'Don't reign on my parade.........'

Yanks are camping out at Westminster Abbey to get a good view of the Big Day (as long as they don’t camp out at Westminster Cathedral instead). At the moment the rain appears to be holding off, an estimated 600,000 tourists have flocked into London alone, which should keep the cash tills ringing. The financial gurus reckon the Wedding is worth £1.2 billion to the economy. The unlikely figure of 2 billion TV viewers is being touted. There will be the usual suspects whingeing about ‘Who’s paying for all this?’ ; the Queen contributes more than four times the upkeep of the Crown through the revenues of the Crown Estates which are paid over to the Exchequer in return for the Civil List, but never let the facts get in the way of a good moan.

So may we now get back to reality?

The dreadful European Arrest Warrant is back in the news. Those blockheads who say ‘if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear’ should consider the case of Ian Bailey.

He is an eccentric English journalist living in a village in Ireland. He adopted an Irish name and is much given to going around reciting poetry. He might be thought fair game on all these counts.

Fourteen years ago he was arrested on a charge of murdering a French visitor outside her holiday cottage. The Director of Public Prosecutions fund that there was no credible evidence against him and he was released without trial.

Despite reports that the woman was found clutching hair, there was no forensic evidence – blood, DNA footprints – linking Bailey to the crime, but there was evidence that he was put in the frame by corrupt local police. The main witness issued no less than 8 contradictory statements and subsequently withdrew all of them. She said that she had been pressured and coached by the police. She said that she had seen a man near the cottage on the night in question who was around 5ft 8in and wearing a long dark coat. Bailey is a big man at 6ft 4in and does not have such a coat. But a man answering that description was traced to a guest house in Cork, with what outcome we are not told.

Enter the French.

Despite the absence of any credible evidence, they have issued an EAW for Bailey to stand trial in France. This has some absolutely fundamental implications.

Witnesses can’t be compelled to attend a French court, but the court can rely on witness statements, thus denying the accused the opportunity to cross-examine. And the effluxion of time means that memories will have faded and there will be problems tracing witnesses and experts. But there are wider issues.

If the warrant is granted, it opens the door for suspects to be repeatedly investigated and tried in another country with different rules and laws.

The EAW was intended to make it easy to detain fugitives from justice and return them to the country where the crime was committed. Bailey is not a fugitive; he co-operated fully with the police, including forensic samples. And the French are purporting to try a crime that was committed in another country, which begs the question of whether we are now seeing the extension of criminal jurisdiction against one of the basic precepts of international law. It would be possible to arrest a person who had never even visited the country of trial.

A further point is that I was under the impression that the EAW could only be invoked for crimes committed after its introduction (I recall that there was a Polish case thrown out because it related to war crimes from WW2).

The Brits contribute £9 billion a year to be ruled from Brussels and get this kind of oppression. And nobody gives a flying &*?!.

But it’s not all bad. The Economist Intelligence Unit gives the euro a 15% chance of going tits-up – quite short odds.

And what have Dave Snooty and his fag Nick Clanger done to date to rollback the Orwellian state created by Blair? What have they done about civil liberties? Nothing. Zero. Zilch . Bugger-all. Perhaps this is shortage of Parliamentary time when the Government is having to engage with such pressing topics as the rule of primogeniture and the Royal Succession, since a decision will be needed in as little as 50 years time. Of course, this could be a little tricky as it would need the concurrence of 15 other countries of which Her Maj is also Queen plus the disestablishment of the Church of England.