ANOTHER VOICE
Quis castrabit ipsos castratos?
AU BERON WAUGH
We cannot now, if ever we could, rely on the standards and integrity of good, sound chaps in Parliament and the judiciary. We now have a much more populist political climate. These instincts can be nasty. We cannot trust them any longer. That is why we need the backing of a Convention.
This may not be quite the same thing as saying that we need to be protected from the ignorant, fanatical yobs who threaten to take over both main parties in Parlia- ment, but it comes quite close to it.
Labour's spokesman on this occasion was Mr Nicholas Brown, MP for New- castle-upon-Tyne East. He is apparently the Shadow Solicitor General, second to John Morris, Shadow Attorney General who, like Sir Michael Havers, was absent from the debate. But when I telephoned Mr Brown at his home in Cardigan Ter- race, Heaton; on Saturday afternoon, he seemed a pleasant, well-spoken sort of fellow, not at all the fanatical yob I had feared. He put other fears at rest by assuring me he had no legal training. Neither at Swatenden Secondary Modern School, nor at the Tunbridge Wells Tech- nical High School, nor even at Manchester University had he studied law. In fact after leaving Manchester he worked for Proctor and Gamble, in their advertising depart- ment, in Newcastle, and then in the dry- cleaning business. It was only after he started working for the GMWU (now called the General, Municipal, Boilermak- ers and Allied Trades Union or GMBA- TU) in 1978, and found himself appointed northern area legal adviser that he took any interest in the matter, but this was not a legal appointment — it just meant that he was the officer who had to deal with the union's solicitors. Possibly his well-spoken manner recommended him to the part, and this item on his c.v. was enough to convince Mr Kinnock that he was the right man to be Shadow Solicitor General.
Now he claims to be as worried as Sir Patrick Mayhew, Sir Ian Percival and half the bloody fools in the House of Com- mons, lest judges, having to decide on matters of human rights, should accidental- ly involve themselves in politics and thus bring themselves into as much disrepute as the politicians themselves. 'It is for Parlia- ment to legislate and for the courts to interpret this legislation,' he cried, which is exactly how both institutions have become their present objects of fear and loathing.
It may show just how much Labour MPs really care about such civil rights issues as the Special Branch raids that only 16 bothered to vote for Sir Edward's Bill, but my own particular focus is on the fact that only 58 Conservatives bothered to vote for it. So much for all their rhetoric about standing for the individual against the encroaching power of the State. One can easily understand that nobody with a job in government would wish to see his powers diminished by an alternative source of authority, although even so I would have thought it was the sort of issue on which any Conservative Government minister worth his salt would have been prepared to cut the traces. Equally, I suppose that a few really stupid Conservative MPs might have been confused by Such expressions as `human rights' to suppose that they were voting for women's liberation, black pow- er, privileges for homosexuals, trade union closed shops and all the other left-wing causes assembled under the mantle of the discredited National Council for Civil Liberties. In fact the European Conven- tion is an entirely sensible and benign document, which guarantees rights to life, liberty, privacy and freedom of expression and forbids degrading punishment.
Perhaps it is this last item which upset Conservative backbenchers. Sooner or la- ter they are going to grow bored with demanding longer prison sentences for every crime which comes up. Sooner or later they will find they can no longer be certain of getting their horrible faces in the newspapers every time they demand longer sentences for child sex, or rape, or drug dealing or drunken driving. Mr David Kerr, 21, one of the victims of the Ealing vicarage case, set the tone: 'My law would be to castrate him and let him lead a life of misery inside prison away from society,' he said. 'As an atheist, I cannot hold the view of forgiving a man like this.' Even the vicar said he was 'outraged' at the leniency of the three sentences, one for 14 years, one for 10 years, one for eight.
On this occasion, perhaps, they had a case of sorts in the apparently illogical way the sentences were apportioned, with one villain getting seven years for aggravated burglary and only three for grievous bodily harm, another five for the burglary and only three for the rape. But Mr Justice Leonard is surely right to stress that crimes against property are in even greater need of discouragement in the present climate of opinion than crimes against the person. On Saturday, he again came in for criticism in the newspapers when his judgment that it was 'neither wrong in principle nor exces- sive' for a pick-pocket to receive three years was upheld on appeal. 'The distress and inconvenience caused to people who lose their wallets etc in this way is great,' he observed. I think he has a point.
Perhaps the only way the punish- ment-freaks in this country will be satisfied is by a return of the stocks. Then enthu- siasts from Childwatch, Women Against Rape, the US Drug Enforcement Agency and Action Against Alcohol could work off their hysterical and unpleasant urges by throwing rotten eggs. I fancy — although I may be wrong — that they would soon lose public sympathy under those circum- stances. The English, on the whole, are a kindly race nowadays, and do not like seeing cruelty, however much they are told by all the Glenda Slags and Conservative backbenchers in business that it is in a good cause. Even in the 17th century, when prisoners were taken to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, the sympathy of the crowd was usually with the criminal and against the executioners. That is why I always urge that if ever capital punishment is restored in response to popular demand, executions should once again be public, or at any rate seen on television. I do not believe that the popular enthusiasm for capital punishment would last long in those circumstances. Would even Mr David Kerr, 21, for all his atheist convictions, be happy to wield the scissors at the judicial castration he proposes? It's all the stuff of backbenchers' fantasies.
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