Hitting the back button

It is moral funk to insist that someone who strays on to a forbidden website must pay all their life

Peter Preston
Monday January 16, 2006
The Guardian
The real fight for the future of liberalism is the fight for justice and human rights. It is the fight to make Britain a "fair" and "tolerant" society that cherishes its "liberty" (three Gordon Brown words as he waves his union flag) rather than pawns its freedom for 90 days without charge. So why, pray, are the voices of liberal conscience muffled now, when most of parliament and the press wallow in moral funk? Why is the instant response to Ruth Kelly's problem with List 99 to jeer and bay - with a twist of tawdry sexism - at a politician who seeks to explain and address infernally complex issues?
Let's begin where Ed Davey, the Lib Dem education shadow, began on day one. Was it right, he was asked, to put every name on the sex offenders' register straight on to List 99, which means a lifelong ban on working in schools, without let, hindrance or chance of appeal? Well, Ed conceded, that might be going too far. There should always be the possibility of second thoughts or second chances.
Precisely. We know that miscarriages of justice, great and small, are inevitable. We have particular cause to fear them, as with the Birmingham Six, when public, politicians and press are seized by a common hysteria. We ought to take special care in cases where a police caution is quietly issued in return for an admission of guilt - and may be automatically expunged after a few years. Forced, dodgy confessions breed prolifically along Miscarriage Mews: the convenience of a caution, a case the police are happy to chalk up as not worth more effort, makes such dubiety even worse.
The system is flawed and deeply fallible. Of course there should be some chance of appeal. Of course a teacher, banned for life should have some chance of arguing back. Did he download any of the images on the porn website that took his credit card number? Were there false allegations that could not be disproved? Was there malevolent intent, or naive imbecility? Could he, like Pete Townshend of the Who, plead research of a subject he had to know better because he, too, was abused as a child?
There is a difficulty in even asking such questions, to be sure. It is to be thought somehow soft on paedophilia, to seek to excuse and thus somehow downgrade a sickness and crime that truly sickens the stomach. A single tide of public revulsion runs from Catholic cathedrals to the school steps of Soham. Beware any who stand in its way.
But that, now, is the liberal duty. Last week the man who shot Pope John Paul was released from prison after 25 years. The priest he tried to kill had forgiven him. Are we truly saying that there is no forgiveness, no prospect of rehabilitation, on offer to a teacher who strayed, just once, on to a forbidden website? Or to a teacher who, 25 years before, made sexual advances to a 15-year-old girl?
Last year a British libel court, bewigged and judicious, awarded £50,000 damages to a fugitive from American justice, who fled charges of statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. More, it allowed Roman Polanski to testify to the hurt to his "reputation" via a TV link from Paris. Where, remotely, is the symmetry of fairness in any of this?
The difference between the sex offenders' register and List 99 is the difference between an all-purpose ragbag of offences and cautions and a list that trained professionals can review in the light of individual circumstances. It is also the difference between a caution or sentence that will be gone in two or five years and a punishment that lasts a lifetime (and can seemingly be unearthed at any time in random, retrospective blazes of publicity and panic).
So far the only attempts to see the situation whole have come from a few lonely voices in the press. "Parents are not interested in subtle distinctions," says the Observer, which broke the story, nor do they remember that, overwhelmingly, "most child abuse happens within the home".
No: this is a new virus of moral McCarthyism, right down to lists compiled rather than tested. A few columnists can't begin to slow its infection rate. Nor can poor Miss Kelly, a brain turned to Westminster blood sport.
Where is Ed Davey now that reason needs him? Where are Ming the Merciful and Simon the Shrewd - or Dave with his class-A humanity? What "liberty" does Gordon love? Will Downing Street stand up for, as well as "stand by", the hapless Ruth? To have a debate you must first make a case, not slide away with the herd.
p.preston@guardian.co.uk