The tyranny of lawyers

Ihave spent most of the morning trying to convince people online that Huw Edwards’s conviction does not mean that all, or even a majority, of Welsh people are sexually attracted to children. ‘We thought it was just sheep. It isn’t,’ one furious interlocuter named only as ‘Ned’ posted with what I assume he thought was bitter irony. Another mentioned that Edwards’s supposed ‘friend’, from whom he procured the disgusting photographs, was also Welsh and that there had been recent, very serious paedophilia cases in both Swansea and Cardiff crown courts.

This is a perfect example of how false news is generated. Long before the end of these lengthy and malevolent exchanges, someone had argued that Owain Glyndwr hung around nursery schools with a bag of sherbet lemons and that our first Welsh king, Henry VII, was born to a woman who was 13 years old. I tried to rebut all this rubbish with hard facts – except the bit about Henry VII, which I discovered is actually true – but nobody would listen. They were borne aloft on an energising collective hatred and the truth was an unwanted interloper at their party. On another site, the thesis was different – namely, everyone who works at the BBC is a paedo, regardless or not of whether they are Welsh. The Marxist Blair Broadcasting Corporation is chock full of them! And so on, interminably.

We might worry similarly about the propensity of the public to buy into another theory, which is that we have a two-tier judicial system and that Edwards would be in prison right now if he had merely tweeted his approval of an anti-immigration march (if you’re on the right) or climbing gantries on the M25 (if you’re on the left). This theory does not quite hold water, either – the truth here is rather more complex and no less damning of our judicial system. The sentence Edwards received was more or less precisely what legal experts had expected, given his very early guilty plea, repentance and lack of previous convictions. You can argue as long as you like that we should have tougher sentences for sexual perverts but you would be a) marching against the tide of recent history in this country; and b) offering up an irrelevance to the issue at point – which is that Edwards was not afforded special treatment because of who he was. For those of you who are not sufficiently comforted by the complete and utter destruction of his life, at least you might take pleasure from the fact that it has thrown the BBC into another tailspin towards extinction. The irony, really, is that Edwards was the subject of that increasingly rare thing in our courts – a genuine, non-politicised verdict.

The big lie is that our courts are pristine and above the fray and never beholden to the ephemeral influence of politics. It has always been a downright lie – just ask the striking miners from the 1980s – and never more so than today. It is not so much two-tiered policing, as multi-tiered policing. Instead of operating in a realm which is properly distanced from the political and concerned only with judging each individual case solely on its merits and the evidence provided – which is what is meant to happen – our courts now reflect every political spasm which shudders through the nation at large. Our politicians are partly to blame – not least Yvette Cooper, whose government department decided that all those arrested for participation in those early summer riots were ‘criminals’ – but so too is the gradual politicisation of the police (partly as a consequence of elected crime commissioners who are usually third division party hacks) and the frantic demands of the press. I do not believe for a nanosecond that the lengthy sentences meted out to elderly thugs were a case of blind justice: they were politically motivated sentences beyond any doubt. They were motivated by the insistence of the Labour party and part of the press that this was a dangerous and co-ordinated attempt by a quasi-fascist organisation to take power in the streets, rather than a convocation of a few hundred pissed-up, elderly football hoolies.

And how about four- and five-year sentences for members of Just Stop Oil – people who had taken part in peaceful, if inconveniencing, protests? I am sure they are ghastly, arrogant, privileged idiots, but I am also tempted to agree with Just Stop Oil’s analysis that the sentences were an ‘obscene perversion of justice’. Those sentences, however, were handed down because of the long clamouring from the press and Tory politicians that the police and courts were not taking these idiots seriously enough. Either way, the process was scarcely pristine.

You will remember that Black Lives Matter protestors were met by coppers who went down on one knee, rather than wading in with their truncheons held aloft. More political interference – as was, of course, the bizarre exoneration by a court of those BLM morons who threw a statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour.

I suppose you might see all this as the flip side to our country becoming, fairly rapidly, a juristocracy, rather than a democracy. Over the past 25 years, more and more of the governance of our country has been handed over, not to elected members of parliament, but to the lawyers. As we saw with the Rwanda debacle, there is almost nothing a government can do – no matter how huge its majority – if the lawyers and the courts say no. You may remember that the courts tried very hard indeed to stop us leaving the European Union. If the courts are these days ever more involved with politics, then you can expect that to be reflected in the way they deal with ordinary criminals. The person to blame isn’t a Welshman, Huw Edwards, but a Scot – Lord ‘Charlie’ Falconer. I heard him chuckling about this achievement recently, on the BBC, of course.