So it appears that the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, is going to be out on her ear, when her contract runs out in late 2018. She’s not being kept on and to my mind that’s a damn good thing too. I say this because it was under her watch at the Crown Prosecution Service that this government agency became much more politicised than it had been and should be. I’m not saying she’s a bad lawyer or a bad practical prosecutor, after all it was Ms Saunders who, as Sussex lead prosecutor, oversaw the prosecution and eventual conviction of the child killer Roy Whiting, the beast who murdered Sarah Payne in 2000.
Her legal skills are difficult to question but it is relentless politicisation of prosecutions, such as her promise to get more rape convictions and in the area of ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’, where this is most obvious. There must be suspicions that this expressed desire, communicated by Ms Saunders, may have contributed to the collapse of some high profile rape cases, where the police had allegedly withheld evidence that favoured the defendant. It is to be wondered whether Ms Saunder’s call for more rape convictions may have influenced certain police officers to cut corners in some rape cases when they should not have done. We probably will never know but this is a worrying possibility.
She was also in the public eye for negative reasons when she decided that allegations of sexual abuse against the late Lord Greville Janner, allegations which the Janner family strenuously deny, could not be tested in court due to Lord Janner’s dementia. This was a highly unpopular decision which was overturned on review and a trial of the facts was recommended on account of Lord Janner being unfit to plead, but all trial activities ceased on Lord Janner’s death. The behaviour of the CPS under Ms Saunders during this scandal made it look like the CPS was a bit shifty and gave the impression, whether false or real we may never know, that Lord Janner was being protected by the CPS. It’s never a good idea for any Crown servant to give the impression of impropriety, as she did in this case, even if there is none, as the impression of being bent can stick more surely than any vehement declaration of honesty or subsequent proof of honesty.
For my own part, my personal criticisms of Alison Saunders, and the CPS which she oversaw, relate to her pushing of the freedom destroying ‘hate speech’ laws and the widening scope for prosecution of these ‘offences’ under sometimes very vaguely drafted legislation. Under Ms Saunders we found ourselves in the ludicrous situation where an individual’s mere perception of a word or a phrase as ‘offensive’ could see the person who has uttered it brought before the courts and possibly imprisoned. For Ms Saunders ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ were offences for which no solid evidence was needed before prosecution, apart from the alleged ‘victim’s’ or third party’s own individual perception, something that may be wrong, mistaken or just plain dishonest.
The Crown Prosecution Service under the stewardship of Ms Saunders seems have become, at least to the outside observer, a diversity obsessed clown-car of a department. Apart from the ever increasing number of ‘hate speech’ prosecutions under her watch, which are more often than not aimed at those who oppose Islam or who state biological facts such as ‘there are only two genders’, she has also allowed certain questionable axe-grinders to gain access to and influence over certain areas of the work of the Crown Prosecution Service. I speak here particularly of the Tell Mama ‘Islamophobia’ monitoring group and its founder Fiyaz Mughal.
This group has allegedly been allowed, via Fiyaz Mughal, an enormous amount of influence in CPS circles, influence they should not have had, bearing in mind the significant amount of evidence circulating around for years that Tell Mama had played fast and loose with the truth when it came to figures relating to ‘Islamophobic attacks’. Fiyaz Mughal, as an adviser to the CPS on ‘Islamophobia’, seems to have been a significant player in deciding how the CPS prosecutes cases where Muslims or Islam are claimed to be ‘insulted’. It is suspected, and alleged by a few people of my acquaintance, that it was this close relationship between Tell Mama, Fiyaz Mughal and the Crown Prosecution Service which was was behind the decision a year or so back to prosecute the counterjihad writer Tim Burton, then of the, now defunct, Liberty GB political party.
Mr Burton was prosecuted for sending to Fiyaz Mughal a joke job application and couple of not exactly threatening equally jokey emails, one of which included links to an articles on this site, such as one calling Mughal a ‘poltroon‘. Fiyaz Mughal had also alleged to the court that it was religiously insulting to a non-practising Muslim such as himself to be referred to as a ‘mendacious grievance mongering taqiyya artist’. Mr Burton was charged and convicted of ‘religiously aggravated hatred’ and gaoled for twelve weeks. Contemporaneous reports of this trial can be found here, here, here, and here.
Alison Saunders presided over a Crown Prosecution Service that is giving the distinct impression that they are not prosecuting offences impartially and which is all too willing to listen to whatever minority group shroud-waves in front of it. It appears to be the case that in the land which Alison Saunders inhabits, the one-eyed transsexual black Muslim lesbian is king and everyone else can go screw themselves. Her diversity-obsessed department has gone on a wild goose chase after speech offenders, for things that have been said on social media, whilst real crimes, crimes that really do negatively impact communities, are brushed under the carpet, not prosecuted, or not prosecuted properly or even allowed to be handled by incompetent CPS lawyers.
It was under the reign of Alison Saunders that we saw the CPS, rather than being an impartial prosecution agency, start to get into the social engineering business and because of that justice itself has suffered. The blunt and vague instrument of ‘hate speech’ law has been used a number of times by the CPS under Ms Saunders to crack down on and intimidate those who have genuine and well founded problems with the ideology of Islam. But she used these laws much less than they might have been used or could have been used, to tackle Islamic preachers who call for genocide. Alison Saunders presided over a department that significantly restricted the freedom of all Britons to speak freely, helped to ensconce the idea of ‘no evidence required’ for ‘hate crimes’ and invited a whole bunch of grievance-mongers and minority shroud-wavers to influence prosecution policy. Alison Saunders should feel some sense of shame for what has occurred under her stewardship of the CPS. Quite frankly she seems to have left the CPS in a worse condition than that in which she found it. However I suppose any sense of shame she might feel at the mess she is leaving behind may well be cushioned somewhat by the alleged £1 million retirement package she is said to be getting from the Government and her new, presumably very well remunerated position at the big law firm Linklaters.
I would hope and pray that the next Director of Public Prosecutions will be the sort of person who will clean house at the CPS. There should be under a new DPP, a focus on honesty and clarity in prosecution decision making, less emphasis put on restricting people’s free speech and an end to the use of the CPS as an instrument of social engineering. There is also an urgent need for the removal of groups like Tell Mama, along with those associated with them, and similar groups and individuals, from any positions of undue influence on the prosecution process or priorities. We need a clean Crown Prosecution Service managed by a clean hands senior lawyer. We certainly don’t need any more of the likes of Alison Saunders or her ‘diversity’ obsessions. I’d like to think that the next DPP will be a lot better than the current incumbent. However, I have a bad feeling that the recruiting and appointment process will impose on the CPS someone as equally odious as Ms Saunders, but that will be a person who can better keep their feet out of their mouth than Ms Saunders proved she could do.
Goodbye Alison Saunders, you really will not be missed.
