Conservative spokesman Dominic Grieve MP has delivered possibly the most shocking speech since Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
Today, at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham he said,
“…a Conservative government will change the regime that applies to the police under the Health and Safety at Work Act… health and safety legislation is the wrong way to scrutinise a counter-terrorism operation.”
Why, of all the possible examples of the Act’s application, did he refer to counter-terrorism?
There has only been one prominent occasion that the police have been ’scrutinised’ in terms of health and safety law in a counter-terrorism context, when the Police Service were prosecuted after shooting dead a completely innocent man, Jean Charles De Menezes, at Stockwell Tube Station in July 2005 on his way to work.
Is he seriously saying that prosecution was wrong and the shooting was defensible? Consider this:
1. The Crown Prosecution Service examined the evidence and concluded, with the advice of independent counsel, that the shooting was not reasonable.
2. A judge at the Old Bailey presided over the trial, which he could have stopped if he considered it unfair or an abuse of the court process.
3. The jury, representing the public, heard the evidence and concluded that the shooting was wrong.
4. The police did not appeal against the result of the trial.
He says it is a “wrong way” to deal with it. But he does not suggest any other way in which it should be done. That trial under Health and Safety legislation is the only way any justice was obtained for the dead man, his family, or the public who don’t public officers to act safely
The only possible implication of his remarks is that he considers juries (who represent the public) should have no say on the rights or wrongs of it if police shoot our fellow citizens.
Dominic Grieve is a clever enough man to know that what he said was populist clap-trap. But he should also know how dangerous what he was implying is. He should be ashamed.
