By any reckoning the American official reaction to the Megrahi release, above all by a President elected for his enlightened politics, is sickening and the British official disassociation from the Scottish decision contemptible.The crime of which he was convicted could not be more heinous but to release any such criminal in his dying days is a humanitarian act which any civilised society should take. If Megrahi was a scapegoat, a victim of a miscarriage of justice, which he maintained and many including quite a number of the families of those killed in the outrage believe is possible, the official reaction is disgraceful. My only quibble is with the Scottish administration which required him to withdraw his appeal as a condition for his release and so to preclude an independent enquiry which would have been in everyone's interest.

ctrlv

Welcome as is the news that the prime minister has written to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) urging it to build on recent international breakthroughs on secrecy jurisdictions, "to address urgently the issue of tax avoidance" and "to make further advances in the fight against harmful tax practices", has the irony of this approach struck the Government? After all, it is just over two years since you reported (7 January 2007) that a key OECD committee monitoring international bribery challenged the Government's decision to quash the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the alleged BAE Systems slush fund for Saudi Arabian officials which, it believed, could undermine the international convention against bribery. In the spirit of, and consistent with, its newfound openness will the Government now reconsider pursuing the investigation?

In this country we profess trial of those accused of criminal offences by our courts, not by public opinion. Thus Blake Morrison does a service in highlighting the manner in which the more sensationalist parts of the press have vilified the two young brothers charged with the attempted murder of two other young boys. Notionally Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (now part of our domestic law) guarantees the right to a fair trial but it provides no sanction against such pre-trial reporting which prejudices a fair trial. It prompts the question as to why we continue to permit our media to report anything other than the bare facts of an arrest in advance of trial. By all means let us have full and fair reporting of a trial. The only beneficiary of uninhibited pre-trial publicity is a profit-seeking media satisfying an unhealthy appetite by a section of the public.

Whilst inspired to write I ought to mention another subject which continues to concern me, the disgraceful way in which the Government (admittedly then headed by Blair) handled the cover-up of the bribes allegedly paid to Saudi officials when the investigation being carried out by the Serious Frauds Office was discontinued, ostensibly in the national interest, an action which equally disgracefully was rubber-stamped by the House of Lords. I revisited the subject after the Observer, on 5 April in its Business section, ran an article headed "Brown backs new global assault on tax avoidance" which reported on the present Prime Minister's letter to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (the OECD) "about the need to build on recent international breakthroughs on bank secrecy 'to make further advances in the fight against harmful tax practices'". The article quoted from Gordon Brown's letter (described by No 10 as an 'opening salvo') to the OECD and said he wanted the OECD which co-ordinates international tax protocols,to relaunch its drive to outlaw harmful tax competition and to end tax abuses that deprive the public purse of hundreds of millions of pounds. This struck me as rich, real chutzpah, coming from a Government of which Brown was a key member, which in 2007 had put the damper on the Saudi arms bribe investigation which was roundly condemned by none other than the OECD for breaching the international convention on bribery. So I wrote to the paper and although my letter was not published I now reproduce it as it seems to me very relevant and exposes the Governmental hypocrisy in using the OECD for one purpose, a very proper one, when it rejects it for another:

Pre-trial publicity

16 April 2009
I have been rightly castigated by a blogfan for my blogatrophy; nothing since early March when I went off to Crete. Simply pure indolence.
However today the Guardian has published one of my letters (in truncated form), so I am putting the full letter on the blog. It was a response to an article on 11 April headed "Let the circus begin" by Blake Morrison, the writer and journalist, our Blackheath neighbour, on a subject on which he is a real authority since in 1993 he wrote up the Bulger case, the demonisation of youngsters by the media and public. This time it concerned the two young brothers charged with the attempted murder of two other young boys. Blake deserved plaudits for drawing attention to the current case. So I reproduce in my blog my letter as sent:

Pre-trial publicity

16 April 2009

Yes, I have been rightly castigated for my blogatrophy; nothing since early March when I went off to Crete. Simply indolence. But today the Guardian publishes a letter from me responding to an article on 11 April headed "Let the circus begin" by Blake Morrison, our Blackheath neighbour, the writer and journalist, in which he follows on his authoratative write-up of the Bulger case in 1993 by drawing attention to the similar way in which parts of the media have vilified the two young brothers charged with the attempted murder of two other young boys. Blake deserved plaudits for this. My letter (which was edited by the paper) reads as follows:

Iraq & John Milton

2 March

"We will leave Iraq a better place" Thus saith Lieutenant-General Cooper in his valedictory address on retiring from Iraq and the army. Oh what a favour we have done the people of Iraq. We have rid them of the tyrant Saddam Hussein who (tell it not in Gath) we used to sustain; we have bestowed the blessings of democracy; we have let them into the mystique of "internal security services" (no doubt fresh from our triumphant display in prising out information from Binyan Mohamed); we have given them a "well-defined" legal system and a "well-defined and understood" legislative system and not least "security structures that have grown". Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. John Milton had exactly les mots justes for our role in Iraq. So I sent this to the Guardian today, not that it will see the light of day:

Thanks to the invasion of Iraq, al-Qaida established a base there, sectarian savagery erupted, and in the maelstrom thousands of Iraqis were killed and maimed, thousands fled the country, its infrastructure was decimated and thousands of US and British troops were killed or wounded. Yet Lieutenant-General's valediction talks of al-Qaida's defeat and the rooting of democracy. John Milton's words in Paradise Lost come to mind:
"But all was false and hollow; though his tongue
Dropped manna and could make the worse appear
The better reason."