A BLOW TO REAL JUSTICE... FROM THE ARCHERS

LATE last year a strange new law came into force in this country, making it a crime, punishable by prison, to use repeated ‘controlling or coercive behaviour’ in the home.

You might think there’s nothing wrong with that.

But what if it becomes one of the many offences in family law where social workers, police and courts assume that the accused is guilty, and he or she has to prove his innocence?

The growing numbers who have fallen into this pit simply do not get fair trials.

No doubt some of them are guilty. But in many cases this is not proved beyond reasonable doubt. They lose homes, families, children, livelihoods, reputations and – sometimes – liberty. And if we stop caring whether they’ve been properly tried, we forge a weapon that may one day be used against us.

That’s why I really dislike the great fuss recently made about the BBC Radio 4 soap opera The Archers.

In this programme – which I have many times explained is openly intended as propaganda for ‘progressive’ ideas – two actors pretended to be a married couple. This long drama got under way as the new law came into force.

For months, the male actor pretended to be a perfect example of the ‘coercive control’ which extreme feminists claim is so common. Again and again he bullied and belittled the female actor, as if he were a Victorian squire who had her imprisoned in a cottage miles from civilisation.

She submitted to it meekly for months in a way I doubt any modern woman would do for more than about five minutes. Then, in a bizarre and incredible scene, the male actor pretended to goad the female actor into pretending to stab him.

There was then a pretend arrest, and a pretend trial. There was even a pretend jury, made up of celebrity actors. And the nation was supposed to be terribly engaged, anxiously hoping that the fictional jury would pretend to acquit the female actor, so she could pretend to go back to her fictional home.

This rubbish had two propaganda aims. The first was to make more people willing to believe that this kind of thing is common, when we have no way of knowing. The second was to give the audience information it never normally has, in any proper courtroom drama. Listeners thought they already ‘knew’ what had ‘really happened’. They ‘knew’ the male actor was ‘guilty’. Actually, they didn’t. They just knew what the scriptwriters had decided to portray, a fictional wicked man, fictionally coercing and controlling, and fictionally trying to get away with it.

But in any real trial on this charge, without solid evidence, and where the only two witnesses disagree, I am sure that some real jurors’ minds will be influenced by this programme towards convicting. As a result, an innocent defendant might go to prison for years. I think the BBC has done a wrong and shameful thing.