A Crime Is Anything That A Group In Power Chooses To Prohibit.
You think you have problems, USanian readers, with Alberto Gonzales. You’re not alone.
I’ve often said to Martin that I think John Reid, the current Home Secretary, is the most dangerous man in Britain and when he says things like this , it’s difficult to for him or anyone disagree:
Mr Reid acknowledged in his speech in Bristol yesterday that the government’s renewed drive against antisocial behaviour was based on a concept of justice that many legal authorities might not recognise. “The problem we face is what I call the justice shortfall. That is, the difference – sometimes big – between what you and I think is justice, and what a lawyer or legal academic might think it is. My kind of justice is swift, effective and matches the crime,” said the home secretary.
“My kind of justice’? So John Reid’s personal ideas trump nearly a thousand years of legal evolution, a tradition of justice refined by some of the most talented (and it has to be admitted, some of the worst) minds in British history? Reid may as well’ve said “Law? What law? I’m the bloody law!”. Who does he think he is, Judge Roy bloody Bean?
Blunkett, blowhard and bully that he is, was a positively smoothie and Charles Clarke comes over as the personification of reason and balance in comparison .
To be Home Secretary of the UK is a massive job, involving as it does responsibility for all home affairs, including but not limited to criminal policy, prisons, anti-terrorism, immigration, race relations and the police. It has an annual budget of 14.9 billion pounds.
So what exactly are Reid’s qualifications for the job? Other home secretaries have had backgrounds in law or policing or public adminsitration, but it seems he’s never had a job that wasn’t funded in some way by the Party :
After graduation he worked as a research officer for the Labour Party and as a trade union organiser. He entered parliament at the 1987 general election as MP for the Motherwell North constituency. After boundary changes, he was returned at the 1997 election for the new constituency of Hamilton North and Bellshill; and after further boundary changes in 2005, he was returned at the 2005 election for the new constituency of Airdrie and Shotts.
That’s it, his whole CV after uni. Impressive. Not.
I’ve met a lot of trade union organisers, I’ve been a trade union organiser and while most are the best people you could ever wish to meet, a lot aren’t and most of those are male and in the Labour Party. It seems that’s all the qualifications you need to run a massive empire of a department, one which holds the keys to the toolbox of repression – party loyalty, naked aggression and the ability to cow committees. (Oh, and a penis helps.)
Should a home secretary wish to invoke the Civil Contingencies Act that New Labour’s majority has pushed through Parliament we would swiftly become a police state. That a home secretary such as Reid has such a tool available to him in a country without a written constitution is a disaster, to put it mildly. (Think the government in V for Vendetta.) There are those, including me, who feel we’re 2/3 there already and that John Reid wants to take us the rest of the way.
Labour party hacks have long mistaken naked agression for strength (how else would John Prescott ‘ve risen so far with such limited talents?) and have assumed that the ability to be totally in your face in a meeting and to stand your ground regardless of logic means that someone is strong and resolute, rather than just an asshole.
This terrible tendency in Labour men to pledge allegiance to anti-sexism and equal opportunity, whilst all the while secretly admiring and enabling misogynistic hard-drinking philanderers is the dark secret of New Labour. The likes of Alistair Campbell, David Blunkett. John Reid and John Prescott are assholes by proxy for the more civilised male party members, who are constrained either by rules or circumstance (and the odd few by principle) from behaving in the same way. Either that or they just haven’t got the gumption.
That’s how bullies and blowhards like Prescott, Blunkett and Reid have risen to the top in unions, constituency Labour parties, and eventually the country.
Reid is now constructing a new public personality for himself as part of his push for the eventual party leadership, with the active participation of allegedly leftist newspapers like the Observer. That’s what all the recent flurries of repressive press announcements, scare stories about terrorist plots, and public labelling of all Moslems as potential terrorsists has been about – to make John Reid look like a potential Leader with a capital L, a strongman to protect all us hard-working families against the encircling and infiltrating islamofascist hordes.
What bollocks it is, and most people can see it: but this brutally ambitious populist demagoguery’s still having a chilling effect on public life and national morale.
Blood and Treasure has a great post up on the real Reid, and on the steps being taken to clean up his ‘Glasgow hardman’ ( aka pathetic bullying tosser) reputation:
It?s not up on their website yet, but the Observer profiled John Reid yesterday. It found many things to praise, with a few mild caveats:
No particular speech or book helps us to identify him; he exists simply as a sometimes charming and certainly politically effective operative in the current era.
Actually, there are a number of things that help identify him, as a quick trawl through Guardian Media?s own files would have revealed. There?s this for instance, from 2002.
The things that Toolis managed to remember are as follows: covering up for his son?s influence peddling; using parliamentary allowances to pay staff campaigning for Labour and then –
In the course of the inquiry, it emerged that Reid had held “discussions” with other witnesses, which in plain unparliamentary language sounded a lot like threats.
This was followed by his censure by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. And then of course, there?s this:
In the international arena, Reid, during his drinking days, fell into bad company in the Balkans with the Bosnian Serb mass-murderer Radovan Karadzic, who tops The Hague’s International War Crimes Tribunal list of wanted men. Reid has admitted spending three days in 1993 at a luxury Geneva lakeside hotel as a guest of Karadzic. “He used to talk to Karadzic, he admired Karadzic. He mistook the Bosnian Serb project as the inheritor of the united Communist ideal,” says Brendan Simms, a Cambridge academic and author of Unfinest Hour: Britain And The Destruction of Bosnia.
That was three years ago. In September, Reid was also profiled by Tom Bower in a piece that opened as follows:
In 1991, John Reid’s reputation appeared to be in tatters. Drunk one day in the House of Commons, he tried to force his way on to the floor to vote. When an attendant stepped forward to stop him, Reid threw a punch. What the MP for Motherwell North did not realise was that he had taken aim at a former SAS soldier. As bemused colleagues looked on, he was effortlessly wrestled to the ground.
Bower also adds that Reid?s visit to Karadzic was paid for by a lobbyist and not declared in the register of interests, that he was a serial womanizer while at university and married to his first wife and that he joined the Communist Partry at the time out of naked opportunism (though I suppose these days that?s considered a recommendation).
Reid is dangerous because he shows no compunction whatsoever (indeed he seems proud of it) in using all of the apparatus of state at his command to push his own personal agenda, which is simply power and more of it. Reid is misusing the power he has to beget more power – and he’s the last person that should be trusted with it.
He’s already shown he has little character and even less judgement, and is, not to put too fine a point on it, little more than a former drunk, party hack, fraud and bully who’s after the premiership and will use whatever he can to get it. It’s unsurprising that the Blairite tenednecy is backing him against Brown.
What a choice eh, Gordon Brown or John Reid for prime minister. Actually, it’s no choice at all: only the few remaining party members get to choose, the rest of the elctorate have no say.
I don’t know about you but I’m sick of the rest of us having to pay the price for some men playing out their own personal psychodramas using the nation’s future as their own personal therapy couch. Yes I do mean you, Messrs Bush & Cheney, but I also mean the likes of Brown, Blair, Prescott, Blunkett and Reid.
All are deeply psychologically flawed men who should have their hands nowhere near the levers of power. Those who crave power are these able to wield it responsibly.
But at the moment in my opinion it’s Reid that’s the most dangerous, with his imposition of summary law on the streets, policing by fiat and indefinite detention in a prison regime any civilised country would be ashamed to acknowledge.
And to those in favour of summary justice for yobs, speeders and obnoxious neighbours, if I haven’t convinced you with the character argument against Reid’s having such untramelled power, then think on this.
The summary judicial powers Reid is proposing may nominally be state powers, but because New Labour’s commited to a US-backed free trade model and is privatising public services, they’ll be exercised not by publicly funded, accountable civil servants but by the private employees of private corporations.
Rentacops, ‘community safety officers’, underpaid petty jobsworths from contracted-out council departments, traffic wardens: all will have judicial powers. It won’t be Reid on the street making decisions about who gets fined and who doesn’t – it’ll be some undertrained, outsourced, lowpaid behaviour-droid with little support and lots of grudges.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
CS Lewis
Read more: UK Politics, Home secretary, New Labour, Police state John Reid
