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uk-news-talking-politics · 6 years ago

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Lies, politicians and the criminal law: How do we solve a problem like Boris?

By Steve Peers

To say I dislike Boris Johnson would be the understatement of the century. I anticipate his defeat as an MP – however unlikely a prospect – with the same level of enthusiasm as an antifa activist entering a milkshake factory. If it actually happened, I would cheer loud enough to shatter glass in the Shetlands.

And yet I think the recent judgment quashing the possibility of prosecuting him for making a misleading statement about the UK's contributions to the EU is the right one. Not because I respect him, or because I am happy with the prospect of politicians making false statements. But because partisan cases make bad law. Despite my own disdain for Johnson, my reluctant chant would be: "Don't lock him up."

Let's examine Johnson’s case in more detail (for more on the legal mechanics, see the Secret Barrister's explanation). First of all, what did the judges say? They disallowed the prosecution for misconduct in public office on the grounds that it did not satisfy the elements of the offence.

Johnson was not acting as a public officer and was not carrying out a public duty when campaigning in the referendum. Moreover, they thought the lower court had failed to explain why the prosecution was not vexatious.

They did not refer to human rights issues, but rather assumed that when parliament previously passed laws constraining false statements made about the character of another candidate in an election it "must deliberately have excluded any other form of false statement of fact, including those relating to publicly available statistics".

It's been argued that the judgment lets politicians "get away with lying". But the law takes different approaches to lying depending on the context. For fraud, the criminal law may well intervene. For defamation, it's usually civil law. Cheating on an exam might simply mean that you fail the course. Lying to your boss might merely mean that you're fired – as Johnson has found out twice already. Fibbing to your wife might mean an uncomfortable night in the spare room. Two-timing her might entail indefinite time on your friend's sofa. Rowing with your girlfriend might lead to an improbable photoshoot at a random picnic table. But none of these examples, other than fraud, are likely to lead to jail time.

So the law does not criminalise all lies. Far from it: an encounter with the criminal justice system is the exceptional consequence of telling porkies.

We could, if we wished, extend the criminal law to cover political falsehoods, given the impact of political outcomes upon millions of people.

The idea is attractive at first sight, but there's a systemic problem with it. If a prosecution against Johnson is admissible, so is a prosecution against a whole raft of politicians – not just others I dislike, but probably against many I like as well. Yes, in time the courts would work out nuances of when a politician's falsehood reaches a threshold for prosecution and when it does not. Political falsehoods are often misleading, rather than wholly untrue, and it would have to be established that the politician facing prosecution knew that he or she was telling a falsehood – or was reckless about the truth.

But undoubtedly partisans of different political parties and causes would be drawn up in this litigation. Whatever fine lines might hypothetically be drawn in the case law for criminal liability, it could end up being inconsistent. And certainly it would be perceived to be inconsistent – or, more bluntly, biased. Already some critics of Johnson have suggested that the judges were prejudiced in his favour. If the judgment had gone the other way, Johnson's supporters would surely have said the same. It's hard to see whatever is left of public belief in the integrity of the rule of law surviving this process. Judicial appointments might soon become openly politically partisan.

Where the law does attach sanctions to political falsehoods, it's narrowly drafted and sets out a process primarily about politics, not criminal law. The Recall of MPs Act can lead to a by-election due to convictions for fiddling expenses, or under the general criminal law, or after being sanctioned for breaches of parliamentary standards.

As the Johnson judgment pointed out, elections law also has a role: S 106 of the Representation of the People Act can lead, following a decision of the Electoral Court, to by-elections for false statements of fact about politicians' character or conduct during election campaigns. This law has been applied several times in recent years, in an attempt to prompt new elections (see the judgments in Woolas, Carmichael and Rahman). The criminal law could apply in parallel, but the focus has been on voiding the elections.

Neither of these mechanisms constitutes a free-standing unlimited criminalisation of political lying.

I sympathise with the view that there should be greater accountability for politicians' falsehoods. But any broader sanctions for political lying should go with the grain of the law in place already, perhaps reforming it to offer a formal process to retract the falsehood, and to relax the rules on running for office again. We need to speed up the fibber's encounter with voters, not jailers.

#boris johnson

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go-redgirl · 5 years ago

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Democrats Must Live with Consequences of Their Foolish Impeachment Farce Journal of American Greatness ^ | December 26, 2019 | Conrad Black

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will not send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promises to go to court and oblige administration witnesses to testify, a step the trained Democratic seals of the House declined to take because of the urgency of trial and removal of the president.

Finally, the revelation appears to have been noticed by the speaker, just ahead of the arrival of Santa Claus, that the Democrats have no case against the president, are slipping in the polls, and that the last stand of the argument that a moral imperative makes Trump clearly unfit to serve in the great office to which he was elected, has crumbled.

Trump grates on the nerves of many—including many supporters—but that is not an impeachable offense. The country will punish a party that puts its own rabid partisan antagonism ahead of the national interest in effective government. The Democrats have no case for impeachment so they can’t go forward. They cannot possibly imagine there is any smoking gun anywhere to unsettle this administration. And as the country enters a presidential election year, they can’t get anyone except their lickspittles in the national political media drooling again about any legal threat to this president.

The voters will exercise their right and duty to determine if they want to reelect Donald Trump. The Democrats started late, after years of huffing and puffing. They failed to impress anyone, came up empty, produced and passed a pack of lies as an argument for impeachment. Now they are trying to assert constitutional rights they do not possess and a moral authority they squandered years ago to deprive the Senate of the control over an impeachment trial which the Constitution clearly reserves to the upper chamber.

It’s over, Madam Speaker. Go back to San Francisco and ask Santa’s elves to help you clean up the public sanitation problem of the homeless people the California Democratic miracle has put on the city’s sidewalks.

The country will wish to know if these spurious impeachment divertissements will now become a regular irritant in the political calendar when the White House and the House of Representatives are in the hands of different parties, or whether the impeachment of a president will become again a rare, “solemn, and sad” process which will only occur when there really is fear the president has committed grievous offenses.

The Wall Street Journal on December 19 suggested that the Senate should proceed with its trial without receiving the articles from the House, frivolous and vexatious litigation though they are. I doubt if such a step would have any legal validity, but it would be in order for McConnell to give Pelosi notice that the Senate will not conduct a trial unless the articles of impeachment that have been adopted are officially delivered to the Senate by January 15.

The Democrats and their frenzied claque of media harpies foisted the Trump-Russia collusion fraud on the country, followed by a vapid, phony impeachment investigation which has produced meritless allegations of inoffensive offenses, and now they would virtually dictate a process, if not a verdict, from the Republican-controlled Senate. No, not again—not even if all the media’s junkyard dogs bark and wag their tails in unison again.

It’s showtime. Let the fools’ carnival of unfeasible candidates elevate the designated Democratic piñata for this successful if edgy president to hammer through the election campaign. And let the Democrats finally cease their howls of moral outrage against Trump and prepare their explanations for the indictments that are likely to emerge from the special counsel investigation of the illicit spying conducted against the Trump campaign and transition team, and the assorted legal and ethical lapses of the Obama Justice Department and the Clinton campaign.

They have had their full share of public attention for their defamatory nonsense; they laid this rotten egg of impeachment and they can take full responsibility for the stench of it.

I cannot allow my last column of the year in the United States to end without declaring the winner of the fierce competition for the silliest and most pretentious tweet or email I have received from readers in 2019.

It goes to that most worthy and deserving champion, Joe Scarborough, co-host of the anti-Trump daily screed “Morning Joe,” for a tweet three months ago accusing me of writing a whitewash of President Trump in exchange for a presidential pardon and wishing me good luck in avoiding a felony conviction. He wins this prize going away, not only for his asinine accusation (the book spares nothing and was no Hallelujah chorus, and I doubt if the president was even aware of it).

But Joe wins because he invited me on his program in August 2011 to commend me on the book I was just publishing then on the disgraceful travesty of my prosecution, which has since completely collapsed. He claimed to have read and liked the book, A Matter of Principle. I’ll remember you as the gracious host you were, Joe, long before you pickled yourself in Trumpophobic bile.

Pleasant religious holidays and best wishes for 2020 to all readers, friends and foes.

TOPICS: News/Current Events

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thepanicoffice · 8 years ago

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- Deceptive Symposia -

...

“We must live the plausible lie.” These words, carving through the distractingly sharp, white teeth of the counterintelligence officer, had a solemn and studied air, suggesting it was a phrase he frequently used to impress women or non-work colleagues; suitably portentous but vague enough not to contravene any official secrecy laws. I chewed the lip of my plastic coffee cup. No real answer was needed from me so I was already dumbly thumbing through logistics in my mind – the cost of hotel rooms, whether delegates would expect personal cars instead of taxis, the maximum seating capacity of the first, second, and third largest conference centres nearby – without connecting any of them together. The task was too large as a whole for me to keep in focus.

The job of arranging the phony conference fell to me for reasons I’m still not clear on. Yes, I acknowledge that I work, in a tangential way, for the Service and have often arranged events on their behalf. These usually involved little more than setting up stalls on college campuses at which disarming women and expansively-chinned men sat and invited the more academically productive to sign up for a summer course that, while appearing to be a fun, free way for young scholars to pad out their resumés without resorting to time-consuming and frankly ostentatious voluntary work abroad, was in fact an initial stage in an exhaustive and exhausting process to find the nation’s counterintelligence officers (CIOs) of the future. It was not the kind of process that I could ever have navigated. And that’s why I set up the stalls instead of sat at them. In spite of this experience – of which, if you had ever heard me during a job interview and were fool enough to believe me, you would know I was fiercely proud – I had never had any involvement with academic conferences, real or fake. I had, of course, some experience with academics. They were the ones who would only begrudgingly direct me, with my arms full of pamphlets and the dense table covering in navy blue, its dignified shield-and-compass emblem a wan yellow from years of use without replacement, to the exhibition centre, or wherever the event was being held. I certainly did not relish having to make contact with, pacify, and marshal several hundred of them.

I asked a friend – Eric, who had started a Masters in esoteric social theory before dropping out to follow his dream of becoming a vexatious litigant in manufactured personal injury lawsuits, and who therefore, I assumed, would have attended at least one or two academic events – for any tips. “Flood the place with coffee that alternates between being too bitter and too piss-weak to drink. Ensure their expenses are paid, or you’ll have no one attend. And…” Eric considered, scratching at a probably unnecessary plaster-cast with a fork. “Call it a ‘Symposium’. Academics love a symposium. It reminds them of a time when they believed these things were a confluence of minds and ideas, rather than a place to share funding tips.” I assumed Eric was being arch but such was my limited engagement with and understanding of that world that I didn’t really find it funny. I wrote down the point about expenses though. And about the coffee. Luring academics was one thing – it required skills that, despite the paralysing self-doubt that I enjoyed with my breakfast cereal every morning, I believed I possessed. Getting a senior foreign diplomat to attend would require more specialist involvement.

Gillespie, the CIO who would be liaising with me throughout, called me several days after our first meeting with additional sparing details. We were to stage a fake conference designed to bring Dr [XXXXXXXXX], who was, I was told, a senior ministry official from [XXXXXXXXX], out into the open. Then, when a convenient moment presented itself, Service agents would intercept him and make brief, precise offers to convince him to defect. I had no idea what they would do if he refused, if they were caught, or any of the other million ways it could go awry. It seemed implausible to me that the best way to secure this outcome was to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a fake conference. But what do I know? Again, there is clearly a reason why I was organising the event rather than being invited to it. Gillespie also informed me that the event would, naturally, need to be held in a ‘third party country’; that is, one of the nations which had brokered the uneasy peace that currently held, with white-knuckled tautness, between our nation and that of [XXXXXXXXX]. Through a combination of irritatingly opaque clues dropped by Gillespie and my own basic internet research, I discovered that Dr [XXXXXXXXX] has been a spectral presence within the [XXXXXXXXX] administration for over a decade, advising President [XXXXXXXXX] directly on the development of what he himself described, in a 1993 article in the obscure International Journal of Statecraft and Policy, as ‘a sophisticated architecture of cultural interpellation and control’. After a great deal of searching I found a pdf of this article. Despite my best efforts and seven or eight minutes spent trying to digest the abstract I eventually gave up and found, instead, a summary online. His ideas, this summary enthused, ‘stand at the intersection of language, culture, technology, and social policy’ and may have led directly, it breathlessly speculated, to the creation of a ‘syncretic and semi-autonomous body of techno-linguists whose sole focus is to divert, mislead, disinform, and broadly create a parlous state of perennial confusion’. I’ve had to type that carefully as it means very little to me and I have more or less copied it verbatim. In any case, it gave me some nebulous sense of the kind of academic sphere, or spheres, that Dr [XXXXXXXXX] would be involved and interested in. Fortunately, the Service had ‘tame’ connections at several respectable institutes of higher learning, forged through covert funding streams for Centres of Research Excellence which were essentially just hubs for the centralised harvesting and analysis of data which, apparently, form the tedious bread and butter of counterintelligence operations the world over. Several junior academics involved in these Centres would develop the marketing principles and overarching theme of the conference, at an arm’s length, to give it credibility, while others would be expected to actually attend. Those involved in growing the, as it were, intellectual spine of the event, suggested that it be called the International Interdisciplinary Conference on Symbolic Power and Praxis. As a joke, I suggested we replace ‘Conference’ with ‘Symposium’, though as I say, it was a joke that I didn’t wholly understand. The junior academics loved the idea and it was duly changed. It was then my responsibility to spray numberless invitations in the direction of any and all internationally recognised university, college, or institute of higher learning, addressed to any PhD candidate, fellow, lecturer, or professor who also stood ‘at the intersection of language, culture, technology, and social policy’ (which, again at my suggestion, was precisely how we phrased it).

The event – sorry, Symposium – would take place at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The reasons for this are too tedious to enumerate, involving as it did a painstaking whittling down from a very short long-list of potential venues in sympathetic though technically and publicly neutral nations. Ultimately, it came down to which venue would provide the most competitive rates for wifi access (despite the Service willing to spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to plan and run an entirely phony academic conference, there were, they said, clear limits on how much they would spend to maintain the ‘plausible lie’). I continued to make bookings, manage, coordinate, deploy. It was challenging work. Not just from a logistical and administrative perspective but also the difficulty of arranging a fake conference that to all intents and purposes was real. I entered into lengthy email exchanges with internationally acknowledged experts in digital anthropology, technolinguistics, modern political sciences, etc., etc., to set up workshops that I hoped would be informative and stimulating even if, I say again, they were essentially fake. It is of course worth pointing out that when it came to inviting Dr [XXXXXXXXX], that was a task the CIOs would undertake themselves.

...

The first day of the Symposium arrived and me and my small team of staff (paid for by the Service but with absolutely no involvement with the broader scheme, nor any understanding of the imitation and trickery of the event itself, for which I largely envied them) were waiting to greet guests, register them, ply them with delegate packs and weapons-grade coffee, before ushering them into various rooms for seminars, workshops, panel discussions and networking sessions. The humidity was appalling. The Convention Centre boasted large glass-panelled walls which cheerfully admitted the day’s swollen heat. It seemed to me an obvious and unforgivable design flaw for a building this close to the equator to have large glass-panelled walls. The general swelter pressed outwards in an effect mirrored by my headache. A pocket of researchers had gathered by the stairwell where channels of less aggressively hot air circulated, and, rather than discussing their work, seemed to be dispassionately chanting a list of the names of those who had once slighted them. By the vending machine which dispensed cans of cola and familiar candy in exotic packaging, a young(ish) professor combed her hair back with slender fingers, clipped it into a bun, and began to quietly undertake some exam marking. My light blue shirt was clinging to the accretions of sweat that had gathered at my most intimate contours. The patterns it formed were a cartography of masculine torpor: a dense central mass with damp archipelagos and darkened islets branching off at the love-handles; a sticky Rorschach for the psychologists present to gaze at fondly. As I fanned myself helplessly with a programme of the three-day event, merely displacing heat across my face, I wondered what Dr [XXXXXXXXX] looked like (my cursory googling had yielded no pictures of this noted and, by all accounts, inordinately powerful theoretician and diplomat). I wondered whether I would see him, briefly alone, or perhaps chatting to peers about some matter of arcane scholarship, when he would be approached by affable CIOs, keen to shake his hand. Would they take him to a side room? Or would they tell him then and there? Would I see his face when they did? I imagined moist, uncomprehending eyes - gaping pink apertures set in cradles of puckered skin; shading his face with a large hand, the tanned distal side thick with greying wires and precancerous blemishes; his forefinger and thumb fretting at the mauve depressions on either side of his nose (I’m imagining him with spectacles) as he makes rapid calculations about his future… His headache turned into my own, a muted pulse behind the right eye. Squinting, I wandered into a panel discussion where a group of bearded men were asking whether individuals on the internet could be productively classed as a nationality in their own right, separate from their more traditional citizenship, and whether there were approaches of foreign policy that could be usefully applied to them. One of the panellists ventured, with earnest flaring of eyebrows, that refusal to use one’s own picture as an avatar on social media should now be seen as the last truly provocative socio-political act. I found that this all made me feel far hotter and I left.

I got the text from Gillespie while I was standing at the urinal, vaguely staring at a pubic hair trapped between the porcelain and a pungent citric cake as I forced it to thrash and bend helplessly in my stream, trying idly to free it. I checked my phone with one hand: Target not coming. Flight rerouted. Proceed anyway. I called Gillespie straight away to ask what I should do. Surely he didn’t mean that we had to proceed with the entire conference? This was an abortive attempt – a failure – it needed to be shut down ASAP. Surely. “It is imperative,” Gillespie clarified, with the transparently strained patience you might save for an inquisitive but dull child, “that you proceed with the conference…” “Symposium,” I whispered to no one in particular. “This… won’t be the only time we try this.” “Pardon?” He sighed harshly. “This isn’t the first of these events we’ve held and it won’t be the last. The Service has poached nuclear physicists, molecular chemists, biochemists… hell, even dissident astronauts… through these events. What is absolutely imperative is that our rival nations never discover, or at least can never be certain, which of these events are real and which are false. We hold dozens every single year. And the only way this can ever work is if the attendees, the universities and their academics, also have no notion that the events they are attending are false. Do you understand?” I nodded slowly, forgetting that I was on the phone. I was trying to process the idea of decades of ersatz conferences – hundreds of deceptive Symposia – arranged not by like-minded academics brought together by a common intellectual pursuit, but by dolts like me. In the name of espionage, or counter-espionage, or whatever. Decades of seminars, hastily arranged and vacillating loosely around a tactically imprecise central theme. Decades of travel expenses and travel expense forms. Decades of specially-printed delegate packs, countless tiny notepads, countless plastic pens with Symposium written on them. It was incomprehensible. Why had they even told me? Did I even need to know? The whole enterprise could have been carried off just as well if I had no idea it was a lie – better even, as I would have spent fewer nights roiling in damp bedsheets worrying about being caught out, caught in the lie. And I’d have been happier to wander around, ensuring the regular refills of the refreshment decanters, picking up delegate name badges that had been carelessly shed like feathers, if I had believed that it all meant something, even though I suppose the difference between a real symposium and a symposium with real academics and real seminars and panel discussions but that was, in fact, fake is probably a philosophical question… And, as I tried vainly still to comprehend it, a lecturer in digital psychology fussed around me, demanding to know the wifi password. This, I saw, was my punishment. I was going to be forced to live the plausible lie for the next two and a half days.

#Maslin #Fiction #Short Story

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grits-galraisedinthesouth · 2 months ago

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Happy Birthday Princess Charlotte: Ravec Appeal Dismissed 🎉

"I could not say that the Duke's sense of grievance translated into a legal argument for the challenge to Ravec's decision."

The King’s youngest son, 40, sought to challenge the original decision by High Court judge Sir Peter Lane in February last year, which determined that the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (Ravec) was right to remove his high-level police protection while he's in the UK. But in a ruling on Friday, Sir Geoffrey Vos, Lord Justice Bean and Lord Justice Edis dismissed Harry's appeal. Sir Geoffrey Vos summarised the decision and told the court that while the Duke of Sussex's personal arguments were both "powerful and moving", he concluded that: "I could not say that the Duke's sense of grievance translated into a legal argument for the challenge to Ravec's decision."

Sharing Tourre's original tweet from Sparry's 1st RAVEC loss in celebration of his FINAL loss.

Harry felt he could not afford to lose this case, I saw his frustration in court. For Prince Harry, this was the court case that he felt he could not afford to lose.

By Julia Atherley, Home Affairs Correspondent

After last month’s hearing he said it was the one which “always mattered the most” amid his myriad of legal challenges.

That was evident from his appearance at the Court of Appeal during which he followed the proceedings intently with the help of his lawyer, Jenny Afia.

I was sitting a few rows behind him and at one point he threw his pen down in frustration during the Home Office’s arguments.

He was visibly animated during the two-day hearing and later said that what was heard in the private session confirmed his “worst fears”.

Today’s judgement means that the rift between him and his family is growing ever wider as Harry argues that his family is no longer safe when visiting the UK.

What happens next depends on whether Harry decides to try to take this to another appeal at the Supreme Court.

If he does, he would have to prove that the law in the case raises a point of general public importance.

As it stands, Harry’s security is determined on a case-by-case basis every time he comes to Britain - which the judge has ruled is entirely "sensible" given his circumstances.

For the Duke of Sussex, he has said the case has been overwhelming, and the evidence he has heard has been "difficult to swallow".

The financial cost is also due to be crippling - with Harry now facing paying costs for both sides, estimated to be up to £1.5 million.

#vanity litigator #Ravec #vexatious litigants #meghan and harry are pathetic #celebrate #celebration #megxit #spare us #worldwide privacy tour #IPP staus #happy birthday princess charlotte #thank you jesus

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go-redgirl · 5 years ago

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Democrats Must Live with Consequences of Their Foolish Impeachment Farce Journal of American Greatness ^ | December 26, 2019 | Conrad Black

The NeverTrump campaign has sputtered to a ludicrous and pitiful end with this year. Having dragged its media lackeys and the dwindling curiosity of the country through an absurd burlesque of a “solemn, sad,” impeachment process—without alleging any actual illegalities—the NeverTrump campaign has rushed through in a procedural Star Chamber because of the “urgency” of removing the president before the country reelects him. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will not send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promises to go to court and oblige administration witnesses to testify, a step the trained Democratic seals of the House declined to take because of the urgency of trial and removal of the president.

I have already suggested, here and elsewhere, that the Senate refer to the Supreme Court the question of whether it is obliged to hold a trial when the House has failed to check any of the boxes the Constitution provides for removal of a president: treason, bribery, high crimes, and misdemeanors. The country will wish to know if these spurious impeachment divertissements will now become a regular irritant in the political calendar when the White House and the House of Representatives are in the hands of different parties, or whether the impeachment of a president will become again a rare, “solemn, and sad” process which will only occur when there really is fear the president has committed grievous offenses.

Pleasant religious holidays and best wishes for 2020 to all readers, friends and foes.

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