Afternoon:
14°c
Often it is hard to feel happy about the state of this country but the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes ought to make us proud.
After a pitiless investigation by the media and a court case in which the judge decided that if the Met couldn't be done for murder it could at least be done for breach of health and safety regulations, the inquest into his death opened this week.
Such is the public interest that the coroner has had to move to the conference room at the Oval cricket ground to cope with the crowds of spectators. When the police kill an innocent man in a dictatorship, no one dares protest. In de Menezes' Brazil, there are protests aplenty about police violence but they have scant effect on men who are little more than murderers in uniform. As the United Nations noted recently, the Rio de Janeiro police kill three people every day. In London, the killing of one man in 2005 is a national scandal.
We don't always realise it but we are lucky to live in a country that takes breaches of its rules so seriously. Before patriotic fervour overcomes you, however, I should warn that the anger over de Menezes has not always been creditable. For three years, it has acted as a cover for those who can't face up to radical Islam and as a useful weapon for partisans in the vicious arguments over London's policing.
Within hours of the shooting, I realised his killing was almost a relief for many. A radio producer asked me to come on her show and say that the Met was as much a threat to the lives of Londoners as radical Islam. I declined as politely as I could and asked if she really didn't know the moral difference between Osama bin Laden and Sir Ian Blair.
She didn't, nor did thousands of others. They found it much easier to concentrate on the faults of the Met which, after all, can be held to account by politicians, judges, coroners and journalists than confront the uncontrollable psychosis of religious fascism. Add to their psychological need to deny the horrors of the world, the willingness of Sir Ian's many enemies to use a bungled operation as a stick with which to beat him, and the commotion the case has produced, becomes more understandable.
In the hubbub a simple point is being lost. I don't want to defend the Met's mistakes but it is blindingly obvious that when the police think they are confronting suicide bombers they will shoot first and ask questions later. If they didn't, and a terrorist detonated a bomb on the Tube, they would be denounced by the very people who are shouting loudest about the death of poor Mr de Menezes.
