Spectator's Notebook
As I write, it's too soon to reach any precise conclusion about the escape from Dartmoor of Frank Samuel Mitchell, who reads like Stein- beck's Lennie to the life. But it's obvious that at least one major error of judgment was made, and whether or not Mitchell is quickly recaptured the Home Secretary has some awkward questions to answer. All the same, Tories thirsting for Mr Jenkins's blood (and there seem to be an increas- ing number of them—an inverted tribute to his successes so far, as is the unsuppressed jealousy of his colleagues) would, I suggest, perform a more useful service if they were to concentrate their fire on the Criminal Justice Bill now going through the House.
The major provision of this Bill, of course, is the notorious clause 10 which abolishes the need for juries to be unanimous. I advise anyone who feels that there may be something to be said for this drastic move to read Mr Jenkins's pathetically inadequate defence in this week's debate. This rested entirely on the need to prevent big-time criminals from escaping justice by bribini or in- timidating one or two jurymen. (This needs to be done twice, since it is only when there is an un- resolved jury disagreement at a retrial caused by a previous disagreement that the accused is allowed to go scot free.) Mr Jenkins at no time contested the widely held belief that insofar as this sort of corruption occurs at all on any significant scale it is con- fined to the Old Bailey. And the statistics at that Court—according to the Home Secretary, who failed to provide any other—are that last year 'double disagreements' occurred in nine cases— three-quarters of 1 per cent of the total number heard. Of this very small proportion a number must have been genuine disagreements where genuine doubt existed, while of the corrupt dis- agreements a further number would probably have been stopped had the sensible clause 11 of the new Bill, excluding people with criminal records from jury service, been in force. Still more could be stopped by abolishing the defendant's right to go on objecting to jurors, without cause, indefinitely, until he has got a jury he thinks he can corrupt.
In short, we're being asked to throw away the cornerstone of British justice, and increase the risk of convicting innocent men (yes, I know they have majority verdicts in Scotland; but with dif- ferent rules of evidence and a third verdict, the unsatisfactory 'not proven,' there's no valid analogy whatever) simply to prevent corruption succeeding in perhaps one or at most two cases a year. The Tory party prides itself on standing for the protection of the individual and the preserva- tion of our institutions. If it fails to vote against the Criminal Justice Bill in its present form—as the Liberals. bless them, are pledged to do—it will be difficult to discover whether it now stands for anything at all.
Damned Dots There are two great issues which really exercise the people of Britain—that is, if newspapers' post- bags are any guide. I refer, of course, to the fluori- dation of drinking water and the decimalisation of the coinage. Sensitive as ever to the nation's pulse, our dynamic, trendy, with-it Government, after little more than two years in office, has already announced that in less than five more years from now it will start to change over to a decimal coinage system on the basis recommended by the Select Committee on Decimal Coinage in 1853—that is, with the £ as the major unit, divided into 100 cents. (This proposal was pretty old hat even by 1853. A motion to the same end had been introduced into the House of Commons more than a generation previously by one Sir John Wrottesley, the Member for Staffordshire. While this particular motion failed to commend itself to the House, he did succeed in procuring the exemption of draining tiles from duty.) The only trouble with Mr Callaghan's 'historic decision' (to quote the White Paper) is that, as every schoolboy knows, it's the wrong one. If you must decimalise, the ten-shilling unit (ten new pence=one shilling, ten shillings = one new pound) is altogether superior. The Treasury, how- ever, believe it or not, is afraid that to move from the £ to a lower unit would so reduce confidence in an already shaky currency that we'd be forced to devalue. If it really believes this sort of mumbo-jumbo let me make Mr Callaghan a con- structive, not to say patriotic, suggestion : have a £5 unit, divided into 1,000 parts (ten new pence =one shilling, 100 shillings =one new blue pound) and overseas confidence in sterling will presum- ably become almost embarrassing.
Cents and Centuries With the Government's £-100 cent system, how- ever, the overriding drawback is that the smallest coin envisaged, the half-cent (worth approxi- mately a penny-farthing—which, come to think of it, isn't an inappropriate description of the scheme itself), is much too expensive—especially since the banks and others have already warned that they can't be bothered with half-cents, and will round off to the nearest cent. In other words all prices will rise and the smallest unit will soon be roughly 24d. The insouciance with which the Chancellor regards this is terrifying. 'The "heavy" unit has advantages in a highly developed in- dustrial and trading economy,' says the White Paper (that's why America has a 7s 2d dollar and the biggest Common Market unit is 2s: also why the only country in the world to have a 'heavier' unit than the £ is the Sudan); 'the £ system will need a half-cent coin but, with growing pros- perity [anglice: continuing inflation] this coin will eventually disappear. Indeed, the fact that the lowest unit of coinage can be readily shed is an advantage of the £ system; Such an advantage, in fact, that America has seen fit to keep the cent as its lowest unit for over one hundred years now, even though it's worth considerably less than the half-cent to which the Chancellor can't wait to wave good-bye.
But what's one hundred years? 'We're fixing a coinage system for the next 1,000 years,' ex- plained Mr Callaghan to a press conference this week. Perhaps Mr Benn might gently whisper in his ear that long before the millennium comes we shall all be fully computerised. And computers can't understand decimals at all. They all talk binary.
Depressed
In spite of its absurd leading articles, I like the Guardian. I think it must he the appeal of its zany amateurishness more than anything else. Certainly, I'd hate to see it go under and I hope that some of the talent for survival of the re- markable Mr Chichester will rub off on the paper that did so much to help him. But what's the solution? For the Guardian is by no means the only paper that will be engaged in a life-and- death struggle during the next eighteen months of recession.
The remedy beloved of the left, one or more state-financed newspapers, would be disastrous. For one thing, the extra competition of a state- owned paper would kill off the Guardian com- pletely—hardly, I'd have thought, the object of the exercise. And it would make a mockery of the concept of a free press—ask anyone who works there if the BBC is free in the way Fleet Street is. The same objection applies to most other forms of state help—although, I must say, the present Government, which struck us all a severe blow last year by putting up the inland newspaper postage rate by 66; per cent, could do worse than demonstrate the sincerity of Mr Wilson's professed 'deep concern' for the press's plight by cancelling this extra impost.
Solution
But the real remedy lies with the papers them- selves : they should charge more. If they-re too dependent on advertising, this is hardly the ad- vertisers' fault. It really is a bit much to expect the state—which means the taxpayer—to fork OM if he isn't prepared to do so as a reader. All the Guardian's troubles would be over if its readers were willing to pay an extra three- pence (or even less) for the paper. If they aren't, why should the taxpayer step in? Over a period, I have a feeling that the newspaper-reading public could be persuaded to pay quite a lot more than they do at present, without any massive drop in sales (of course there'd be some fall, but then we read too many newspapers anyway). But the grim truth is that the onset of the severest recession since the war is hardly the best time to begin the move to a realistic price basis.
NIGEL LAWSON
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