mindhenge

The meaning of life

This morning's news that the Home Office is to initiate a review of the law on murder is as good an illustration as you could ask for of the rotten nature of British politics. The review, the Guardian reports, "comes after a Law Commission inquiry ... recommended a major overhaul, including a rethink of whether murder should always carry a life sentence."

The BBC also emphasises this aspect, reporting that the "results of a consultation exercise showed 64 respondents out of 146 - among them 21 judges - believed a mandatory life sentence for every murder was 'indefensible and should cease'".

How curious, then, that both the Home Office spokeswoman quoted in the Guardian piece and, more explicitly, Home Office minister Baroness Scotland as quoted by the BBC, both sought to make clear that the review would not question the mandatory life sentence. The baroness rather unequivocally said: "Murder is the most serious of crimes and we have no intention of abolishing the mandatory life sentence. Where an offender is convicted of murder, the court must pass a life sentence."

What is going on? Obviously the review will look into the question of the mandatory life sentence, otherwise there would be no point in the exercise. The injustices that it causes are the main reason for having a review. But the Home Office is so cowed by the "popular" press that it's primary concern is to avoid headlines in tomorrow's papers along the lines of "Murderers to walk free under new government proposals". So it sets up an eminently sensible and liberal-minded review and then trashes it to keep the tabloids onside.

Why does it matter? Because such cowardly behaviour only makes the situation worse. It encourages rather than challenges the newspapers' more illiberal instincts, it shields the public from the trouble of having to think about the complexity of the issues and it undermines what is left of the government's reputation for probity by requiring those conducting the review to find weasel forms to achieve the outcome of flexible murder sentences without breaching a principle that has so rashly cast in stone.

Another victory for the red-tops, and another bad day for criminal justice.

Seven days

Voters in the U.S. are about to discover whether the threat of terrorism that has dominated the presidential election campaign is a real and present danger or a smokescreen to conceal the appalling consequences of the war in Iraq. Alternatively, depending on your point of view, they are about to discover whether the much vaunted "homeland security" measures of the present administration have been a resounding success or a complete failure.

In other words, if al Qaida or its surrogates have the capacity to mount a serious attack on the U.S. mainland they will do so in the next seven days. The Madrid bombing demonstrated brutally the effect that could be achieved just before an election. Irrespective of which side wins in such circumstances, the terrorists are able to claim their attack as the decisive event. Whoever comes to power has to live with the suspicion that it was the terrorists who put him there.

With the presidential election so close, an attack in the final week would undoubtedly swing it one way or the other. Which way is more difficult to say. Probably it would favour Bush, on the basis of his strong "war on terror" platform. But if the initial impression is one of security failure it would, as in Spain, work against the incumbent. The terrorists themselves would claim victory either way. To bring down Bush would be a major scalp but to keep him in office would ensure the continuance (and, perhaps the extension) of the global policies that provided them with such fertile ground.

In the second of my articles in the aftermath of the Madrid bombing I noted a communication that was sent to the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade. "We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections" the statement was quoted as saying, because Bush's "idiocy and religious fanaticism" would "wake up" the Islamic world.

Let us hope that the threat implied by those words does not materialise. The ensuing argument - as to whether homeland security should receive the credit or whether the threat of terrorism had been over-hyped - is one that Americans can probably accept as the price for a peaceful election day.

Trespassers will be persecuted

News from the BBC that the government is considering introducing a specific criminal offence of trespassing on royal premises illustrates how easy it is for politicians to fall into the trap of doing something too hastily that is apparently sensible but is revealed upon closer examination as both daft and dangerous to people's freedoms. We had this over the purple flour bomb in the House of Commons. The whole point about that episode is that it was not dangerous, although it might have been frightening at the time. The same is true of people who clamber over the front of Buckingham Palace. Wearing a Batman costume does not make someone dangerous. As the police pointed out at the time, if they'd thought the man was a terrorist they'd have shot him.

The Tory peer reported to have complained that if an international terrorist got into the Palace, he could only be charged with "non-criminal trespass", has missed the point that what makes a terrorist a terrorist is his terrorist intent. The idea that a terrorist with terrorist intent would be put off making an assault on a royal residence by the knowledge that he might be done for royal trespass is frankly ludicrous. Besides, if there is evidence of such intent, he can be charged with terrorist offences. If there is not, he is not a terrorist.

The proposed new law is, by definition, aimed not at terrorists but at people who have not done anything more harmful than mere trespass. Trespass that is not harmful is not a criminal offence precisely because it is not harmful. So what harm will be prevented by making it one?

The value of life

Today's news has been all about death. News of the attack that killed 31 people at a resort frequented by Israelis in Sinai was displaced mid-morning by unconfirmed reports of the death of Ken Bigley. A BBC bulletin followed up this story with that of twelve or more Iraqis at a wedding party who were killed by a U.S. bombing raid. Meanwhile, on Five Live, a debate on the case of Charlotte Wyatt was taking place. Someone phoned to point out the socio-economic aspect of this question, that money spent keeping a dying child alive was, in effect, being taken away from some other healthcare area, such as cancer treatment that could save lives.

The idea that money might come into a question of this sort was too much for the presenter to engage with. There was a sort of stony silence before the programme moved on rapidly to more palatable views. But the fellow was right, of course. NHS staff make value judgements every day about the use of their resources. Some sick people die and some live; in principle, resources are directed towards the ones with the best chance.

What distinguishes baby Charlotte and others in her position is thet they have specific, identifiable, named lives. So, whereas health policy makers may condemn one category of patients in favour of another when they make their investment decisions, they have to be much more circumspect when applying these powers in a particular case. When it comes to life, people value the particular over the general every time. So poor Ken Bigley's terrible death is a much bigger deal than those of the father and his seven sons reported to have been killed in the U.S. raid.

Mostly, it comes down to proximity. A named Briton is closer to the BBC audience that a family of unnamed Iraqis. The people killed on 9/11 similarly seem much closer to home than the far greater numbers who have perished in the wars of southern Sudan. It's an understandable attitude, of course, but instead of permitting people to take a careless approach to unnamed lives, it ought to work the other way. If you can get so worked up about the death of somebody with whom you identify, then it's worth remembering that pretty much everyone in the world has got a mother, brother, father or sister - or someone - to get worked up about them, too.

Not the winning that counts

Not actually to have won the Hartlepool by-election may concern the Liberal Democrats little when they reflect upon the significance of the Tory humiliation in the vote. Indeed, if the wilder commentators were to be believed, a Lib-Dem vistory at Hartlepool would have fatally undermined Mr Blair's leadership of the Labour party, and since the Prime Minister is a great electoral asset to the Lib-Dems they must be grateful to have avoided such a Phyrric victory. Their party is the great beneficiary of the Blair fall from grace, sweeping up hundreds of thousands of disaffected Labour votes nationally that are never going to go towards the Conservative opposition. These votes would be in danger if the Labour leadership changed.

Satisfied, as they must be, with their monopolisation of the anti Iraq war vote, the Lib-Dems are surely now hoping that the eclipse of the Tory vote at Hartlepool by UKIP will push the Conservative party even more to the right. By picking a fight with UKIP the Tories would be going after votes that the Lib-Dems can't aspire to; but the centrist ground they would abandon in this lurch to the right is fertile Lib-Dem territory to which the new, hard-edged Liberalism trailed at the party conference is designed to appeal.

It is a truism to observe that elections are lost by incumbent parties rather than won by the pretenders, but the Lib-Dems have suffered from the third-party predicament of needing two other parties to play losing hands simultaneously if they were themselves to go through. With the Tories still nowhere and Labout reeling from the fall out from Iraq, it's perhaps not surprising that Lib-Dem strategists are rubbing their hands...