A milestone - but the conflict rages on

I was first taught about the Arab-Israeli conflict in fourth form history and I must admit as a 14-year-old I found the situation fascinating as a subject of study. Unfortunately the reality is less grounded in paper and more in blood – the recent conflict between Israeli commandos and peace protesters at sea may have hit the headlines but this clash of cultures take the lives of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike on a daily basis.

I’m not interested in pitching up on any one side – I used to be a supporter of Israel but I think being a supporter of either side is increasingly untenable; a solution will never be found by force of support but by an abandonment of tribalism and a calm, reasoned settlement.

Whether that is – or will ever be – possible with the extreme elements contained within either side, is another matter. But what is certain is that there are no winners – from the people who thought it was a good idea to get on ships and deliberately provoke one of the most alert security forces in the world by trying to break a blockade, to the commanders who sent in crack troops to perform a riot control operation against conventions in international waters.

Who has benefitted from this episode? Not the dead and injured, not the people of Gaza who need aid and not the Israeli state, which is being forced onto every conceivable media outlet to justify its actions.

To me there is an equivalence between a state surrounded on all sides by neighbours who want it annihilated and a displaced people who live in abject conditions and without many rights, some of whom resort to violence to improve their lot. To enter the court of interational opinion and try to argue a settlement on the basis of who is the most “right” and “wronged”, who are the “victims” and the “aggressors” is a totally pointless exercise.

This is what “peace protesters” and “Israeli supporters” alike don’t get. The very maintenance of their positions is a blockage to peace. The only way to achieve a better life for everyone is to let go of the very circumstances that bind them together and give them identity. And that, regrettably, is why I feel a solution to the conflict is no closer than when I was at school – and will remain far off for another generation to come.

Woking Magistrates Court - photo: Surrey Advertiser

A couple of weeks ago, the Surrey Ad also ran a story about rumours surrounding the possible closure of Woking Courthouse, which incorporates the magistrates court, as well as family and youth courts. It would appear that this is an option being considered and many people at the courthouse are determined to fight any such proposal.

The reasons for keeping Woking Courthouse open are manifold and, I believe, self-evident. We have in this country a superb principle of justice delivered for the community by the community. A person accused of a crime can expect to have a fair and uniform hearing locally in public and by their peers – removing the Woking function and placing it all with Guildford means that people from as afar as Camberley, Addlestone and Weybridge as well as Woking will have justice administered in a different part of Surrey. I feel this is entirely inappropriate.

More so given Woking’s unique ethnic and cultural diversity. The courts service in Woking has a very good relationship with Woking Mosque and other organisations dealing with mental health and social issues in North West Surrey. Moving the court operation to Guildford interrupts many of these good relationships and makes achieving the court’s objectives with large sections of society in this part of Surrey more difficult.

Woking is Surrey’s largest town with an urban population exceeding both Guildford and Reigate. It is unthinakable that we should be without the facilities to cater for the needs of that population and those include the apparatus needed to dispense justice fairly, quickly and locally. Woking’s proximity to Guildford should not be an excuse to ignore these demographics – Guildford is quite busy enough as it is.

Finally, there has to be a question about what happens to Woking Police Station if the courthouse closes. The station is linked to the courthouse via an underground passageway and both the station and courthouse have a suite of custody cells. There is a similar arrangement in Staines, Guildford and Redhill and between this quartet, 95% of people accused of crimes are dealt with in these courts. If Woking courthouse went, there would be little sense in keeping the police station in its present form if it were denied the above role – and that too is a serious worry.

As for the magistrates, I can only speak for myself but I applied to serve my community in my community and while I agreed to sit anywhere the courts service requested, my clear preference was always Woking. For that option not even to exist for applicants in the future would indeed be a very retrograde step.

The Surrey Ad is carrying a story highlighting the fact that residents along Horsell Moor have been hit by a series of burglaries and thefts from vehicles. I met Josh Parish, the Horsell beat officer, at the May Fayre and his team is doing a great job to target offenders and get results in the courts.

But he can’t win them all and occasionally the law is stacked in the favour of the criminals. We had a similar thing in Grange Road last year and these people tend to work a patch, looking for soft targets like open windows and unlocked cars. Don’t let yourself become a victim – make it not worth their while by taking all the simple security measures.

You’ll not only thank youself but Josh will thank you too because it’s his job to keep the crime figures down and one spate of thefts can damage months of hard work.

An interesting story in a few of the papers today is the case of the magistrate in Blackburn who faces disciplinary action after using the term “absolute scum” to describe young defendants in court.

The Daily Mail story (almost verbatim) is interesting because it offers us an insight into some public opinion in the comments underneath, almost all of whom agree with the magistrate and say that his comments were justified and correct. This raises an interesting question about magistrates – whose justice do magistrates dispense?

Justice, of course, is the crown’s and the Queen’s and last Monday I swore two oaths – both included phrases to serve and pledge alliegance to the Queen and her successors. But if magistrates are taken from the local population, shouldn’t they be free to express the views of the society they serve? Well, yes and no. Magistrates are free to express the court’s views on a crime or sentence to defendants within certain perameters if they are serving as a bench chairman.

But the Judicial Oath also contains in it the words:

“I will do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of the Realm without fear or favour, affection or ill will”

To me, although the bit about the Queen is important, it is this forward-facing part of the oaths that is most relevant on a day-to-day basis. The magistrate on this occasion may feel he was speaking for the community and that by phrasing it the way he did and attributing the “absolute scum” to what “normal people”, rather than he or the court might think he was ameliorating the bane.

But what he has actually done is created the perception – however misplaced – of ”ill will” towards the defendants and reinforced those feelings within the community. That, it my view, goes against the Judicial Oath. The fact that the comments were made in a Youth Court – where particularly sensitive and careful work with young people goes on – is also unfortunate.

The gentleman concerned is an experienced magistrate and has  given considerable service to his community. And the culture of the magistracy generally is one of ongoing training, improvement and support for everyone involved – we all make mistakes and discussion, correction and learning is the positive approach to addressing them.

But, sorry to disappoint the Daily Mail, we can’t have justices appointing themselves as “voices of the community” or stamping their own moral code on the courtroom, however awful the offence and unrepetent the defendant.

Using their reasonable judgement to dispense justice according to the law is the sole purpose of a justice; anything else is politics and that, as we know, belongs in a different place.

Close your mouth, Chris. No, close it. Before you say anything else.

Personally, I blame David Davis. When he went off on his strange flight of fancy over the 42 days detention extension, he prompted a flurry of activity to try and fill his place as Shadow Home Secretary. Davis is on the opposite side of the party to me but he’s an able, likeable man and possesses support from sections of the party that DC could do with right now. But his visible rejection of DC’s leadership and the shocking manner in which he chose to express it was a selfish act that debarred him from high office for the forseeable future.

While the shadow ministers in the treasury are a strong team and William Hague great in foreign affairs, we’ve struggled through Dominic Grieve and Chris Grayling to find someone of Davis’s stature to fill the role at the home office/justice department. My feeling is that Grayling has always been on the edge of his envelope as Shadow Home Secretary and his ill-judged and utterly stupid comments about the rights of Bed and Breakfast owners to turn away gay couples are indicative of this. It’s not the first time he’s opened his mouth without thinking and caused problems for the leadership.

I’m not going to argue about the moral rights and wrongs of the B&B issue because they are not the point. We have laws in place that mark the boundaries society has laid down. Occasionally they change and occasionally people get left behind but we all have to obey them. Chris Grayling knows this and suggesting that B&B owners ought to be able to turn anyone away is almost giving them carte blanche to break the law, which says quite rightly that businesses must offer services without prejudice to anyone.

I don’t believe faith groups - or anyone else - ought to be able to “opt out” of the law on grounds of “conviction”. The “I don’t need anyone to tell me what to think, I’ll do what I want” attitude is one of the root causes of so many problems in society – from the young people who won’t respect authority to the uber-wealthy who think that money will exempt them from accountability. Conservatives don’t support the anarchists at G10 meetings who want to opt out the legal framework capitalism lays down because of what they believe - nor should we support individuals who want to opt out of the European Convention of Human Rights because of their beliefs. The ECHR has a lot of nonsense in it – but not in this area.

Grayling was attempting to curry favour with the Daily Mail view that Christianity is being persecuted in Britain and offer succour to those people of faith who feel that they are being led along into a secular society that no longer recognises their values or gives them leaway to put their faith first. I have some sympathy with that view – but not where it impedes on the rights of others acting within the law. That Grayling doesn’t see a distinction here makes me believe that his intervention was ad hoc and not properly thought out.

To sack him now would be an over-reaction and would be interpreted by the right of the party as an attack by the leadership on free speech. But I sincerely hope that if we have a majority on May 7, DC will look elsewhere for his Home Secretary. I believe Iain Duncan Smith would be superb choice for the role if he feels able to. If not, Nick Herbert has impressed me greatly as Defra shadow and such a promotion would be entirely appropriate in my view.

Either way, gaffe-prone Grayling has got to go.

I received a letter when I got back from work this evening with some very exciting news – Jack Straw has confirmed my appointment to the Commission of the Peace for England and Wales and – subject to some induction and training days – I will begin sitting as a magistrate in Woking from this summer.

It’s obviously a great honour to come through a pretty rigorous application process that’s taken nearly two years successfully. I’ve great support from my employer Mouchel, which has been brilliant in giving me assurances and the time off needed to sit on the bench without which I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

But even though it’s an honour for me, more importantly it’s a duty for the rest of Woking. I’m due to start my training next month and be sworn in at Guildford on May 10.

I used to spend quite a bit of time in court as a reporter and was always interested in the role that magistrates played. It crossed my mind back then that it was something I wanted to do and I’m just really pleased that now I’ve got that chance.

Just going out to a Horsell Village Hall trustee meeting and then hope to write another update later.

We're lucky to have PC Josh Parish in Horsell

No, not like that - sorry to disappoint. PC Josh Parish knocked on my door about half an hour ago while I was emptying the dishwasher (good job I didn’t have the meat cleaver in my hand when I opened the door) and just wanted to pass across details of the Safer Neighbourhood Policing Team in Horsell, which is basically him and PCSO Kimberley Muir.

I’d be stretching it a bit if I said that I regularly see Josh patrolling these parts but then I’m not here all the time and I know from my experience elsewhere that Surrey Police faces a struggle against budgetary constraints to provide the presence they’d ideally like. Josh and Kimberley can’t be everywhere all the time and they do a very good job for the village – attending HRA meetings when they can, working with councillors and making an effort to communicate with residents to get to the heart of problems before they get out of control.

Around Grange Road, I have to say that we have almost no trouble at all but I’m told that there have been a couple of burglaries in the area of late, which given the time of year and the nature of the area is not hugely surprising. It’s good advice to residents across Horsell as the nights draw in – make sure your windows are closed and preferrably locked, that gates are secured and valuable goods not left in sight. Use your alarm if you have one and if you don’t have one think about it -  we paid £600 for ours a year ago and while it’s not a small sum, you’ll gladly pay it to get your sentimental items back if you fall victim to these people.

Burglars are often real professionals and they can sweep through a house, pick out the valuable, re-sellable items and get out again in under 10 minutes before your neighbours are even aware they have arrived. The vast majority are highly opportunistic and attracted by open windows, doors, loosely secured entry points and obvious means of easy escape. Don’t get scared; get secured and do everything you can to make your house a risky proposition for them.

I’m grateful to Josh for dropping round to point out an open window on our out-house – while there’s nothing of value in there anyway because it’s unsecure even with the window closed, I’ll be closing it tomorrow so it doesn’t give any unwelcome observers an invitation to visit that they don’t deserve.

The Moors murders are a grisly subject for any blog and I’m not going to recount the details. Since he was jailed for his part in orchestrating these terrible killings, Ian Brady has spent 43 years inside. Just one year before he started his stretch, the death penalty had been abolished for murder – and there were plenty of people at the time who would have happily made an exception for Brady and Myra Hindley from such clemency.

I have always been and will always be a staunch opponent of the death penalty. People kill other people in all sorts of circumstances; I have never felt that the state should stoop to their level and Ian Brady’s pathetic letter to a news agency decrying his treatment in Ashworth Hospital shows why.

For the past 10 years, he has been on a hunger strike of sorts, consuming only nicotine and caffeine in protest at being denied the right to die. He says that he should never be released and has nothing to live for. In short, he wants a choice.

Brady is clearly a very disturbed and deluded individual but the choice about death that he seeks now is precisely that he denied to his victims – all children aged between 10 and 17. And in my view it is right that he should be kept alive whatever the cost so that he has as much time as possible to think about his actions all those years ago. Five youngsters, who would now be in their fifties and have families of their own, gone; five families and sets of parents (few of whom are left) devastated and destroyed; a whole community rocked by fear and shock and a nation’s innocence shattered.

The long drop would indeed have been a quick and easy solution for both Hindley and Brady. It wasn’t until 1985 that they both finally confessed to their crimes and the body of Keith Bennett has never been – and may never be – found on Saddleworth Moor. But they were given something that they denied their victims - a chance at life.

Brady has refused to engage with the prison service, showed himself incompetent to undergo treatment and has spent the entire 43 years in an isolation that has been as arrogant as it is self-loathing. He doesn’t want to confront relinquishing the control he so enjoyed while killing.

A chance at life is worth everything and the ultimate act of power. We, nor anyone else, owe him anything more.