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The spectator’s notes

Charles Moore

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Charles Moore's thoughts on the events of the week

This column continues to draw attention to the curious incident of the hen harriers on the Sandringham estate. The papers were full of reports that a pair had been shot. Natural England, a quango, claimed that one of its employees had witnessed the shooting, but refused to name him. The police solemnly interviewed Prince Harry and two others, but since there was no body, or other actual evidence (e.g. a photograph), charges were not pressed. A reader writes to suggest that the birds seen were not hen harriers at all: ‘People think of hen harriers as the male bird, which is light-grey. Wood pigeons look like that in bright light.’ One observes that ‘wasting police time’, which was traditionally a criminal offence, now seems to be the chief occupation of the police themselves.

It is a relief to one’s feelings, then, that the complaint by the West Midlands Police to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, has been entirely dismissed. The police complained after Channel 4’s Dispatches produced a programme called Undercover Mosque, which showed preachers in British mosques praising people who kill British soldiers in Afghanistan (‘The hero is the one who separated his head from his shoulders’), calling for homosexuals to be thrown off mountains and for replacing the British state with an Islamic polity where apostates could be killed. The West Midlands Police had been asked to see the film in case the incitements shown were breaches of the law, but they took it upon themselves to declare the programme had ‘completely distorted’ the remarks of the preachers. The police then turned the tables on the programme and referred it to Ofcom for stirring up racial hatred. It would be interesting to know the nature of the relationship of the West Midlands Police with particular mosques. Is this a case in which a ‘community’ (self-defined) decides how the rule of law should be applied?

An EU-wide census proposed by the European Parliament wants to ask people whether they are, or ever have been, in a ‘consensual union’, meaning sexual cohabitation. It is a funny question for a body which refuses to ask us whether we consent to the Union which pays its wages.

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