Thursday, August 14, 2008 

No sense of shame.


I predicted yesterday that the same newspapers that stalked and smeared Colin Stagg for 14 years would not be at all happy with his £706,000 compensation award. Even I though didn't expect that both the Scum and the Mail would splash on it, each doing their very best to whip up faux-outrage in the way they have become so accustomed to doing. Not only did we get the £98,000 that was awarded to Nickell's son rolled out for comparison, but anyone and everyone who's received less of late has been brought up, or their families contacted for comment. Hence we have the Scum contacting the family of a woman murdered in the 7/7 attacks, who received only £11,000 in compensation, who declare that this makes the system a joke. The Sun being the Sun, "Our Boys" have to be brought into the equation, with the injured in action often receiving less than the maximum £285,000, although they also get a £20,000 annual pension. According to Phil Cooper, whose son received £57,000 after he lost the use of a leg and received severe injuries to his stomach, it's "a kick in the teeth." Danny Biddle, another 7/7 victim who lost both his legs, an eye and his spleen calls the system "disgraceful". The Mail even got the Tory MP Patrick Mercer to open his trap, commenting on both the "total imbalance" between the payout to Stagg and to Nickell's son, and then also onto our servicemen who are receiving nowhere near the same amount.

There is one comparison which neither of the tabloids make that other bloggers have however. Ben Collett, a promising Manchester United player, only a few days ago received a payout totalling £4.5 million in lost earnings after a high tackle broke his leg in two places and brought an end to his career. The one abiding message coming out of all of this is that the various compensation systems aren't fair or equal - hardly a newsflash. None of this is Stagg's fault. Indeed, that is the very reason why Stagg's payout deserved to be so high, if not higher. While everyone can sympathise with the victims of 7/7 who similarly were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's a little different to the case of soldiers, who know full well the risks when they join up. This by no means justifies either their lower payouts or their relatively low wages, but it's not comparing like with like. Stagg was picked out for his treatment by both the police and the media for no other reason than he was supposedly weird: meaning he was a loner, had a couple of books on the occult, some paper knives and an unusual decoration scheme. This was enough for the police to decide that he was a murderer. It was enough for the media to believe, or convince themselves enough to believe, that he was the murderer.

What directly lies behind today's phony apoplexy is that the newspapers themselves know that they're just as responsible for the payout as the Metropolitan police are. It's impossible to think that Lord Brennan wasn't in part influenced when deciding the amount by the media's continued obsession with either directly or indirectly accusing Stagg of being involved in Nickell's death. Their cover is to pretend that they themselves are wholly innocent of any wrong-doing, and so again claim to be on the people's side and for those others that have been compensated less well. Even now the Mail is continuing in just the same way as it has for the last 14 years: wilfully misquoting Stagg in the headline of its current article to give the impression that he is unfeeling towards fellow miscarriage of justice victim Barry George, when in he fact says he feels sorry for the time he spent in prison but less sympathy because of his past conviction for attempted rape and tendency to follow women. As Dave Osler also notes, it also gives the most perfunctory of explanations to what happened to Stagg: he was simply cleared of Nickell's murders, not wrongly accused or fitted up by the police, perish the thought.

The Sun kindly however provides a reminder of how it and the other tabloids covered Stagg's acquittal, putting up a scan of their front page the day after. NO GIRL IS SAFE, it shrieks, alongside a photograph of Stagg, with Rachel murderer will strike again underneath. The inference is all too clear: this man has got away with it, and he will kill again.

Perhaps realising that they can't go too over the top, the Scum's leader admits, probably for the first time in such language, how Stagg's life was ruined:

THERE is no doubt Colin Stagg’s life was ruined by Scotland Yard’s cynical fit-up.

He spent a year in jail on remand before the charges over Rachel Nickell’s murder were dropped.

He has since spent 15 years as a social pariah, unemployable, and with the stink of suspicion hanging over him despite his total innocence.


Could the stink of suspicion hanging over him in any way be attributable to the Sun? Obviously not, as even now neither it nor any of the other tabloids have offered apologies to Stagg for their low-level campaigns against him. Here comes the but that you were waiting for:

Even so, £706,000 is an enormous compensation payout.

Especially compared with the £90,000 given to Rachel’s son Alex, who saw his mum murdered and will spend a lifetime without her.

Or compared with the payouts to victims of terrorist atrocities.


How much does the Sun think an adequate award for spending 15 years as a social pariah is then? Considering the tidy sums which newspaper editors and their proprietors are paid and pay themselves, isn't £706,000 an about right sum for their own role in his misery?

Many will be asking today whether the enormous sums given out in miscarriage-of-justice cases should dwarf so spectacularly those for people left enduring a lifetime of physical and mental agony.

Does the Sun think that spending inordinate lengths of time in prison for a crime that they didn't commit doesn't often leave miscarriage of justice victims with a lifetime of mental, and in some cases physical agony, considering the treatment they receive inside? One judge notably described the process some have been subject to as "like a prolonged kidnapping". If anything, the majority of payments to the victims of miscarriages of justice are derisory and add to insult to injury when "room and board" payments are deducted from them, like in the case of the Hickeys.

The system is patently unfair.

As indeed is life, and the press in this country. The one bright spot is that so many in the comments on both the Mail and the Sun sites have defended the payout, often saying it isn't enough. The only thing that hasn't been stressed enough is the media's own role. To that, we should leave the last words to Emine Saner:

The compensation is only a part of making amends. Stagg deserves some very public apologies: from the police and others who were convinced Stagg was guilty. From defaming authors who have made money from him and from every person who has ever spat at him in the street or hurled abuse. And definitely from certain newspapers (it would be tempting to think the press had learned its lesson but the recent experience of Robert Murat shows that nothing has changed). Then, perhaps, at last Colin Stagg really can get on with his life.

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8/14/2008 08:29:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 

The Stagg hunt draws to a close.

It's difficult to think of someone more of a victim of the gutter press in this country than Colin Stagg. One other name does come to mind, but she used them as much as they used her. Here's a prediction: tomorrow the very same newspapers that stalked and hunted him for over a decade will be at the least less than happy with the £706,000 that Stagg through his solicitors has revealed he will receive in compensation for his treatment courtesy of the Metropolitan police. They will raise the amount which Rachel Nickell's son received, a derisory sum which could never even begin to account for how he was found, gripping his mother, covered in blood and begging her to get up. They will point out for a very long time indeed he was the only suspect; because the police themselves wanted him to remain the only suspect. Keith Pedder for one, the detective inspector in charge on the case, has written two self-affirming and congratulatory books on how Stagg had managed to get away with murder. It was only after a further investigation by a separate cold case team that another man, Robert Napper, a paranoid schizophrenic being held at Broadmoor indefinitely for two murders with similarities to the killing of Nickell that the police finally admitted to themselves that their hunt for Stagg had been futile.

Not that they have admitted publicly to that, or said the simplest words to Stagg personally that they got it wrong. Then again, why should they? After all, those other companions in the decade long stalking, baiting and smearing of Stagg, this country's finest tabloid newspapers, have never admitted they were wrong or said sorry either. Although almost of them were involved in pursuing him and ran articles calling either for the abolition of the laws on double jeopardy (which New Labour happily obliged in removing) or that implicated him in the murder if not directly accusing him, undoubtedly the most bile was delivered in the limp Sunday rag The People, which republished the letters which "Lizzie James", the Met's honeytrap exchanged with Stagg during the attempt to link him to the kind of bizarre sexual practices which the psychologist Paul Britton was convinced the perpetrator had. The Mail meanwhile, in the best practices which the newspaper retains for those that are accused of crimes, performed hatchet job after hatchet job, serialising Pedder's impotent book, and also ran an interview with Nickell's former boyfriend, who made a personal appeal for the double jeopardy law to be repealed. Their attitude towards Stagg could not be more summed up than by the words of John Junor, whom in an article purporting to ask the question whether Stagg would always be targeted as the killer who got away, wrote:

It would be terrible, however, to think that he is going to be hounded for the rest of his life for having been found not guilty of murder when it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was indeed innocent.

How magnanimous and kind of both Junor and the Mail to admit that it was possible that Stagg was indeed innocent, despite his acquittal. The irony and amazing chutzpah of the Mail asking whether Stagg would remain to be stalked when it was the one leading the stalking, while also attempting to soften its line but failing miserably is something to behold.

Nick Cohen, writing in the Observer a couple of years back, linked the credulity and continuing belief that Stagg was guilty among the tabloid hacks to the influence of the police on them, to the closeness which gives them their stories, their exclusives, and the photographs of the suspects themselves either being brought in or when arrested. This is undoubtedly part of the reason, but I am far more cynical than Cohen. These reporters knew full well that Stagg was innocent, as did their editors. The best that can be said is that they convinced themselves in order to appraise their consciences of any guilt. This had to be done because there was no evidence whatsoever linking Stagg to Nickell except the Met's attempts to entrapment, which he even then rebuffed. No, these stories were not out of any public interest to ensure that the killer was brought to justice, they were because they knew they were what the public wants to read, that they want someone to blame when such horrible crimes are committed, even if the case is apparently unsolvable, and that most of all, they sold. Nickell's former boyfriend, already mentioned, noted this. His bitterness at being chased out of the country, forced to live in France to escape was more than palpable in his description of the hacks:

"Callous, mercenary and unfeeling scum ... you've got people on your doorstep every day, people following you around in cars taking pictures of you, people peeping over fences and Rachel's face appearing in the paper every day with any tenuous link ... it's one of those stories that's become part of British culture."

Quite so. Much is the same with any attractive woman or child that is tragically killed, murdered or abducted. Whether it be Nickell, Princess Diana, Sally Anne Bowman or Madeleine McCann, they stare out from the front pages, forever locked in their youthful beauty, demanding that something be done about their disappearance or deaths. They pretend that it's because they care, when in reality it's because of their own business models, the phoniness of providing a service while sucking the individual they've latched onto dry until they too can be dispensed with, when the trail finally dries up and everyone, except those being exploited, have moved on.

The police's insistence in having found the right person is the justification, not the reason why. We saw it again just a couple of weeks back with Barry George, where again hardly any journalists or anyone outside of the police really believed he was anywhere near capable of killing Jill Dando, let alone in the way in which she was assassinated. Yet they printed the police's self-serving, laughably weak attempts to still pretend that George was the murderer, even while they must surely have known it was not true. In Nickell's case, at least the police have now found a man who might well be her real murderer, while with Dando it seems incredibly unlikely that her killer will ever be brought to justice. The victims in both cases have been treated abominably, whether they be the relatives or those fitted up. And yet our supposed justice seeking media, which never lets up on the law and order agenda, defends and carries the squeals of innocence spoon-fed to them by their sources.

Stagg's award, despite its size, will never get him his life back. It seems doubtful, even now, that he'll find work, after being made unemployable because of his notoriety. There is however most certainly a case for the £706,000 not completely being stumped up by the taxpayer. No, the real damage was done not by the trial and the fit-up, but by the compliant media which demonised and destroyed day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year. It should be Associated Newspapers, the Mirror Group and News International that should be writing the cheques and stumping up at least half if not more of the money. The suffering they have caused and continue to cause to countless people through their complete lack of integrity and not knowing when enough is enough is such that it's time they were hit in the only place where it hurts: the pocket. Their power however protects them, and there is absolutely nothing it seems that we can do about it.

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8/13/2008 10:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, July 10, 2008 

A form of justice at last for Baha Mousa.

These are not just so-called injuries, these are the Sun's so-called injuries.

It's wonderful news that the family of Baha Mousa and 9 other innocent Iraqis who were viciously beaten and tortured by British soldiers are to be paid almost £3m in compensation.

More interesting though is how this news is going to be communicated to readers and others by certain media organisations that did their best to either ignore our personal Abu Ghraib shame or to play it down. As you might have known, the biggest, most unquestioning supporter of "Our Boys" was at the forefront of it. After all but one of the soldiers court martialled was cleared, a result of what the judge described as a complete closing of ranks, with the words "I don't remember" being used over 600 times by the various witnesses according to one of the lawyers involved, the Sun published this following leader comment:
COMMON sense prevailed when two British soldiers were cleared of abusing Iraqi prisoners.

Major Michael Peebles and Warrant Officer Mark Davies served with courage and bravery in the most difficult conditions.

This ludicrous show trial — which has already seen four other soldiers cleared on the judge’s orders — has been a waste of time and money.

These men risked their lives in Iraq but were repaid by being hung out to dry.

Every aspect of investigating so-called crimes within the military needs to be re-examined. Our servicemen and women deserve nothing less.

These "so-called crimes" have now been recognised by the Ministry of the Defence, but only after being forced into holding an independent inquiry by lawyers acting for the Iraqi men. The MoD, in the form of Colonel David Black, was also dismissive after the court-martial collapsed in such ignominy:

[Our Boys needed to be able to work] “without looking over their shoulders inhibited by the fear of such actions by over-zealous and remote officialdom”.

Such over-zealous and remote officialdom has now apologised "for the appalling treatment that you suffered at the hands of the British army. The appalling behaviour of British soldiers made us feel disgusted." Not so those within the army and the media however that did everything they possibly could to pretend that that such appalling treatment had either never taken place or had been the work of one lone soldier who bravely owned up to his part in beating Baha Mousa and two of the other men detained with him. Donald Payne's punishment for his role amounted to a year in prison, a discharge from the army, and the loss of his pension. No one else is now likely to charged or prosecuted in connection with the incident.

Comparisons will doubtless be drawn with the compensation payouts to those who have lost limbs and suffered other injuries while in service in both Iraq and Afghanistan, often derisory settlements which are an insult to their commitment and sacrifice, but they do know what the consequences of their decisions are when they join up. Baha Mousa and the other men were simply in the wrong place in the wrong time, and mistreated by soldiers that had not been trained properly and whom were under the impression that such techniques had been authorised. Whether they were or not is still open to question, but the payments to the men will help to close the chapter on what went wrong. The independent inquiry, which will hopefully get to the very bottom of what did, although putting too much faith in it would be unwise, should provide the lesson on how this is to be avoided in the future. Perhaps the real blame should however lie with the politicians that signed us up to the illegal, murderous folly of the war in the first place.

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7/10/2008 09:19:00 PM | | | links to this post

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