The police have a great deal to answer for over this media crisis and one resignation, however honourable, does not exculpate their collective liability. Three months ago the Guardian highlighted that “we now know that in dealing with the phone-hacking affair at the NoW, they (the Met) cut short their original inquiry, suppressed evidence, misled the public and the press, concealed information, and broke the law”. Police HQ failed to change course or to intensify investigations or to act decisively on the damning information they hade been sitting on for years. The stunning Guardian revelation nearly a year earlier, in July 2009, that there were “thousands” of victims of NoW hacking came from a very senior police officer close to Sir Paul Stephenson. Why did the police do nothing to follow it up vigorously and immediately? Continue reading
Tagged with Police
Different rules apply?
For the record, here’s the extract from Sir Paul Stephenson’s resignation statement which has enabled Yvette Cooper to pinpoint the critical question which now has to be asked about phone hacking — why different rules apply to the Met police commissioner and the prime minister over their respective phone hacking links: Continue reading
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How far can we trust the police?
The evidence coming out of the Tomlinson trial is a serious challenge to police integrity. We now know that two days after Ian Tomlinson died, three Met constables admitted they had seen a colleague hit him with a baton and push him to the ground. Yet senior officers at City of London police failed to pass this crucial information on to the Independent Police Complaints Commission or to the coroner or to the family. Why not? Why did the City of London police instead release a press statement the day after the information supplied by the police witnesses saying that the cause of death was a ‘sudden’ heart attack? And why in the light of the evidence of the police witnesses did the City of London Police then tell the family there was ‘no evidence’ that police in the area were involved in the death? Continue reading
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About those “peaceful” suffragettes
Firstly, a defence of Ed Miliband. He has been savaged from both left and right for speaking at the TUC’s historic demonstration against the cuts on Saturday. Some activists booed him as he spoke, angered by any association between Labour and the anti-cuts movement. The criticisms from the right, meanwhile, have been largely predictable: in modern Britain, any politician who associates with the largest democratic organisations in the country – our 7 million-strong unions – is automatically regarded as unelectable. Continue reading
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Gross police negligence or malpractice should be severely punished
Today is the start of the inquest into the death of Ian Tomlinson in the G20 protests last year. The kettling tactics used by the police to squeeze protestors against the tripling of student fees a few months ago could easily have caused further fatalities. Certainly they caused immense discomfort to young and old alike, when they were herded on to the narrow confines of Westminster Bridge and squashed there without let-up for 5 hours, even though their only offence was that they were peacefully demonstrating against the government reneging on a major election promise earlier in the same year. Continue reading