2010 in Dicks

2011 has started and seems disappointingly familiar, but it gives us all a chance to look back at the year just gone. And I felt that I'd look back at all the dicks who have made the world slightly worse. And where better to start than...

THE CONSERVATIVE-LEAD GOVERNMENT: We all knew it was coming. There was no way that New Labour could hold on any longer, but the popularity of the Liberal Democrats (a phrase that is as laughable now as it was last January) just kept the Tories from a majority. And then gave them the MPs they needed anyway. Much of the anger has been (rightly) directed at Nick Clegg for backtracking on virtually every promise that made him so popular in the first place, but let's not forget that to bend to the every whim of the Conservative Party, there needs to be Conservative policies to begin with. So whilst Cameron and Osborne are happily pissing on everyone, let's not take out all of our anger on the guy pointing and laughing.

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: This was the year when Paul Chambers was convicted for an illegal use of irony, but at least he was fortunate enough not to end up in hospital at the hands of the police (allegedly, of course). Surely the worst injustice of the year is of the rape victim jailed for eight months for retracting her genuine allegations. Though she has since been released, she still has to fight for her children. The husband had all the charges against him dropped, begging the question: How can they convict someone of falsely retracting allegations of sexual assault, and yet not convict the (therefore genuine) rapist? It saddens me that the organisations that are suppose to protect me -- the police and the CPS -- have shown themselves to be thuggish and shockingly misguided.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Not for his work with WikiLeaks, an organisation which I support and I believe has done a remarkable amount of good work in revealing what it has, but for his entirely dick-ish remarks following the recent allegations against him. Sunny Hundal has compiled a brilliant piece on whether the accusations of conspiracy stand up, but regardless of his guilt or innocence (neither of which have yet been proven in court, and I would not like to speculate on it), he has recently said some phenomenally unpleasant things, such as claiming he fell into a "hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism", that Switzerland is the "Saudi Arabia of feminism", and that these women had got into a "tizzy" about something as trivial about the very serious subject of STDs. WikiLeaks would do very well without him.

KAY BURLEY, ADAM BOULTON AND BEN BROWN: 3 journalists, two working for Sky and one for the BBC. Boulton and Burley provided us with such shoddy journalism that people were compelled to shout at them in the street, but then at least you would expect that of Sky "News". Ben Brown's treatment of Jody McIntyre was a different matter, with the supposedly "impartial" BBC doing all they can to pin blame on a victim of a violent and horrific incident. The official statement from the editors completely misses the point. Would they really interview anyone in the same way? Is Crimewatch an interrogation of the victims, ascertaining whether they were "rolling towards" the criminals, perhaps? It was not a balanced view, but a disgusting display of victim-blaming.

NADINE DORRIES: I have tried several times to write a post about Dorries, about her 70% fictitious blog that she uses to make personal attacks on her constituents, but every time I begin I realise that Tim Ireland has said it earlier and better than I ever will (and been the victim of some vicious and nasty smearing as the result), so I'll just point you in his direction.

DANNY DYER AND ZOO MAGAZINE: Oh how we laughed back in May when Danny Dyer joked about cutting women's faces. Except we didn't, because it was deeply unpleasant. Dyer initially claimed to have been misquoted, but has since offered this apology, in which it becomes clear that the problem was that he was quoted, albeit an off-record aside. He has since resigned, and released the film Pimp to huge box-office takings of £205. Zoo magazine, however, which approved and printed the column, continues to be published to a wide readership.

THE POPE: An inevitable inclusion on this list, the Pope currently feels more like the head of SPECTRE than the Catholic Church. Accusation after accusation after accusation of child abuse and subsequent cover-ups have been leveled at Catholic Priests (too many to link to, but the length of this Wikipedia article is startling in itself), and yet all Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his lot have done is attack homosexuals, secularists, and women. I said back in September that

I will never be able to put into words the horror and sadness that I feel, knowing that there are millions of people who hold this hateful, bigoted, misogynistic homophobe in the highest regard possible.

Since then, the Pope has claimed that paedophilia wasn't a big deal in the '70s, and that child pornography is increasingly seen as "normal". Am I really expected to moral advice from a man who opposes the use of condoms more than child pornography?

So, that's why he's my Dick of 2010. Until the end of Monday you can vote for five dicks here (Cameron, Osborne, Dorries and Dyer were my other choices, by the way).

Happy New Year!

Policing the Police

Recently, I wrote about my displeasure at certain judicial decisions made in this country. But if we have learnt anything from the introduction to Law and Order: UK, in analysing justice,we should also look at the police force.

I would have thought the MSM's (Mainstream Media's) bias supporting the police force, rather than condemning it, was fairly apparent. Anton Vowl's piece here seems to sum up why that would be the case - that the authority of the police force would initially outweigh statements from the general public. Throughout Thursday's protests the only figures being relayed from Sky and BBC News were the number of police officers injured and protesters arrested -- no mention until much later of the number of protesters injured. The lack of relevance the MSM places on the wellbeing of protesters, many of whom were caught in the middle (if that is an important factor anyway), is highly troubling.

However, there is a lot of condemnation from the blogosphere, because time and time again police have been shown to be using needlessly brutal and thuggish tactics. But these are not groundless accusations. The case of Ian Tomlinson seems almost too obvious to mention, but the video footage shows clearly that he was walking away with his hands in his pockets when pushed, and regardless of whether or not this did cause his death (and it is my opinion that it probably did), this footage alone raises questions. More sickeningly, Lance Corporal Mark Aspinall was savagely beaten in a case of mistaken identity, yet only one of the three was successfully prosecuted.

These incidents are all at least few months old, but there have been so many during the recent protests. Take the case of Officer U1202, shown punching repeatedly into a crowd of students in a clearly unnecessary display of brutality. I doubt very much that the students suffering brain injuries as a result of being hit over the head with truncheons, or being pulled out of their wheelchairs would argue that they are more of a service than a force. The intimidating tactics, such as kettling or those deployed in Cambridge, only serve to make situations worse.

And charging with horses is wrong. These animals are large, fast and impossible to control entirely. The footage at London really is not as critical as it deserves, and the claims that this is the first time that this tactic has been used since the eighties are demonstrably false (despite what the Metropolitan Police would have you believe, with the official statements to the contrary).

The fact that the Metropolitan Police are happy to cover this up proves that it is not the purely the individual loose cannons that are the problem, but the organisation itself has questions to answer. Misrepresentation is everywhere, with very little being done to put it right. Were police officers "dragged off horses and beaten", as Cameron claims? No. Here the protesters are the "bad guys", and any incident must therefore been of their doing, whether it can be substantiated or not.

On the Today programme, the Met Commissioner praised the "restraint" of the firearms officers, suggesting that the shooting of protesters was an option, and only the moral judgements of individual officers saved bloodshed. This statement seems entirely contrary to the argument that it is the individuals who go wrong, whilst the force (or service) maintains the peace.

Time and again the police have shown these brutish tactics. The citations in this post are the most concrete evidence I could find of problems with the police, but the twitter feeds and live blogs from within kettles, or on the streets, go further still. I am glad that blind faith in the police is down, and if they really want our trust, then, like anybody or anything else, they must earn it.

This blog has been adapted from a comment left in response to this post. This comment is currently awaiting modification

Justice for All

Today, I read, with disgust, about the PC dismissed for raping a woman in police locker room. Unfortunately, though sadly not surprisingly, the CPS are not pressing charges. The British Judicial System seems to be, at the moment, behaving less like an organisation seeking to fight for justice and more like some kind of SPECTRE-lite.

Let's take a look at some recent cases:

The prosecution of Paul Chambers: This is probably the most famous recent case. Paul Chambers, upset that Robin Hood airport was closed, vented his frustration on Twitter with the tweet:

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!

. Despite the fact, as laid out in Jack of Kent's excellent blogpost, that neither the airport nor the Police considered his tweet to pose any credible threat, he was charged by the CPS, and prosecuted.

The imprisonment of a rape victim: A woman was jailed for falsely retracting a statement she had made, in which she claimed she had been raped by her husband. To put it a bit more clearly, she was jailed because she had been raped, and then "emotionally blackmailed" by her husband into retracting the statement, wasting the CPS's valuable time and money that could be spent prosecuting people on Twitter. Remarkably, the judge who handed this sentence down has offered less severe sentences to people who download child pornography or beat their wives.

The CPS trying to sue someone for kidnap with no grounds whatsoever: Only one source for this one, but if it is true then it is yet another brilliant use of resources by the CPS, which are, of course, finite, meaning that they can't always prosecute over insignificant little events like...

The Death of Ian Tomlinson: How there can be no case here? There is video footage of a policeman pushing a man to the ground, a man who was walking away with his hands in his pockets. Whether or not this caused Mr Tomlinson's death, there should be enough to show that wrongdoing is in place. The anger I felt at the CPS's decision here cannot be overstated. I was immediately reminded of this case after the CPS's most recent decision, and it troubles me that serious crimes are potentially going ignored, whilst trivial events and victims are being attacked.

I am, of course, aware of the fact that many guilty people are sentenced correctly, and many innocent people let off. I am aware that there are far worse legal systems out there, and that my increasing interest in politics over the last few years has increased my exposure to these instances of injustice. But the illiberal judgements and questionable prosecutions, or lack thereof, are overpowering any faith I once had in the police, the CPS and the organisations that are supposed to be there to protect me, and society.