When justice ended up in the dock...
I’M deeply relieved that the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, pictured, is going. I don’t care if she’s going voluntarily (as she claims) or if she’s been sacked. But I do know she’s had a toxic effect on public life, humanity and fairness during her five-year term.
The kind of issues she has focused on – historic sex offences allegedly committed by celebrities and senior politicians, and at the same time a determination to raise the number of rape convictions – strike at the heart of our families and communities. Saunders leaves a legacy of ruined lives in her wake.
Under her watch Cliff Richard and DJ Paul Gambaccini suffered outrageous injustices, both left dangling in legal purgatory – Gambaccini for 12 months, Cliff for two years – after being falsely accused of totally invented historic sex offences. Meanwhile frightened young men were being falsely charged with rape. Saunders introduced a new and monstrous inversion of criminal investigation; that any woman who said she had been raped must always be believed and referred to as “the victim”. Not “the accuser”, but “the victim”, long before any jury had the chance to decide whether she was a victim or not.
Failures by the prosecution to disclose relevant facts to the A SCHOOL friend and I once tried to hitchhike from a rural railway station in Essex to a folk festival in Suffolk. It was only about 20 miles, but could we get a lift? We could not. Maybe it was the guitar cases on our backs or our shoulder-length hair, but not a single driver deigned to stop for two apparent hippies. We had to walk the entire way. It took us six hours.
So I was both intrigued and irritated this week to read that the average time it takes for a hitchhiker in Britain to get a ride is just 18 minutes. Intrigued, because I thought that as a nation of motorists defence which might have helped the accused man (for example, mobile phone messages between accuser and defendant) resulted in trials collapsing although the innocent young men who were charged have seen their reputations ruined for ever.
I’m writing about this because any parent of sons (as well as daughters) will have been horrified at the implications: as boys mature and seek girlfriends, they have entered a minefield of not just political correctness but possible legal threat. Courtship misunderstandings are common among young people. The law stepping in, unless there is clear evidence of criminal behaviour, is totally inappropriate.
Every time I see Alison Saunders’s smug face in the press or on TV, I shudder. She looks so fearsomely angry and intransigent. We don’t want a woman with her highly political and radical feminist agenda interfering in our lives. Now, thank God, the exceptionally intelligent and thoughtful new Commissioner of the Met, Cressida Dick, has told officers they “must have an open mind when an allegation is made, and their role is to investigate, not blindly believe”.
Hallelujah. Innocent until proven guilty. That’s what we always believed was the principle of British justice. For the past few years, it hasn’t been. Now Saunders is going, maybe we’ll retrieve it.
thumbs up to the uk hitchhiker
we are reserved, tetchy, detached and alienated from everything on the other side of the windscreen; irritated, because it shows my mate and I were obviously doing something fundamentally wrong.
In fact, Britain rates quite high in willingness to offer strangers a lift. We’re tenth in the top 30. Iraq is the best place to thumb a ride (average waiting time, seven minutes) and Sweden the worst (almost an hour).
Appearing smartly dressed helps, as does the location where you stick your thumb out. But you can’t really go to a folk festival in a jacket and tie, can you?