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What happens when juries stop thinking and start feeling
The jury system may be one of the few remaining jewels in the battered old British crown, and a light unto the nations, but I am beginning to feel a sneaking sympathy with the Home Secretary's sinister designs on it. This feeling was brought about by the contemplation of the smiling face of Lord Melchett, after his victory at Norfolk Crown Court on Wednesday, where a jury had just found him and 27 other Greenpeace demonstrators not guilty of criminal damage on a Norfolk farm, even though they admitted making a dawn raid on the land of the Brigham brothers and destroying their GM trial crops.
Of course the demonstrators were guilty. We could all see for ourselves that they were, since they were much photographed at the time, wearing extremely silly white overalls, carrying strange checked bags and systematically doing their rather feeble worst in a field of maize. Apparently, Lord Melchett had some difficulty setting up the cutting machinery he had brought and, before they could complete the damage, the angry farmers were upon them.
What can this jury have thought it was doing? My own view is that the jurors weren't so much thinking as feeling, in the modern manner. In the contemporary sentimentalisation of culture, feeling counts for far more than argument or thought. Besides, careful analysis is time-consuming and difficult, while there is something very feely-touchy about those swashbuckling, high-minded eco-warriors and about greenery generally - so much nicer than those nasty rich farmers, craven government functionaries and international agribusiness moguls, with their scary GM "Frankenstein food". How much more agreeable to see oneself as a latter-day Robin Hood or Maid Marian, helping to keep Sherwood Forest green.
By a curious coincidence, on the same day at the crown court in Manchester, a jury was unable to reach a verdict on the case of two nuclear disarmament protesters who were accused of damaging a Trident submarine. Two enterprising young women from London, armed with spray cans and a lump hammer, went to Barrow in Furness, put on wet suits and, under cover of darkness, swam 150 yards in the murky waters of Barrow dock - where, as they admit, they attacked a submarine.
These marine Maid Marians spray-painted "Death Machine" and "Illegal" on its side and smashed equipment worth thousands of pounds with the lump hammer. They claimed their actions were justified. The jury found them not guilty of criminal damage in spray-painting the slogans, but was unable to reach a verdict on the charge of criminal damage with the hammer and has been discharged. What can this jury have thought - or felt - it was about?
Direct action, based on popular feeling, is back in fashion. It is a powerful weapon, cheap, easy to use and extremely effective. Unfortunately, though, it has all the characteristics of the boomerang; unless used with great skill, it is highly likely to come back and hit you in the face. If it is permissible for you to trample over my land or my work or my Trident, just because you feel it is right, then it is permissible for me to do the same to you.
And who are you to tell me I did not sincerely feel it right to do so? If a jury is swayed not by the letter and the spirit of the law, but by its own feelings, how can anyone look to it for impartial justice?
Judgment reached by feelings alone is the judgment of the lynch mob, and one might as well cut out the middleman in the form of the judiciary and go straight to the kangaroo court.
It is an awkward fact, for those of democratic convictions, that our jury system is not entirely satisfactory. Some arguments in court are extremely difficult to grasp, and jurors are not getting any better educated, to put it mildly. The arguments surrounding GM crops, for instance, are genuinely difficult to follow. So, too, is the concept of risk itself; we live in a risk-averse culture, where any degree of peril is felt to be unacceptable.
It takes thought, rather than feeling, to understand what biotechnology may have to offer, or what its risks amount to. It also takes knowledge. A huge spectrum of eminent and disinterested scientists think Lord Melchett and Greenpeace are entirely wrong about GM crops; they believe that the risks of outdoor trials are no different from the risks involved in similar trials with traditionally modified crops - hence the licensed trials in Britain. That is also the view of the US government's Smith report, published earlier this year, which goes much further in its all-embracing endorsement of GM technology, after years of trials.
The tragedy is that GM crops could actually create a truly green revolution. They could make worldwide organic farming possible, by eliminating the need for chemicals, but eco-warriors such as Greenpeace are making it quite impossible for people to entertain the idea, even for a second. The difficulty is that a loss of critical thought has gone along with a loss of respect. Every major institution in this country has been undermined by cynicism, and with reason.
After the BSE crisis, and this spring's fiasco with rogue GM seed, not to mention the agricultural uprising over fuel, few people will trust a British government on farming, still less an American one on agribusiness. Many scientists are disinterested, but many are not. It is worth pointing out that Greenpeace itself has been caught out in dishonesty, in its misleading campaign about the Brent Spar oil rig. Future juries please note; what is wromantic is often wrong.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, September 23, 2000 | Comments (0)
The great petrol revolt that has made Americans of us all
What we have been seeing, in this past astonishing week, has been more than a fuel emergency or a tax revolt; we have also been watching the convolutions of national identity crisis.
We have suddenly all been forced to wake up and see ourselves and each other rather differently, and to discover that we are not what we thought; a sense of confusion and change seems to be emerging.
To start at the top: the Prime Minister has certainly had a rude awakening. Suddenly, taken completely by surprise this week, he can no longer see himself as the People's Premier, with his finger instinctively pressed to the popular pulse; he must now see that he has lost his touch. He is out of touch.
Tony Blair may not yet have lost much in the polls, but he must have lost confidence in himself, and other people in him. Nor can he any longer see the People as a great mass of supporters and fellow travellers who were broadly on-message, for almost everybody in the country - more than 90 per cent of us - was entirely off-message this past week, and deeply cynical about the message, too. He has been revealed, at last, as a very curious specimen, a populist who does not like or even understand the people.
However, the Prime Minister has not been alone. Many of the rest of us must have been forced to see ourselves quite differently, and others too. Funniest of all, to me, has been the spectacle of Guardian columnists and Labour Cabinet ministers and all the united forces of Blairism, holding forth against the evils of direct action, and for the urgent necessity of respecting the Government of the day at all costs, and above all of sticking to due democratic process.
Yet these are the people who were the impassioned political activists and demonstrators of the 1960s and 1970s, who so ardently supported the miners' strike, union intimidation, flying pickets and all the rest.
One can only laugh. Now that they are in government, they find themselves sounding exactly like the wicked old Conservatives of yesteryear and, if they have the slightest shred of self-awareness, they must now be forced to notice that the faces they see in their bathroom mirrors every morning have changed, changed terribly. This must be very awkward for their followers as well as for them. New Labour, new identity, new identity crisis; it was bound to happen, sooner or later.
Conservatives, however, cannot afford to be smug; nor can anyone, of any political persuasion, who has in the past opposed direct action - or holding the country to ransom, as we used to call it.
We all seem to have changed terribly, too, since very nearly all of us, if the polls can be believed, wholeheartedly supported the hauliers in holding the country to ransom; I was very confused to find myself entirely on their side, even when it caused me some serious family difficulties.
In a comical and unlikely alliance across all sections of society, against the lawful fiscal decisions of the elected Government, we have discovered that we are all Poujadists now, and not what we thought at all. We have somehow, against tradition and against our usual prejudices (loudly voiced during the French lorry drivers' strike), decided to imitate the French; it was not lost on Middle England that direct action bullying actually works.
Can we be becoming more European? But William Hague could not publicly align himself with us Poujadists or with a promise to reduce taxes; this wonderful political opportunity was lost to him because the Conservative Party is not supposed to be like that these days. There is some sort of Middle England identity crisis going on here as well.
So who are we? Where are we going? These of course were the questions that the Government vaingloriously said that the Millennium Dome was going to answer, but answer, so far, has come there none, except that we are about pounds 1 billion poorer.
But the events of this week have been suggestive. It seems that, whatever people may claim to feel about social justice, they are in fact getting very tired of paying big taxes and putting up with big government, for very little public service or none; what's more, they no longer believe that New Labour can use public money any better than anyone else.
The British generally may see themselves, broadly, as social democrats on the European model, or New Labour/Tory wets at heart, but actually they are deceiving themselves, or were until recently. Mr Blair may think that most British people have liberal, pale-green Islington responses like his, but he's deceiving himself, too. The New Labour experiment is coming to an end.
The British don't want to pay high taxes, not if schools and hospitals are still in crisis, and especially not if the car is attacked; the car is a powerful symbol of personal freedom. Last week's massive support for the hauliers was a revolt against excessive tax and government generally and in favour of personal freedom, including the freedom of the road, without much concern for the environment.
In this sense, it was an expression not of European sentiment, but rather of American sentiment. And in this sense, for better or for worse, I suspect that the way to look for a new political identity is not across the Channel, but across the Atlantic.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, September 16, 2000 | Comments (0)
