Innocent man shot in Stockwell

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It’s come to something when I find myself agreeing with Jack Straw, but he does have a point that the police are in an incredibly difficult position at the moment. This still doesn’t, however, justify the killing of an innocent man, which we now know to be the case.

I must admit that when I first heard the news on Friday I naively thought the police couldn’t possibly have shot someone who was in any way innocent, as they must have had a foolproof reason for tackling a guy so comprehensively. Then when I heard Jean Charles de Menezes was actually innocent, I still felt that he’d been asking for trouble by running away when challenged and jumping the ticket barriers at Stockwell underground station. This does not, of course, justify a summary execution but it does at least make it easier to see why the police acted as they did under the circumstances. The fact that he was wearing an unseasonably heavy coat which could have concealed a bomb and he initially emerged from an address police found in one of the unexploded rucksacks from Thursday’s botched terror attacks didn’t help his case, but now these details just look like the worst possible bad luck.

It seemed fairly common sense that running from armed police is simply not something you do if you’re entirely innocent of any crime, and that he may have run because he was (for example) carrying drugs or was in trouble over something else which under normal circumstances would have been merely arrestable, as opposed to killable. However, I didn’t originally realise the officers were in plain clothes, and they haven’t said he was involved in any other kind of crime, so the fact that he did run surely proves he wasn’t fully aware of what was going on. To him, the guys with guns chasing him could have been anyone from London muggers to Brazilian mafia – I doubt we’ll ever know the full story.

That said, the police’s case is pretty threadbare. The fact that they allowed him to get onto a bus before they started chasing him doesn’t tally with their defence that he could have been carrying a bomb. It looks like the whole operation was botched from the start, and that the intelligence they had was more than faulty. But on the other hand, in the current climate, if you have even the slightest suspicion that a bloke has a bomb strapped to his body, how you’re meant to arrest him in a peaceful manner without risking death and destruction is very difficult to determine – but nonetheless something for the police to sort out without resorting to murdering innocent people.

Incidentally it’s not that I haven’t been watching the news as closely as everyone else for the past few weeks, but I tend generally to think I haven’t got anything very interesting to add to the fountain of comment gushing forth at the moment. Sometimes though you have to stand up and make an exception…

Microsoft helps China to censor bloggers

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‘Civil liberties groups have condemned an arrangement between Microsoft and Chinese authorities to censor the internet,’ writes today’s Grauniad.

‘The American company is helping censors remove “freedom” and “democracy” from the net in China with a software package that prevents bloggers from using these and other politically sensitive words on their websites.

‘The restrictions, which also include an automated denial of “human rights”, are built into MSN Spaces, a blog service launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, a venture in which Microsoft holds a 50% stake.’

Tossers.

Democracy: is it coming to the UK?

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Now that Tony Blair has won a (not particularly unsurprising, but still annoying) third term, the Independent and others are picking him up on the fact that he did so with just 36% of the popular vote and with the support of only 22% of the electorate. The Independent’s campaign for democratic reform is a bit shutting-the-stable-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted but there’s something to be said for it and who knows, maybe Tony might even listen (although I doubt it). The above link links to the Independent’s page of links on the topic, including an online form you can fill in to sign their petition.

Leonard Cohen for the Nobel!

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The BBC reports on a bid to nominate Leonard Cohen for the Nobel Prize for Literature. To my mind he deserves it more than many ‘proper’ writers and certainly more than almost anyone working in popular music. That is, only one other person really deserves it more than him, and it’s Bob Dylan. So the chances are pretty slim methinks.

It’s Iraq, stupid

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This brilliant article in today’s Times calls this “the Basil Fawlty” election (the UK general election I mean, not the one for the new Pope). Journo Martin Samuel’s reference is to the John Cleese character’s catchphrase “Don’t mention the war!”, on account of the three main parties’ hypocritical and cowardly silence over Iraq. But another quote from that great TV series also springs to mind, the one about “the bleedin’ obvious”.

Samuel’s piece, in being staggeringly simple, honest and true, is exactly the opposite of the politicians’ bluster. Iraq is the real divisive issue in this election, the real issue, the only issue. It’s bleedin’ obvious – but nobody seems to be seeing it. Worryingly, one of the people not seeming to see it is Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats. As Jeremy Paxman said to him in a TV grilling last night, “You were the only party that opposed the war. People should be flocking to you in droves. Why aren’t they?”

“There remains a tremendous amount of anger over the invasion of Iraq,” writes Samuel, “and Kennedy is the only party leader that can rightfully lay claim to it. Howard supported the war, Blair started it, but Kennedy spoke against it throughout. This is what any capable marketing executive would call his Unique Selling Point. The Lib Dems should be the true opposition party in this election, yet they are stuck peddling the same tired lines as the big two.”

The reason for this, it seems to me, is that the Lib Dems are afraid (as, in fairness, would the other two parties be if they were in the same position) that the electorate will turn off if they start talking about “stuff happening abroad”; the emphasis of policy, it is perceived, has to be on what’s happening at home – hospitals, tax, education, crime. But this isn’t a normal election with only those normal election issues at stake. As Samuel says, “Vote for what you think a politician will achieve, based around a loose bag of pledges, promises, bluster and speculation. The war is not like that. It happened. We’re in. They’re dead.”

And, I would add – even if Charles Kennedy won’t – vote Lib Dem.

Leonard Cohen to tour again??

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The above links to a press release I’ve just read courtesy of Google’s News Alert service about The Lenmeister’s new management, which also mentions his plan for “extensive worldwide touring”. This sounds very intriguing – LC turned 70 last September and did his last concerts over ten years ago. Should we really believe that LC is seriously considering such international frolicking at his advanced age? I thought he was growing old gracefully and taking it easy these days? Maybe he’s getting bored now and is longing for some excitement (as well, perhaps, as musical inspiration, if a few of the tracks on the last album Dear Heather are anything to go by). I wonder if the old Cohen heart (and loins too, probably) can still withstand life on the road? Then again, I remember reading somewhere that he said he’d like to die onstage, so maybe it’s all part of some very Cohenesque plan. Kind of reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing: “In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.” In other words, Leonard Cohen should come out of the closet!

Ian Jack – ‘A sentimental education’

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Granta editor Ian Jack, writing in today’s Guardian Review, “deplores the media’s role in fomenting grief on the death of public figures”, most recently in the form of the Pope.

However, having said “It is impossible to equate the Pope with the Princess”, Jack does exactly that in a spurious piece which says very little about the Pope and a great deal about his contempt of Princess Diana and her mourners.

As far as I can see the only difference between mourning Diana or the Pope and mourning a relative or friend is that most mourners of the Pope and Diana never knew them personally. Newspaper columnists, however, tend not to criticise people for grieving for relatives and friends. Funny, that.

So what if people feel upset or want to pay their respects when a Pope or a Diana dies? Surely Jack isn’t so lacking in imagination that he can’t understand that millions of ordinary people identify with such larger-than-life figures?

The criticism of those who grieved for Diana has become legitimate not because her legacy is “little more than a dysfunctional memorial in a London park” but because of her mass appeal at the time of her death. But those masses, that spectacle, consisted of individuals with any number of personal reasons for grieving. Those reasons were as simple as a gut feeling and as complex as anything you can imagine. The reporters weren’t out there asking every one of them why they were there, they were just saying “Wow, look at these crowds.” Which makes it very easy for people like Jack to tar everyone who felt differently to him with the same brush.

Jack writes that “not to grieve [for Diana] was to be odd, cynical, wicked”. I don’t remember meeting anyone at the time who felt that way. You felt how you felt, you grieved or didn’t grieve in your own manner and it was nobody else’s business either way. Certainly nobody attacked anybody for showing insufficient grief, or too much – except in the left-of-centre newspapers, of course.

And if you did perchance find yourself embracing a complete stranger, was this such a bad thing? Was it any different, fundamentally, from the embrace you find yourself giving the fellow mourner of a relative or friend whom you barely know? Was it any different, in fact, from hugging a stranger in joy because your team won the football?

I also don’t remember meeting anyone who did not express some regret at Diana’s death. I remember walking down Kensington High Street and everybody talking about it, the signs in all the shop windows saying they were shutting on the day of the funeral, the handwritten tributes on the flowers in Kensington Gardens saying things like “God bless you, sweetheart”. There is no escaping the fact that people were personally affected.

Jack’s beef, finally, is with the media and the way they report such events. Sorry to spring this on you, Ian, but when someone famous dies, it’s news. And for the record, the Guardian was hardly the only newspaper whose coverage of the Pope’s death could be described as overkill.

Brown ‘lifts Labour’s hopes for big majority’

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According to today’s Observer, Labour are several points ahead of the Tories in the paper’s latest opinion poll. This article also reports that Peter Hain “launched a fierce attack on self-indulgent ‘dinner party critics’ among the liberal middle classes who are tempted to use the ballot box to punish Blair”. By doing so, he says, such voters “would only hurt the poorest, who were dependent on a Labour victory”. Blair has “got the message” about their displeasure, Hain insists, arguing that those who still disagreed over Iraq or civil liberties “should reopen the arguments after the election”. “There’s now a kind of dinner party critics [sic] who quaff shiraz or chardonnay and just sneeringly say, ‘You are no different from the Tories,'” Hain goes on. “Most of the people in this category are pretty comfortably off: it’s not going to be the end of the world if they get a Tory government. In a working-class constituency like mine, this is a lifeline. It’s not a luxury.”

Well, I have no doubt Peter Hain would love for Iraq and civil liberties to slip off the agenda until after the election. However, he might like to know that it is precisely because of these two issues that I will not be voting Labour on 5th May. He needn’t worry, though, about my vote going to the Tories – they are indeed the totally desperate option. As one of the middle-class liberals he so despises (and, therefore, very proud of it), as stated elsewhere here I will be voting Lib Dem.

Incidentally, Peter should note that I prefer cabernet sauvignon to shiraz, although seeing as he’s so busy generalising I doubt he’s got time for such details. And by the way, are we middle classes he lambasts the same middle classes as those his party want “the poor” to aspire to being? Surely not!

Richard of Bordeaux

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An inveterate self-Googler, I often find Thoughtcat coming up as a search result in some fairly unlikely contexts. But the most recent, “Richard and Koy’s French Inter-Rail Adventure” (aka Thoughtcat’s Tour de France), a trip I took with my wife around the country in 2003, turning up on a site called Factbites (subheadlined “Where results make sense”) under the topic “Richard of Bordeaux“, is, let’s face it, just silly.