UK Age

Before police condemn an online pursuit of a rapist, they should put their own house in order

Vigilantism's problem is that it's usually quite stupid. You talk about a mob response, and you immediately think of the howling thickos who mistook a paediatrician for a paedophile in south Wales in 2000. Six years later, when this event had been cited many times by commentators concerned about tabloid influence - even "government by tabloid" - Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked Online, did a definitive breakdown for the BBC of what actually happened: there was no baying mob, no threat of violence. A doctor came home to find someone ("probably in the 12-17 bracket", police noted) had vandalised her home with the word "paedo". Who's to say that the vandal had confused the two terms? Perhaps he or she was pointing out how amusing it was that paediatrician could be shortened to "paedo". O'Neill makes the more comical point that broadsheet fear of the tabloid mob is usually as unreflective and unfounded as whatever the mob itself is afraid of.

And yet, certain unarguables remain: one's first response to an event is rarely one's most mature or reasonable, and yet this is the response that governs any spontaneous outpouring. So, when the Baby P story was first broadcast, immediately after the Facebook pages urging you to Pray for Baby P came the Facebook page unmasking his killers (it also appeared on Bebo). It was removed, but not before it had served as a good example of the worst kind of social networking guard-doggery. These people were already in prison so there was nothing to be done with the information, beyond co-ordinated, illegal reprisals. It didn't bring anyone back to life, or improve the judicial system; it just jerked a bit more fruitless energy into that savage event.

Naturally, all arguments against people taking the law into their own hands rely on the law being effectively prosecuted in police hands. Even if the court of public opinion scorns the regular court - for inadequate sentencing or parole too readily given - then at least those decisions were arrived at systematically, and can be defended. But nothing complicates the case against vigilantism as much as the current Facebook rape appeal. A rape victim's partner has posted some CCTV pictures of the alleged attacker on the site, along with the name of his regular pub, asking the public to help identify the man. Police are worried that this will make it harder to get a conviction. The poster responded that "if he's not caught, there won't be a court case at all".

It would be a compelling argument anyway, given that an eight-month inquiry has yielded no suspect. But here the police really are beginning to pay for their own inadequacy. The recent cases of John Worboys and Kirk Reid, rapists investigated so lackadaisically that scores of women were needlessly attacked, have changed the temperature. The reputations of the police and the judiciary were already execrable, but the 6% conviction rate at least had room for a bit of ambiguity - perhaps it wasn't always, or often, the fault of the police; perhaps juries were misogynistic.

But since Reid and Worboys there have been rumours that rape units are deliberately underfunded, that traffic offences are taken more seriously than sexual assaults, that conviction rates are being kept low. With nobody taking final responsibility for any of these decisions - and with the debate prematurely cauterised as the police face the more pressing priority of overreacting to climate-change protestors - I am in no way surprised that a regular person, neither baying nor howling, might now accord more faith to a social networking site than they do to their constabulary. Sanctimonious warnings from the police that this might damage the chances of conviction will not stand; they need to look to their own standards if they want to keep hold of law enforcement.

You hear the word 'hazak' here an awful lot at the moment. It means strong in Hebrew. It features in Benjamin Netanyahu's slogans, in roadside placards and one of the smaller parties contesting these elections has even called itself "Strong Israel".

Conventional wisdom has it that this word plays well after the Gaza offensive because it taps into a national mood: that Israel's bombardment of the Palestinian territory showed the value of strength in dealings with the Arabs. We put up with Hamas rockets for eight years, runs the Israeli popular narrative, and now at last we've done something that's got the Palestinians' attention.

I wonder though how far people who use the word 'strong' so much are not actually those who at some level sense their own weakness. The notion, repeated by many in the centre ground here too that the Gaza operation restored Israel's "deterrent capability", after it was damaged by the 2006 Lebanon War is, to my mind, more an expression of hope than fact.

In the first place, few Israelis - of right or left - think that Hamas has fired its last rocket from Gaza or become any more reconciled to the presence of a Jewish state here. Any advantage gained by January's killing, then, is temporary. In the second it is clear to anyone who knows this part of the world that battering Hamas in the confines of the Gaza strip should not give Israelis any particular confidence that they would do any better against Hezbollah if the 2006 Lebanon campaign was re-run now. The Shiite militant movement is a far more competent, better armed adversary and its position in Lebanon allows it a strategic depth, as well as freedom to import weapons that no Palestinian group could match.

Looking beyond Israel's immediate borders, the strategic situation seems no better now than it was before the Gaza operation. Indeed it can be argued that is has worsened. Barack Obama's White House cannot be relied upon to look the other way quite as often as George Bush's one did. Iran meanwhile is closer to possessing the nuclear weapon.

The possibility of Iran getting the bomb touches Israeli insecurities so deeply that one would be foolish to rule out the possibility of a military strike against those nuclear facilities. My own analysis is that Israel acting on its own lacks the capability to do serious, lasting, damage to the Iranian program. But in a situation where people feel the need to demonstrate their strength so often, it is quite possible that an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities could be one consequence of this election.

• Three weeks ago 17 people were killed when a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter carrying oil workers to a Canadian drilling platform off Newfoundland ditched in the Atlantic. One person was rescued.

• In February this year all 18 people on a helicopter were rescued from life rafts after a Super Puma came down in the North Sea near a BP platform 125 miles from Aberdeen.

• Nineteen people died in April last year when the tail of a Ukrainian Mi-8 helicopter struck a gas drilling platform in the Black Sea.

• In December 2006, five rig workers and two crew died when a Eurocopter craft crashed while travelling from Blackpool airport to gas platforms in the Irish Sea.

• Eleven men died in July 2002 when a Sikorsky helicopter taking staff from Norwich to a North Sea gas rig crashed due to a fault with a rotor blade.

The prime minister's always blamed America for this economic crisis. The French and the Germans have blamed Britain and America. "Who's right?" I asked at this morning's Brown/Obama news conference.

Their answers were instructive. Obama accepted that America had to take its share of the blame but then sought to share it with Britain and Europe:

"If you look at the sources of this crisis, the US certainly has some accounting to do with respect of a regulatory system that was inadequate to the massive changes that had taken place in the global financial system," he said.

"What is also true is that here in Great Britain, and continental Europe, around the world, we are seeing the same mismatch between the regulatory regimes that were in place and the highly integrated global capital markets that had emerged."

Gordon Brown retreated behind his new formula of "global problems require global solutions".

Aware of the threat from Paris to leave an empty chair if meaningful agreements aren't reached, he went on to joke that he was confident that President Sarkozy would be in his place for the last - as well as the first - course of tonight's pre-summit dinner.

Both men sought to play down talk of a rift, with Obama mocking journalists for being bored by pictures of heads of state and communiqués and wanting to inject some "controversy and drama".

So, now it's over to Merkel and Sarkozy to sound conciliatory or, well, inject some controversy and drama.

Narrative matters in politics.

Political parties seeking success will stress facts and issues which bolster their world view, thus inviting the voters to conclude that they alone offer solutions.

Sometimes those facts and issues will present themselves readily.

Sometimes they will have to be assembled. Sometimes they will run stubbornly counter to the party's vision, despite every effort. In those latter circumstances, the party will inevitably fail.

In the early 1980s, the SDP in alliance with the Liberals drove a narrative which said that Labour was too extreme to present a credible alternative to the Tories.

In the 1983 election, they came close to overtaking Labour as a consequence.

At the present time on the UK stage, the Tories have been telling a story of "broken Britain", a picture of economic but more commonly social fragmentation.

This narrative is designed to depict them as, uniquely, offering cohesion.

In Scotland, one can currently see the development of another narrative, used by Labour but also by those other parties which espouse the Union.

Scotland, it is said, is unable on her own to cope with the local impact of global recession.

That, it is said, was true with regard to the banks and is now true of the Dunfermline building society.

For example, Iain Gray, Labour's leader at Holyrood, has welcomed the sale of the positive elements of the Dunfermline society to the Nationwide.

He voices delight at the assistance this will afford to staff and savers.

Then he goes on to note: "The Treasury has taken on £1bn in toxic assets, something that the Scottish Government would not have been able to do."

Labour's narrative with regard to independence has shifted over the decades.

It was formerly easy to caricature them as arguing that Scotland was simply "too wee and too poor" to go it alone.

Understandably, that caricature prompted modification. It was too rude, too ugly.

Scotland, it was then said, could become independent - but should, on balance, choose not to do so.

Now the story has been refined once more in the light of the economic crisis.

Here, it is important to distinguish between the financial steps taken by the UK Government - and the political narrative built upon those steps.

There is continuing dispute over the fundamentals.

For example, there are those who argue that both HBOS and Dunfermline could have been maintained as Scottish institutions.

Against that, UK ministers insist they took the steps necessary to protect jobs, savers and investors.

They are adamant that the various problems were so deep-rooted that there was no alternative.

It is important to reflect that this matters less when it comes to the political narrative which is being assembled - and the challenge this presents to Alex Salmond.

One might argue that the narrative contains self-fulfilling claims: that Scotland's financial institutions failed because no credible rescue was mounted.

However, that is to disregard the impact of the narrative itself.

Labour ministers will repeatedly stress - from now to the UK election, from then to the Holyrood election - that Scotland's financial institutions had to be rescued by UK clout, that SNP ministers were peripheral.

You can argue that this is simple truth. You can argue that it ignores key elements. You can say it is a fact, you can say it is part fairy tale.

But, either way, it is a powerful story to tell.

As I have argued before, the SNP now requires to generate a new narrative of Nationalism, one that addresses the present economic conditions, one that relies less upon the previously proclaimed "arc of prosperity".

But then I suspect Alex Salmond already knows that.

The assembly returned to Sammy Wilson's decision not to back the UK wide "Act on CO2" advertising question. A series of MLAs from the SDLP, Greens, Ulster Unionists, and Alliance lined up to take pot shots at Mr Wilson. The only problem is that, as a veteran political prize fighter, the minister seems to enjoy such bouts more than his tormentors and always gives back at least as good as he gets.

On the receiving end today was the SDLP's Tommy Gallagher, who Sammy dubbed the Stormont "Carbon King" and "Christopher Columbus" because his mileage claims suggested a propensity for travelling around the world. This was a mite unfair as Tommy Gallagher lives in Belleek, about as far away from Stormont as you can get, and the minister's suggested public transport alternative would probably ensure he never got to a committee or assembly session on time.

Given the question mark over Mr Wilson's respect for scientific orthodoxy, we were then treated to a bizarre lecture on the teachings of Galileo. In describing the ending of the Ice Age Mr Gallagher maintained this came about beacuse "the sun moved closer to the earth". Mr Wilson retorted that Mr Gallagher should acquaint himself with the findings of Galileo, who determined that the earth orbited the sun, not vice versa. It was a rare instance of the DUP lining up in favour of the enlightenment and against religious fundamentalism.

When the minister asked the Fermanagh MLA which scientist's work he had read as the basis for his views on the end of the Ice Age there was an uncomfortable silence. Like Tommy, I am short on academic authority for the Pleistocene era, but I have seen the film.

The row over Sir Fred Goodwin's pension is just one unseemly manifestation of a banking crisis that has brought the global economy to its knees.

How do we prevent a repetition of this crisis?

Tomorrow we'll have the blueprint of the City's watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, drawn up by its chairman, Lord Turner.

He will make proposals to put the brakes on banks lending too much during boom years, to restrict their ability to take excessive risks (for those who want the technical detail, there'll be an endorsement of the imposition of counter-cyclical capital adequacy rules).

There'll also be a thumbs-up for a so-called backstop restriction on what banks can lend relative to their assets at any point in the economic cycle (so-called leverage limits).

Also, Turner will say that banks should be forced to hold more cash or liquid investments, to make them less vulnerable to collapse when other sources of finance dry up.

None of this is terribly surprising. In a way the tragedy is that it's required financial calamity to bring about an outbreak of common sense.

Among other recommendations, Turner will recommend that banks publish more and clearer information in their accounts about the risks they're running.

And, to the possible alarm of eurosceptics, he will say that a new pan-European body may need to be created to set standards for national regulators to follow - and that national regulators will need to work more closely together in regulating the activities of international firms.

Perhaps most importantly he will repeat his pledge that the FSA will become less trusting that banks are usually doing the right thing; the FSA will abandon the prevailing dogma of the past 30 odd years that the market is always right.

So in theory, if the FSA had been operating along the lines set out by Turner, it wouldn't have allowed Northern Rock to become too dependent on unreliable wholesale sources of funding

It wouldn't have permitted Royal Bank of Scotland to buy the poisonous rump of ABN, the former pride of Dutch banking.

And it wouldn't have allowed HBOS to lend billions to property and building companies that analysts believe were always going to struggle to repay their debts.

Or at least that's the theory.

In practice we can't expect any regulator to be infallible.

But it won't be business as usual for any of us till we're confident that the financial economy is operating in a way that supports our prosperity, rather than undermining it.

And for that we need confidence that the FSA, and other regulators around the world, are doing their job properly.

Anyone out there remember the old "Not The Nine O'Clock News" sketch when the Trade Union bosses end their meeting and try to decide whether to have tea or coffee. The punchline ran along the lines of "So that's seven votes for tea, and 1.5 million votes for coffee".

Watching the vote on the Stormont motion calling on Sammy Wilson to reverse his opposition to the "Act on CO2" climate change advertising campaign felt a bit like that. 48 backed the motion, 30 voted against. And so, under the Assembly's cross community voting rules, the motion fell.

I have been scratching my head to work out why climate change is of particular relevance to one community or the other. The only precedent I can come up with was the heatwave of June 2007 when nationalists took their jackets off and unionists sat on stoically. Do unionists and nationalists react differently to temperature changes? Several academic research projects could be sustained on this topic alone.

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