This farcical witch-hunt will drag British justice back to the Dark Ages
COUNTRIES on the brink of madness are riven by whispered scandals about the powerful – some of them true, most of them not. Four years before the French Revolution, some tangled rubbish about a diamond necklace was used to smear Queen Marie Antoinette. Pre-1917 Russia seethed with obscene rumours about the monk Grigory Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra.
This tittle-tattle helped to discredit the existing regime, and opened the way for a new order which was far, far worse.
With us, there is a strange belief that a vast sex-abuse scandal, reaching high into the establishment, is being hidden by the powerful.
The great thing about such claims is that they can neither be proved nor disproved. And so those who doubt them can be condemned as part of the coverup. You cannot be neutral.
In a reversal of the normal rules on slander, an accuser can allege the vilest things about an alleged culprit, and yet not suffer at all. He or she can also shelter for life behind legally enforced anonymity.
Meanwhile, the accused are publicly humiliated, their homes absurdly searched – for what, exactly?
This unjust lunacy reached its peak in 2014 when the then Home Secretary, a Mrs Theresa May, responded to a media frenzy by setting up an ‘Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’. It was a very silly idea.
If crimes have been committed, we have a huge and expensive police and justice system which, to tell the truth, isn’t half as busy as it likes to pretend. This is because it has decided that so many things that used to be crimes aren’t crimes any more, so it ignores them.
And immediately, because of the wild and fantastic nature of the claims, almost nobody could be found who wasn’t in some way disqualified to lead it. Ridiculously, that fine lawyer and judge, Baroness ButlerSloss, was ruled out as chairman because she was ‘part of the establishment’. I bet the Baroness is relieved to be out of it now, but isn’t it ridiculous that the joke MP, Simon Danczuk, later to gain fame for his sexually explicit text-message habit, was allowed to influence the matter?
Now on its fourth chairman, this gigantic, foggy inquisition has just lost its chief lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, amid a tornado of leaks and counter-leaks.
Meanwhile, most of those involved in the original scandalmongering have suffered various embarrassing setbacks and aren’t quite as chipper as they were when they stomped around the land demanding a state-sponsored witch-hunt. And Mrs May, who wants to be thought of as open-minded and willing to review the decisions of the Cameron Government, now has the chance to review and reverse her own mistake. I do hope she does, and shuts the whole thing down.
This kangaroo court, which is, incredibly, allowed to hear evidence against accused individuals without allowing any defence, is an embarrassing hangover from a bout of national lunacy.
We are slowly recovering from it. The Metropolitan Police chief who joined in far too keenly with the hunting pack has quit his post early.
APOWERFUL new Channel 4 drama, National Treasure – in which Robbie Coltrane plays a showbiz giant brought down by abuse claims – is at least toying with the possibility that some of these accusations may actually be untrue, and that some accusers may be hoping for gain more than for justice.
About time, too. For far too long media, police and, shamefully, the courts themselves have forgotten the rule which stands between us and tyranny – that an accused person is innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
It is no good saying that the crimes are terrible. Locking up an innocent person, or destroying his life with anonymous smears, is terrible, too. And if we don’t stop doing it, we will soon cease to be a free country.