Simon Singh, the highly respected science writer (Fermat’s Last Theorem, etc), is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association. Chiropractic is an alternative/complementary therapy which purports to treat various ailments by manipulation of the spine.) The BCA are promoting Chiropractic as treatment for children with (potentially serious) ailments such as asthma and frequent ear infections. Simon Singh criticised this in a Guardian “comment” piece. In particular, he criticised the BCA for doing this without appropriate clinical evidence.
He is now being sued for libel.
The BCA want damages and an injunction against him saying such things in future. Fundamentally this is about free speech and the use of evidence. An informed and responsible science writer should be able to write about genuine concerns on an important public health issue (the correct treatment for children) without the threat and expense of High Court libel claims. Even if he was wrong, it would surely be enough for the BCA to simply show their supporting evidence. But they are suing him instead.
In the words of Frank Frizelle: “Let’s hear your evidence, not your legal muscle.”
The BCA’s claim specifically refers to Singh’s statement that there is “not a jot of evidence”for the eficacy of chiropractic interventions for colic; sleeping problems; feeding problems; frequent ear infections; asthma; and prolonged crying, mentioned in that original doc from the BCA. The upshot is that the case could revolve (as I understand it) around one of two things; whether an organisation like the BCA has a reputation in this case to be protected (which has all sorts of positive implications for free speech) and an actual look at the evidence for the said eficacy. In other words, the BCA may just have put chiropractic on trial.
Ho, ho, ho.
The preliminary hearing starts tomorrow, 7th May, at 1000 at the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand.
Unfortunately, no-one knows about it as the COI doesn’t do much to promote it despite being “the Government’s centre of excellence for marketing and communications”. It consists of news updates for all the big bits of government – departments, agencies and regions – that you could want. It’s a good way of keeping an eye on what they’re all up to an finding the occasional hidden gem of a press release. They’ve had RSS feeds for ages and now they’re on Twitter (thanks to yours truly).
Firstly, this isn’t murder. Battery, yes; manslaughter, perhaps; conduct unbecoming, definitely. We do not have enough evidence yet to say that the actions of the police lead to Ian Tomlinson’s death. The fact that A happened after B does not imply that B caused A. It may be that Mr Tomlinson’s sand had run out, regardless of the intervention by the police officer. It also does not look like the police officer intended to kill Mr Tomlinson. Manslaughter may be a possibility, but the people saying ‘it was murder’ are just flat wrong.
At the same time as one side of the political debate has sought to say, straightaway, that this is murder, another side has tried to play the whole thing down. It doesn’t matter – from the point of view of the principle – whether Mr Tomlinson died or not. As Septicisle points out over at Liberal Conspiracy, the copper in question could not reasonably have expected pushing someone over to result in death.
There is a problem with CCTV and, indeed, all forms of photography, whether still or moving. We simultaneously want the right to take pictures wherever we want without interference by the state (I recommend looking at Matt Wardman’s list of incidents) and we want a right to privacy in the public space. I add a couple of riders to that – firstly, the public space bit means that Max Mosely’s sexual preferences should have remained private. Secondly, the problem of the gutter press publishing pictures of celebrities in unfortunate positions is a function of the lack of responsibility of said outlets and our own (media-driven) obsession with celebrity rather than photography.
Given that a private organisation, Google, now has the capacity not only to photograph us all from above but, street by street, from the road, the debate shifts as the power to accumulate a huge amount of photographic data on just about everyone is no longer solely in the hands of the state. I think this helps frame the debate in a more helpful light as the widening of the capacity removes some of the noxiousness that occurs whenever ‘the state’ comes into debate.
One of the distinctions that has been made for private and state cameras is that we have a choice about going into private shops and so on but do not have that choice for the public highway. That is a false choice, as nigh-on every convenience store, supermarket and pub in London and, I suspect, most built-up areas of the country have CCTV and it can be pointed from a private building into a public space. There are also private spaces that have a public function – for instance, a football match at any large stadium will be covered in cameras.
We need to decide how we resolve the tension between right to photograph and right to privacy in public before we address CCTV. I don’t want to go into it at length, but I favour the former as the restrictions on public space required by the latter I find unpalatable and unworkable.
Fundamentally, what is the difference between the images caught of a police officer attacking Mr Tomlinson and the (putative) images of a civilian attacking a police officer? Fundamentally, what is the difference between the government saying that it is wrong to photograph its agent (in the form of a police officer) in delicto flagrante and the assertion of a right to privacy by a celebrity?
There is no difference. In the latter case, there are issue of reasonableness but they have more to do with excess and aggressively shoving a camera in someone’s face than the principle itself. There are risks in having a large number of cameras around the country. These can be managed and reduced, but, in this instance, the state has been made a legal person like any other – or at least, like Google – by the march of technology. Particularly given the footage that has emerged of the police behaving in what is at best a stupid manner and may well be a criminal manner, the need to be able to show what the police are doing.
Newsflash to the right: just because someone’s in a police uniform doesn’t mean that they’re Dixon of Dock Green.
Newsflash to the left: just because someone’s in a police uniform doesn’t mean they’re a member of Birmingham CID.
The police are sometimes a bit naughty. Well, stop the presses. No, m’lud, he fell down the stairs before accidentally brutally stabbing himself to death while shaving.
Indeed, while it shouldn’t happen and other officers there should have stopped him, it’s no great surprise that when you put a load of people in uniform and then alternate them between sitting in vans for ages and dealing with the great unwashed, things go a little bit Zimbardo.
There has been an amount of soul-searching given that the right would not normally react in a positive way to something like this; I’m going to point you in the direction of our Hellenic chum, Mr Eugenides.
The police are, amazingly, humans. As I said earlier on, it should be no surprise that the police are subject to all the other features, good and bad, of the H. sapiens. For the record, I suspect that most but not all police are not in the habit of hitting someone with their truncheon for no good reason. For the record, I suspect that most but not all police are not racists.
It only takes a few people to give a larger group a bad name, whether their name is Constable Savage or their penchant is for throwing bricks through windows. As ‘Various People Against Nasty Things (Hijacked by Nutty Lefties)’ does not, as yet, have a standing army, I’m going to focus on the police as they are present everywhere and are rather more important to the cohesiveness of society.
Fortunately, the police are a lot better than they used to be but incidents like the death of Ian Tomlinson (or, rather, his being hit with a truncheon) don’t only happen when there’s a camera watching.
Opposition to paperwork in all its forms has become something of a leitmotif for many parts of the political spectrum, as is opposition to ‘heavy-handed Whitehall diktat’ or words to that effect. Certainly, there is a balance to be struck, but I hope that this incident shows that we do need to find a more satisfactory answer to quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – who watches the watchers? – than the Guardian and Indymedia. That means paperwork and that means procedure and that means form-filling and that means having a watching brief to make sure that it’s not going to far in either direction. That equally applies to social services, teaching, medical care and so on.
I have been on protests for all sorts of things and I rather suspect I will continue to protest for all sorts of things. For the record, I’m a fairly law-abiding sort of fellow. I have been known to attend protests without, I might add, the slightest intention of throwing anything at anyone. I only mention this because I recall being shoved by a police officer on one occasion; I was walking, with a friend, right at the back of a block of demonstrators. The police wanted us to go a bit more quickly – a few of us at the back were dawdling – but instead of asking us to stay with the rest of the group, they pushed us. Not violently, not with any force of any substance, but enough to get the message across.
This raises a couple of issues.
Firstly, the rationale for protesting. For a lot of people – think of the huge protest against the war – it is a bourgeois, middle-class activity on a par with writing a letter to your MP. It’s not something you do very often, it’s not something you really expect to achieve anything but at least you’ve had your say and you feel like you’ve had something to do with democracy, or something similarly nebulous, registered your protest and hopefully brought some publicity to your cause. There is a section that does want to throw bricks around and/or start the revolution, but it is relatively small. What the police don’t seem to have realised is that they push the former group into the latter group before they even arrive at a protest if they’ve seen pictures of the last protest and are expecting trouble.
Partially, there is a disconnect between those who wish to protest peacefully and those who are going to cause trouble. That isn’t going to be resolved any time soon. In the meantime, the police are going to need to rethink their tactics – yes, kettling – but also the attitudes of individual officers, on the ground, towards protesters. For a start, they have to explain this photo. Not the fact that the officer in question is a medic, but that the officer in question has baton raised and that this is not an isolated incident.
The justification of protecting public order seems to be pretty weak, given that SOCPA has been kicked in the teeth by the displaying the flag of the LTTE – a proscribed, terrorist group within the EU, USA and other countries – on Parliament Square without the necessary permissions to be even protesting under the Act.
Secondly, failure. One of the most scandalous parts of this whole, sorry tale was that the police made up a story and then passed it onto the papers, who dutifully reported it without checking the facts, with no amendment made until the infamous film footage came to light. Not only that, but the IPCC seemed to think that the CCTV cameras in the City of London – an area liberally coated in them and other security apparatus – were all broken that day. It needs to be possible for organisation to say ‘we screwed up’ or ‘we don’t know’ without howls of derision from the media and, indeed, the blogosphere.
This the operative White House position. All other statements are inoperative.
– Ronald L. Ziegler, after Watergate was uncovered.
Similarly, you could look at the Menezes case, or the Lawrence case, or Blair Peach, and so on. I don’t know what the answer here is. Some of the questions and some of the answers might be above, but ultimately the police need to try to change the attitude whereby rule-breaking by officers is not reported. That has been going on for some time, but pressure must be maintained for it to continue and the change must respond to the current situation.
Our sympathies must and do go to the family and friends of Mr Tomlinson. However, the last few minutes of his life are, I’m afraid, unremarkable except for the issues that they raise. To lose sight of those issues and focus on the personal tragedy for Mr Tomlinson’s kith and kin would be to miss the opportunity that events have forced upon us.
xD.
Update: Bloggerheads – I’m not standing for this. Why were police officers going around with their numbers covered? Why were they allowed to? Why were they attacking people who weren’t doing anything?
The thesis of Garreau’s 1981 book, The nine nations of North America, is deceptively simple. Not only, he argues, are the borders between the states of the USA and between that country and Mexico & Canada are artificial constructions – they clearly are – but that they are irrelevant. There are commonly recognised regions with the USA, but they don’t work either. Consider, within the Mid-west, the differences between Missouri and Michigan! This all became increasingly obvious to Garreau, a journalist, and colleagues of his as they travelled around North America. If they wanted to work out what actions in what localities would effect which people in which places, they needed a different set of tools to explain how the USA works.
This gives rise to the titular nine nations. They are the Foundry, New England, Quebec, Dixie, MexAmerica, Ecotopia, the Empty Quarter, the Islands and the Breadbasket. They each have a capital (Detroit, Boston, Denver, Quebec, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Kansas City respectively). Some are historic regions – New England, Quebec, Dixie – others are characterised by their ethnic makeup – the Islands and MexAmerica – but, in Garreau’s book, they are all cogently described by looking at where different social, economic and geographic factors cause dividing lines with greater relevance to the quotidiarian than the accidental lines of history. The book goes through each ‘nation’ and looks at its extent, its borders and so on.
There is a problem with the term ‘nation’ as, if we accept Benedict Anderson’s definition of nations as imagined communities then these entities so not qualify as, not being widely recognised, people cannot, for the most part, imagine themselves to be members. There are exceptions. Quebec is a clear, full exception; MexAmerica and the Islands might be partial exceptions.
I don’t think Garreau had it quite right in ’81. There was still considerable variation within his nine nations; consider, for instance, Appalachia, which crosses two and possibly three of the nine. I would argue that its cultural and economic histories and situation make a good argument for it to ‘exist’ in some way; the existence of the Appalachian Regional Commission would suggest that I have at least some weight to my argument.
However, that very example shows the strength of Garreau’s argument. If Appalachia exists in any meaningful sense, it crosses state lines. From there, it is not far to crossing country borders. As anyone who has travelled across Texas will know, the Lone Star State is a varied place; that is not to say that people there do not identify both as Texans and Americans, but that, in terms of reality, someone from Texarkana might have more in common with a Sooner than someone from El Paso.
This idea has all sorts of implications.
First, identity, interest and reality are really, really complicated. Secondly, effective public policy needs to look at crossing international boundaries. Thirdly, given that in some cases, particularly MexAmerica and the Islands, the Anglo (Garreau’s term, not mine) policy establishment will need to be, ahem, a little more reasonable towards non-Anglo, and particularly those who don’t speak ‘Anglo’ as a first language, people.
The book was published in 81 and refers back over Garreau’s experiences in the previous decade. Things have changed greatly since then; the mentions of the possibilities of computers seem quaint now, the worsening economics of the Foundry have continued and the Hispanic population of the US has grown significantly. Nevertheless, the general thrust of the book holds true; polity, nation and economy do not necessarily overlap.
An interesting question would be how much this applies to Europe (is Saar-Lor-Lux more relevant than Benelux? Does Jutland make more sense tied to Northern Germany than Scandinavia? How well does Northern Italy sit with the rest of the Republic?) and the UK; England exists, in some sense, as a nation. Does it exist as a polity or an oiconome?
David Cameron wants the UK to withdraw from the social chapter.
David Cameron wants to scrap the legal guarantee that gives us four weeks paid holiday.
David Cameron wants to scrap the right to be consulted about changes at work.
David Cameron wants to scrap our entitlement to parental leave – denying the legal right for parents to spend time with their newborn babies in the critical first few weeks
Lord Oakeshott, a LibDem peer, has used parliamentary privilege to say what everyone knew: the seven Barclays memos about tax avoidance schemes are available on Wikileaks. Those are the memos that Barclays had removed by an injunction – aka gagging order – at half past two in the morning on the seventeenth of March.
From today’s Lords (link here; it may stop working tomorrow morning when Hansard is posted):
Lord Oakeshott: […] Documents leaked to the Liberal Democrats, which appear to detail systematic tax avoidance on a grand scale by Barclays, were injuncted last week. The Sunday Times and the Guardian had already made them front-page news and these documents are widely available on the internet from sites such as Twitter, wikileaks.org, docstoc.com and gabbr.com. Yet the Guardian had to remove them from its website and cannot tell its readers where to find them. These documents describe deals worth billions of pounds set up by the bank in order to make money out of depriving the UK and foreign exchequers of revenue. Barclays would not last for one minute without the British taxpayer standing behind it, yet it is holding out one hand for taxpayers’ money while it picks taxpayers’ pockets with tax avoidance activities on the other. […]
I think congratulations are in order to Lord Oakeshott. Aside from that, it does suggest that any other banks who have unfortunate leaks are going to have to think twice about injunctions in the small hours if parliamentary privilege is going to be used to tell people where those memos can be found. I am not sure of my ground, but I think I’m right in saying that the actual text of the memoranda is still covered by the injunction; it is only the fact that “these documents are widely available on the internet from sites such as Twitter, wikileaks.org, docstoc.com and gabbr.com” which may be repeated.
Now there’s an ominous title for a post. What’s started this post is the blogstorm over an article by Paula Murray. Read this, this, this and this. In short, Murray ran an article on the front page of the Scottish Sunday Express that attacked survivors of the Dunblane tragedy for using social networking sites like any other teenager. There are some slightly crude comments and some photos of them being teens. It would appear that a quote from Elizabeth Smith MSP was grossly taken out of context and that the article was deliberately run shortly after the survivors reached majority.
It is merely the latest, and a particularly egregious, example of the tabloids running stories that are not news, not fit to print, go after people who are unlikely to respond with content that seems designed to titillate the sense of moral outrage that a section of society – sadly, this is not an exclusively British phenomenon – seems to have permanently turned all the way up to eleven. It helps to shift newspapers and therefore increases advertising rates.
Let me describe a hypothetical situation. An increasing number of articles of this type (that is to say, of no public interest but of a salacious nature and for the most part aimed at people who do not have the means to take legal remedy) lead to an increasing amount of comment and dissatisfaction amongst what I am going to call the liberal elite, the political class, certain journalists and the media. This is increasingly picked up at Westminster, with Westminster Hall debates. Brought into these debates are the twin evils of reporting good science badly and reporting bad science – quack remedies and so on – at all. There is a public outcry after a child’s death is partially attributed to a particular newspaper article saying that such-and-such a disease can be cured by eating goji berries. Eventually, the PCC steps in and sets new guidelines for science reporting as an EDM condeming the poor levels of science reporting receives much support at Parliament. However, shortly afterwards, some poor sod ends up feelings so hounded by the media that they tragically commit suicide and it is felt that self-regulation is failing; not only are the papers reporting non-news, they are not reporting actual news. A Ten Minute Rule Bill is introduced by the MP whose constituent committed suicide calls for the PCC to be made a statutory body.
Perhaps this is all a bit unlikely; perhaps not. I think that state regulation of the newspapers would be A Bad Thing; however, the current, irresponsible manner of the exercise of free speech by some parts of the media could make that more likely.
The story is that, civilization approaching its possible doom (not really, but it’s the premise of the poll), the normblog readership has been assigned the task of assembling for posterity a representative collection of the Arts of Humankind, to be preserved in a sealed container so that some future beings of intelligence, discernment and taste can discover it and be impressed. That’s you and me, and also you. What we all have to do is to nominate under the following 12 headings those artists whose work we would like to see going into the sealed container.
I lived, for a short time, on Connecticut Avenue in DC and it was with a few hours of layover and a profound sense of nostalgia that I took a very familiar train journey, on the red line from Union Station to Cleveland Park.
Things there have both changed and not changed. The Uptown Theatre is, of course, still there and a few of the shops – Uptown Opticians, Magruder’s Farmers’ Market, Ireland’s 4 Provinces (now called Ireland’s 4 Fields), Nanny O’Briens and the 7-Eleven – that I used to frequent are still there. The Park & Shop by Cleveland Park metro station was one of the USA’s first strip malls; fortunately, it was still enough of a novelty for people to give some consideration to making it attractive and it is vastly more pleasant that some of the shopping parades you might see in the USA today. Some have gone; the coffee shop I used to stop at almost every day has been replaced by a health food store and a couple of bars have gone.
That much is to be expected; business close, people move on and areas change. What surprised me was that Cleveland Park – a relatively well-heeled neighbourhood – seemed to be suffering. Even on Sundays, it used to be busy and it was always well-kept. Now, there are a few empty shops and the streets are a little shabby. I suppose that the recession means people aren’t painting the storefronts and the District can’t pick up the trash as often; I don’t know. It was terribly sad to walk around. Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure that Cleveland Park is still a lovely place to live and it’s still pretty well-to-do; my memory is probably adding a goodly amount of gilding as well. If there is one part of the USA that I know better than any other, it is Cleveland Park. That little part of Washington is suffering.
Anyone watching me wander round must have thought I was quite mad but, in the end, there didn’t seem much to do other than head back to Union Station. I guess that Peter de Vries was right – “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be”.
As various people have noted (not least Septic Isle), s76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act is somewhere between barmy and 1984. The relevant section reads
58A Eliciting, publishing or communicating information about members of armed forces etc
(1) A person commits an offence who—
(a) elicits or attempts to elicit information about an individual who is or has been—
(i) a member of Her Majesty’s forces,
(ii) a member of any of the intelligence services, or
(iii) a constable,
which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or
(b) publishes or communicates any such information.
In fairness, the following paragraph says that “It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for their action”; as ever, our laws are ‘laboriously built about a mythical figure – the figure of the reasonable man‘1. What is not clear is what is ‘reasonable’. Is CCTV reasonable, as, presumably, the primary intention is not to take pictures of the police. I rather doubt that would apply to tourists; if a photo showing where the police stand outside (say) the Palace of Westminster were posted on Flickr, it could conceivably be of use to terrorists.
This rather unfortunate law, amongst other things, will sour things for tourists. The distinctive uniforms and headgear mean people want to take photos of themselves with the British bobby. Making it harder – in reality or in perception – to photograph and to see photographs of constables will widen the gap between the police and the public. It could be argued that the ‘reasonable’ clause is an effective catch-all as it is clearly reasonable for (say) a family to want to take a photograph with a police officer, perhaps with one of the children wearing the custodian helmet. There is also the issue of taking photographs and video footage at demonstrations. In this and many other instances, it is easy to see how an individual constable2 could act in a manner that is not in accordance with the spirit of the law. I expect that the Home Office will issue guidance in due course.
One wonders what would happen if we started having a little bit of fun with this law by taking out private prosecutions against, say, the BBC (because video footage of Central Lobby or Scotland Yard that shows where the police do or don’t stand could be of use), CCTV companies or tourists.
xD.
1 – With apologies to A.P. Herbert
2 – A constable is not just someone with the rank of Police Constable, but anyone who has been sworn as a constable; in other words, a police sergeant (or whatever) is also a constable.
This gives rise to the titular nine nations. They are the Foundry, New England, Quebec, Dixie, MexAmerica, Ecotopia, the Empty Quarter, the Islands and the Breadbasket. They each have a capital (Detroit, Boston, Denver, Quebec, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Kansas City respectively). Some are historic regions – New England, Quebec, Dixie – others are characterised by their ethnic makeup – the Islands and MexAmerica – but, in Garreau’s book, they are all cogently described by looking at where different social, economic and geographic factors cause dividing lines with greater relevance to the quotidiarian than the accidental lines of history. The book goes through each ‘nation’ and looks at its extent, its borders and so on.
This rather unfortunate law, amongst other things, will sour things for tourists. The distinctive uniforms and headgear mean people want to take photos of themselves with the British bobby. Making it harder – in reality or in perception – to photograph and to see photographs of constables will widen the gap between the police and the public. It could be argued that the ‘reasonable’ clause is an effective catch-all as it is clearly reasonable for (say) a family to want to take a photograph with a police officer, perhaps with one of the children wearing the custodian helmet. There is also the issue of taking photographs and video footage at demonstrations. In this and many other instances, it is easy to see how an individual constable2 could act in a manner that is not in accordance with the spirit of the law. I expect that the Home Office will issue guidance in due course.