Spectator's Notebook

ORFORD is a pleasant quiet spot on the Suffolk coast. It was visited, apparently with premeditation, by a bunch of forty yobs on motorbikes, calling themselves the Wessex chapter of the Hell's Angels, last Saturday. They caused a small circus to pack up and leave. They ruined a flower show on the recreation field. They climbed to the top of Orford Castle and pulled down the flag. A castle attendant said: "They urinated everywhere they could and chucked things all over the place. They rode their motorbikes up and down the grass banks, and wrecked the steps." The police received about thirty calls of complaint. It is reported that the police were first telephoned shortly after 12 o'clock, but that the main body of police did not arrive until 3 o'clock. The chairman of Orford parish council rang himself three times.

And what happened after these louts wrecked Orford's holiday Saturday? I quote from the excellent East Anglian Daily Times: "The Angels agreed to leave quietly and police let them all go one at a time after searching them and noting their names and the registration number of their vehicles." Nice of the Angels to agree to leave quietly. And nice of the police, too, to let them go, so that they could spoil other people's holidays somewhere else. The police confiscated a chain. It would have been better if they had confiscated motorbikes (in yobs' hands most offensive weapons) and the Angels' boots, and offered them the choice between walking barefoot back to Wessex, or spending the weekend in the nearest cooler.

Gaoling shoplifters

The British Legal Association surely does right to express concern over the evidently premeditated policy of many magistrates, especially in London, to hand out prison sentences to foreign tourists convicted of a first offence of shoplifting. The Association has drawn attentiori to section 14(i) of the Criminal Justice Act, 1972, which expressly orders that no first offender should be sent to prison "unless the court considers no other method of punishment is appropriate." This is still to allow magistrates a fair amount of freedom in specific cases, and a fair amount of discretion, which is usually to be relied upon, and it has been extremely rare for a local citizen to be gaoled for a first shoplifting offence.

Undoubtedly the visitor from abroad raises special problems as regards other 'appropriate' punishments. Most of those convicted would not seem to be particularly penurious, so a fine would not carry any great weight (but this is not a rule applied strenuously to British-born people before the courts on charges of stealing goods they would be well able to pay for), and orders for deportation would ordinarily take far longer to put into effect than the period of the shoplifter's intended stay (and would thus achieve the opposite effect to that intended). Even so, the magistrates' handing down of fourteen days' ,here, 'one month there is a badly conceived policy bearing all the earmarks of a panic measure.

Scapegoat

For one thing, it is unlikely to have the 'deterrent ' effect that the magistrates presumably have in mind, since foreign countries, like our own, are not lavish in their reporting of the misdemeanours of their nationals abroad and the magistrates can have no great hope that the sentences will be reported widely in the countries from which the offenders come. For another, there is an unpleasant discriminatory, even racialist, tone to these sentences that many will find disturbing in its one-law-for-us-another-law-for-them connotations, and it is hard to avoid the impression that a convenient scapegoat is being found to account for an appalling situation in which, it appears, British stores are being robbed by shoplifters of goods to the value of around E300 million annually.

The total value of goods recovered from the foreign offenders who are caught is but a trifling proportion of this astounding sum (in which, having been recovered, it is doubtless, not even included). Some 80 per cent of the convicted may be foreigners, but considerably more than 80 per cent ,of shoplifted goods neither lead to convictions nor are recovered, and it is not at all to be assumed that foreigners are responsible. On the contrary it can more reasonably be assumed that the major, uncaught, culprits are local thieves.who have so much more opportunity to study the conditions and 'get away with it.'

Store security is obviously absurdly lax, and it would be more sensible for the large stores that are the principal victims to give rather more attention to that aspect of their businesses (more plain-clothes detectives, more hidden television surveillance and so on) than to be bleating to and encouraging magistrates to contravene, if not the letter, at least the spirit of the Criminal Justice Act.

Punitive bonus

Speaking of crime and punishment, it is hardly to be doubted that the press contributes something to the latter, over and above the

sentence actually passed by the court, and there is often some ground for feeling that newspapers are distastefully enthusiastic about their entirely unofficial and no obligatory punitive job. Examples can be culled virtually any day from any paper. As for instance, a paragraph at hand which reports the grievous case of a young man of twentythree convicted of "indecent exposure" and "enticing a child into indecency," for which he was fined £50 and put on probation for two years. His real punishment, of course, was to have his name, . address and employment casually reported, without, in this instance, any supporting report of the court proceedings which might well have revealed some particular extenuating circumstances. The newspaper in which the paragraph appeared (it was doubtless in others as well) has over a million readers, of whom perhaps 3 hundred at most coild have any acquaintance with this unfortunate young man; so that In order to inform this minute circle that someone they knew had been apprehended in an emotively shameful act, the newspaper printed a name and other details of no conceivable interest to 99.999 per cent of its readers. The paper can thus be said to have gone considerably out of its way to impose a punishment that the bench had not ordered. The ethics of such reporting are dubious.

Great day coming

Platitudes are at their best in times of crisis. No one actually muttered this at Billy Graham's recent press conference, certainly not Dr Graham himself, but the thought was undoubtedly there. The crisis itself is, of course, Watergate, and although Dr Graham is here to attend a Bible Conference (commonly known as 'Spree '73') it was Watergate that was in the air. "The first cover-up took place in the Garden of Eden," was Dr Graham's response to some hostile questioning about his friendship with Nixon, the cover-up in question being a fig leaf. Although the motive was pure, the allusion seemed a little doubtful and there must have been some consternation among the more theologically minded of the journalists present. Billy Graham was dressed in blue suit, white shirt and polka-dot tie. The very model of a modern major evangelist. His comments were generally of the apocryphal variety, and there was a Southern rhythm to his voice that lent emphasis to the most routine of statements. The Bible Conference itself seems to be a rather staid affair: "We're not going to have the regular type of singing," brightened only by the presence of Johnny Cash and Cliff Richard — or what one lady journalist described as "sex appeal for Christ," It will be, according to Dr Graham, "probably the largest Bible Conference ever held in Britain." This is saying something, although even this gargantuan event will not match up to Billy Graham's personal 'Crusades.' He remembered his successes at Wembley Stadium — when Lord Fisher, sitting at his right hand, looked upon the .massed crowds and murmured to Dr Graham: "We'll never see a sight like that, until we get to heaven." Good luck, Dr Graham, and see you there.

Next question

Following that amiable ' Notebook ' item last week about the names Hampstead parents bestow upon their children, an inquiring reader has been moved to ask whether we suppose that the editor and assistant editor of Homes and Gardens, listed respectively as Psyche Pine and Primrose Minney, could have been born in Hampstead? It would seem a formidable possibility, but there would probably be those who would lay a shade of odds on Tunbridge Wells.