Lord Carlile is amazingly unobservant. An excellent article in today’s Observer by Jay Rayner gives details of the establishment cover-up of Janner’s long continued child rapes. The silence of the Vaz draws most attention. But let us think about Alex Carlile.
Rayner states “The establishment, in the shape of his fellow MPs, men such as Labour’s Keith Vaz, Tory David Ashby and the then Lib Dem MP now Lord Carlile, closed ranks.” In the 1991 House of Commons debate deploring accusations against Janner, Carlile played a prominent part, describing Janner as a man of “integrity” and “determination”. Carlile should have known Janner fairly well. They were both MPs, both QCs, both members of Friends of Israel, both patrons of UK lawyers for Israel. The appear still to both be patrons of the Friends of Israel Educational Foundation. They were regulars on the same parliamentary committees dealing with legal affairs. They were both to leave the Commons at the same time and both to join the Lords only slightly apart.
Still, Carlile’s stalwart defence of his friend is understandable. You can’t expect him to have picked up on Janner’s secret life. Nor that of Cyril Smith. Carlile shared a small Commons office with Cyril Smith for many years. Oh dear. He really isn’t good at noticing things, is he?
Carlile’s mistress and eventual wife was a senior legal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Cosy world, Westminster, it it not?
Carlile went on to be a stunningly illiberal “Independent” Reviewer of anti-terror legislation, where he demonstrated his independence by agreeing to absolutely everything the security services told him. 42 day detention with no charge? No problem. In fact there was no period of detention without charge posited so extreme that Carlile did not support it. Secret courts hearing intelligence evidence the defence were not allowed to see? Fine by Carlile. Control orders? Great. He is a fantastic bastion, protecting the public, is Carlile.
Even better, of course, at protecting his associates.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31970034
“There should be a statutory ban on identifying people who are arrested for sexual offences in England and Wales, a committee of MPs has said.
The Home Affairs Select Committee said sexual offence suspects deserved the right to anonymity, unless they were charged or police needed to name them.
There should be “zero tolerance” of their identities being leaked, unattributed, to the media, it added. [….]
Committee chairman Keith Vaz said reform of police bail was “long overdue” and it was “unacceptable” that people could be kept on bail for months and then be told no action would be taken against them without any explanation.
In March Mr Gambaccini told the same committee that lost earnings and legal fees had cost him more than £200,000 as a result of him being kept on bail until the case was dropped against him in October.
Mr Vaz said: “Police use of the ‘flypaper’ practice of arresting someone, leaking the details, then endlessly re-bailing them in the vague hope that other people come forward is unacceptable and must come to an immediate end.
“We have seen how destructive this can be to a person’s livelihood, causing irreparable reputational damage and enormous financial burden.”
The committee said the identification ban would stay in force unless and until a suspect was charged or if police believed there were “public safety” reasons for naming them.
Off topic, but so what, it’s days later. Just reading various poster’s accounts of variousaffairs — eg the daughter of Nicolas Fairbairn waiving her right to victim anonymity. Those of a certain age will remember Fairbaird as another of those “eccentrics” whose intense fierceness was very thinly veiled, and who didn’t trouble to disguise what even in the 1970s would be called misogyny. Which is all to say that with all of this, it is becoming more and more cleaer why the old-boy network was so keen to keep women out of the places of power. Notthat women are not able to be “handled”, blackmailed or cuborned for other things, but I do think they feared the advent of women getting to positions of power in law and politics for much more personal reasons than we ever guessed.