterday I cited this NY Times article on my blog about hate-crime against Sikhs in the United States. My question was:

The question is, should “hate-crime” based on a person’s race, sexuality or religion carry extra punishment? I’m not sure because on the one hand crime sentences should be uniformly addressed, on the other hand it looks like unless they are specifically addressed then the powers that be end up ignoring them.

In the comments below Dave Cole made a persuasive case for extra punishment:

Firstly, they have a pernicious effect on society, breeding mistrust, suspicion and hate beyond those immediately affected by the crime.

Secondly, they are more common than hate because on the basis of someone’s cardigan and are indicative of societal attitudes that must be challenged, morally and in a more utilitarian fashion, through the criminal justice system precisely because of the effects mentioned above.

Thirdly, as has been seen in many instances, hate crimes tend to lead to retaliation - they are a feature of group psychology - and so it is important to prevent cycles of retaliatory hate crimes both by presenting the stick and saying that the state is opposed to hate crimes.

(I’m going to ignore the right/conservatives here because while they pretend to be colour blind, articles like this illustrate they are anything but. Plus, on hate-crime legislation they seem mostly confused anyway.)

The left is rightly protective of (racial, religious, sexual) minorities when they are being demonised. But one of my editorial aims on LC is to bring more nuance to this debate since I think this protectiveness sometimes spills into covering up for malicious agendas by self-styled “community leaders”. David T’s exposé of Ken Livingstone’s apologia for the MCB is a good illustration of that.

There’s a point here about group identity that I think the liberal-left needs to come to grips with. One the one hand we should champion the need for people to live as equal citizens under the law. On the other we can also end up ignoring group dynamics that lead to tension and social disruption. In my article The sexual politics of Partition I showed how people have spread race/religion based rumours to fuel hatred and violence in the past.

More recently, the Hindu Forum of Britain has made allegations of Muslims forcibly converting Sikh/Hindu girls, repeated in the national press, without any actual evidence. To date the Met Police still has had no such cases come to light. They have the free speech to make such baseless allegations but what about the mistrust (and possible violence) it results in? I think this is the point that Dave Cole is making above; that extra punishment for hate-crime isn’t necessarily going to deter anyone but it may be a signal that there should be extra stigma attached to such kind of violence. Plus, as Unity points out, motives feature heavily into the length of sentencing and it’s clear that hate-crime is based on added maliciousness. What do you think?

I’ve written a (typically) long dissection of Cameron’s speech on the subject of rape, which I’ve posted over at the Ministry (under a self imposed ‘rule’ of trying to keep the really long articles and occasional forays in swearblogging on my own turf), the short version being that Cameron’s proposals are nothing like what they’ve been cracked up to be in some quarters.

The article is what it is, judge it for yourself. That’s not what this post is about, rather its starting point is a couple of the comments I’ve received on that piece over the last day or so, for example:

6% of all rapes that go for trial are successful convictions.

That means the jury reject the evidence of 94% of women who make the allegations.

Looks as if the full circle has turned and justice has finally seen through the sexual fantasies of neurotic women.

And

However you waffle and weave your tissue of monstrous injustice what is being imposed is the refusal of justice to male defendants until “justice” is ensured for the the liberal media`s disgusting little constituency of drunken tarts who career about our city centres every weekend too pissed to stand up straight but with “100% recall” of events that can see some poor man banged up for years.

Nice, eh? Not to mention ignorant, antediluvian and just plain dumb.

Yeah, dumb. Dumb as in stupid, idiotic, moronic, couldn’t get the point if you stuck a pencil up their nose and wrote it on the base of their frontal lobe-type dumb.

One of the perennial causes of dispute between the genders whenever the issue of rape and the current, depressingly low, conviction rate raises its head is the fear that some men harbour that the price of securing more convictions will be the weakening of the presumption of innocence. Depending on the proposed solutions being floated - and ignoring the neurotic views of the usual coterie of out-and-out misogynists, of which you’ve just seen a couple of prime examples - there can be some justification for such anxieties.

The fact is that we already know what’s needed to raise conviction rates, significant medium-to-long investment in specialist rape investigation and prosecution services of the kind that in some US cities have succeed in raising conviction rates above 80%.

Such investment does not, however, come cheap, which is one reason why it isn’t happening (or being promised by Cameron) nor does it provide the kind of quick-fix, sound-bite driven, novelty headlines of which our current political classes and mainstream media are too much enamoured, which is the other. Long term investment in services of the kind that will deliver, but may take 3-5 years (or more) before their impact is fully reflected in conviction rates does not an eye-catching headline make, certainly not in Daily Mail/Daily Express/Sun* (delete as applicable) country. What does grab the headlines is promises of tougher sentences, ‘re-balancing’ the criminal justice system and, in the case of rape, tinkering with the legal basis of ‘consent’, which is nightmare whichever way to come at it, the very kind of thing that’s guaranteed to stoke up male anxieties about false accusations, wrongful convictions, and a judicial system that’s loaded against them.

What no one ever seems to get around to pointing out is that there is nothing quite so damaging to the interests of men than the current state of affairs, in which a mere 5.7% of reported rapes result in convictions. That men, as much as women, have a clear and vested interest is seeing conviction rates for rape rise to levels closer to those one finds in other offences (75-80%+).

It is, I would contend, a matter of fact that there are very few more damaging allegations that any (innocent) man could face than that of having committed rape - the only accusation that most would consider to be worse would be one relating to a sex offence against a child.

For all that rape is under-reported and subject to desperately poor conviction rates, there are cases in which mistakes (usually of identity) are made and there are, sadly, occasions on which men are subjected to false allegations, with the result that an innocent man stands accused not only before a court but before his friends, family, neighbours, colleagues and, if the case in question catches the eye of the media, before the usual tabloid media circus, with all the prurient interest in the minutiae of his life and the intrusions on privacy that entails.

You would, naturally, hope never to find yourself in that situation but if, by some mischance, you did you have no option but to place your trust and faith in judge and jury and hope that justice prevails and an acquittal follows.

And there you have a problem.

What value is there is being acquitted of an offence in which convictions rates are so poor that they create the impression that a significant number of those who are accused of rape are actually guilty as charged but getting away with it because of the failings of the system?

Justice is, and can only be properly served, if its understood by all that the criminal justice system works as it should in convicting the guilty and exonerating the innocent, that people can be confident that the system gets it right if not all the time - there will always be some mistakes and errors because nothing is ever perfect - at least on the vast majority of occasions; often enough for people to believe genuinely that mistakes are rare and occur only in exceptional circumstances.

Without that confidence, what can an acquittal really mean if not that there’s a possibility if not, with rape convictions at such a low level, even a likelihood that a ‘not guilty’ verdict may be tainted to point at which its rendered near meaningless.

To read/hear what some men have to say for themselves whenever rape rises up the political agenda, even those who can (and do) articulate their concerns reasonably and without recourse of misogynistic remarks, one might think that its absolutely against the interests of men, all men, to see conviction rates for rape improved and rapists placed where they should be - behind bars.

Nothing could be further from the truth, just as nothing could be more damaging to the interests an innocent man who finds themselves wrongly or erroneous accused of rape than the current situation in which conviction rates are so low that its impossible to see how anyone could think that justice is genuinely being done, for women or for men.

I’m in the process of working up a fisk of Cameron’s speech on rape from yesterday (to be posted at the the Ministry) and hacking through some the background information and while looking over the mid-term report on the Conservative’s Police Reform policy group I’ve found something we can all help them with.

They’ve found a bit of problem with the British Crime Survey, which you may all know is an annual questionnaire issued to about 24-25,000 people, which asks if they’ve been a victim of crime over the previous year. The information gathered by the BCS is used, along with police statistics to provide the government with its official crime statistics.

What the Tories have noticed is a bit of a gap in the BCS data:

The Government claims that crime measured by the British Crime Survey has fallen, yet the British Crime Survey massively underestimates crime. It covers only half of recorded crime and ignores murder…

To help correct this anomaly I thought we might carry out a bit of survey of our own, so I’d like to ask everyone to answer the following question as openly and truthfully as possible:

1. Have you been a victim of murder in the last year?
Thanks for your help and rest assured, we will be collating responses and forwarding them to the Police Reform policy group to help with their deliberations.