Charles bent down to slip on the boots. As he did so, the pressure on his stomach forced his breakfast to repeat on him. “Hmmmm,” he thought, “bacon, fried eggs, sausage, fried slice thrice, mushrooms, burgundy, tea, coco pops, roast potatoes, porter, kedgeree, kippers, scrambled eggs, toast, weetabix and swan.”

Although they were very tight, the boots slipped on easily. They were very new and needed a little wearing in. He’d been hoping to be given David’s pair after David had left. They had been very soft after much use but David had wanted to keep them. “As a souvenir,” he had said.

Still, these new ones were very special. Polished black leather, up to the knee. He gave a practice stamp on the polished wooden floor. A report like that from a Webley revolver echoed around the high-ceilinged office. Not bad for starters. David had been able to go off like the Royal Artillery but Charles would get there eventually.

“I never want to take these off,” Charles murmured aloud, lost in a reverie. Slowly, he started to sing, in a soft, wavering falsetto.

“These boots were made for walking and that’s just what they’ll do…”

In April this year, Double Jeopardy, or the legal principle preventing people being tried twice for the same crime, was abandoned by the Government. According to the BBC:

The Court of Appeal can now quash an acquittal and order a retrial when “new and compelling” evidence is produced.

So when the Algerian men who had been exonerated (”They went through a six-month trial where they saw all of the evidence and where the jury exonerated them,” said Gareth Pierce, lawyer for three of the seven detainees.) in the Kamel Bourgass ricin-ring-that-never-was farce, were rearrested last week, you would have been forgiven for thinking that “new and compelling” evidence had come to light.

Gareth Peirce, lawyer for some of the defendants, said yesterday the government had simply repeated the original allegations against the men as the reason why they should be expelled from Britain.

Clever, eh? It’s a neat twist. Instead of going to all the trouble of testing the law now that double jeopardy is no more, examining evidence, putting to a jury again, all that tiresome stuff, the men are to be simply deported back to Algeria.

Alongside the violence committed by the Islamic armed groups over the last decade are numerous documented allegations of human rights abuses by the security forces and state-armed militias, including the enforced disappearances of at least 4,000 people, abductions, torture and extra-judicial killings.

The UK Government continues to urge the Algerian Government to comply fully with all its obligations under international human rights law, including the investigation of human rights violations, and to grant a visit to Algeria by the UN Special Rapporteurs on torture and on extra-judicial killings. The UK with EU partners has also raised a number of cases with the Algerian authorities.
Foreign Office Country Profile of Algeria

But there’s no need to fret. The Government is in negotiations with their Algerian counterparts to draw up a “memorandum of understanding” in which the Algerians will agree not to be horrible to anyone being deported back from the UK. The talks probably went something like this.

Foreign Office Johnny: Now see here, my good man, if we send these fellows back, will you promise not to be beastly to them?

Johnny Foreigner: Ok.

It’ll all be fine in the end. If even if these men do disappear once back in Algeria and find themselves in a basement having their fingernails pulled out, who’s going to know or care? Not the government who want this embarrassing episode under the carpet. Not the media who have coke-snorting models to fry. Not the public who have been convinced that there must be something dodgy about this crew.

Just what do you think the Government will do, on the slim chance they discover these men have been “disappeared”? Bomb Algiers? Instigate ecomomic sanctions? For a bunch of battered and bruised wogs? How about a strongly-worded statement expressing concern? Don’t push your luck.

All this, of course, is law-making and enforcement as public relations. How many times have you heard a legal expert say, “we already have laws to prosecute those who would conduct or encourage terrorist acts”. It’s just that our current list of crimes are just so unsexy. They don’t instill the requisite amount of fear in the public, making them realise how close to armageddon they actually are. We need new, scary, laws and then Charles Clarke or Tony Blair or Hazel Blears can go on the telly or the radio, point to the long list of new laws and say they’re really, really honestly doing something.

Incitement to violence is quite a frightening term but we’ve become used to it. It conjures up an image of some weedy dick in a pub cowering behind his mates, screaming, “‘it ‘im, Bazza!”. No, we need much more scarier terms so the public know it’s really, really bad people we’re talking about here. “Glorifying terrorism” is the hot one. You can be arrested and prosecuted for “glorifying” any terrorist act committed in the last 20 years.

Which is fortunate. Imagine if the period was longer. The King David Hotel in Palestine was bombed on the orders of Menachem Begin, future Israeli prime minister, in 1946. 91 people were killed. Nelson Mandela’s reign of terror was brought to an end in 1962. Robespierre had the sense to hang up his guillotine in 1794.

You say freedom fighter, Charles say… careful now.

But familiarity will breed apathy. We’ll soon get used to people being “charged” with glorifying terrorism so we’ll need increasingly scarier crimes enshrined in law to keep the public interested. Supercrime. Ultraviolence.

Once the “incitement of terrorist acts” has lost its power to terrify, look forward to “incitement to irradiate the gold at Fort Knox in order to corner the world’s gold market”, “incitement to destroying cities with a satellite made from diamonds” and “incitement to destroying the sun and plunging the solar system into an eternity of darkness”.

Cue Tony Blair saying, “look, people are very welcome to come and live here, but if they’re going to incite people to make the moon crash into the earth, they can jolly well go and live somewhere else.” Blair must long for the Sixties when they had a better class of supervillain.

(Blair’s been banging on again about rights having to come with responsibilities. I’d like to take this opportunity to say that Laurel must come with Hardy, eggs must come with salt, and Tony Blair must come with nutrition-free, chanted platitudes. But what rights and what responsibilities? Couldn’t we have a written list of what they are, for easy reference? We could call it, oh I don’t know, a constitution?)

It’s just that, these new laws are supposed to inspire confidence in the public. But, for those of us who can drag ourselves away from Eastenders, they do the exact opposite. Take this new idea that the police should be able to hold suspects for up to three months without charging them. Forget whether it’s internment by another name and consider the practical implications.

Policemen, it is alleged, are human like everybody else. When I was at university and was given six weeks to do an essay or a piece of coursework, do you know how long it would take me to write that essay or piece of coursework? Exactly six weeks. Sometimes, to the minute.

When I was working in IT and the team had a deadline to complete a project, did we ever get the project in early? In a pig’s eye we did. We dicked about for the first few weeks and then soaked up masses of overtime later on to get the job done in time. The systems always went live on the day stipulated and not a second earlier.

So, in some cases, you run the risk of innocent men being held for three months and then released without charge. Will the scheme run like jury service, do you think? Will they pay your expenses and order your employer to keep your job open so that, when they find out you’re a web designer from Dunstable and not one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, you can go back to your life? Or will you just be another political embarrassment to be forgotten? You missed Xmas, your son’s first day at school, your daughter’s first steps and the final episode of Lost. No job. Are you eligible for benefits? What about the mortgage? You’ll have been arrested in a blaze of publicity but the police won’t make quite the same fuss over your release, meaning the cloud of suspicion will hang over you. Hey, get over it.

But all this bother is reserved for shifty-looking immigrants, isn’t it? It’s not for the likes of us comfy middle-class types, is it? We’ve nothing to hide and therefore nothing to fear. David Mery could probably disavow you of such complacency. Mery went through a very frightening ordeal at the hands of the police, but I imagine he also reflects that it could have been much worse. Imagine if the mercenary legion that Sir Ian Blair has a hankering for had been prowling the streets that day. (There is no shoot-to-kill policy on the streets of London, says Charles Clarke. Any connection between people being shot in the head and them dying is purely coincidental.)

Outsourcing, that’s the thing. Soldiers for the shooting, accountants for the financial investigations, and Jensen Button for the hot pursuits. You could get a medium to ask Richard Nixon to consult on the cover-ups. Why not hire a Milo Minderbinder figure to orchestrate terrorist outrages. I mean, if terrorists are going to bomb us anyway, why not cut out the middle man?

But if you do find a) yourself wrongly arrested, b) your possessions confiscated with no promise of return, your DNA on the Police National Computer for all time and the details shared with Interpol, or, c) yourself dying of lead poisoning on a tube train, just keep saying, “I have nothing to hide and nothing to fear, nothing to hide and nothing to fear.” It’s for the greater good, after all.

We believe in the Greater Good. We all must work for the Greater Good.

Unfortunately, the Greater Good isn’t a concept, it’s a very exclusive club that runs the country.

We must strive for it.

Posted on September 23rd, 2005 at 11:06 am

See also • But I don’t want comfort • Human rights: Beatles, beer and bollocks • The Guardian: UK accused of complicity in torture		Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe By Email • Print This Post • • •
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