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Le titre séduisant (PETER HITCHENS: Make the Post Office boss keep her CBE… as a reminder of how justice was strangled) en dit long.
Le rédacteur (identifié sous le nom d’anonymat
) est reconnu comme quelqu’un de sérieux pour plusieurs autres papiers qu’il a publiés sur internet.
La crédibilité est ainsi substantielle en ce qui concerne cet article.
Le post a été édité à une date indiquée 2024-01-06 14:38:00.
Justice will never be done to the victims of the Post Office computer scandal. What they have lost is irrecoverable, in some cases more than others.
Years of what could have been happy and contented lives have been stolen. Good names have been snatched away and grudgingly returned years later. Innocent people have been locked away in prisons, a horror very hard to forgive. Marriages have been torn apart. In some appalling cases these ill-treated people understandably lost their minds or took their own lives.
I will not join in the easy call for the removal of the CBE awarded to the former Chief Executive of the Post Office, Paula Vennells. I think she should be forced to keep it, as a lifelong reminder to her and to the rest of us of how justice and mercy have been strangled in this country.
Resigning her medal is too easy, too simple and too quick. We – and she – have to come up with ways of ensuring that she (and others) may consider how they may spend the rest of their lives trying to put right the wrongs they have done. This is for their good as well as for ours.
All of us, in our own ways, have such a duty while we live. But in her case it is especially heavy. As someone who has preached the Gospel of Christ in church, she will know in detail that there are many things she can and must do.
There have been calls for the removal of the CBE awarded to the former Chief Executive of the Post Office, Paula Vennells
I watched the ITV drama on the Horizon outrage, and was constantly switching from anger to grief, to occasional joy at the shafts of light which pierced the awful gloom
Alan Bates is brilliantly portrayed by Toby Jones on the ITV drama about the Post Office scandal
As the prophet Micah asked thousands of years ago, ‘What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God’ – such simple demands, but how many in high office now know of them or seek to obey them?
My concern is for the future. Like millions of others, I watched the ITV drama on the Horizon outrage, and was constantly switching from anger to grief, to occasional joy at the shafts of light which pierced the awful gloom. And I wondered if I would be able to see, and ready to oppose, another such injustice if it was brought before me tomorrow.
I thought of all the times some government department or corporation has blithely informed me (as the sub-postmasters were told) that ‘nobody else has complained’. I thought of the growing powerlessness of the individual in Britain in the modern age, as government, police and business have hidden themselves behind electronic walls which keep out all the cries of pain and misery, but still let the money through. We have gone so wrong, and we can only get back to civilisation if we restore the presumption of innocence as the keystone of all our law.
For that principle forces us to refuse to run with any crowd, to question any certainty, to doubt all official statements, to side instinctively with the weak against the strong and to recognise that we are most unlikely to know the full story. And surely that when we see people such as Alan Bates (so brilliantly portrayed by Toby Jones on ITV) wrestling with giants, that we do not take the side of the giants.
Jews fleeing Hitler weren’t the same as today’s asylum seekers
I too choke with unexpected tears at the famous scene when Nicholas Winton, then not honoured or even much known, found himself in a TV studio with scores of people whose lives he had saved half a century before, when they were children. Who cannot?
But I am not sure of the purpose of the new film about Sir Nicholas, One Life, in which he is played in old age by Anthony Hopkins.
In an early scene, set in the late 1980s, he is shown listening to a radio news broadcast about Tamil refugees. I can only assume this is supposed to suggest that the refugees from modern conflicts are pretty much the same as the ones Sir Nicholas saved. But they aren’t, just as modern conservatives who object to unlimited migration are not Nazis. The film’s timing turns out to be sensitive, as it reminds us all of the reasons for the existence of the State of Israel. The children Sir Nicholas rescued were Jews, who would have been murdered in death camps if he had not got them out of Prague when he did.
I am not sure of the purpose of the new film about Sir Nicholas, One Life
The story is far more complicated than the film can possibly show, and the politics of the time are explained in the usual Ladybird Book way
Businessman Nicholas Winton organised the rescue of 699, mainly Jewish, children from Czechoslovakia to Britain
There was not much doubt about this after the Nazi state had openly supported a horrifying anti-Jewish pogrom all across Germany in November 1938, in which Jews were killed for being Jews (a policy shared today by Hamas).
Many who could not be rescued did in fact die in the years afterwards. Their parents (who we did not allow into Britain) suspected they were saying goodbye for ever when they waved their sons and daughters farewell on stations across Europe. And they were right. They would almost all be murdered in Nazi death camps.
The story is far more complicated than the film can possibly show, and the politics of the time are explained in the usual Ladybird Book way, assuming that Britain (then, as now, a weak and indebted country with ramshackle and unprepared armed forces) was an almighty superpower which could and should have ‘stood up to Hitler’ in 1938.
Actually, the refugee trains stopped the moment we did go to war in 1939, and thereafter we did almost nothing to help Europe’s endangered Jews, which is a fact we might ponder from time to time.
Case with two judges… and one issue
Have you ever heard of the same court case being tried twice, in front of two different judges? This must be very rare, yet the event has attracted little attention – except in The Mail on Sunday.
The case is that of Graham Phillips, the British former civil servant and video blogger who has been sanctioned by his own Government, apparently for holding and spreading the wrong opinions about Ukraine.
It is necessary to say here that I do not like or agree with Mr Phillips. But I think his opinions are none of the business of the British Government, which has frozen his assets and made his life almost unliveable, by decree.
As his lawyer, Joshua Hitchens (no relation) has argued: ‘There is an enormous and crushing effect this decision has on my client. He is unable to pay rent, unable to return to Britain, he lives in a friend’s flat in a warzone.’
The issue was first tried before Mr Justice Swift, but then had to be held again when it turned out this judge had himself been sanctioned… by the Kremlin.
My colleague Cameron Charters attended both trials (I was abroad when the second was rather suddenly held) and reported that the second judge, Mr Justice Johnson, asked the Government lawyers a rather pertinent question: ‘If you are concerned about what he is saying, why do you not challenge what he is saying rather than impose very, very rigorous sanctions on him which do not actually stop him doing what you do not want him doing?’
It may be some weeks before the outcome of this unique and rather important trial, which is about a vital issue – whether the Government can arbitrarily punish people who say things it doesn’t like. In the meantime, I hope more people take an interest in it.
A lire sur un propos proche:
Droit processuel : une science de la reconstruction des liens de droit,Clicker Ici .
Justice,A voir et à lire. .
Précis d’épistémologie/Applications,(la couverture) . Disponible à l’achat sur les plateformes Amazon, Fnac, Cultura ….