MAYBE the next time Boris Johnson and the obnoxious Priti Patel demonise “lefty lawyers” and “do-gooders” for upholding asylum seekers’ rights, they should remember what careless political rhetoric can lead to.
In January 1989 Home Office Minister Douglas Hogg told MPs there were some Northern Ireland lawyers who were “unduly sympathetic to the IRA”. Three weeks later solicitor Pat Finucane was murdered in front of his wife and three children by loyalists, who acted in collusion with British security forces.
A decade after that, solicitor Rosemary Nelson, who represented high-profile republicans, was murdered in a loyalist bomb attack. A subsequent inquiry said the RUC had failed to protect her, despite numerous death threats. She had also been publicly threatened and assaulted by officers, which helped legitimise her as a target.
Patel raged at the “activist” lawyers who she compared to people traffickers, for trying to defend asylum seekers against deportation orders. Johnson echoed her words when he blamed lawyers for hold-ups in the criminal-justice system, not long-term underfunding by successive governments.
This was classic dog-whistle cant to win applause from the anti-immigrant lobby within their party. But they are deliberately creating a dangerous culture – the same one that can lead to high court judges being branded “enemies of the people” in screaming headlines.
The Law Society has warned that such language not only undermines the rule of law, but it can lead to lawyers being physically attacked for doing their job. This we know.
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IT’S difficult to predict how the latest plot twist in Donald’s Adventures in Trumpland will turn out because everything about his presidency is without precedent.
Will he emerge, as his supporters fervently believe, as the superman who conquered Covid-19? Or will common sense prevail and voters will ask themselves how the White House, under doubting Don, became a superspreader venue for all those who believed the virus wouldn’t touch their unmasked gobs?
Will they ask why, when he was still infected, did he choose to be driven in an armour-plated, hermetically sealed, germ-mobile to wave at his deluded fans, like an erstwhile Typhoid Mary, unconcerned for the safety of those secret service agents forced to share the vehicle with him? Bullet proof, yes. Idiot proof, no.
The polls still point to a Biden victory, but faith in polls has declined considerably after so many notable fails in recent years.
The whole saga raises two questions for me: 1. How did Melania get it when she has been socially distancing from her husband for years? And 2. How come Trump started to look a normal colour when he was ill, instead of his customary orange? Was he maybe injecting bleach?
It’s ironic that someone who has also ranted against “socialised healthcare” was himself a beneficiary of completely state-funded care at the Walter Reed hospital which is 100 per cent government aided.
I wonder if the doctors treating him there were following the same script as the medic who gave Trump a clean bill of health ahead of the 2016 election. Not many people have had their blood pressure described as “astonishingly excellent” with “extraordinary” physical strength and stamina.
That doctor later revealed that Trump had dictated the letter himself. Maybe he also declared himself fit to return to the White House.
There was something about that line-up of men in white coats that made me think that in the country’s interest, they should’ve been there to take away the president, not let him loose again.
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I’VE been banging on about the need to change public spaces to cope with the distancing necessary for us to have some kind of social life in our new pandemic world. So I must give a shout out to a small step in the right direction with the creation of the Ormeau “parklet”.
This is the temporary transformation of a space, about the size of two parked cars, for cafes and restaurants to support physical distancing. It was a hit on the first sunny Friday evening, with tables and chairs from nearby eateries. But in the wet days that followed it was simply providing space for an upmarket breadline… the queue for sourdough from the local posho bakery.
I wondered on Twitter if the Parklet couldn’t include a pergola or two to provide shelter from the inevitable rain. But apparently anything that is over one metre and isn’t temporary needs planning permission so they’re looking at the possibility of umbrellas.
So this is where civic imagination needs help from civic power. There should be a short-cut planning process to aid this sort of initiative. This virus isn’t going away anytime soon, so we need to find ways to live with it and that means loosening red tape. Pronto.
