by Chris Baylis, The Critic
The significance of ethnicity to crime depends on the nature of the crime
There is something grimly absurd about the fact that it is Ann Widdecombe, out of all of the possible targets, who became the victim of the most brutal assassination in modern British history. We might have hoped that she would have been accorded some of the dignity she was denied in death in the public aftermath, but instead we have witnessed a nauseating battle for narrative control.
From the outset, it was clear that the authorities and their allies in the media were desperate to prevent political inferences being drawn from this very political murder. The police and the government hastily announced that the murder was a burglary gone horribly wrong, before conceding that it appeared to be a more targeted killing.
At that point, the strategy shifted to the same one that was deployed following the sentencing of Henry Nowak’s killer — in which anything beyond anodyne expressions of sadness at her death was portrayed as a heartless attack on the family’s privacy. This was harder in Widdecombe’s case, given her lack of close living relatives, but an admirable attempt was made nonetheless.
We then shifted on to the more traditional British argument around contempt of court, which has now become a routine part of the aftermath of high profile killings in Britain. In the crudest possible terms, the authorities effectively threaten to let the guilty party off if anybody points out anything too inconvenient about the circumstances. Then, last week, we saw perhaps the most brazen attempt yet at political manipulation of the criminal justice system, when thirteen people were arrested over a suspected terror plot against an Islamic fundamentalist family gathering in Sussex. All thirteen were subsequently released, with the police confirming that no further lines of inquiry were being pursued. I cannot for the life of me come up with an alternative hypothesis for this, other than that the government felt that an act of political violence from the Right would be a convenient distraction from the Widdecombe story for the weekend’s news cycle, and one was duly rustled up.