A trouble shared is a trouble halved

Well that's the idea of John Reid, the British Home Secretary, anyway who has decided to split the massive Home Office into two separate departments, the existing Home Office retaining responsibility for the prevention of terrorism and for immigration control while the newly created Ministry of Justice will deal with offending, prisons and probation.



I have grave doubts about whether this will stop the downward spiral in the current Home Office which, over the past 12 months has a) admitted they didn't know which Britons had been convicted of serious offences abroad b) Had no idea how many probation offenders were violating their orders c) Failed to check whether over 1000 foreign born prisoners were suitable for deportation before releasing them.

I don't believe this is done in the public interest at all, simply a ruse by Read to hive off the bits of his job which are so inefficiently run that they drag him down politically. And anyway couldn't they have thought of a less sinister name for the new department than the 'Ministry of Justice' ?

It smacks of some secret police HQ in one of those authoritarian states where human rights have been subordinated to the demands of state control, where people are monitored by phone taps and CCTV 24/7 and where you can be arrested for just being from the wrong religion! Oh yeah right, of course, sorry! Fits the nation perfectly!

A murder that defies belief

I know that many people, particularly my friends in the United States, cannot understand my love of cricket, that so very British Empire game with its history of men in white flannels, the slow languid pace of the game and the weird apparently incomprehensible rules. But I think even they understood it to be a game of gentlemen, played by gentlemen, the very epitome of all that is good about sport.

But all that has been changing for quite a few years. The old county game watched by the proverbial one man and his dog, the clubs supported by local raffles and lotteries, and the players wives making the cream teas has long gone. Some one decided there was money to be made in cricket and a whole new marketing drive was created to sell the game to the masses. First one day cricket came in with a limited length of innings for each team, loud coloured clothing and a definite result at the end of the day. Out of this was spawned competitive leagues and eventually the World Cup, currently being played in the West Indies.

Money began to circulate in the game - an awful lot of money. Lots of people got very rich..and some people got rich illegally. Maybe the first high profile casualty of greed and corruption was the South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje. A man of God, known for his strict Dutch Reform Church beliefs, and a man who has coached youngsters throughout the world, Cronje was found guilty in 2000 of organising match fixing with bookmakers and making a lot of money from crooked results. He was banned from cricket for life.



In 2002, a light plane on which Cronje was travelling crashed in the mountains near South Africa's western cape and Cronje and the two pilots were killed. There were voices then who said that the plane had been tampered with and Cronje killed by a betting syndicate to shut him up, but few believed them.

Since then other players from various countries have been found guilty in betting and match fixing scandals and a sense of discomfort has grown that something is far from right in the cricketing world but that a lid has been shut on how bad the situation is.

Then the World Cup began this month in the West Indies and, after an extraordinary defeat for Pakistan, the 4th ranked team in the world, against Ireland, a team of part-timers, the Pakistan coach, Bob Woolmer, was found murdered by strangulation in his hotel room. So far the guilty party has not been caught but it is hard to believe, particularly after the Pakistan defeat, that his murder is not related in some way to more disreputable goings on involving some kind of betting scandal. No one has been charged and I am not suggesting any particular party is to blame.

I have met Bob Woolmer when he was coach of my county team, Warwickshire, back in the mid nineties and the fact that his life could end in this way is almost beyond belief.




What is now clear for all to see is that the game of cricket, though a game for the cognoscenti with its strange traditions, was always a game played in the very finest spirit of sportsmanship. Apart from the tragedy of Woolmer's murder, the tragedy for the game of cricket is the now clear loss of that image. It is in fact a game that currently smells alarmingly of something very unpleasant indeed!

Hurray for the American committment to free speech!

A U.S. federal judge sitting in Philadelphia has struck a resounding blow for free speech by striking down a 1998 law designed to put the onus on web operators to protect children from extreme material.

Judge Lowell Read Jr. was quoted as saying, "Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if (free speech) protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection." Instead he suggested that PARENTS....(Glory be, remember them? Those taller people who used to be responsible for their own children?).should employ cheaper and more effective solutions like software filters and not put all the onus on other people.

This has undermined a substantial tranche of Federal law designed to stop internet pornography at source rather than leave it to individual families to take action.

Well Judge Read you'd have my vote! Living,as I do in a Nanny state 3000 miles to the east of your own I just love this decision to put the responsibility for adult material and who sees it back where it belongs....with the parents.

Will this blast of judicial freedom for the individual encourage a similar sentiment on this side of the Atlantic. Somehow I doubt it. With Child Protection obsessions now paramount it is not in the interests of any Member of Parliament to suggest that anything but the most draconian approach should be taken in this area. Already there are new tougher rules on the way about what can be viewed on the internet. When these were submitted for an apparently 'democratic' consultation to the public, more people voted against than for - but they are still going through. That's how British democracy works you see, they ask your opinion and then ignore it!

An Israeli who understood the Palestinian problem

The Israeli linguist and scholar, Tanya Reinhart, has died at the age of 62. Ms Reinhart was a former professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University and wrote articles for several Israeli newspapers. She finished her distinguished career as Distinguished Global Professor at New York University.



Her Emeritus Professor when she received her Doctorate of Philosophy from the MIT in 1976 was Noam Chomsky, who remained a close friend and political ally for the rest of her life. He commented, on news of her death that "..she would be remembered not only as a resolute and honorable defender of the rights of Palestinians, but also as one of those who have struggled to defend the moral integrity of her own Israeli society, and its hope for decent survival."

Ms. Reinhart was the subject of much opprobrium in her native Israel for her continued criticism of Israel's retention of the territories occupied in the 1967 war and argued that Israel should abandon the West Bank and Gaza. She said:-

"Israel should withdraw immediately from the territories occupied in 1967. The bulk of Israeli settlers (150,000 of them) are concentrated in the big settlement blocks in the center of the West bank. These areas cannot be evacuated over night. But the rest of the land (about 90%–96% of the West bank and the whole of the Gaza strip) can be evacuated immediately. Many of the residents of the isolated Israeli settlements that are scattered in these areas are speaking openly in the Israeli media about their wish to leave. It is only necessary to offer them reasonable compensation for the property they will be leaving behind. The rest — the hard-core "land redemptions" fanatics — are a negligible minority that will have to accept the will of the majority."

She pointed out that such a settlement would still leave between 6 and 10%, plus Jerusalem, in Israeli hands and these territories should be the subject of serious negotiations.

In 2002, Tanya Reinhart was heavily criticised in Israel for signing a petition which was heavily critical of the Israeli government's Palestinian policies. In the same year she published a book Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948, in which she analyzed what she saw as the breakdown during the preceding three years of constructive engagement over the Palestinian issue and the hardening of the Israeli position.

Tanya Reinhart was only 62 and I think the world has lost an intelligent and compassionate woman, and the state of Israel (though she was resident in America), has lost a genuine patriot, a woman who was not prepared to take a myopic culturally insular view of a complex and difficult problem. She was prepared to take a lot of hostility and criticism in outlining a future in which she believed both Jewish and Palestinian peoples could live side by side within a political framework that was fair and just.

A date which will live in infamy!

Well it could be President Roosevelt declaring his judgment on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but it is more immediately relevant to the actions of another US President when on, 20th March 2003, George W. Bush ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq. Acting in concert with the snivelling, conniving British the Americans engineered a situation whereby war was inevitable regardless of the reports -subsequently proved to be correct- from the United Nations weapons inspections team that no weapons of mass destruction -the so called raison d'etre for the war - existed.

Undaunted by the intelligence reports, America simply manufactured the evidence it needed, a hapless Colin Powell having to pretend that a domestic gas manufacturing plant was a secret weapons manufacturing plant. At this point, simply because the British people wouldn't swallow it and Blair needed to keep his job, the pretence continued that the invasion was all about weapons of mass destruction. Once American troops had more or less combed every square inch of sand so that the excuse no longer stood up, the Americans smoothly changed the plot so that it was always about 'regime change'.

Had the British had that fed to them on day 1, I suspect that would have been the end of our involvement and possibly the end of Blair, had he stuck to his guns and gone ahead.

The 'war' began, you may recall with the obnoxious Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary, boasting about his 'shock and awe' tactics when American bombers pounded Baghdad and other key cities causing something like 8,000 innocent civilian deaths as a result of the bombing.



But it was all worth it, said the grinning, laconic Mr.Rumsfeld, because it would bring the Iraqis to their knees in weeks and hasten the end of Saddam Hussein's rule. On May 1st of that year, President Smirking Chimp visited the USS Abraham Lincoln dressed in full combat uniform and announced 'Mission Accomplished' to the cheering hordes of sailors.



Well indeed Saddam had fled and in December of that year, one of Bush's chinless wonders, one Paul Bremer who was supposedly in charge of the provisional government, but who no one in their right mind would trust to run a whelk stall, was able to have his moment in the spotlight with his immortal 'Ladies and Gentlemen! We goddim!' His day in the sun didn't last long and he left Iraq with questions being asked about where $9 billion earmarked for Iraqi rebuilding had disappeared to. The question still hangs in the air!



Well Saddam was indeed in custody so this invasion of a sovereign nation which had constituted no threat to the US or Britain had been successful, had it?

Er..well not exactly. Whatever one might have thought of Saddam's harsh authoritarian rule, extreme Islamic factions had no part in it. Now as a result of the destabilisation and America's total ineptitude at producing a post war plan of consolidation, indigenous Shia and Sunni factions, with help from Iranian and Syrian guerrilas, swept into the vacuum and reduced Iraq to a place where no one was safe to go out on the streets.

So four years on President Chimp chooses to 'celebrate' the war. One might think he would don a niqab and burkha himself and try to slip away anonymously, so crass, evil and inept has been his foreign policy but apparently not.

So far, after four years of dedication in producing chaos out of order, the cost of so doing is approximately as follows:-

The medical journal 'The Lancet' estimates the total number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000

The number of American dead is in excess of 3,000

Contractors and other US Allies dead; over 1000

Journalists and other media: 201.

It would be hard to argue that this carnage had been justified even if Iraq was now a model of western democracy. But its not. In fact its a living nightmare. Bombs are exploding daily. 30 or 40 people a day on average are being murdered. The insurgents are now flooding the country. The newly elected government is riddled with corruption in its army and police....

...and Smirking Chimp is still celebrating the war. Oh admittedly, his jaunty cockiness has gone and American objectives have come down faster than a runaway elevator, but Bush is still trying to sell some kind of success story, rather than the heinous international crime it actually was and for which he and Blair should be facing a War Crimes Tribunal.

Now readers of this blog may think this article is not constructed in the measured, rational and objective prose with which you have become familiar. Well you're goddam right it isn't!

Because this invasion changed my whole perspective on my own national leader, Tony Blair, of the lick spittle wimps who backed him and who prompted me to leave politics altogether. Because British participation in this crime made me sick to my stomach. Bitterly, furiously angry because this is the most heinous foreign expedition the British have been involved in during my long life time. For the rest of my life I will be ashamed, bitterly ashamed, of the British participation in this and, if there is a God, I ask Him to forgive all of us who couldn't do, or didn't do, enough to stop it.

The Witch of World War II

One of those true stories re surfaced today which is in the 'too bizarre even for fiction' bracket as a result of a renewed campaign to pardon a convicted criminal - nay worse - a convicted witch!

Was this back in the days of Cromwell or earlier one might ask? No it was 1944, towards the end of World War II when Helen Duncan became the last person in Britain to be convicted of witchcraft.

Born in Scotland in 1897, Helen Duncan made a part time living as a medium. She earned a reputation of sorts for summoning the spirits of the dead by emitting 'ectoplasm' from her mouth. She had been arrested a number of times for suspected fraud but her fame ( or notoriety) stemmed from one seance she gave in Portsmouth in 1941.





Just prior to the seance, the British battleship H.M.S. Barham had been sunk by German torpedoes with the loss of two thirds of the crew, nearly 900 sailors. The Admiralty realised from intercepting German radio that the enemy did not know they had sunk the ship. So they went to great and elaborate lengths to hide the news of the sinking from everyone, even going to the lengths of sending greeting cards from the dead crew to their wives and families.

Some days later, Helen Duncan gave her seance at which she announced that H.M.S. Barham had been sunk and that she was contacting the spirit of one of the dead sailors. No one knows to this day how Mrs. Duncan obtained this knowledge that the Admiralty had gone to such lengths to keep secret.

She was not arrested immediately but, though its hard to believe, some British intelligence officers believed that Helen Duncan was possessed of some extraordinary power and, when the D-Day landings were planned, British Intelligence remembered the uncanny message 'from beyond the grave' some three years before and had Helen Duncan arrested.

Any charge they could reasonably throw at her would have resulted in a fine and freedom but they were terrified that her 'power' might put the D-Day landings in jeopardy, so they dug out the British Witchcraft Act of 1735 and charged her with sorcery under that Act. Unbelievably ( though probably with connivance) she was found guilty and sentenced to nine months in prison - thus off the streets of Britain during the lead up to the invasion.

Now her relatives are petitioning Tony Blair in order to get her pardoned and this smear as a witch removed from her record. By all logic and reason it should of course succeed but who knows with this government.

I feel a little better now, knowing that our Intelligence Services were running around only 50 years ago prosecuting witches, for the ritual I always undertake when visiting my Manx homeland. Just outside Douglas, on the way to Castletown, is a little hump backed bridge and when your bus or car goes over it, you have to say 'Good Day to You, Fairies' for if you don't, the Little People will visit you in the night and do you grave harm. Do I repeat this mantra? Well of course I do! No of course I don't believe a word of it but, like the brains of British Intelligence in 1944, better safe than sorry, eh?

The tragic consequences of 'expert' opinion

Sally Clark, the Cheshire solicitor, who was wrongly jailed for life in 1999 for murdering her two children, has died in her sleep at the age of 42. Although there has, as yet, been no coroners inquest, family members have said that, while Mrs. Clark was not known to be suffering from a specific illness, her health was in ruins as a result of the conviction and the traumatic experience she underwent at the hands of British 'justice'.

Her first child, Christopher, was found dead in his cot aged 11 weeks by his mother in 1996 and she discovered her second child, Harry, aged 6 weeks, to be dead in his cot two years later. The second child was found to have a brain inflammation consistent with, paediatricians claimed, severe shaking.

What was NOT said at Mrs. Clark's trial was that there were other circumstances which could have led to the brain deformities and, in fact, Home Office pathologists had found lethal doses of a meningo-coccal type bacteria in the child's system about which the defence team was not informed.

The final nail in Sally Clark's coffin was the testimony of Professor Sir Roy Meadow who claimed, testifying for the Crown, that the chances of two siblings dying of 'cot death syndrome' were 1 in 73 million. He appears to have plucked that figure out of the air and, given his paediatric stature, the jury believed him. It was the death knell for any chance Sally Clark had of being found innocent.

Later the Royal Statistical Society wrote to the Lord Chancellor asking for any evidence to back Sir Roy's estimate and of course there was none. The figures were off the top of his head.

Poor Sally Clark was jailed for life and I can still recall the face of her husband after the trial was over, a man in shock convinced that the truth would have come out before the jury reached a verdict.

Well th truth DID out, but not before Mrs. Clark had spent three years in prison, abused as a child killer by fellow inmates, having already suffered the tragedy of losing her two children. Sir Roy Meadow was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and struck off the medical register but both decisions were overturned on appeal and he is free to continue exercising his 'expert' opinion.

Sally Clark was released from prison in 2003 after all this deception and hypothesis came to light. I remember seeing her standing on the steps of the appeal court with her husband, a young woman of 38 whose hair was prematurely grey, her eyes were sunken and she looked many years older than her age. She was free but her life had been ruined both by tragic personal circumstances and by the British legal system.



Now, four years later, Sally Clark is dead, maybe the last act in a tragedy that should never have happened on such slender circumstantial evidence. I believe the real villain here is the adversarial system of justice which places more emphasis on the prosecution and the defence outwitting one another than it does in getting to the truth of the matter. It is always hoped, in our system of justice, that this adversarial conflict gets to the right result in the end. I have long had my doubts about the wisdom of this assumption and, particularly in child death cases where so much weight is placed on expert testimony and medical probability, it is clearly gravely flawed.

Sally Clark is not the only young woman to have been convicted - and then cleared - of murdering her children based solely on expert evidence which has subsequently proved to be unreliable, but she is perhaps the first to have so clearly and so tragically suffered the ultimate consequences of stress, depression and ill-treatment that such a miscarriage of justice can engender.

Let us hope that this is a wake up call to the legal system and a motivator to ensure that considerable changes are implemented in child death cases before a mother can be sent away for life on the supposition of a so called expert and the vagaries of believing medical probabilities.