Nick Cohen: Writing from London

Not once does the word “innocent” appear in the Ministry of Justice’s 161-page proposal to remove legal aid from defendants. The British right is no more troubled by the notion that citizens are innocent until proved guilty than it is by the thought that wealth should not determine access to the law, or that the police can fit up suspects or that the state can behave unjustly and that the best way to keep it honest is to expose it to constant scrutiny.

You hear the powerful’s impatience with accountability everywhere in the statements of ministers. “What we mustn’t do is just leave untouched a system that has grown astonishingly, making the poor extremely litigious,” said Ken Clarke when he was justice secretary. Defendants don’t need a “Rolls-Royce” service, says his successor, Chris Grayling. Trust the benevolence of the bureaucracy, they seem to whisper. Believe in its procedures. No one but cunning criminals or greedy lawyers objects to protecting it from challenge in the courts.

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is meant to protect against “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind”. The conscience of mankind, however, has become remarkably forgiving of late.

What can outrage it? Not the 80,000 dead, according to the UN (a minimum of 94,000, says the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights). Not the 1.5 million the war has driven into exile in poverty-stricken camps, where families sell their daughters to dirty old men to pay for food. Not the United Nations, which last week talked of soldiers forcing children to watch the torture and murder of their parents and concluded that, while all sides were guilty of war crimes, rebel actions did not “reach the intensity and scale” of the massacres committed by government forces.

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With the predictability of acne spreading on a teenager’s face, the British right and left used the ritual slaughter of Lee Rigby to confirm what they already knew. The security establishment called for the revival of its pet project to allow spies to engage in blanket web surveillance without saying why it would have helped. For the “anti-imperialist” left and Greens, who have never wanted to look clerical fascism in the eye for fear of what they may see, the attack told them that the west was to blame – as it always must be.

Neither could accept that political violence is mutating in ways that give past cliches a musty smell. For the first time since 9/11, the similarities between violent movements in the west are more important than their differences.

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On the edge of Rugeley stands Amazon’s largest distribution centre in Britain. Life for the workers who trudge around the 800,000 sq ft warehouse is not as bad as it was for the men who once worked in the pits of the Staffordshire coalfield, but that is not saying much. They must carry satnavs, which direct their movements round the stacks and flash warnings from managers to stop dawdling or chatting with colleagues. Britain being the way it is, they have no job security.

Trade unionists call the Amazon shed a “slave camp”. But whatever arguments they have with Amazon’s management, one point should be beyond dispute – Rugeley is in Britain. British customers send Amazon their money. British workers package their goods and send them off in vans along roads built and maintained by the British taxpayer. If workers steal – and before they can go home or visit the canteen, they must walk through airport-style security scanners to prove they have not – Amazon will call on the taxpayer-funded police to arrest them and the taxpayer-funded criminal justice system to prosecute them. Admittedly, Amazon’s buyers who supply the stock are based in Slough rather than Rugeley. But the last time I looked Slough was in Britain too.

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Review of 5 Days in May by Andrew Adonis

Cool anger drives Andrew Adonis’s first-hand account of how Labour tried to stop the Liberal Democrats handing Britain over to a reactionary and incompetent Conservative administration. As a Blairite education and transport minister and a former member of the Social Democratic party, Adonis had spent his adult life believing a “progressive coalition” could unite the centre and left of British politics.

His five days in May 2010 negotiating on Labour’s behalf disabused him of that notion and much else besides.

“Clegg wouldn’t put the Tories in power, throwing over a British Liberal tradition going back a century and a half as a progressive anti-Tory party,” he thought as the electorate returned a hung parliament. When they heard that David Cameron was making Clegg a generous offer, Gordon Brown and much of the cabinet thought the “process would turn to our favour once the Tories and Lib Dems had rehearsed the extent of their differences”.

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When you see rottenness in a system you must ask: does it come from one bad apple or does the whole barrel stink?

The rank smell emanating from the coalition is impossible to miss. At first sniff, it appears to come from the blazered figure of Iain Duncan Smith. It has taken me some time to identify its source, because appearances deceive. From his clipped hair to his polished shoes, Duncan Smith seems to be a man who has retained the values of the officer corps of the Scots Guards he once served.

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We flatter ourselves when we boast of mastery of the ironic style. Unlike literal-minded Germans and Americans, we are not ashamed to live behind masks and speak in riddles. On the contrary, we delight in it and damn foreigners for their insistence on saying what they mean. They lack our sophistication. The delightfully quirky British sense of humour leaves them cold.

If we were harder on ourselves, we would notice that on the reverse side of the ironic coin are the smuttiness and evasiveness that always accompany self-censorship. We would wonder how we ended up in a country where fear of causing offence or crossing a powerful or litigious interest had become so ingrained the British could no longer speak plainly or read freely.

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If you want to combat poverty, empower women. There are few uncontested arguments in social policy, but this is one of them. Give women control of their fertility and overpopulation and undereducation will fall. Give women financial independence and they will have the means to free themselves and their children from dangerous men.

Everyone accepts the proposition that, in general, mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money on children. Even the British government accepts it after a fashion. But religious bigotry, rightwing prejudice and bureaucratic convenience have made the coalition determined to forget what it already knows.

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When they hear the screams of rage of the United Kingdom Independence party, leftwingers and liberals are tempted to label them as cries from a “far right”. It is not a hysterical charge, at first glance. Ukip is to the right of the Tory party. Among its members are people who you wouldn’t want exercising power over your life or anyone else’s.

Take Julia Gasper, former chairman (not “chairwoman or “chair” or “chairperson”, because to suggest that Ms Gasper isn’t a man would be political correctness gone mad) of Ukip’s Oxford branch. She licensed every kind of dumb prejudice when she said: “As for the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, there is so much evidence that even a full-length book could hardly do justice to the subject.”

But here’s a disconcerting point for those who want to chant anti-Nazi slogans at Nigel Farage..

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As for the BBC, what is there left to say about it? Can it show The Wizard of Oz again? Can it only run the film after the 9pm watershed? Must the announcer warn: “This children’s story contains Munchkin choruses that some viewers may find offensive”? Its decision to ban every part of the song except for a five-second clip in a news report shows clearly something that many people outside the media rarely understand: the BBC folds under pressure.

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