Don’t leave veteran’s fate to the jobsworths
AWORD on one of my covert info-lines. It may be the Government has quietly decided to switch the judicial persecution of Dennis Hutchings from a nojury Diplock court to a jury trial after all and has scheduled it for next February. True or not? Nothing official yet. But I hear the jobsworths behind the campaign to hound the old soldier to his grave (he is 79 with severe illness) are terrified by the nightmare (for them) of being in breach of the Bill of Rights, which they probably are.
The no-jury trial, called after Lord Justice Diplock, was introduced years ago when it was clear no jury in Northern Ireland could be empanelled without several members probably terrified by IRA threats to murder them if the verdict was guilty for an IRA man. Those days are long gone, but the mandarins who have taken over our governance loathe all elements of the constitution that constrict their power. In this the Bill of Rights is a colossus.
Still mystifying is the silence of Veterans Minister Johnny Mercer. In quarters where the wearing of trousers with something more than a marshmallow inside them is not yet a crime young Master Mercer has always been thought of as “a good egg”. He was in the Royal Artillery Commandos and fought in Afghanistan. He saw his mates killed but was never frightened of the Taliban.
So why does he now seem “frit” (to use Maggie’s word) to face down and overrule the paper-shuffling jobsworths who seem determined to crush one old veteran while IRA killers, personally amnestied in letters from Tony Blair, strut free? Among all our phalanx of multimillionaires is there not one who would fund a Judicial Review of this outrage against decency and the Bill of Rights? Or must it be crowdfunding as with Marine Sergeant Al Blackman?
There must be a lot of us who once wore the uniform and carried the blue passport with some pride who are very fed up with Blondie’s handover of us all to the tender mercies of an invisible and ruthless bureaucracy.
Does he really want to win the next general election or is he prepared to junk it?