New Year Dishonours

When sad old aging rockers /variety acts - like Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi of Status Quo  - are included in the New Years' Honours List then it is easy to dismiss the whole thing as  farcical and comic. At worst yet another instance of our antiquated state - quaint if increasingly irrelevant.

But when Cressida Dick is included - the senior police officer in charge of the Charles De Menizes shooting scandal - there is something downright fucking outrageous going on. The inquiry may have exonerated her from criminal responsibility but it still found that the whole operation was mismanaged - so it is difficult to see in what possible sense an award could be merited.

In fact it is impossible to conclude that this is anything other than the state sticking two fingers up at its critics - in the most insensitive and offensive way it can.

It's ironic that the concept of 'honours' is involved at all: If 'honour' had played any part then Dick should have very publicly  fallen on her sword (or possibly truncheon ?) - even now she could have  quietly declined the award. The front-line CO19 officer  tasked with pulling the trigger at least had the decency to break down whilst giving evidence at the inquiry. Meanwhile Dick who directed the operation from the safety of a command room merely tried to worm her way out of  responsibility ... for which she now has the Queens Police Medal.

Beneath every uniform ...

I was walking down a street near my work place in Soho when an armed motorcycle cop pulled up sharply and ordered a bloke who had parked up to make a delivery at a café to move on.

The guy was understandably a bit taken aback and looked non-plussed for a few seconds. The copper shouted at him again to move. The bloke dithered about for a few more seconds and mumbled something about finishing his delivery.

So this time the copper screamed at him - and the terrified driver who must have just registered the gun - jumped in and drove off. (Leaving his palette of deliveries behind on the pavement).

A couple of seconds later, two black Range Rovers screeched to an emergency stop and then a couple of plain-clothes heavies emerged and whisked Gordon Brown into a nearby restaurant.

At best a PR home-goal from the forces of the state. But at worst a confirmation that beneath every uniform, particularly one that carries a gun and has a bit of authority, there lies a fascist prick.

Knife crime

It’s difficult to avoid the knife-crime frenzy. It’s literally close to home – the four killings in a single day last week were within a five mile radius of where we live.

Knives scare me. I’ve been doing martial arts for just over 20 years and I can say in all honesty that I have very little to help me deal with a skinny fifteen year old armed with a kitchen knife. Some self-defence experts will demonstrate swift and neat disarms when faced with an armed attacker. This is pure bullshit – try it with an unco-operative opponent with the added bonus of surprise and concealment on their side. I’ve talked about this before - we did it once - in controlled circumstances. It was pretty sobering and it demonstrated to me that you don’t tackle a knife unless your life depends on it, and then be prepared to be hurt.

So what is to be done ? Stiffer sentencing ?

Maybe deterrents can work with pre-meditated street robberies. But these much publicised killings aren’t muggings gone wrong. They’re about a fucked-up culture of ‘respect’ and machismo. I doubt deterrents come into it much – in fact they might even add to the kudos of being a bad boy .

You don’t have to be a sociologist or psychologist to see that the less you have going for you – materially or educationally – the more important things like ‘face’ and status are. I doubt anyone has been stabbed because they ‘dissed’ a homeboy in Henley Upon Thames. Gangsta culture doesn’t help when the Ali G factor spreads it from the inner city to the suburbs but to hold hip-hop or dodgy computer games responsible is to mistake the effect for the cause. Nobody can seriously argue that the root cause isn't poverty or lack of opportunity.

I don’t have any simple answers to knife crime, but there is one thought which might seem a bit old-fashioned: Young males will always fight – it’s a side effect of testosterone – so why not teach martial arts, including boxing in every school? I’ve always found that the more you study the mechanics of violence the less likely you are to resort to it.

'I can't belive it's not torture'

Christopher Hitchens gives me problems.

I really want to like the man who gave us “God Is Not Great’. And the man whose heroes include Oliver Cromwell and Tom Paine. Who has exposed Zionist atrocities in Palestine and Serb atrocities in the Balkans.

But I’m stuck with the guy who thinks that George Dubya was the lesser of two evils and that invading Iraq was somehow progressive. The ex-Marxist who articulated the idea of ‘Islamo-fascism’. The guy who dismissed the idea that atrocities were being committed by the allies in Iraq in the name of ‘regime change’. And who down-played water-boarding* as ‘aggressive interrogation’ and emphatically not torture.

I now want to like the man who had the balls to allow himself to be water-boarded. And who has the good grace to admit he was wrong and that the practice is in fact torture.

But instead I am stuck with the fact that he is supposedly number 5 in the world’s ranking of intellectuals (whatever that means) and yet apparently needed to personally experience torture in order to recognise it. Or more importantly, still can’t extrapolate from the experience that possibly the rest of the allies claims to be the good guys in the Middle East are also bullshit.

• Note: this is not a sport allied to snow-boarding it is, and always has been, a newspeak term to describe the horrific practice of TORTURE by controlled drowning.

Short memories

Last Sunday I drove with the family through Runnymede. Typically, because I am a self-confessed history bore, I took the opportunity to tell my kids about Magna Carta and its importance .

Ironic with the news this week that the judicial and security establishment is queuing up to tell the government that they don’t want the 42 day detention of terrorist suspects.

Of course it shows precious little confidence in the security services that they supposedly need six weeks before they can gather enough evidence, not to convict, but to merely bring charges against suspects.

It also shows little knowledge of recent history to forget that the single thing that did most to propel ordinary Catholics into the arms of the IRA was detention without trial.

Or from our more distant past, the lesson that freedom from arbitary detention or arbitary government was gained by long and bloody struggle. And lost not overnight but in subtle increments.

But hey - the economy’s going down the tubes, we’re bogged down in un-winnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - New Labour needs to demonstrate that they’re ‘tough’ on terrorism. So bollocks to Magna Carta.

Maybe it's time to hold Brown hostage and make him sign a Bill Of Rights. There's a precedent.

NOT just a tragic accident

If you squint hard enough, there is possibly a vague similarity between these two men. The one on the right is Osman Hussain, the bloke that the police had identified as a suspected terrorist, and the bloke on the left is, of course, Charles de Menezes, the bloke they actually shot.

To be fair, the CCTV operator who had been staking out the block of flats were both men lived did ask for verification of the identity from his superiors before they decided to follow the man on the left. There was a delay though because the officer in question had stepped out to take a piss. As a result the authorization was given anyway. And of course this led to a chain of events that culminated in the wrong man being shot dead when he was followed onto a crowded tube.

On the basis of this narrative, I would be willing to concede that the affair was a tragic accident. I would also be loathe to criticize the guys who actually pulled the trigger (albeit seven times); whether they were armed police, SAS , SRR or whoever else. Never having personally confronted someone who I had been told was a suicide bomber, I wouldn't presume to know what constitutes an acceptable level of force.

But none of that is really the issue.

The inquiry has made it clear that within minutes of killing Charles de Menezes the police realised that they had got the wrong bloke.

And then lied systematically about it.

• They said that he was dressed in bulky clothing (possibly concealing a bomb) - inappropriate for a hot July day.

• They said that he was running.

• They said that he vaulted the ticket barrier.

• They said that they identified themselves as armed police and that he ignored their warning.

All of which it now appears according to the inquiry, was total bollocks.

The correct outcome of this revelation should be very straight-forward. Every police officer who colluded with this deceit should be removed from their post and prosecuted . And the eye-witnesses who appeared on the TV news to confirm the police lies should be traced and prosecuted.

Quite simply nothing less is adequate in a democracy; if authority is entrusted with the power of life and death it must be subjected to the strictest scrutiny. After this scrutiny it might be accepted that operatives on the ground made an honest but tragic mistake. But a conspiracy to conceal the truth from the public can never be accepted.

If it is, we are taking a step towards a police-state (an over-used phrase but the only one appropriate).

And finally:

It is utterly unbelievable that Commissioner Ian Blair was not aware that his own organisation was lying. According to the inquiry within hours of the shooting there was gossip around Scotland Yard to this effect. A competent manager in touch with his organisation would have picked up on this gossip and investigated it; so if he didn't Ian Blair is at very least a pretty poor leader for the Metropolitan Police. One way or another he facilitated a calculated piece of arse-covering, and now is dishonourably trying to duck out of his responsibility.