Justice for smiley

Six weeks before the English riots, more than 600 people marched from Brixton to Scotland Yard chanting, “No justice, no peace!” and calling for a public inquiry into the death of Smiley Culture.

Smiley will be remembered as one of the most significant figures in the history of British rap. He was the first MC to use a mixture of London street-talk and Jamaican patois, set to a rapid-flow beat. He had hits with ‘Police Officer’ and ‘Cockney Translation’, fronted a Channel 4 youth programme, had a small part in Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners. He had a wonderful way with words. The Guardian described him as “a ­fabulous storyteller”.

Smiley died on March 15 from a stab wound through his heart. At the time, Metropolitan Police officers were executing a search warrant at his Surrey home. Within 48 hours, the Independent Police Complaints Commission confirmed the Met’s story that Smiley had gone into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea while officers searched the house and, without warning or preliminaries, had picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed himself to death.
Said a family spokesman: “It beggars belief that they let someone go into the kitchen where there are sharp utensils, hot water and whatever else, to make a cup of tea. I’ve never heard of anyone whose house has been raided and who is being held as a suspect afforded these kind of liberties... I can speak for the family and the rest of the community – we don’t believe it.”

It was the IPCC which initially endorsed the Met’s explanation that Mark Duggan, the man whose death triggered the London riots, had died after opening fire on police officers. Six days after the riots erupted, the IPCC admitted that it may “inadvertently” have misled the public. Readers may wish to calculate the odds against the IPCC making this admission had it not been that London was burning.
Isn’t there a lesson in that for Smiley’s family and friends?
 
I gather that people in Donegal are waiting with anxiety and dread for the report on clerical child sex abuse in the Raphoe diocese. 
After Dublin, after Cloyne, after Ferns, after all, now Raphoe. Will it ever end? Or to put the question another way: What reason is there to believe the pattern of abuse in these dioceses doesn’t apply to all dioceses?
I say again: the courts should order a trawl through the archives of every diocese and demand the delivery to a special prosecutor of all evidence of abuse and cover-up, including relevant correspondence with the Vatican. Then the law should take its course.

This would happen if such a litany of crime had come to light in a sporting or trade union or cultural organisation.
Incidentally, although the Raphoe report hasn’t been published at the time of writing, I think I know some of the detail it will include. However, the most revolting example of child abuse that I know of in Donegal does not involve any priest but a sizeable number of laymen who more than once mass-raped a child, including on her confirmation day, and who have since been protected by a conspiracy of silence involving not the hierarchy, much less the Vatican, but a large percentage of their and the child’s neighbours.
 
The rage of Posh Boy Cameron and his smarmy sidekicks Clegg and Osborne against the rioters who a couple of weeks back forced them to cut short their sojourns in the sun-dappled climes where they’d been pampering themselves was something to be seen. I watched the subsequent Commons debate with a mixture of cynicism and incredulity.
Former Labour Minister Tessa Jowell lashed out at teenagers who had “shown no respect for society” when they stole a flat-screen television. Back in 2006, Ms. Jowell signed a mortgage document which enabled her husband, lawyer David Mills, to bring £300,000 into Britain tax-free from Italy – payment for representing Silvio Berlusconi in a corruption case, it was claimed.
The scandal resulted in Jowell’s demotion by Tony Blair. But she bounced back under Brown.
Italian police reckoned that the dinero Mills had brought in didn’t represent legal fees but his share of Berlusconi’s takings. Eventually, however, the Italian courts ruled that the case had gone beyond a ten-year statute of limitation. Lucky for some.
And speaking of flat-screen televisions: Labour MP Gerald Kaufman demanded that police “reclaim society” from the rioting “scum”. This is the guy who hit the headlines last year when rumbled for claiming £8,865 of taxpayers’ money for a flat-screen television.

Shadow Minister Hazel Blears said that the rioters would “have to learn that their actions have consequences.” She had been revealed in 2009 to have avoided £18,000 in capital gains tax from sale of a taxpayer-funded flat which she had designated as her main residence for tax purposes but as her second home when claiming parliamentary expenses. Consequences? None.
One store was cleaned out of laptops by looters of the sort lacerated by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane, who himself had touched the taxpayers for £5,900 for the purchase of eight laptops.

Like their Irish counterparts, the shamelessness of Britain’s law-makers knows no bounds.
I watched the debate while cupping my ear for the sound of a hundred thousand hoodies marching down Whitehall with pitchforks aloft, hoes at the ready and a cull of crooks in mind. Maybe next time.