EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

        

 

Ian Tomlinson: Unlawfully killed by the law

Justice in the individual case is still far from certain, but following the inquest's verdict it is at least a possibility once again

Nothing could be more serious than the state taking the life of one of its subjects – except, perhaps, for the state's agents preventing this coming to light. After an inquest's ruling yesterday, it is now official that the newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, was unlawfully killed amid the policing of the G20 protests in 2009. Many who saw the footage the Guardian obtained, which showed PC Simon Harwood striking Mr Tomlinson just before his death, will regard the verdict as a statement of the blindingly obvious. But it matters. For one thing it raises again the prospect of a prosecution; for another it invites searching questions about why it took so long to get the truth recognised.

The most immediate dilemma is for the director of public prosecutions. As he is required to do, he last night set the wheels in motion for reconsidering whether there is a realistic chance of a conviction. His unfortunate conclusion last year, which was not lightly arrived at, was that the mixed (and mixed-up) medical evidence precluded pinning responsibility beyond reasonable doubt on anyone. The inquest jury's considered view that the cause of death was "abdominal haemorrhage due to blunt force trauma", albeit it in a person whose susceptibility was increased by liver cirrhosis, surely moves things on. Justice in the individual case is still far from certain, but it is at least a possibility once again.

Even if it ultimately arrives, however, justice will have come via such a tortuous route that one has to wonder whether it could get lost next time. After a day on which many officers were concealing their identity badges, the Met dragged its heels. A botched postmortem followed, carried out by a physician who was under investigation. The Independent Police Complaints Commission said there was "nothing in the story" that Mr Tomlinson had died after a fatal run-in with the thin blue line, and it waited a full week before launching an investigation. Whether through incompetence, conspiracy or some mix of the two, every check that the citizen imagines him or herself to have against the authorities was initially frustrated.

Healthy democracies are distinguished from police states by the ideal that those who enforce the law should be subject to it in the same way as everyone else. For the most part this happens in Britain, but there can be chilling lapses in the most serious cases, as was seen in the pall thrown over Blair Peach's killing for 30 years, and in the failure to bring the Met to book over the de Menezes case, other than through health and safety laws. The killing of a newspaper salesman who was simply trying to get home raises all the old anxieties about state power which is accountable to none.

AV referendum: The fairer alternative

Otherwise progressive Labour voters who are contemplating a no vote have a special responsibility to think again

There is a built-in difficulty with all referendums. You ask the voters one question – but you risk getting the answer to a completely different one. Tomorrow's UK-wide referendum on changing the general election voting system has been marked by a mostly dismal campaign that may well produce such an outcome.

The question on the ballot paper is whether to replace the first past the post system with the alternative vote (AV). That issue is straightforward. In the present system, where voters select a single candidate, there is frequently a large majority of votes against – not in favour of – the successful MP. Under AV, where voters number their choices in order of preference, the winner must always have a majority mandate, after a process of redistribution. But that is not the issue uppermost in many voters' minds. For these, the referendum is about how to do down their opponents. In conservative Britain, energetic as ever in defence of the status quo, the unerring aim is to preserve the Tory party's capacity to win a Commons majority on the basis of minority support – as Margaret Thatcher did three times to such divisive effect. In progressive Britain, opinion is more evenly balanced. Most progressive Liberal Democrats are for change, as are many in the Labour party, including Ed Miliband. But large numbers in the Labour party are consumed by a cruder purpose – to bash the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg in particular, and preserve a system which also produced three successive majorities for their own party in recent history. To defend this system, large numbers of Labour activists have eagerly jumped into bed with the Tory party. Not a pretty sight.

There is plenty of criticism to dish out in all directions over this campaign. But the otherwise progressive Labour voters who are contemplating a No vote have a special responsibility to think again. A No victory will weaken the Lib Dems. But it will not kill the coalition. Instead it will bind it together on increasingly Tory terms. This will not help Labour as much as these opponents of change imagine. Under new constituency boundaries that eliminate the current pro-Labour bias, with Labour losing its grip on its Scottish heartlands to the SNP, and under new party funding rules that will boost the Tories and make things harder for Labour, the big winner from a No victory will be David Cameron. A Yes vote, by contrast, would inflame the Tory grassroots, threaten Mr Cameron's control over his party and strengthen the resolve of progressive Lib Dems to be more assertive about their party's values on social justice, civil liberty and democratic reform. It would also massively enhance the possibility that Labour and the Lib Dems can work together in the progressive cause in the future.

So, even progressives whose priority is to bash the coalition should vote Yes. But those who have remained focused on electoral reform should do so too. The existing system may be simple. But it is unfair to the ever larger proportion of voters who do not vote for the two big parties. And the alleged complexities of the alternative vote have been overstated. What's not to understand about one, two, three? AV gives a better reflection of public opinion than the existing system while retaining the constituency basis of the House of Commons.

You can't be a fairer society without having fairer politics. Keeping first past the post would mean keeping the system in which general elections mean national media campaigns funded by very rich backers which concentrate all their efforts on a few thousand swing voters in marginal seats. AV would take democracy back to the grassroots and would make more voters matter. Britain in 2011 is becoming a more unfair country both economically and politically. Voting Yes to AV tomorrow will help to stop that process and eventually reverse it. It will help to put the majority in charge, not the minority as at present.

In praise of … hunting for black boxes

The retrieval of two Air France flight recorders from the Atlantic renders the needles and haystacks cliche woefully inadequate

The resolution of one long hunt is dominating the news, but by any objective criterion another deserves some exposure too. The "uncovering" of Bin Laden's compound, with its 12-18 foot walls, hardly justifies the cliche about needles and haystacks. By contrast, the same analogy is woefully inadequate for the parallel search operation to retrieve two Air France black boxes from the bottom of the Atlantic. The flight recorders took up perhaps one part in every 1020 of that ocean's watery vastness. You thus need a number with 21 digits to put things in mathematical perspective, which – from any human perspective – means the recorders simply drop out of view. But since the French flag carrier's worst crash cost 228 lives in 2009, the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses has slogged for 23 months, and through savvy deployment of submarinal robots with manipulator arms, it has now made its double retrieval from the deep. The vanishing of flight AF447 was shrouded in obscurity but, if the boxes dry out as hoped, the first will reveal precisely where things went wrong, and the second, which recorded the crew as the catastrophe hit, could even reveal why. Was there a problem with the hardware's design, or merely the way it was used? This is a question of pressing legal and practical importance. The boxes, which despite the name are painted orange to make them conspicuous, offer the bereaved a chance of the truth, and give all air travellers the hope that lessons will be learned.