Maxi@AllForProgress_
Here's a good joke for your Bank Holiday.
A British magistrate identified in court papers only as "Taylor" has been deciding convictions and sentences for more than 100 British defendants from his home.
In Portugal.
The arrangement, conducted under the Single Justice Procedure - which is the streamlined process by which a magistrate can deal with minor offences without an open court hearing - was running for years before anyone in the British legal system noticed it was happening, and would still be running today if a fellow magistrate had not, at considerable personal cost, refused to take part and raised the alarm.
The whistleblower in question is a serving magistrate who had concluded, after some study, that what was being done was unlawful. He is now suing the Ministry of Justice. He alleges that, having flagged the practice internally, he was bullied, ostracised and progressively excluded from the work he had volunteered to do.
The only thing about this that's a surprise is that it's been exposed at all.
This sort of baroque, even sublime level of piss-taking is, by now, a recognisable British institutional ritual.
So, I must concede, is the reaction to it. An individual notices something is wrong, says so through the proper channels, is treated by the institution as the problem, gets bullied half to death, and ends up in court.
We saw it with Alan Bates, with the consultants at the Letby ward, with the surveyors at Grenfell, and now with this magistrate, who has the additional indignity of having had to bring his case while his colleague was, presumably, still in the Algarve.
The Ministry of Justice's response is the part of the story that most repays attention. Asked, by Sir Jeremy Hunt MP in Parliament, whether more than 100 convictions secured by a magistrate sitting from a different country might need to be revisited, the Ministry stated that there were "no grounds to suggest that any case where the magistrate conducted remote hearings from abroad was unlawful or needed nullification."
The Senior Presiding Judge then advised, in a separate communication, that magistrates and judges should not, in fact, be conducting court proceedings from outside the United Kingdom, the diplomatic objections of the foreign states involved being one of the more obvious reasons. The two positions are not formally in conflict. They are, however, the same Ministry saying that an arrangement which the senior judiciary has now banned for the future was, until ten minutes ago, completely fine. Totally alright.
One hundred British defendants (at the lower end of the magistrates' jurisdiction, sure, but the lower end is where most people in this country actually encounter the courts) have now been sentenced by a man from his holiday home. When the Ministry of Justice found out, it concluded that the arrangement was fine. When the Senior Presiding Judge found out, he concluded that it was not. The whistleblower who exposed the whole thing has, predictably, been treated by his colleagues as the problem and is now suing his own Ministry. The convictions, meanwhile, stand.
I just hope I get the screenplay rights to this one. It's just too perfect an encapsulation of what the British genius, once responsible for the architecture of the world and man's command over nature, has been reduced to: running obvious abuses of office, rank, and authority for years under the noses of the people paid to notice but too thick or venal to actually notice.
If we weren't being consistently saved by single people, heroic individuals, willing to throw themselves into the meat grinder to expose these charlatan prats by a single individual at his own cost, it's absolutely frightening to imagine where we'd be. In respect of abuses like this, like Chagos, like the rape gangs.
Anyway, the arrangement ends and the convictions stand. The magistrate will fly back from Portugal (he's still sitting!). The Ministry of Justice will issue a procedural note. The whistleblower goes to tribunal.
It's not only time we root-and-branched the criminal justice system in this country - in which 'criminal justice' has come to imply an affinity for the criminal, just as the 'Taylor Swift Holy Dinner Party & Human Affairs Circuit' implies an affinity for Taylor Swift - but our approach to whistleblowing as well.
These are the only people preventing our slide into barbarism, as things stand. And whistleblowers who exposed dysfunctions of this kind will, under a Progress government, be honoured for the public service they have performed, and the institutions that punished them will be held to account for the punishing.
