Wikileaks Farage eMail Shock

From: N.Farage [mailto:N.Farage@labellefrance.fr]
Sent: 07 January 2013 12:50
To: Charles Louis Farage de Mille Feuille
Subject: Notre Victoire!

 

Mon Cher Papa,

There is nothing more depressing than an English winter.  It is dank, it is foggy, il est gris!  Nothing on earth is more calculated to make a Frenchman pine for la patrie than Farnborough in January.  These English in their deathly suburbs with their club ties and their blazers with little brass buttons, their gin and tonics and their four by fours; this is the only country in the world that prides itself on a complete absence of culture – and to think I have to pretend to be one of them.  Sacre bleu!

I have said it before and I will say it again. Nothing grieves me more than being unable to use the name you gave me at my christening.  But I cannot deny that the identity you created for my mission bears the mark of genius.  Who could possibly suspect a man called Nigel?

What name is there that better captures British médiocrité, their insularité, their contemptible lack of style, than this ‘Nigel’.  At least I am able to keep my nom patronymique. These stupid English, they are too dim and slow witted to suspect a thing.  But how I long to stand up, to claim back my true identité and declare; “C’est moi, Napoleon Farage!”

If there is a solitary ray of soleil it is that our plans for the destruction of Grand Bretagne move forward apace.  Oh how delicieux the revenge that has been 200 years in the making.  Not since le petit Corporal paraded the Grand Armée at Boulogne have our prospects been so bright.

Mais écoutez moi!  They must suspect nothing.  When the British talk of leaving Europe we must reassure them like this; ‘do not worry.  There will be no problem.  Of course we will trade with you.  We will have special arrangements.  It will be like before only better.’

I feel almost sorry for them.  They have such a childlike, such a naïve view of Europe, it is pitiful.  They think that having lorded it over us all this time, having made life for us in Brussels a living hell, having foisted their stupid language on us, that they can have all the good things that come with belonging to Europe without having to share the pain.  They have no idea how we have suffered having to be nice to both them and the Germans, at the same time.

Non.  We send them on their way with sweet words like the last guest at the dinner party and then nous fermons la porte avec un boom.  And when they knock to be allowed to come back in we pretend we’ve gone to bed.

They have no empire left.  They have offended almost every nation in their Commonwealth.  The Americans can’t stand them, these Englishmen who go on all the time about things that no one who wasn’t at their stupid schools can understand.  What is this Wall Game merde?  Cameron; zut!  Ile est une pomme de terre avec le visage d’un cochon d’inde.  Forty per cent of their trade is with the EU.  Only four per cent of the rest of the EU’s trade is with Britain.  They are beyond mere imbeciles.   They are… finished!

But enough of this papa.  I have once more to wear that ridiculous blazer, pretend to be a proper Englishman and to secure our revenge.

A Bientot

Napoleon

Vegan Tigers and Moral Corporations

What is it with politicians?  All too often it’s all about them looking good and not at all about getting something done.

Take Margaret Hodge.  With bosses from Amazon, Starbucks and Google lined up before the Public Accounts Committee she lectures them on their failure to pay more tax and when they point out that they’re within the law she comes back with “We aren’t accusing you of being illegal; we are accusing you of being immoral.”

Excuse me?  Corporations aren’t immoral, they’re amoral.  That’s the way they’re constituted.  Their legal duty is to make profits to pay for dividends to shareholders.  If it doesn’t add to their revenue they’re not allowed to do good.

“I am very proud of the structure that we set up,” says Google boss Eric Schmidt. “We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate.”  He’s been given a set of rules to play by and he’s gamed them.  If it’s not very sporting it’s because it’s not sport, it’s business.

And while that little lecture raised Mrs Hodge’s profile it didn’t do anything much to address the underlying problem.

I’d have some sympathy for the politicians who would rather fire off a soundbite than actually take concrete action if they hadn’t had plenty of warning that this sort of rampant capitalism was coming down the track.

“I hope we shall…crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country,” wrote one former president of the United States.

‘Which president?’ you ask. ‘Clinton?  Carter? Kennedy maybe?’

A little further back.

‘How about one of the Roosevelts, FDR or even Teddy back in the day?  Don’t tell me was it Abe Lincoln?’

Nope.  It was Thomas Jefferson in a letter dated 1816.   Thomas Jefferson was no socialist.  He was quote convinced of the ability of private business to provide the goods that the people and the government needed better and cheaper than could the state. But he was equally convinced that business, unfettered, would try to run the show for its own benefit and not for the good of the nation.

So having had two centuries to wake up to the realities politicians like Mrs Hodge still appeal to corporations’ sense of morality.  That’s like asking a tiger to consider veganism.

Corporations are the way they are because requiring them to maximise profit was deemed to be the best way of ensuring they didn’t cheat their shareholders.  But while they don’t make moral choices, they do make cost benefit analyses.

If a new product stands to make a listed company £1Bn profit, but there’s a risk of it causing death or injury, the analysis will weigh potential profits against fines, compensation and the cost of reputational damage.  Governments can set fines, courts can determine compensation and campaigners can make a company’s reputation the issue and, between them, they can do their best to deter bad behaviour.

But better than surrounding a tiger with people wielding pointy sticks and hoping they don’t nod off, is building a really good, plain wall.

Companies are forever looking for the gaps in legislation through which they can slip a couple of billion quid and keep it out of the taxperson’s way.  The more complex the legislation, the more gaps go un-noticed by legislators, but not by sharp-eyed corporate-tax lawyers.  In general the simpler the rules the harder they are to game.

One thing global corporations cannot hide is global profits.  They have to declare those to shareholders.  They avoid tax through internal accounting so that their profits are made, for legal purposes, in low-tax jurisdictions.

So how’s this?  If Starbucks makes £10Bn profit worldwide and 10% of its turnover is in the UK the starting point for tax calculations should be 10% of its global profits, i.e. £1Bn.  The default minimum taxable profits would be set at a percentage of that £1Bn, say 50 or 66 per cent.  If a corporation wants to argue that it really isn’t making that much profit in the UK, and should pay less, then the onus should fall on the company to prove it.  Internal licensing and silly payments from one wholly owned subsidiary to another should be discounted.

I can hear the Tax Payers Alliance (an odd name for people who want to avoid paying tax) and the libertarian right protest; ‘you’ll drive businesses out of Britain!’

Really?  In just over a decade Starbucks has persuaded millions of people in the UK to pay £3 or more for a small bucket of not-great coffee, something we’d have called crazy in the days before all that coffee made us crazy.  If Starbucks go will people stop drinking the stuff?  Will we suddenly become a decaff-nation?  Or will some enterprising soul, seeing hundreds of empty coffee shops and hundreds of unemployed baristas, and more to the point a ready made market, not simply open new, better coffee shops and make themselves a small, or actually quite large, fortune.

So let’s quit the grandstanding, the soundbiting and the moralising and build us a good, simple legal wall.

A Hole Where A Heart Should Be

People, it’s time to get real.  The rich don’t want to stay rich because it allows them to consume vastly more resources than you and me.  Vast wealth does not equate 1:1 to vast consumption.  Once needs have been met and wants have been sated wealth is about far more than that; it’s about status. But beyond that, once mere status has been surpassed vast wealth buys you power.  It’s not really about stuff.  Any old moderately well off person gets to buy more stuff than they know what to do with.

Let me give you an example.  A while ago an academic research group investigated who was the richest person in history.  The measure they settled on was measuring wealth in terms of the number of average incomes of contemporary citizens from the same state that it would take to equal a given rich person’s wealth.

If memory serves the answer was Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecoms magnate, whose wealth is equivalent to the earnings of 440,000 average Mexicans.

The point is this: when Carlos Slim gets up in the morning he doesn’t eat 440,000 fried eggs for breakfast.  He doesn’t own 440,000 cars.  Indeed he has a reputation for leading a fairly unremarkable life.  He lives in a 6 bed house in Mexico City.  He drives himself around.  Yes, he collects art, but he has built a public museum to house much of it.  In short he’s a fairly down-to-earth multi-billionaire.

However as the Telegraph article observes: “The reach of his dominion is so large that the average Mexican will wake up on sheets bought from a Slim-owned store; buy their morning bread from a Slim-owned bakery; and drive to work in a Slim-insured car. They will call friends on a Slim-owned (sic) mobile phone, lunch at a Slim-owned restaurant, and smoke Slim-owned (sic) cigarettes.” That’s power.

I’m not even sure that it’s the super rich that should be our primary concern.  After all where businesses are wholly owned by a Slim or a Warren Buffet, a George Soros or a Bill Gates, they’re capable of having a moral dimension.  Of course the super-rich are often super-rich because they’re super-ruthless, but there’s no inherent contradiction.   If you wholly own a business you get to decide the principles on which it operates.

Publicly listed corporations on the other hand are a very major problem.  A blog post by Rob Manuel of B3ta captured the notion very neatly:  “Psychopaths, as explored in Martha Stout’s wonderful The Sociopath Next Door, will tell any lie to achieve their aims and not be troubled by conscience. They represent about 4% of the population, and the corporation is effectively psychopathy encoded into law. A publicly traded company legally has to choose the option of maximising profits for shareholders – to be a corporation with a conscience is to break the law.”  Or as Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s CSO (and a former California D.A.) summed it up neatly when we met last year; “Corporations are not moral entities.”

There are good reasons why listed corporations are required to maximise profits for shareholders – primarily because the maximisation of profit is relatively easy to assess and it serves the ostensible aims of those shareholders, whereas other considerations are nebulous and could easily be used as a smokescreen for fraud.

But however good the reasons are it means that the world is run for amoral organisations and amoral ends while the rest of us are expected to act in a moral manner.

Look at the contrast between the Microsoft Corporation and Bill Gates.  They are not one and the same – despite rumours to the contrary.  Back in the 90s Microsoft was seen to be using its power in the market to destroy the competition either by breaking its own software so it didn’t work with that of competitors, or through bundling or by buying up competitors and killing them off.

Microsoft would surely argue to toss with that description but it oughtn’t to dispute that that perception was widespread, and so back in the 90s Gates, as the face of Microsoft, was demonised as ruthless and amoral.

Now he’s using his billions through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to do good stuff.  So is he a good person or a bad person?

Truth be told the Gates you see now is probably the Gates he always was.  However a good guy in a corporate straight jacket is constrained to be an evil Borg.  The corporation admits of no morals.  It will eat your children unless the cost of doing so outweighs the benefits.  Freed of corporate constraints and with the vast resources at his disposal Gates champions many worthy causes and funds them too.

Instead of moral judgements corporations carry out a cost benefit analysis.  In other words ‘what is it going to cost us?’  So they’ll ask themselves ‘will we get caught?’  They’ll ask themselves ‘what is the highest fine we’re likely to have to pay?’  They’ll ask themselves ‘what will this cost us in damage to our reputation?’ They’ll ask themselves ‘will the compensation we’ll have to pay to a dozen families for killing their loved ones outweigh our projected profits?’

So what’s the answer?

Their answer will be ‘take the most profitable course of action’.  Ours must be; we’ll treat you like any other entity without morals – we’ll put up bars around you to keep people safe.

It’s the ultimate hypocrisy of the political right that it constantly lectures people about being moral while absolving corporations of any moral obligations whatsoever.  If we all acted like corporations there would be anarchy (and not in a good way).

Yet it’s corporations that increasingly set the tone of Western society.  To function within them it certainly helps to align your values with theirs.  Expediency takes over from right and wrong, profitability from usefulness, worth is measured in terms that work on a balance sheet not on a hymn sheet.

When the great minds of The Enlightenment hoped to see the influence of organised religion wither it wasn’t that they hoped that society would become less moral.  Rather they hoped that the principles shared by the world’s great religions would be freed from the bonds of the institutions that had set themselves up as gatekeepers over them and parlayed that position for wealth and power on Earth rather than a place in heaven.

But as the churches retreated from public life corporations filled the void with an anti-morality.  We owe much of the world we have inherited to that phenomenon.  When conservative religious societies in other parts of the world reject Westernisation it’s in part because they recognise not a different morality but, all too often, the absence of morality.

Some, myself included, suspect that corporations may collapse under their own weight in an increasingly agile, fast moving culture.  So many big players look flat footed compared to their smaller rivals.  Others argue we should take a collective sledgehammer to corporations.

Short of that there are certainly measures that are open to us that would have a radical effect on the corporate world.

The first would be an all out assault on the notion of ‘legal personality.’  Legal personality is essentially a legal fiction that assigns personhood and the rights that go with it to a non-living entity, such as a corporation.  Thus a corporation, in the US, enjoys the right to free speech and that stretches to making campaign donations, just as would a citizen-voter.  Obviously corporations have more money than citizen-voters and buy a bigger shout.

They can also sue and get sued and because they can get sued the corporate shell can (albeit not in every instance) shield directors, shareholders and employees from legal action.  If you find a corporation guilty you can’t jail it.  You can only fine it or take other measures – often rather paltry (fines are rarely stated as a percentage of turnover, for instance and if they were the cost based judgements that corporations make might be rather diffferent).  The ultimate sanction in a civilised society (as opposed to one that allows the death penalty) is to deprive criminals of their liberty.

All of us, whether rich and poor, have only so many days, so many months, so many years upon the Earth.  Take a year from a poor man and take a year from a rich man and it’s a great leveller.

If a rich man gets caught speeding the fine is meaningless.  Take away his licence and it’s an annoyance; he’ll hire a driver.  Take away his freedom and finally he experiences justice just as a poor man would.

So corporations get rights but they don’t get the same responsibilities or the same obligations as the rest of us.

If we insisted that the individuals at the top of corporations took responsibility, real responsibility, personal responsibility, for the actions of the organisations they ran, if we didn’t allow the buck to stop with an abstract entity, if we limited the rights of corporations so their only real rights were those of their workers and shareholders as citizens, we might be a lot further down the road to a world where the moral sense that guides most of us through life would be the same moral sense that guided the way business is done on our planet.

And if we didn’t allow companies a voice but only their workers and shareholders as citizens then we might find that power returned to where it belongs – with, all of us, rich, poor, young, old, men, women, gay, straight – that’s what the founding fathers meant when they introduced their newborn constitution with the words; “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It’s a sad irony that those words ring hollow in modern America – because we the people, and not we the corporations, is what it’s all about.

Wotcha Pippa, Got an Old Motor?

So, Pippa Bartolotti drives a Jag!  That’s a little surprising given that she’s one of the four candidates for leader of the Green Party.  And though she expresses amazement it’s that fact that The Independent chose to lead its contest coverage on, frankly that’s hardly a surprise at all.

Journalists like nothing more than the whiff of hypocrisy especially when they smell it on one of our (would-be) elected representatives.  No matter that there’s a cogent case that a Prius is impractical, or that now Pippa has the Jag it’s more eco to run it than buy a new car.  Nope, the question is how someone who wants to front the Greens could have bought one in the first place.

Cards on the table time; I have a car.  I drive it more than I’d like to but, living in the sticks, and 2 miles from the nearest bus stop, and almost 5 from the nearest village, it’s not as easy as when I lived in London, there was a bus stop 50 yards away and I only used the car to drive back to the sticks every month or so.

I bought a second hand VW Golf 5 years ago.  It runs on diesel, and when I go past one of those rare outlets that sells the stuff, it runs on recycled biodiesel.  I like it.  I get variety.  I can smell of stir-fry, curry or fish and chips and as I go past I know I’m doing a little bit to boost sales of deep-fried food as people get a whiff.

Am I a saint?  The heck I am.  If I was saintly I’d cycle everywhere with my small son in a trailer on the back.  And if we got wiped out in the process by one of the psycho lorry drivers that uses the road between me and the station I might get an obit in Green World, while the non-green world would write me off as a selfish idiot for putting my child in harm’s way.  See; you can’t win.

But the point is this – if you espouse a principled position, as Greens try to – you can do too little and you can do too much.  Do too little and you sound like on of those old time SWP bores that used to tell women at my uni that liberation would come after the revolution.  The ones that believed them are still waiting,  It’s not good enough to say ‘well it’s not easy being green’ (though it sounds better if you sing it).  You have to make some sacrifices.

On the other hand if you really do live your ideals, as people like Brig Oubridge do – Brig who I also saw speak at university and who, as a result, I suspected was possibly the coolest person on the planet – the mainstream commentariat declare that you’re living in la-la land and couldn’t be trusted with high office.

So it’s a bit of a tightrope.  If you want guidance for how to walk that tightrope you might take a leaf out of the Caroline Lucas guide to how to do it.  Get a good haircut, choose simple, stylish but unostentatious clothes, avoid extravagance but don’t sound like you’re lecturing mum and dad Middle England to wear a hair shirt and radiate good vibes.

I’m afraid Pippa rather fell off the tightrope.

However her other point, that Greens have a rather uncomfortable relationship with business, is well made.

I became a Green, for among other reasons, because I agreed with the green critique of the consumer society.  It’s something we don’t talk about enough at the moment, but the endless cycle of creating unhappiness in order to create wants so that those wants can be filled is a cycle that has to be broken.  It’s a cycle that has enslaved us to needless labour and has turned us into a society that judges everything by its cost and values people by how much wealth they conspicuously display.

However even if we do manage to break these chains we’ll still need things and services and jobs and businesses provide all of those.

The big debate is really about two things – the scope of the state and the scope of private enterprise.

I believe strongly in limited government (as distinct from small government); that the state should be the instrument of action and not the repository of power.  It should be (with caveats) the embodiment of the popular will.  We want an NHS?  Then we mandate the state to create and run a public healthcare service free at the point of use as the most efficient way to realise our chosen collective endeavour.  Likewise all the other services we decide that we need to provide for all citizens in order to create a compassionate and civilised society.

What the state shouldn’t do is go freelancing – looking for ways to increase its scope beyond its doing what we want it to do.  I don’t want the state spending money infiltrating peaceful protest groups, or engaging in foreign wars that serve neither our interests nor the greater good of humanity.  I don’t want the state to poke its nose into my bedroom, allying itself with one religion or another or a host of other things.

Because there are about 60 million different opinions about what the state should and shouldn’t do we work out these differences through the ballot box.  It ain’t perfect but, as Churchill said, it’s the worst possible system except for all the others that human beings have tried.

So if you were to suggest that it’s the job of the state to design, build and sell us mp3 players, you might have some difficulty persuading your fellow citizens that we should take our government’s eye off the ball of more important tasks with such fripperies.

As for business, what is it’s scope?  For me the Greens’ real gripe with business is this: business has no place whatsoever co-opting power for itself.  In a democracy power belongs to all of us; one person, one vote.  Moreover if you believe in subsidiarity that power should be kept as close to the people as the people wish.  (Me, I’m happy to delegate organising rubbish collection to the council UNTIL they do something stupid and I want to stop them doing that stupid something).

But what we have now is the apparently inexorable leeching away of power from the institutions we delegate it to, to big business.  Note I don’t simply say business.

Small and medium sized businesses rarely have much, if any, power at all.  Greens are instinctively pretty sympathetic to smaller businesses and I reckon it’s because they provide goods, services and jobs without trying to set themselves up to make decisions for us for which they’re unaccountable.  Big business tries to do exactly that.

That is the big political issue of our age – the theft of power from the people (yes all the people – stockbrokers, company directors and the idle rich along with the rest of us – they all get one vote just like you and me) by big finance and big business.

If Greens used the power question as the litmus they’d be far less conflicted about their relationship with businesses.  It’s abuse of power by corporates – from bullying local authorities into approving megastores to leaning on government to drive down the minimum wage or holding a gun to our collective heads to bail them out after the financial crisis – that is at the root of it all.

If we got that power back and if we made decisions collectively, every person in this country over sixteen, in our best interests as both a whole and as a collection of 60 million individuals, we’d probably not be facing the global meltdown we all fear.

So Pippa, make smarter decisions next time you shop for a motor and start talking about the proper role of business in a greener society.

Innocent or guilty, if Assange’s rights aren’t upheld then neither are ours

I’ve been having heated exchanges with a number of Greens on Twitter about the Assange case.

Seeing people whose politics I identify with tweet “he’s a rapist” or “he’s guilty” frankly makes my blood run cold.  I like to think myself a member of a liberal political movement committed to due process, the rule of law and human rights not a lynchmob.

Clearly it’s better politics to button one’s lip and say nothing but it’s hardly principled to do so.  What might be more useful is a calm overview of what is happening in this case.

At stake are the human rights of three people: Julian Assange and his two accusers.  His accusers have the right to see their complaints of rape and sexual assault properly investigated, and if prosecutors decide there’s a case to be answered Assange should stand trial.

Meanwhile Assange has the right to a fair trial.  He also has the right not to put himself in jeopardy of rendition to the United States where he might face a military tribunal and the possibility of the death sentence by leaving the UK where his activities with Wikileaks have not been judged criminal.

Separating these two cases is hard because the British and Swedish governments make it very hard.  According to the Ecuadorian government which, though it has its own human rights issues, has now offered Assange political asylum, the Swedes have refused to give assurances that they won’t allow him to be extradited or rendered to the United States and the Swedes haven’t contradicted that claim.

Thus we face a damnable Gordion Knot of competing interests.  So let’s start at the beginning and remind ourselves how we got thus far.

Warrants for Assange’s arrest were initially issued late on Friday August 20^th 2010 on one charge of rape and another of molestation.  The following day those warrants were cancelled.  Eva Finne, a Swedish Chief Prosecutor said: “I don’t think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape.”

In the days that followed the women’s case was taken up by Claes Borgstrom a lawyer and some time spokesperson for Sweden’s Social Democratic Party on gender equality.   Borgstrom is a committed campaigner, however his involvement in the case inevitably brought charges that it was becoming politicised.

The fact that police subsequently questioned Assange for an hour in Stockholm on Monday 30^th August 2010, when he denied the charges, and also that two days later Sweden’s DPP Marianne Ny decided to resume the investigation, only gave those alleging a political motive more ammunition.

Assange left Sweden in late September after an application for a work permit had been refused and, it would appear, after avoiding attempts by Ny to interview him.  There is a reasonable question to be asked why, when police were initially so quick to question Assange, Ny took her time about doing so.  He’d been in the UK for several weeks when on November 18^th Ny eventually went to court to secure an arrest warrant for him.

Meanwhile the hacking community came out heavily for Assange.  He was well known on the hacking circuit and many of those who hacked websites, avowedly in his cause, saw the entire episode as an attack on Assange’s work with Wikileaks – which gave the hacker motto ‘information wants to be free’ into its most dynamic and visceral incarnation ever.

Wikileaks had already upped the ante in its FOI campaigning in April 2010 by releasing video of a US helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a number of civilians including a Reuters crew. Then it distributed hundreds of US diplomatic cables – the first major tranche (of 220) being put out on November 28^th with thousands more following over the next year.

Quite disgracefully hackers and supporters outed Assange’s two alleged victims and they were subsequently vilified in social media.   Even Assange’s London defence team, assembled to fight Sweden’s attempts to extradite him, were careful not to demean his accusers.  One of the most neutral accounts of the key proceedings reviewing the evidence is provided by The Guardian.  Close examination of proceedings reveals that Assange counsel was not accepting the alleged victims accusations but was rather, as would be quite normal, taking them at face value for the purpose of testing whether his  alleged actions amounted to a crime under English law which counsel argued they would not.  His critics have chosen to read or have apparently miseread his defence counsel’s remarks as an admission of guilt.  What doesn’t seem to be in dispute is that there were sexual relations but the issue of consent is.  His defence team have not conceded that he committed a sex crime.

That is for a court to decide.  At present no charges have been filed in Sweden.  Assange is wanted for questioning.  He has repeatedly offered to be questioned in London and that offer has, apparently, been refused.  Instead he exhausted his appeals against extradition and was due for deportation when he sought asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy.  Now we have arrived at a juncture where the UK government is apparently hinting it will enter the embassy to seize Assange.

So, what to make of this mess.

Firstly it is impossible to dissociate Assange the FOI activist from Assange the accused.  He has seriously angered some extremely powerful interests, notably the United States government.

The US has been expanding its jurisdiction for several years.  The Gary McKinnon and Richard O’Dwyer cases are examples of UK citizens pursued for the US though they committed no crime in the UK and never set foot on US soil.  The situation has escalated into a major issue in the UK because of the perceived (disputed) difference in the weight of evidence each country needs to produce to secure extradition, with critics saying the bar is set far too low for extradition to the United States.

Likewise European arrest warrants are under scrutiny because British citizens can be extradited and held on remand without charges being levelled and on evidence that wouldn’t bear scrutiny in an English or a Scottish court.

So we face a situation where Assange believes that if sent to Sweden he will be delivered into the hands of the United States and face prosecution, possibly for treason (there is an irony if that is the case since one can only commit treason against one’s own state).

There’s precious little evidence to persuade Assange’s supporters that this isn’t a stitch up.

Put aside the claims of his defence team that his alleged actions wouldn’t be a crime if they had taken place in the UK.  That may be so, but plenty would then ask if they shouldn’t be.

Put aside the fact that he hasn’t been charged in Sweden.

Rather ask yourself this: why, when Britain’s own record on sexual violence against women is so shamefully bad, is the UK government apparently talking about violating the sovereign territory of Ecuador’s embassy in London in contravention of the 1961 Vienna Convention.

Its efforts in the cause of two Swedish women, whose allegations are yet to result in charges, are out of all proportion to the efforts it makes on behalf of thousands of British women who face sexual violence every year.

Still we ask for better street lighting, for more rape suites, for better training for police officers handling allegations of sexual violence and better public education.

And look at the statistics: in 2006/7, 800 people were convicted of rape despite one in 200 women reportedly being raped in that year – a conviction rate of around 1%.  Would the UK government go to so much trouble in any comparable case?  Has it ever prosecuted any foreign diplomat accused of rape in the UK without the explicit permission of that envoy’s government?

None of this means that Assange should be let of the hook.  Whatever he may have achieved in the cause of freedom of information does not absolve him of any crime he may have committed against his accusers.  He should face charges as and when they’re brought.  Every facility should be offered to the Swedes to question him so that a decision on charges can be made.  However he and his supporters fear that Swedish law and the stance of its conservative government would facilitate his speedy extradition to the US where former Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has already called for his assasination and where several prominent members of congress, including heads of key relevant committees, have demanded he face charges of espionage that carry a potential death penalty.

Rather the British government should seek assurances from Stockholm that nothing will happen that is not in accord with European Human Rights law and that Assange will not be extradited to face an unfair trial or possible execution.  No such arrangement has been sought or offered and I suspect it won’t be.  One must ask why an unprecedented ‘threat’ was levelled at the Ecuadoreans when if the real aim is to ensure Assange faces a proper trial in Sweden there are better ways to address what many see as Assange’s attempts to evade justice.

The whole episode leaves his two female accusers bruised and abused not only allegedly by Assange but also by some of Assange’s supporters and by the legal systems and governments of several countries.  They deserve justice and we should support genuine efforts to see they get it.

However we should not be prepare to see their plight hijacked by those who would surrender our hard won rights to a government in Washington that preaches one thing at home and pursues an entirely hypocritical line when it suits it abroad.

There’s another victim in all this – the cause of liberty.  We’re slowly but surely losing any moral standing we have to take despots around the world to task.  Every failing on our parts is used to justify abuses many times worse elsewhere.  Our real power comes from our principles.  Shame on those who sell them so cheap.

Thanks G4S! You’ve Reminded Us All Why The Private Sector Ain’t The Answer.

G4S’s abject failure to keep its side of the bargain over Olympics security ought to act as a damned great neon warning sign when it comes to the private sector taking a public role.

We’ve had to put up with the bleating of the ideological right for way too long.  “The private sector is more efficient,” “the private sector delivers value for money,” “the state shouldn’t be taking on roles that business could fulfil.”

The G4S debacle ought to serve as an object lesson in how the private sector serves its own interests and not those of the nation.

Yes they’re likely to pay a penalty for not having delivered on their contract, but a fat lot of good a penalty would have been if the state hadn’t been able to make good G4S’s mistake by calling in the military.  If we didn’t pay for the armed services through our taxes then the whole £8 or 9 billion corporate binge that is the Olympics could have been fundamentally compromised.  G4S’s liabilities however wouldn’t have covered a fraction of that bill.

Just as with the banking bail-out the state provides a safety net for the private sector just as it does for citizens.  But while the government is quick to act against people on benefits for relying on that safety net they’re a lot slower to act against big business.  Of course they government points the finger but it doesn’t follow up the rhetoric with concrete action.

Rather than do that they throw a couple of high profile scapegoats to the wolves – Fred Goodwin and Bob Diamond being two fine examples – but once the public appetite for blood has been sated the rest get to breathe a sigh of relief and carry on much as before.

And not only does the state cover the fat behind of big business when it screws up, it allows it to get away with a far lower degree of scrutiny and accountability.

Companies providing public services are allowed to claim ‘commercial confidentiality’ to avoid answering questions.  They are far slower to answer in the media than our elected representatives.  The G4S story cropped up last weekend but it took the company’s boss Nick Buckles a whole week before he buckled to public pressure and went on the Today Programme to face an appropriate grilling – for days we didn’t get so much as a proper statement.

We’re seeing this right across our public services these days.   Even after a Coroner slammed St George’s Hospital in Tooting for killing a patient suffering from dehydration by sedating him after he called police to complain rather than giving him water, no one from the damned trust would go before the media.

What happened was little better than corporate manslaughter and they don’t have the decency to face questions.

The absolute minimum for private sector companies providing public services should be that they are held to the same standards as the public sector – no commercial confidentiality, no refusing to answer questions, complete transparency and direct accountability to the public.  If you take on a public service contract you contract to become a public servant – not a service provider.  Why?  Because if the public are paying for you to serve them then the public is the boss, or do we have to explain the basic customer/retailer relationship to people in the business world?

But even with proper transparency and accountability there is still a major flaw in the whole notion of private provision of public services.  It’s not addressed often enough – it comes down to contracts and it’s very simple.

With any contract, public or private, you set a budget and you agree a level of service.  With public provision of services if you achieve greater efficiency you can raise the level of service and deliver more for the taxpayers contribution.  With private provision companies deliver up to the agreed level of service and no further.  Efficiencies don’t result in a better deal for the public, they result in bigger profits for shareholders.  You don’t get to drive up the level of service until the contract comes up for renewal – and in some cases that could take up to 25 years.

And that’s just the start of the problem because while it’s relatively straight forward to agree a budget and build it into a contract, nailing down a level of service in an operation as complex as a hospital is far harder.  And when the right witter on about how much better equipped the private sector is I’d unhesitatingly agree with them in one respect above all others – they have better lawyers.  If the public sector is bad at one thing it’s contracts.  Nine times out of ten the private sector runs rings around government and once a bad contract is in place we’re stuck with it.  So drawing up an enforceable service agreement is tough enough, but arriving at one that delivers ongoing and incremental service gains to the public is nigh on impossible to frame.  We can only lose.

So perhaps it’s time that we started to think about how the public sector can take the best of the private on board, encourage innovation, reward excellence at every level, make staff a real part of the public enterprise, so we can start to deliver what the private sector can’t – for while listed companies are bound by law to deliver for their shareholders, public enterprises can be bound by their having to answer to all of us so that they deliver better and better for the communities and the society they serve.

And when we hear Conservative ministers, in the wake of the G4S farce, praise our armed forces as the best in the world we shouldn’t let them forget that it’s an unashamed admission that the state, the common weal, the public collectively through our taxes and the work of our public servants, can deliver unrivalled excellence.

Merchant Bankers, the lot of ‘em

Every seasoned television journalist knows that TV is good with people, personalities and emotion and bad with complex ideas, facts and figures.  It’s why TV news reports hang big topics on individual cases; TV can’t make us care about 100,000 disabled people losing their benefits in the abstract but it can make us care about one disabled person struggling to get by, trying hard to get a job, being shafted by the system.  And by making us care about the one there’s a chance it’ll get us to care about the many.

Pity then Stephen Hester, boss of RBS, trying to turn a publicly owned bank back into something that private investors will want to take off our hands (albeit at a giveaway price if George Osborne has anything to do with it).

Hester has become the unwilling poster boy for everything that’s wrong with our increasingly divided society.  Bob Diamond, Barclays’ Group Chief Executive last year got a far bigger bonus (£6.5 million) than the one that Hester has just turned down.  But that’s not the point is it; Barclays is doing fairly well and is private, RBS is struggling and publicly owned.  Hester is our man, Diamond belongs to the market.

So why pity Stephen Hester?  Hester is the victim of the fact that the three big parties can’t address the real issues, the big issues.  That would require too fundamental a critique of what has gone bad with our society.  Hester has become the target over a narrow issue that the Tories, LibDems and Labour feel they can address without getting into really uncomfortable territory.

So, at the risk of being a pariah on Bright Green, I’m going to start with a defence of Stephen Hester.  Hester was brought into RBS to sort out its problems because he had a track record with Credit Suisse, Abbey National and, briefly, with a newly nationalised Northern Rock.  His task was to salvage an RBS which, briefly in early 2009 was the world’s largest company by asset value (£1.9 Trillion) with liabilities of £1.8 Trillion – and we; you, I and every other British tax payer, we own 84% of those assets and, by extension, we are underwriting 84% of those vast liabilities.

Clearly we don’t want a numpty sorting out RBS.  The trouble is that people with the skills needed to avert a disaster big enough to warrant a poem from the late William McGonagall are sought all over the world and they’re sought by very, very rich institutions.  Anyone capable of getting RBS back on track could take their CV anywhere are get a very large pay packet.  Hester’s problem is that RBS’s shares have fallen over the last year, the bank has shed 11,000 jobs and that, notwithstanding the fact that he may have prevented the situation being far worse, a bonus for a result like that looks, in political terms, very bad.  Above all though Hester has become a public servant running the kind of enterprise that no state would have chosen to run, let alone create – a high octane, aggressively acquisitive financial institution that mixed dull retail banking with highly speculative investment operations.  As a public servant he finds himself judged not next to his peers in banking but next to nurses and dinner ladies and cabinet ministers.  The criticism levelled at his bonus by the three big parties is founded on his being a public servant and the poor headline indicators of the bank’s performance.

So Stephen Hester gets it in the neck, faces calls for a Commons debate about little old him, and waves goodbye to almost a million pounds in share options.

The reason I feel sorry for Stephen Hester is that the real issue is not one man’s bonus but a system that consistently rewards ‘top people’ with sums of money that are beyond the imagination of most of those who work for a salary, if they’re lucky enough to get one.

So how has that happened?  Banks like to say that they need to attract the best and the brightest.  It’s long struck me as funny that when we reach for a profession that acts as a metaphor for intelligent we come up with terms like ‘rocket scientist’, ‘brain surgeon’, ‘boffin’, ‘quantum mechanic’.  We don’t say ‘merchant banker’.  If we say ‘merchant banker’ without meaning it literally we’re likely to be using it as rhyming slang as a substitute for something a little more offensive.

I happen to know an astrophysicist.  He’s very clever and paid very badly.  I know a few doctors.  They’re paid a lot better but they’re not paid anything like as well as people in banking many of whom have studied far less hard and do far less good.

Banks don’t have any sort of monopoly on talent.  Plenty of bright people do more useful things with their lives.  Banks do enjoy the greatest proximity to absolutely mindblowingly large streams of virtual cash.  The crumbs that fall from the tables of banking giants are, by mortal standards, huge.  As a result they suck in quite a lot of talent much of which is interested, above all, in those huge crumbs.  So remuneration in banking reflects more the availability of cash with which to reward people (and those people’s ability to make cash), rather than intrinsic worth.

None of this you’ll hear from LabDemCons.  Nor will you hear any fundamental criticism of the way banks operate, of the effect that banking remuneration has to divert useful people away from more socially useful professions, of what it does to a society when tens of thousands of people are propelled into a stratospheric earning bracket creating a vast pay divide (with all the social ills that follow in its wake) and distorting asset prices (such as housing) in a way that positively impoverishes those outside that world.

So let’s have a sensible debate about banks.  Banks can be very useful.  They handle money – money being a clever invention that saves people having to stick a cow in their pocket when they want to buy an iPod and saves Apple having to parlay a cow with a software developer who has time to offer but only a balcony on which to graze a cow…

OK, I’m being flippant, but financial institutions can act as flexible links to ease fluctuations in demand, spot and invest in new trends, facilitate trade between nation states, allow people to save the proceeds of a lifetime’s work against old age and sickness and so forth.  In Germany banks traditionally forged long-term relationships with companies, in which they’d invested, installing a representative on the board to offer advice and provide oversight; it was hands on banking focused on encouraging the production of real and useful stuff that people need and want.  Banks can have a useful, though often rather dull, role in society.

The trouble began when banking started to get rather exciting.  The biggest practical issues to have arisen in the Anglo Saxon world in recent decades have been the increased ability of banks to create cash on their balance sheets and to (supposedly) offload risk, and their tendency to engage in making profit through speculation rather than investment.

Since big bang in 1986 UK banks have typically reduced their capital against their liabilities (what is generally termed increasing their leverage).  With the extra dosh they’ve ‘invented’ they’ve been able to bring US style consumer credit to the UK and Europe (allowing consumers to run up more debts doesn’t of itself lead to more houses being built but it does create more cash to chase the available stock of houses pushing up prices while increasing their exposure to defaults).  They’ve magick’d up financial instruments (of which CDOs were merely the most infamous) that are essentially ways of disguising how bad the quality of debt they’ve been trading amongst themselves is, removing the risk from the lender but not transferring meaningful oversight of that debt to its new owner.

On an international level markets have gone beyond their traditional role of helping to determine true value to a state where they can create crises in order to profit from them.  One could make a cogent argument that what we’re seeing at the moment is disaster capitalism writ large – with markets demanding that states downsize and hold a fire sale of assets (which can be bought cheaply by those able to raise cash) and that governments are unable to take sensible Keynesian measures, such as investing in capital projects that upgrade infrastructure and make an economy more competitive, for fear that they’ll be held to ransom.

The banks aren’t alone responsible for their being too much cash sloshing around and with the asset price and localised wage inflation that’s gone with it.  Technology has also allowed people to become more productive.  Rather than result in a more generalised increase in living standards it’s benefitted those who are in a position to pitch their skills into the biggest and most lucrative markets.  Globalisation works to push up remuneration for those at the top and push it down for everyone else.

Likewise international corporations are able to shop around in a beggar my neighbour search for the lowest tax rates.  Of course any suggestion that global capital needs global regulation provokes cries of ‘new world order’ from the libertarian right, a political movement funded by, of course, big corporations (c.f. the Tea Party and the Koch brothers).

A single article isn’t the place to discuss the answers to such big problems.  One article doesn’t even allow room to set out all the problems.  However it should illustrate that Stephen Hester isn’t the problem.  He’s a symptom.

The reason the flock throws one of its number to the wolves is to keep the wolves distracted.  We can’t take down the rich one at a time (we’ll we could but we’d be about it for ever).  It’s even morally highly questionable whether we should as a society turn on one person – rich though he may be, Hester is but a single human being.  Following the mob won’t lead us to the new Jerusalem.

No, we should refuse to allow our focus to be drawn from the biggest issues of an increasingly divided society and a world where the nation state is being outmanoeuvred by transnational corporations to the detriment of the many and the benefit of a very few.  We shouldn’t be happy about Hester’s bonus but nor should we make him a scapegoat.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Review

Warning contains spoilers

 

Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy raised the bar for crime writers the world over.  Part thriller, part noir and highly political, it gave us two enduring characters who stepped away from the page and became almost three dimensional.

The first is Larsson’s alter ego Michael Blomkvist.  Larsson was a left-wing activist, journalist, the editor of an investigative periodical Expo, a Swedish counterpart to Searchlight and an expert on far-right groups.  Blomkvist is co-founder of an investigative periodical, Millennium, that takes on the rich and the powerful and as a result regularly finds itself in trouble.

The second is the extraordinary Lisbeth Salander, one of the most captivating fictional creations in modern literature.  Victim of a violently abusive father, she’s thrown into state care after she sets fire to him for beating her mother and leaving her with brain damage.  Sexually, physically and pharmacologically abused through her incarceration she remains a ward of the state though she’s in her twenties, and making a living as an investigator through her ability to hack into computers.  As the novels unfold we come to know someone who is deeply scarred, vulnerable and yet possessed of an awesome facility for self preservation.  Salander becomes a modern avenging angel.

Not only did Larsson produce great characters and a truly gripping plot (I read the third volume in a little over 24 hours, stopping only to sleep), but Swedish friends attest to its being beautifully written (though I suspect the translation has rendered it rather more work-a-day).  So it’s a series that despite its popularity one would hope a film maker would approach with a degree of respect.

As a result I went to see the English language version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wondering just how big a hash director David Fincher would make of it.  I couldn’t see Daniel Craig as Blomkvist.  Blomkvist may find himself in the role of action man from time to time but he’s an idealistic softy at heart.  Craig doesn’t make a convincing journalist.  Journalists spend days chained to their computers.  They eat doughnuts and drink coffee.  They don’t have abs.  OK a few have abs but very few journalists are very good journalists and have abs.  There isn’t time.

Rooney Mara on the other hand was a surprise.  I could believe that her Lisbeth Salander had been systematically maltreated.  She managed to capture quite convincingly a combination of low self esteem, fragility and rage.

However my biggest issue was with the directing.  The settings, the cinematography, the degree of fidelity to the original story were all commendable.  I’ll set aside the fact that the film opened with a striking but meaningless pop-video-like CGI sequence set to a godawful cover of Led Zeppelin’s sublime Immigrant Song.

What really bothered me were the sex scenes.  I know that the ubiquity of porn has changed the way sex is shown on screen.  Directors parade more flesh – female flesh of course, no penises – and Rooney Mara’s flesh was put on a float and paraded down Main Street.

That’s widely accepted these days if the sex shown is supposedly between two consenting adults.  But in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo the sex involves someone who has been profoundly traumatised throughout her adolescence and young adulthood.

In the book when Salander slips into Blomkvist’s bed and the two make love it’s an act of considerable trust on her part, while Blomkvist, who one is led to believe is romantically rather cavalier, seems unaware of just how vulnerable Salander is making herself to him and how big a deal that is.  Needless to say Fincher passes on the subtext in favour of straight sex, with the result that it loses much of its emotional power.

If that scene is a missed opportunity then the scene where Salander is manacled to a bed, raped and sodomised by her legal guardian is just plain shameful.

Portraying rape on screen places a huge responsibility on the film-maker.  To eroticise rape is essentially to condone it.  Not only does it ignore the fact that rape is nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power, it also validates the act.

Film-makers who want to show rape for what it is show us faces not bodies.  They allow us to look into the eyes of the victim and see their suffering, their powerlessness and to identify with the emotional impact that sexual violence has on them.

Fincher shows us Mara largely naked, chained face down to a bed.  We never look into her eyes.  We only see her face in profile.  We see her writhing around.

After the attack, when she limps away, we see her from behind, Rooney shuffling so as to underscore the physical impact of anal rape – but again we don’t see her eyes as she processes what has happened to her.  The act is objectified.  We watch.  We aren’t helped to empathise.

Frankly having sat through what seemed to me the eroticisation of the forced and violent sodomy of a much abused woman I felt not a little soiled and complicit for having watched it.

I’m quite surprised that more fuss hasn’t been made about the scene.  It’s all the more shocking because Larsson’s own position seemed pretty clear to me.  The depiction of the rape scene in the book was of an act of violence, not sex.  The incident was about power and domination and we were never allowed to forget what Salander was going through.

Indeed the Swedish title of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is “Män Som Hatar Kvinnor”: “Men Who Hate Women.”  At the start of each section of the book is a page blank save for a fact about violence against women in Sweden.

I hope it’s not pushing the point too far to suggest that Larsson was a feminist writer, or at least hoped that was what he was.  (Nick Cohen in the Observer disagrees though as he bases his argument on remarks quoted without proper context it’s hard to know if he has a case).

I can’t help but feel that Fincher’s movie was a betrayal of the book’s core values and that we’ve somehow contrived to overlook the fact that he’s turned an explicit protest against violence against women into a spectacle which we’re expected to secretly enjoy.

If there’s one thing above all about big money entertainment that saddens me it’s its apparent determination to pander to the worst in us rather than to appeal to the best.

 

Pissing On The Flag

Another day, another scandal involving United States servicemen.  This time its four marines pissing on the corpses of Taliban fighters they’ve killed.  Each time this happens we’re asked to treat it as an isolated case.  What we’re expected to believe is that when US troops misbehave it’s captured on camera and everyone knows about it.  When the cameras aren’t rolling they’re the honourable warriors Americans believe them to be.

Counterintuitive doesn’t begin to describe it.  In the wake of Abu Ghraib, the Iraq Helicopter Video, all those instances of collateral damage, the attack on a Pakistani border post and too many others, we’re expected to believe that these represent terrible exceptions, exceptions that just happen to be caught on video.

A far more credible explanation is that there is a far deeper problem, one stemming from an increasingly inhumane culture that, in the wake of September 11^th, has gripped American forces.  The US military has become brutal and, dare one say it, fascist in the proper sense of the word – that it wields the power to punish and execute and sees itself as the final arbiter.

In the wake of the Vietnam War the US military drafted a ‘Soldier’s Creed’.   You can see the degree of emphasis put on protection, creditable behaviour and the importance of not disgracing one’s uniform.

 

I am an American Soldier.

I am a member of the United States Army – a protector of the greatest nation on earth.

Because I am proud of the uniform I wear, I will always act in ways creditable to the military service and the nation it is sworn to guard.

I am proud of my own organization. I will do all I can to make it the finest unit in the Army.

I will be loyal to those under whom I serve. I will do my full part to carry out orders and instructions given to me or my unit.

As a soldier, I realize that I am a member of a time-honored profession—that I am doing my share to keep alive the principles of freedom for which my country stands.

No matter what the situation I am in, I will never do anything, for pleasure, profit, or personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform, my unit, or my country.

I will use every means I have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my Army comrades from actions disgraceful to themselves and to the uniform.

I am proud of my country and its flag.

I will try to make the people of this nation proud of the service I represent, for I am an American Soldier.

 

In 2003, at the height of the war on terror a section of the US military responsible for the Warrior Ethos rewrote the Soldier’s Creed thus:

 

I am an American Soldier.

I am a Warrior and a member of a team.

I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values.

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.

I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.

I am an expert and I am a professional.

I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy, the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.

I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

I am an American Soldier.

 

All those references to protection and honour and avoiding disgrace have been stripped out.  It’s as though the task of writing the code has been handed to the teams responsible for Gears of War or Call of Duty.  There’s no ethos there just a cartoonish and brutal rant.  The actions of US troops pissing on their dead enemies fly in the face of the original Soldier’s Creed but they’re wholly consistent with the current version.

If the US military wants to defeat its enemies rather than see its soldiers acting as recruiting sergeants for new ones it needs to recognise that it is in the throes of an ethical and cultural crisis.  If it wants to take a step back towards a US military that projects American values, values that might have been recognised as American by the four men whose faces look out from Mount Rushmore, they could do worse than scrapping the current Soldier’s Creed and replacing it with the original.

Lawrence Verdict; Fingers Crossed, Tightly

Doreen Lawrence said that today’s verdict is no cause for celebration.  It certainly isn’t.  At best it represents a belated attempt by our criminal justice system to right the dismal wrong that was the original investigation into her son, Stephen Lawrence’s murder.

At worst, and I hesitate to say this, I fear there’s latitude for a miscarriage of justice.  Don’t get me wrong – I really hope they’ve got the right guys.   If they have then a lengthy spell inside will underline the message that, even if it takes a while, justice will catch up with racist thugs.

My misgivings are more down to two factors.  Firstly the conviction rests heavily on forensic evidence.  Although forensic evidence appears to offer empirical proof, a more reliable alternative to the memory and eyesight of human witnesses, it too is capable of being abused, compromised and misrepresented by lawyers and by ‘expert witnesses’.

Above all though I am mindful of the wider context of this trial.  Just like the trial of the Birmingham Six and of the Guildford Four there’s been huge pressure for a conviction.  That pressure is many fold; from a public that was, rightly, disgusted by the way the entire Lawrence case had been handled hitherto; from a political class that wants to convince people, not least our fellow citizens, neighbours and friends from the black community, that the system serves them as much as it serves anyone; from the campaigning media (not least the Daily Mail); from the police, who have had their fill of the flak this case has brought them and who want to be seem to be capable of doing their jobs.

The point is this –so many stood to lose much face had this trial resulted in a not guilty verdict.  That’s not an environment in which we can feel absolutely, one hundred percent certain that justice has been properly done.

I’ll say it again – I really, really hope they got the right guys.  I see no reason to believe they didn’t.  I certainly don’t want to get some particularly vile people off the hook.  However I am also reminded, worryingly, of situations where someone got banged up because someone had to get banged up.  God help us all if that ever turns out to have been the case.