In These New Times

Cailean Bochanan

23rd December, 2010

The jury at the Tommy Sheridan case has duly delivered the expected verdict of guilty. Expected, that is to say, by those with some insight into British justice system and British society as a whole. However, this isn’t just another miscarriage of justice, as it clearly is on the basis of the case as reported through James Doleman’s blog, it is a show trial through which the British oligarchy has shown its power to put down whoever they wish regardless of the evidence or the facts of the case. In that sense its consequences are of the gravest possible nature for all of us who wish to free this country from the all enveloping tentacles of the financier/war interest.

It is strange to have to write an article on the basis of information provided by a blog: don’t we have a press, TV, media? Well, we may as well not, going by the coverage of this trial. It consisted of little more of soundbites, which certain witnesses seemed to be offering up in an obviously choreographed manner; there was no in depth coverage. The media offered impressions, mood music, suggestive little titbits, the kind of fare appropriate to a post-modern, dumbed-down, justice brought to your living room sort of show trial. Nothing to strain the critical faculties overmuch and certainly nothing to inform.

Still, the trial by media format seemed to have gone wrong,  the impressionism seemed to be going in  favour of Sheridan. This could only be explained by a continual series of reverses which was plaguing what was, on the evidence available to me, one of the most disastrous prosecution cases ever  launched.

The centrality of a dodgy looking bit of video with a voiceover destroyed any notion that the prosecution was coming with something new to the trial. If this is the best the intelligence services of the realm, now farmed out to News International apparently,  can muster then Sheridan is innocent of visiting a swingers club: in fact, he so innocent that he wouldn’t even know what a swingers club is. The rest of the trial was a disgraceful farrago of contradiction, lie and insinuation, an unstoppable fast-forward to fiasco. Against my better instincts, I even began to think Sheridan might win.

But it was too bad to be true. The trial raised a puzzling question which may in the end have clinched it in the jury room: why would so many people come forward to destroy themselves in the witness box? In other words, for Sheridan to be innocent there had to be, as he claimed, a conspiracy, but one which goes beyond even what he can imagine. For Sheridan to be innocent, this society has to be, not the cosy little island of democracy as we like to believe, not the fairy tale, but a benighted place controlled by dark hidden forces. The jury and most of the public prefer that not to be the reality and so can now sigh a collective sigh of relief safe in the knowledge that it is the evil one who has gone down. For me the evil is still very much at large and suddenly looms ever larger. Only truth can destroy it.