Motor Racing And Gallery Motor

This piece of mine appears in the First Post.

Neil Clark: The egotistic culture of free market capitalism is to blame.

It's tempting to see Derrick Bird’s killing spree in Cumbria as 'just one of those things' - a freak, isolated event that has no real sociological cause. It's certainly a line taken by right-wing media commentators. "Terrible deeds like this happen every so often. Nothing could have been done to prevent it, little can be done to explain it," opines political blogger Iain Dale.

In fact, much can be done to explain it.

US-style killing sprees are a relatively recent phenomenon in Britain, occurring for the first time in Hungerford, Berkshire in 1987. We didn't have such occurrences in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, or 70s - and many countries in the world still don't experience such events. So where have we gone wrong?

The answer is that we've Americanised our economy, and consequently are paying a very high social cost.

You can read the whole article here:

0 comments

This piece of mine appears in the First Post.

Back in the early 1990s, ITV filmed its detective series Maigret not in Paris, where George Simenon's famous novels are set, but in Budapest, regarded as a dead ringer for 1950s Paris and a place where production costs were much lower. It's a shame the pipe-smoking inspector is no longer walking the streets of the Hungarian capital, as his skills might have been of great help in solving a baffling murder case that has led to speculation from the US to the Middle East.

On Wednesday March 17, just after seven in the morning, Dr Bassam Trache, a 52-year-old veterinary surgeon with dual Syrian and Hungarian citizenship, was shot dead in his black Mercedes at a junction in Budapest's 16th district. The killer grabbed a black briefcase from the car and made off on foot.

Dr Trache, it was revealed, operated a money-changing business. A few years ago he was acquitted in court of attempting to bribe - with jewellery and Arab cakes - the head of the Budapest police's money-changing investigation division.

At first, his murder was regarded as yet another killing connected with the shady world of money-changing; in the past ten years, there have been no fewer than 123 murders connected with the business in Budapest.

But then a more fantastic theory to explain Dr Trache's murder emerged.

It transpired that on the very day that Trache was killed, two Israeli Gulfstream V-type jets were spotted flying low over the Hungarian capital, leading to speculation that, just two months after the assassination in Dubai of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Syrian might have been the victim of a Mossad hit.

You can read the rest of the article here.

0 comments

The Oldham Chronicle reports:

A MURDERESS who killed a frail Failsworth pensioner, bundled her body in a wheelie bin and dumped it in the canal and then became pregnant while a prisoner, is to be given a taxpayer-funded change of identity.

Healey was convicted with fellow schoolgirl Sarah Davey, then 14, of beating and gagging Mrs Lilley before bundling her body into a wheelie bin and dumping it in the Rochdale Canal.

They had gagged her so hard she swallowed her false teeth and the judge, Mr Justice Sachs, described it as “unspeakable cruelty.”

Healey, who is serving her sentence at Askham Grange open prison in York, became pregnant after meeting Doncaster prisoner Michael Dent at a “Service User Forum” and then regularly checked in with him at the Ibis Hotel, York, while on day release.


For that quite horrendous crime, the murderess, Lisa Healey, received just 11 years in prison. The case is enough to make any decent-minded person angry at Britain's criminal justice system- one which puts such a low value on human life and which allows convicted murderers to become pregnant while they are prisoners.

Our good friend The Exile is even more angry. Because Lily Lilley, the murdered pensioner, was his auntie. He's blogged about how he feels here, here and here.

Just ask yourself how you would feel if a murderer of a member of your family was treated so leniently by the authorities. The very essence of justice is that the punishment should fit the crime. 11 years for taking another human being's life? That's taking the mickey. As is expecting the taxpayer to fund a change of the murderer's identity.

0 comments

At last, the British government has shown some compassion and released the dying former train robber Ronnie Biggs.

But some people aren't happy.

I remember watching Question Time a few weeks back and seeing the politician Iain Duncan-Smith oppose the release of Biggs. Biggs was a serious criminal, the law should be obeyed, people should always serve their sentence etc, etc, he went on. I wonder if this was the same 'IDS' who was an enthusiastic supporter of the illegal Iraq war- which has been responsible for the deaths of up to 1m people? The Nuremburg judgement held that "to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime" - but it was a crime that IDS supported.

So too Simon Heffer.

In today’s DT Heffer expresses indignation that Biggs has been released.

His release ‘exemplifies the moral destitution of our society’

The best comments under his obnoxious piece come from
'Christine M'
I think its heartless to complain about a dying man being given freedom. The right thing has happened. What does it show about our country if we cannot show compassion? we should be proud of the fact.

And 'Noodles':
How sad and twisted Simon Heffer is. For years he has bleated on from an elevated, privileged position and always with an indignant, self righteous tone
Heffer …continues to be a part of the establishment whose arrogance knows no bounds and has little or no time for compassion,instead preferring to take these so called ' higher moral ground ' and completely missing the humanitarian aspects of the case.

The morality of 'IDS' and Heffer is simple. A man who takes part in a robbery is more of a criminal than someone who launches an illegal war against a sovereign state which causes enormous loss of life.

The fact that people who hold such views are still prominent in our public life ‘exemplifies the moral destitution of our society’, far more than the release of an 80-year old man dying from pneumonia.

0 comments

Last week Jamaica voted to end its 20-year moratorium on capital punishment. Here's my piece from The Daily Express on why the Caribbean island is ignoring the opinions of the EU and human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, to bring back hanging. It's quite a long article so I'll be posting it in two halves- part two to follow shortly.


With its idyllic scenery, golden sandy beaches and lush vegetation, Jamaica is unquestionably one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

But sadly, it is also one of the most violent. Last year there 1,400 murders on the Caribbean island, a staggering total for a country of just 2.8 million people. This year the number of killings has already passed 1,240. Jamaica has over 60 homicides a year for every 100,000 citizens, that's almost thirty times higher than Britain.

Faced with rising public concern, the Jamaican Parliament this week voted by 34 votes to 15 to end the 20-year moratorium on the death penalty. The measure was backed by Jamaica’s governing Labour party, which despite its name, is the country’s main conservative party, with Prime Minister Bruce Golding promising to resume executions.

“I wasn't for the death penalty, but since the Ananda Dean incident, I am for it," said Labour MP Karl Samuda in the debate during this week’s vote. He was referring to the abduction and murder of an 11 year schoolgirl in September- a crime which shocked a nation which thought it was beyond being shocked. Little Ananda had last been seeing getting on a bus to go to school- almost two weeks later her naked and headless body was found buried by the roadside in a wooden box.

Her murder was only one in a series of horrific crimes involving children to have taken place in Jamaica this year.

In September the dismembered body of 11-year-old Aakim Scott- who had gone missing from his home, was found in a rubbish bag. In May, gunmen shot two teen sisters dead in their Kingston home, on the eve of their father’s birthday. While earlier this month, 13 year-old Christopher Suckra, was found naked with his head bashed in after not returning home from school.

Violent crime has so blighted Jamaica that even long-standing opponents of capital punishment in Jamaica, such as its leading clergymen, have called for its reintroduction.

"There is need for some tough decisions and people will grumble and cry. But we'll have to make (those) decisions if we're going to have change in our land," said Bishop Ronald Blair, only a few days after a man attempted to behead a pastor with a machete, while he was preaching in the pulpit.

But Jamaica’s decision to bring back the ultimate deterrent looks set to put it on a collision course with western human rights groups- and the European Union, which may impose sanctions. Last month, Benita Ferroro-Waldner, the EU’s Commissioner for External Affairs, condemned the death penalty saying it “serves to aggravate a culture of violence and retribution”. She stressed that the EU- which prohibits the use of the death penalty in member states- was “determined to work towards the universal abolition of the death penalty through all available diplomatic channels”. The EU has openly sided with the anti-death penalty campaigners in Jamaica, giving a grant of 320,000 euros to a Jamaican human rights group opposed to the reinstatement of capital punishment.

Britain too, is not likely to be pleased with the decision taken by its former colony and current Commonwealth member. There are likely to be appeals by lawyers representing prisoners currently on ‘death row’ to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a body which though it sits in England and consists of British judges is still Jamaica’s highest court. The 1993 ‘Pratt & Morgan’ ruling by the Committee mandated that the sentences of inmates on death row for more than five years be commuted to life imprisonment.

Meanwhile Amnesty International, the human rights group which campaigns for a worldwide moratorium on capital punishment, has called for Jamaica to reject the death penalty and claims that “a return to hanging will not solve the public security crisis”.

None of these arguments are however, likely to hold much sway with the Jamaican public who, if opinion polls are to be believed, strongly support the government’s move to resume capital punishment. In fact, there is resentment in the country that outsiders are seeking to influence Jamaica’s right to decide its own laws.

Jamaica’s problem with violent crime is a comparatively recent phenomenon. For most of the 20th century, the country was renowned for being a safe, law-abiding place- as late as 1965 the island’s homicide rate was only 3.7 per 100,000 people, nearly twenty times lower than today. Wealthy Britons such as the playwright Noel Coward and James Bond creator Ian Fleming, made the tranquil tropical island their home.

The rapid rise in violent crime in recent years has been described by Jamaican writer Kevin Chang as “maybe the greatest explosion of civil violence any nation without significant ethnic, tribal, linguistic, ideological or religious differences has ever experienced“.

In the 1970s the island began to be plagued with political violence- carried out by gangs linked to the countries two main parties. The violence reached a peak in the run up to the 1980 general election, in which around 800 people were killed.

Over the last decade, the level of non-political violent crime has soared. The numbers are truly mind-boggling. 1,100 people were murdered on the island in 2001- a 30% increase on the previous year and the highest rise ever in one year.
In 2004 the number of murders rose to 1,471, a year later it was up again to a new peak of almost 1,700.

0 comments

What do you call someone who spends hours and hours maliciously editing the wikipedia page of a journalist he doesn’t like (including at Christmas) and then sends the journalist in question six aggressive, abusive emails in a short period of time on one Saturday afternoon and then twelve the following night?

Well he goes by the moniker of ‘philip cross’ and he doesn’t like me very much at all (although he does seem to like a certain former hedge fund manager called Oliver Kamm very much).

'Philip' is also a very big fan of Henry Jacksonsite MP Denis McShane as you can see from his editing of McShane's wikipedia page. He's even edited the page of McShane's former wife, the late Carol Barnes. In fact so incensed was 'Philip' when I referred to McShane by his original name 'Denis Matyjaszek' that he darted over to my wikipedia page to insert the maiden name of my wife, failing to see the difference between a woman who takes her husband's surname on marriage, with a careerist politician who hypocritically berates the British for not being 'pro-European' enough, while changing his original Polish surname.

You can read some of 'philip cross’ contributions in the comments section of this thread: the idea that neocon columnists might become rarer in newspapers in the year ahead due to readers having had enough of reading their lies, really seemed to inflame him.

'philip cross' didn’t much like being called a ’sad little idiot’ and a ’sad little fxxxxx’ by other commenters so he took out his frustration by returning to my wikipedia page last night to make another edit. (strange how some people get their kicks, isn't it?)

That’s despite having already been warned by a senior wikipedia editor to stay clear of my page.

Actually, 'wally' is far too polite a term for ‘philip cross‘. ‘Pathological obsessive’ is far more accurate. Despite the warnings he's received 'philip' simply can't leave me alone. But as you’ll see from his other edits- this particular pathological obsessive is- however cranky he appears - following a very clear political agenda.

You can read more on philip cross' extraordinary obsessions here and here.

0 comments

This article of mine, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of the great crime writer Cyril Hare (the pseudonym of Judge Alfred Gordon Clark), appears in The Spectator. If there are any other fans of Cyril Hare out there, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

"The best detective story that has appeared for some time and at the end of the year will undoubtedly stand as one of the class leaders in the English school" was how The Spectator described Cyril Hare’s Tragedy at Law, when it first appeared in 1942. ‘A detective masterpiece’ was the New Statesman’s verdict. Others were even more generous in their praise: the crime writer and critic, Julian Symons, included the book in his survey of ‘best, anywhere, ever’.

Tragedy at Law is a detective story like no other. There can’t be any other murder mystery in which the killer strikes so late — on the 221st page out of 252. In fact, to label Tragedy at Law a ‘detective story’ does it an injustice. It’s a wonderfully well-crafted and brilliantly characterised novel which just happens to have a crime in it. Agatha Christie presents great puzzles, but if you don’t like puzzle-solving, her books have relatively little to offer. Hare’s work, by contrast, while featuring ingenious mysteries, can be read even by those who don’t particularly care for the genre: even if Judge Barber didn’t get stabbed to death outside the Old Bailey in chapter 21, Tragedy at Law would still be a cracking read.

The book is set in that strange, twilight world of the autumn of 1939 — a world of blackouts but no bombs — and portrays in great detail wartime life on the Southern Circuit, with its curtailed pomp and ceremony, but far from curtailed rivalries and jealousies.

It was a world that Hare — or rather Alfred Gordon Clark — knew well. Clark was born into a family with strong legal traditions and after schooldays at Rugby (where he said he was ‘starved of food and crammed with learning’) and three years at Oxford (where he obtained a first in History), he made a beeline for the Bar. He learned that his first novel, Tenant for Death had been accepted while on his feet defending a larcenist at Maidstone Assizes. Living in Cyril Mansions in Battersea, and working from Hare Court, Inner Temple, gave Clark the idea for his pseudonym.

Hare, the crime writer, certainly put his day job to good use. During the war he worked as a Judge’s Marshal —- providing the inspiration for Tragedy at Law. A short spell at the Ministry of Economic Warfare spawned the wonderfully atmospheric With a Bare Bodkin. Returning to the Bar after the war, Hare reached the pinnacle of his legal career in 1950 when he became a County Court judge.

While points of law play a large part in Hare’s books, you don’t have to be an LLB to derive great enjoyment from them. Hare is no show-off, boasting of his superior legal knowledge; his style is easy and fluent, and his books are eminently readable.
Four of Hare’s nine novels feature the far from successful, but extremely likeable, defence barrister, Francis Pettigrew. When we first encounter Pettigrew in Tragedy at Law he is leaning back in counsel’s seats in the Shire Hall at Markhampton and reflecting on how little he has achieved.

Looking back at the confident — and he could fairly say it now — brilliant young man who had opened his career at the Bar beneath that self-same flaking plaster ceiling, he fell to wondering what had gone wrong with him. Everything had promised well at first, and everything had turned out ill.... Some time he was going to be successful and make money. Some time he would take silk, become a Bencher of his Inn. Some time he would marry and have a family. And now in a sudden rush of disillusionment, from which he strove to exclude self-pity, he saw quite clearly that ‘some time’ had become ‘never’.

The transformation of Pettigrew from down-on-his luck Circuit barrister, staying in budget hotels and wearing shabby overcoats, into a fulfilled and happily married man, is one of the delights of the Hare canon.

Hare wasn’t only a great novelist; he was a master of the short story. Some of his short stories are very short indeed: in ‘The Rivals’ he manages to construct an intriguing whodunit in a little over 1,000 words.

In his introduction to a collection of Hare’s best short stories, Michael Gilbert recalls his first encounter with the great man at London’s Detection Club. Hare appeared to come

straight from the pages of the Strand magazine and Paget’s illustrations of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The thin, inquisitive nose, the intellectual forehead, the piercing eye, the Oxford common room voice.

Although the description implies a certain austerity, there was nothing chilly about Hare or his writing. He was a kindly and compassionate observer of human failings his work is full of humorous insights and devoid of the snobbery which mars much of the detective fiction of the ‘golden age’. Sadly, Hare was cut off in his prime, dying suddenly at the age of 57, exactly 50 years ago this week.

While his books have regularly been republished, most recently by House of Stratus at the turn of the decade, the great mystery is that, save for a 1975 Soviet film version of An English Murder, there have been no television or film adaptations of his work. Dramatisation of his novels would, I’m sure, make for wonderful Sunday night viewing. Half a century on from Hare’s untimely death, what better way could there be to bring the work of one of Britain’s finest writers to the attention of a wider audience?

0 comments

This article of mine appears on The Guardian's Comment is Free website. Since it was published yet another teenager has been stabbed to death in London.

Denying that violent crime is on the increase (and that it's all been hyped up by the Daily Mail) is a regular theme of Polly Toynbee's Guardian columns.
But even Toynbee has been massively outflanked in the "Crisis, what crisis?" stakes in recent days.

On Friday, in his Cif article entitled What knife-crime epidemic?, Sunny Hundal called for a "sense of perspective" on the knife crime issue and claimed that "the figures don't actually bear out the reality of a crisis". At the time his piece was published, there had already been 19 teenagers stabbed to death in London this calendar year. And in the 32-hour period following its publication, no less than seven people lost their lives in stabbings in Britain.

New figures show that almost 60 people are stabbed or mugged at knifepoint every day. If such shocking statistics don't constitute a "crisis" for Hundal, perhaps he could kindly inform us as to what level of knife crime in Britain would?

By denying the scale of the problem, and pretending that rising violent crime is an invention of rightwing tabloids, the liberal-left are, in effect, defending a society that is far from being a progressive, leftist model.

We live in what is easily the most ruthless capitalist society in Europe. Our European neighbours still have areas where capital is not allowed to go: here, almost every aspect of our lives is governed by market forces. The postwar Labour chancellor of the exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps, who once said that "inducements of a material kind can never and will never replace the spiritual urge which transcends our own personal interests", would turn over in his grave if he could see just how selfish and materialistic our society has become.

The rampant, me-first individualism – the seeds of which were sown in the 1960s, and which came to fruition with the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s, have exacted a heavy cost on our collective wellbeing. We have the highest level of drug use and the second highest level of drug deaths in Europe. Over 2 million Britons are on anti-depressants. The Samaritans report that 5 million people in Britain are "extremely stressed", while last year, a Unicef report listed Britain's brands-obsessed children as the unhappiest in Europe. "We live in a greedy culture, we are rude to each other in the street," headteacher Sir Alan Steer told the Guardian last week, making the connection between the economic system we live under and the deterioration in standards of behaviour. Within a generation, our towns and cities have been transformed into violent and dangerous places: according to the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS), Britain comes second in the league table of 28 rich countries, whose citizens were asked if they have been attacked or threatened in the past five years.

You would have thought the liberal-left would be attacking – and not defending such an atomised and dysfunctional society.

But the fact that privatised, New Labour Britain, with its yawning wealth gap and price tag on every human value, is also a multiracial society which allows gay people to enter into civil partnerships, seems to be enough for some on the liberal-left to rally behind it.

In truth, the Britain of the 1940s and 50s, with its high level of state involvement in the economy, its staunchly progressive taxation system and its strong sense of community had far more to commend it from a leftist viewpoint than the Britain of 2008. And the greater social cohesion of the times, undoubtedly impacted on the crime rate.

What would the Metropolitan police do now to have to deal with only 28 armed robberies in one year – the total in 1949? How much would today's parents give to be able to bring up their children in a country where teenagers didn't carry knives and in which the word "mugging" was unheard of? A society in which people regularly left their houses unlocked and walked the streets without fear of attack?

In 1956 there were only 32 convictions for murder in the whole of Britain – in 2007/8 there were 167 murders in the Metropolitan police area alone.

A time-traveller from 1950s Britain would be astonished at the level of violent crime in the country today.

And having digested the daily diet of news of fatal stabbings and horrific murders, they'd be equally astonished at the complacency of those on the liberal-left who go around muttering "Crisis – what crisis?"

0 comments

Breaking news. The Guardian reports:

Four men have been stabbed to death across London in 24 hours, one of them a 19-year-old who became the 20th teenager to die in a violent attack in the capital this year.

All the latest casualties died within a two-mile radius of each other in unrelated incidents.

In a disturbing spate of violence, the 19-year-old died yesterday after being knifed in a confrontation in a bedsit in Edmonton, north-east London, at about 2.30pm.

Three hours later in nearby Leyton, a 20-year-old Asian man died from a stab wound to his chest after a confrontation with a gang following a car crash.

At about 8.30pm, a 22-year-old man was found with stab wounds to his head and chest in a street in Walthamstow, less than two miles away. He died an hour later.

Earlier, at 4am yesterday, the body of a man in his 40s was found with knife wounds behind a disused pub on Tottenham High Road.

What knife crime epidemic? asks uber-elite blogger Sunny Hundal, (above), the self-appointed leader of the 'liberal-left' blogosphere.



What knife crime epidemic indeed.

0 comments

From the Daily Mail:

The parents of a teenager killed by a speeding cyclist called for a change in the law after he walked away from court with just a £2,200 fine.
Jason Howard was convicted of dangerous cycling for killing Rhiannon Bennett as she walked to a shop with friends.
The two-day trial at Aylesbury Crown Court heard that as Howard, a line painter from Buckingham, sped towards Rhiannon on a quiet road near his home in April last year he shouted: 'Move, because I'm not stopping.'
Howard admitted he could have avoided Rhiannon if he had slowed right down.
Howard, who has a previous conviction and is well-known in his home town as a 'thrill-seeker', was also ordered to pay £750 in costs.

The parents of poor Rhiannon Bennett say the punishment handed down to her daughter’s killer was ‘laughable’.

I think the word I would have used was ‘obscene’.

How about you?

0 comments

Now there will be many readers of this blog who hold a principled opposition to capital punishment, and I have much respect for such views. But can anyone seriously explain why the devil/s responsible for this unbelievably horrific crime be kept alive, at enormous expense to the taxpayer?

0 comments