+++ Boris Fires Blair +++
Well, not strictly “fired”, but as close as you could get.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7648664.stm
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair has announced his resignation after three years in the job.
He said London mayor Boris Johnson, who took over as chairman of the police authority on Wednesday, had told him he wanted a “change in leadership”.
Sir Ian said that “without the mayor’s backing I do not think I can continue in the job”.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said deputy commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson will take over as acting head of the Met.
Sir Ian has faced criticism over the racism row involving the Met’s most senior Asian officer Tarique Ghaffur.
There have also been questions about his handling of events surrounding the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
The Brazilian was shot on the London Underground in July 2005 by police marksmen, who had mistaken him for a suicide bomber.
Sir Ian has denied any wrongdoing over an inquiry into the use of public money to pay a close friend to advise him.
UPDATE: Boris told him to go.
Sphere: Related ContentOstrich Politics
This morning the government, in response to concerns about knife crime, has unveiled its latest strategy.
Denial.
It’s an appealing piece of logic for this government. Point to some flawed statistics, insist that everything is rosy, and accuse your opponents of making political capital out of private grief. The public will swallow the statistics, the media will find another story, and the Old Etonians won’t dare to challenge this new orthodoxy for fear of being seen as condescending opportunists.
So it was that this morning the Times ran with the cover story that the government is to insist that knife crime is falling. They point to British Crime Survey statistics, and plan to spend almost half a million pounds hammering the point home.
These statistics however are deeply flawed; the British Crime Survey does not interview under-16s. Given that knife crime is primarily a youth phenomenon that does not observe the arbitrary cut-off age of 16, this means that a swathe of knife crimes are not recorded. Factor in the code of silence surrounding gang crime, the BCS’s under-representation of ethnic minorities, and its biases against reporting low-level crime, and serious problems emerge.
The use of such dodgy statistics to claim that crime is falling suggests that the government has, despite all the headline-grabbing initiatives, no idea how to confront the problems presented by crime, and is now hoping that if it ignores the problem, it will go away.
After all the initiatives and gimmicks, Brown’s government have effectively admitted that they don’t have an answer.
Sphere: Related ContentNo to Kneejerk Justice
Not long after Jacqui Smith declared that the 42-Days detention measure was brought in as part of a new culture of preventing knee-jerk legislation, Jack Straw… puts through knee-jerk legislation. After a ruling by the Law Lords last week that the present witness anonymity rules jeopardise fair trials, Mr. Straw has decided that the best response is to rush through a Bill that risks being poorly thought-through, failing to adequately address the issues at stake, and filled with unintended consequences.
The reasons for doing so are perfectly understandable: the ruling risks undermining numerous trials that rely on the testimony of anonymous witnesses. The police consider it vital for convicting gang members, drug dealers and murderers. Their case is admirable, but so is that of the Law Lords. It is fundamental to a fair trial to be able to face one’s accuser; to be unable to do so moves the burden of proof away from the prosecution. The defence, unable to cross-examine the credibility of a witness, have to disprove their testimony. In so doing the presumption of innocence is removed. Moreover, the psychological effect of witnesses giving testimony anonymously prejudices the outcome of the trial by implying that the accused is violent.
In these cases the ability to get witnesses to come forward needs to be balanced against the right to face one’s accusers. The Law Lords felt that this was not occurring. The Government’s response should be to take this move constructively and create a law that deals with this serious problem. The concern that the system could allow for a miscarriage of justice is genuine: emergency legislation will not alleviate it. The best solution would be to have a free vote on the matter to ensure proper scrutiny and discussion of what is a particularly difficult legal conundrum. Parliament lends itself towards this solution: the Commons is filled with lawyers, and their expertise, scrutinised through various readings and checked against the expert opinion of those in the Lords, could produce a sensible law. The debate should be constructive and beyond party-political lines. The legislature moves slowly because justice must be deliberate.
More haste less speed.
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