Slavery and Stalking in Luton

This isn't a very pretty subject, so avoid these links if you're having a really good day.

The Watt family have been variously convicted of murder and familial homicide in the case of Michael Gilbert, who was kept as a slave by them from the age of sixteen, for ten years. Medawar will not use quotes or the word "virtual": they kept him as a slave.

The photograph the prosecution issued to the press, of Michael Gilbert, shows him in a sports shirt with a St George's flag on the shoulder. The jury returned their verdicts on St George's day. In doing so, they had to decide between murder and familial homicide for several of the defendants, and in effect, the verdicts directly reflect how much each family member was under the influence of James Watt. It is an interesting lesson in how a group of people, in this case a family, can collectively exhibit psychopathic behaviour, although perhaps only one key member could be individually diagnosed as a psychopath.

Throughout the trial, Medawar was constantly reminded of how like an organized stalking gang the Watt family was, and wondered if there might be some insight into the way such gangs work. Then, once the verdicts were returned, the press were free to report all the things that the jury could not be told, foremost amongst them being that the Watt family were indeed a stalking gang. Organized stalking is a force-multiplier for psychopaths. A rich psychopath might have hundreds at his disposal, a poor psychopath might have only his family and their partners to control. But the outcome, unspeakable cruelty, and in this case it really is difficult to speak about what was done, is the same, differing merely in detail. It's just that a wealthy psychopath can use hundreds of stooges to inflict similar levels of misery on scores or hundreds of victims. And they are less likely to face justice for it, even on a perfect St George's Day.

Sentence update: Life with a thirty-six year minimum tariff for James Watt. See link for details.

Also, this link is to a video, by James Reeves, showing the children's home where James Watt and Michael Gilbert met, together with one of the female defendants. The video was made before Michael's plight was publicly known, and about a year before he was killed. A longstanding weakness in the state-run care system was the abrupt cut-off of social work supervision and support when children were old enough to leave children's homes. In the more distant past, many children from Luton needing such care went to a home in Harpenden, run by the (methodist) charity National Children's Homes. NCH did sometimes manage to go on helping some "children" through college and even university, which local council homes never seem to manage. Medawar doesn't think that NCH would have let a vulnerable client such as Michael, come under the control of a psychopath like James Watt. But that would have required somebody to exercise initiative, which isn't allowed to happen in local government in the UK anymore. Local government is actually conducted in a more repressive manner than national government at the moment.

Mr Eden and the Holocaust

This link ought to quash, absolutely and forever, the conspiracy theory (ie: in this case, malicious fabrication) that the British Government attempted to cover up the Holocaust. Mr Eden made a very complete statement, in response to Mr Silverman's question, on December the 17th, 1942.

In fewer words than a modern politician uses to say "hello, I am Tony, trust me", Mr Eden gives an essential history of the holocaust and the methods used, barring "gas," which, at the time of his speech, was still being used experimentally on handicapped German children rather than Jews. Mr Eden's statement is notable for the information it gives, rather than what it hides.

Mr Eden was interviewed (between 5:00 and 7:30 on this clip) on this matter, years later, for "The World At War" and although he didn't doubt the intelligence, he knew that something this awful and incredible would be attacked as crude "Hun-hating" propaganda unless he was very sure of his ground, but over the course of a few months, persistent rumour became a flood of mutually-consistent eye-witness accounts.
(There were also photographs smuggled out. It is always worth trying to document this kind of thing, even if it seems hopeless. This is why more people believe in the holocaust than in the German massacres of civilians in Belgium in 1914: both atrocities were all too real, but the latter was (and mostly still is) perceived as propaganda. Hence Mr Eden's wariness, but also his determination.)

There was also a need to protect MI6 sources in Nazi Germany, some of whom were very highly placed and of war-winning importance, as well as an equivalent need to protect signal intelligence sources such as "Ultra". In this context, Mr Eden seems to have made as complete a statement as he possibly could have done, just as soon as verification and the physical safety of his sources would allow.

There is no way in which this can possibly be described or honestly presented as any sort of "cover up." But readers will doubtless find a hundred posts elsewhere on the internet telling them another tale. This, however, is the one with the link to an article which any interested party can verify via the contemporary printed copies of Hansard, and the link gives all the references needed to accomplish this.

(All you really need is Mr Eden's name and the date of 17th of December, 1942, but there are "column numbers" on the link, which is how Hansard references work.)

The Nazi holocaust did not commence in a vacuum: the Japanese occupation of most of Burma (there were always large areas that they did not control) was accompanied by the rapid and almost complete disappearance of Burma's Hindu population, apparently at the hands of the Burmese Nationalist Millitia rather than the Japanese themselves. This occurred almost concurrently with the first wave of the European Holocaust, against Jews in the Baltic States. If there's a hidden truth anywhere, it may lie in that synchronization and the inscrutable motives for ethnic cleansing in Burma, which remains an appalling work in progress, sixty-eight years on.

NB: this above post has been updated to include a link to Mr Eden's World at War interview, he was by then (1973) Lord Avon. Thanks to Richard for help in finding this: the series is on You Tube in something like 140 clips! This link is to a database of the relevant episode's contents, Medawar is not sure if there's a database for the whole series.)

A Hung Parliament

First:

The Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru (their Welsh counterparts) have agreed a joint strategy in the event that the UK General Election on May the 6th fails to give a major UK party a working majority in the House of Commons. That is, they will support the legislative programme of whichever UK party agrees to increase central government funding to the Scottish and Welsh administrations by a minimum of hundreds of millions of pounds, even though whoever wins, they will need to reduce overall UK government spending by tens of billions of pounds. They have not said that this is conditional on the legislative programme being good, bad or indifferent: if they are paid, they will support it and thereby make the paying party the UK government.

Medawar's question to these two parties is simple: if you propose to start from a position of complete moral indifference, where on Earth do you expect to end up?

Second:

The Liberal Democrats, amid a shower of trite counsels of perfection, cheap shots and solutions that threaten to cost a great deal more than any problem, are effectively promising to support a minority Labour government, on the sole condition that the Labour leader, Gordon Brown, steps down and is replaced by someone else.
So, they propose that instead of a Prime Minister that only a minority (but just short of a majority) voted in the expectation of getting, they will work to ensure that we get a Prime Minister whom none of the electorate even knew to be a possibility at the time they voted. The Liberal Democrats like to say that the British electoral system is flawed, and it may be that it is, but no electoral system on Earth is as flawed as the moral logic here.

The Conservatives are staking everything on winning an outright majority and do not have a credible, or any, plan for a hung Parliament. This is probably why the SNP and Plaid Cymru have put themselves up for unconditional sale to the highest bidder, because they calculate that the Conservatives will have no option but to buy.

The trouble with either the Conservatives buying enough Nationalist votes to govern, or Labour making a blood sacrifice of its leader to gain Liberal Democrat support for a government led by, well, it could be almost anyone, is that in both cases the resulting coalition will legislate as if it had a genuine working majority, ie: very badly indeed.
Over the past thirty years, fully half of the UK's avoidable problems have stemmed from slack draughting of proposed legislation going uncorrected as bills are forced through by a big majority, followed by cries of woe and denial from the party supposedly in charge when the courts proceed to interpret those bills, now law, in almost any manner except that advertised and expected. Our problem hasn't been with Labour or Conservative ideology, but from the almost illiterate manner in which both have put pen to paper when making laws.

The best possible outcome, for the country, would be a hung parliament with the balance of power held, not by self-prostituting nationalists or opportunistic Liberal Democrats, but by a good tranche of independent members of Parliament.

If, say, there's a twelve seat difference between Labour and Conservatives after the election, and twenty to thirty independents, all with differing ideological positions which will tend to cancel each other out, then those independents will have to be convinced by each piece of legislation on its merits. It is most unlikely that any of them will support legislation written, as by both John Major and Tony Blair, with the express intent of concealing its true purpose, nor will they support legislation written on the assumption that Prime Ministerial intent will communicate itself into law by sheer willpower rather than by careful and articulate phrasing. (See Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown and quite probably David Cameron.)

In other words, a balance held by independents will indeed be a balance, and it can swing on any bill that doesn't do something that's actually clearly necessary, sets out unambiguous measures for doing so and contains no hidden loopholes or flaws. This is the very definition of good government and it's what we have not seen, regardless of ideological positions, for a generation.


And Medawar's other thought on the forthcoming election is this, debate on whether or not the Labour Party is fit for government begs a more interesting question: is the Labour Party even less fit for opposition than for government?

The Party has considerable internal tension between different factions ideologically (and also between personalities who simply hate each other) and the Party's huge financial problems have been kept at bay only by massive and cynical donations from vested interests, who have nothing to gain by throwing money at a party not in power. It is clear that in many ways, the Labour Party is held together by being in government, and as soon as it is not in government, it will splinter in all directions.

A Conservative government, whether with a working majority or some sort of coalition for hire, will probably not be a wholly good thing (it never has been before) and the national interest will require it to be constantly checked from folly and held to account for mistakes. This duty, and the British Constitutional system relies on political opposition rather than tolerating it, as in Russia or the USA, cannot be performed by a party in the throes of its own private civil war.

Labour voters should vote Labour if, as polling day approaches, it still looks as if their party has a chance. But if it doesn't look as if Labour can come anywhere near governing in its own right, and bearing in mind that its only likely coalition partner wants a destabilizing change of leadership as the opening payment for its support, then Labour voters have a duty to consider how much worse a Conservative government can be if it is not held in check by an effective opposition. That might be UKIP's moment, because although it's a huge stretch for a brand new party to become a government, a new-born party might make an effective opposition, whilst a dying one cannot.

British politics depends on the opposition to work, and it's the failure of opposition that has enabled the failure of government over the past two to three decades. For example, our current economic woes are largely the result of John Major, as Chancellor, effectively biasing the housing market towards "buy to let" speculators instead of first time home owners, who might have stabilised things. But the Labour opposition didn't oppose this measure with any energy, and when they came to power themselves, in 1997, they did nothing to correct his mistake, and it took them until 2004 to admit even to themselves that something bad was happening, by which time the bubble had grown so big they were terrified to prick it. In 2008, it burst of its own accord. But the cause, tax breaks for speculators, still hasn't been addressed and the process could yet be repeated in every bloody detail.

Whether Labour voters think they like UKIP or not isn't really the issue. If their own party still looks in with a chance, they wouldn't and shouldn't dream of voting for UKIP instead. But if their party has clearly blown it by about May the fourth, their best option, logically but not emotionally, is to vote for a party that will constructively oppose the Conservatives from the word go, rather than spend the next ten years fighting itself to the death. After eighty years on the sidelines after giving us the most corrupt government in our history, it's a bit unlikely that the Liberals are going to suddenly move centre stage and act constructively.

Does Not the Thorn Have Flowers?

Documenting a Stalker's End-Game

This blog is the author's attempt to keep us informed as a wealthy Canadian stalker attempts to use his minions to eliminate her. In secret, he hopes.

This, This is Spring!

Both river and season start with bright sunshine belying the brisk, eye-watering gale and soil still numbed by four months of unrelenting cold. But water is once more a liquid and it flows, from here to the North Sea, through millstream, river and navigation. Perhaps, too, the coming election will provide a fresh start for Britain, but not if any of the three "mainstream" parties have the least thing to do with it. Though, for all their skill and polished sophistry, they no more control the electorate than mankind controls the seasons.

Liberty, Independence and Prosperity

(Not only has our Kodachrome been taken away, so has our AGFA XRS.
Above is a scanned example of what you could do with the latter.)

The best way to know the state of England in any age, is to look at what her people are putting in their gardens. Under the reign of Elizabeth the First, English gardeners adopted the exquisite "Rosa Mundi", whose very name evokes the world view of a society that had indeed just discovered the concept of a world view, rather than accepting their alloted place at the edge of a Vatican-controlled Europe, as if this were the edge of the known world. Breaking free from Europe under "Gloriana's" reign was to transplant and transform England, from the edge, to the centre. It was under her reign, too, that geographers started to talk of "Britain", even if the act of Union was still a century away.

Under John Major and Anthony Charles Linton Blair, two leaders passionately determined to bury the British nation back under every shackle that Europe might propose, plus quite a few of their own devising for good measure, English gardeners opted for "decking" and covered their gardens in fairly flat (until something warped) areas of sawn and routed Finnish timber.

The emerging trend, under Gordon Brown, is for the decking to be removed to expose the soil once more, to grow vegetables for simple survival. The decking is found in short lengths, stacked ready for a million wood-burning stoves to consume.

Grim times, indeed. But what hope is there, for the future?

Well, grim times bring grim necessity and some very lucid moments.

That is precisely the formula that transformed an uncertain, actually quite frightened, country, whose Queen and whose freedom was hated by the rulers of Europe, into one that fought for her survival because there was nothing else to be done. She won, she survived. Europe remained closed to her, she turned elsewhere -and discovered both Scotland and the world.

The best thing that can happen to Britain now, whether Scotland is still along for the ride or not, is that Europe will once again try and squeeze her out. This will dismay and humiliate Britain's political elite, who will explore alternatives to subjugation only if forced. (Rather like the Hebrews under Pharaoh.) But they will be forced, and the alternatives will be found. And a new political elite will emerge, like Elizabeth's captains, to whom freedom will be exhilarating rather than uncomfortable.

When the Russian people had their taste of freedom, Vladimir Putin was able to persuade them to spit it out. What Gordon Brown, Nicholas Clegg and David Cameron have just six weeks or so left to do, is somehow persuade the British people not, on any account, to put freedom anywhere near their mouths. If they fail, Britain will once again realize that freedom and prosperity are the same thing.

Canvassing, Stalking and the Pimps of Political Corruption

The recent scandal over Members of Parliament and their expenses claims, and lesser scandals (involving much bigger amounts of money!) over funding contributions to political parties at the national level, has served to protect the real core of political corruption in the United Kingdom from public attention. The people in the British Political system who are best placed to improperly enrich themselves are neither ministers nor backbench MPs: it is the Constituency Agents and Constituency Party Chairmen who are in the best seats. Very few laws and regulations specifically apply to them, and those that do are focused on the conduct of elections in the first place and the practical management of the constituency party and any associated clubs in the second. As long as these functions are conducted within the letter and broad spirit of the law, the agent and chairman are almost invisible to the electorate, the returning officer, and electoral commission. Not that returning officers and the electoral commission are really anti-corruption bodies in any case.

MPs and Ministers, on the other hand, are under the public eye, and the eyes of their peers, the whole time, which is why an unwarranted expenses claim of a few hundred pounds is not merely a scandal, but one which can destroy a career. In such an environment, the scope for really serious, million-pound corruption would seem to be almost nil. It is the invisible men who have the freedom. And that's not their only advantage.

Traditionally, there has been one constituency party per constituency, so a 1:1:1 ratio between agents, chairmen and MPs. But with parliamentary boundary changes and a desire to save costs, in some cases one agent may cover two or three constituencies, and the constituency party apparatus itself may be based on the traditional, and not the current, boundary. But assuming that the traditional situation is still normal, and there's one Agent, Party Chairman and MP per constituency, it is almost always the case that the Agent and Chairman have a dozen or so County Councillors and perhaps a couple of dozen District or Borough Councillors under their wing. If one likens the constituency party to a Roman Galley, the Chairman is setting the course, the Councillors are working the oars, the Agent is walking up and down the gangplank, fondling his whip in an overt sort of way -and the MP is the beautifully carved figurehead on the bow script. The vessel is propelled by the wind and the graft of councillors.

The MP may propose, debate and vote on, laws which are of some concern to property developers, public service contractors and the like. But that's only creating an environment common to the vested interests and all their competitors. They might have a desire for this to move in one direction or another, but it's hardly worth a big investment of cash, unless a limited number of MPs are in a position to deliver a drastic change in the outcome of the legislative process. This isn't the normal situation, especially when, as has been the case since 1997, a single party has enjoyed an overwhelming Parliamentary majority.

The Councillors, however, take weekly decisions that implement existing legislation. An MP may be asked to nod through, or vote against, a Parliamentary order that requires local education authorities to designate approved suppliers for schools to purchase consumables from, a Councillor on the LEA gets a vote on which supplier gets that approval. Who do you think a potential supplier will want to bribe? The Councillor? Correct!

MPs vote on the general shape of planning laws, Councillors vote on specific planning applications. Even the limited number of ministers who have a say in planning matters, generally only have authority over outline planning permission for very big or very sensitive developments, and County Structure plans. The minister does not decide whether Mr A gets permission to build a particular trading estate on a particular field next to a motorway junction or not, but the appropriate local Councillors do!

The difficulty facing any vested interest who wants to bribe a councillor, is that councillors are ordinary citizens, often with full-time day jobs, and they are indeed local, whereas the vested interest may be a big developer or a big company, operating nationally. It would be very difficult for such a vested interest to always identify the right councillors to approach: who were on the right committee, didn't already have a strongly-held view on the development, and were the sort to accept an inducement. Unless they work through the Agent and local party Chairman, that is.

The Agent and Chairman know, not only which councillors are on the appropriate committee, which is after all a matter of public record (if you've got time to look!) but also which way they are likely to vote if no inducement is offered. They will know which councillors are corruptible, and which are not. They can advise, firstly, on whether or not the vested interest needs to corrupt anyone to achieve its aim. Then they can advise on how many votes need to be swung, because it never does to overdo things, and it certainly saves the client money if he corrupts the smallest possible number of Councillors on any one issue.

Then they can advise on who to approach, or they can act as intermediaries if direct contact is inadvisable, and they can advise on what sort of inducement each selected Councillor is likely to need. This might not be a cash bribe, but could be help with a pet project. In extreme cases, the Agent and Chairman are well-placed to bully a resistant Councillor into line.

Where the MP is involved in this process at all, will be to create the right climate of opinion for the vote to be swung, or as what the Russians call a "roof" against investigation by central government or other interest authority, such as the police. Again, no matter how moral the MP is, it's unthinkable to go into any election without the Agent and Chairman completely on your side, so they will toe the line, provided that they are never asked to do anything too outrageous. And the way things are structured in the United Kingdom, it never is necessary for the MP to do anything very much, for corruption to thrive in his constituency. All he really needs to do, is stand on the bow script and feel the wind and spray on his wooden features.

The consequences of this can be small, but corrosive. Medawar recently listened to a minor rant from a nice Irish lady who works on the domestic side of a special needs school in East Anglia. The system of preferred suppliers meant that she was obliged to buy food for school dinners, from a "preferred supplier". In a market town surrounded on all sides by market gardens and farms growing vegetables, she was forced to accept battered, tired produce that had travelled from Holland and Spain and looked as if it had already been rejected by supermarket buyers. She was forced to pay £19.95 per bag for potatoes of unknown provenance, when there were half a dozen farms within a five mile radius of the school that would have sold a bag of fresh, undamaged spuds for £5. "I'm being forced to buy shite for the children, at four times the cost of decent food!" was the entirely justified, furious, complaint.

Bribes are not just paid for planning permission to be granted, but for it to be refused, so that a small developer will be forced to abandon his plans and sell on his site to a larger developer. Houses will be built on land prone to flooding, business parks will be built with lorry access straight onto a major road at an awkward junction, or where there are no adequate sewerage works or the power grid is already overworked.

All of this creates problems, and sometimes fatalities, and therefore it creates anger and unease, which some articulate and public spirited citizens might transform into protest and a widespread demand for investigations and a clean-up of local politics. This leads us to the second area where Agents and local party Chairmen have the edge over Members of Parliament:

The Agent and Chairman, at election time, organize the troops and mastermind any canvassing in a constituency. 90% of the work involved in organized canvassing, is identical to the work involved in organized stalking. Much of the information gathered in canvassing, is useful to stalkers. The methods used to find out which way a citizen is thinking of voting, can be used to look into other aspects of his life. A proportion of the people who are willing to go out canvassing at election time, will be willing to go out stalking between elections. That proportion will usually be tiny, but the Agent and the Chairman will know who they are -and what sort of a payoff they will need.

So, when the corruption leads to inappropriate and damaging actions, that annoy the public, the Agent and Chairman can organize campaigns to suppress the leaders, or potential leaders, of any protest or grassroots campaign. They can bully the whistle-blowers on the Council's permanent staff: they can protect the vested interest from the consequences of getting something that is not in the public interest. A member of Parliament is a chancy and potentially useless target for corruption, but his Agent and Chairman may, in some cases, offer a one-stop shop service.

Fraud and Stalking

There seems to be a consensus, amongst animal rights activists in the UK, that most, if not all, of the stalking being done by persons associated with that particular cause, is actually being undertaken for money, or to silence/punish some activist who's got in the way of making money by this means, or out of personal spite by the same people who stalk for money. The Animal Protection Party and elements of "SHAC" being the main alleged culprits. Their clients may even be rival "animal abusing" businesses to those being targeted, or millionaires with their own deeply unsavoury personal obsessions, but all that matters is that they are willing to define a target and pay for his or her destruction.

It is very aptly described as "basement-level organised crime."

In other words, people being stalked by animal rights activists, are not necessarily even imagined to be animal abusers, although lies being integral to stalking, this assertion will inevitably be made: they have just been named by a client who wants them stalked for some criminal purpose.

Medawar wonders if this might apply in North America, too, and more especially in Australia and Germany, because in both countries, a famous international animal welfare charity (much given to threatening people to silence criticism) has been accused, by mainstream animal welfare groups and activists, of raising money under false pretences.

There is no-one on Earth more sadistic and relentless than a pathological liar whose lies have been exposed and rejected. Fraud, impure, dirty, nothing but greed, fraud for money, may actually be the underlying "cause" of many a "cause-stalker" or gang-stalker.

From stock adverts of post-earthquake donkeys (actually in Kobe, Japan, in the eighties not Chile, not Haiti, nor Italy,) dragged out to extract funds from a caring public the world over after every natural disaster, to the utterly sickening "SAGE" fraud run in the wake of the Dunblane Massacre, where a con-man from New Jersey, just released from Norwich jail, managed to persuade many of the bereaved parents to become patrons of his "Swiss-based anti-gun crusade", enriching him by at least £4M in the process, society's compassion has regularly been milked by those who have no compassion for anyone, or anything.

Pathological liars are sadists, and they are not compelled to tell outrageous lies, so much as to use emotional manipulation to force people to believe the irrational. (Such as an anti-gun campaign based in a country which makes gun ownership compulsory for adult male citizens!) The lies are mental sadism, but if they are resisted, physical sadism quickly follows, and will not stop until the perpetrators are incarcerated. Using toxic chemicals on people, to undermine both their physical and their mental health, is so sadistic that most policemen and doctors find it much more comfortable to believe that the victim is deluded; which in itself, worsens the victim's plight and is gleefully factored into the stalker's plans for their slow destruction.

Medawar would welcome comments (anonymous, for your own sake) from anyone who can cast light on the people doing this, in the UK, in North America, and, most particularly at the moment, in Australia.

Is the reason for some fairly middle of the road, worthy and utterly inoffensive, animal welfare workers in Australia being hounded by unknown stalkers, anything to do with their having made a justifiable fuss about a certain "charity's" fraud over the donkeys and the Kobe Earthquake in Japan?

This isn't the whole story about all organised stalking, but there is an emerging consensus that it IS the story where supposed animal rights activists are doing it. And it is interesting that Keith Mann gets named, by his fellow animal rights activists, in this connection, because his brother, Andrew, based in Northampton at the time, was , just a few years ago, jailed for a UK-wide government-funded training allowance fraud, where just about everyone in the UK animal rights movement was supposedly receiving "training" through his little scheme. Was this to fund the cause, or the Mann dynasty's lifestyle? Either way, fraud is fraud, is theft. Theft is even harder to justify in a political cause than violence.

PS: When the infamous Kobe donkey advert was run in Australia, not by the genuine Japanese charity that first created it, it raised roughly A$3M. The international animal welfare "charity" that re-ran the advert, without the Japanese charity's prior permission, donated about A$35,000 of this (less than 2%) to the genuine Japanese charity. Since when, the image has been used time and time again, all over the world. You do not save donkeys, or dolphins, by sending money to the box numbers on these adverts. The only charity that actually was helping earthquake-stricken donkeys shown in such adverts, was in Japan, and it never actually wanted to raise funds from outside Japan.

What Stalkers Want to Stop

Medawar would like his readers to see the sort of work that "Gangstalking-Australia" is being stopped from producing anymore, by stalkers. Their reasons are unknown and quite possibly incomprehensible anyway. What matters is that all stalker inflict similar destruction: the victim is very often someone of an artistic temperament, but it can be a journalist, community leader or an engineer, too. And in every case, the stalking is notable for two things: the human misery that it inflicts, and the work that it prevents from being done.

Stalking is never, ever, noted for the good that it does. Stalkers have no virtue to their name, they are marked only by the voids they create in human culture, achievement and aspiration. They deserve only eternal oblivion.

Transport Infrastructure

Very nicely restored railway signal box, a little way inland from Felixstowe.

The Guns That Didn't Bark

The assassinations of Jill Dando (BBC TV Presenter) and Yitzhak Rabin (Israeli Prime Minister) actually have one, strikingly anomalous, thing in common: A .380" ACP calibre pistol that didn't make anything like enough noise.

When Mr Rabin was shot, in the middle of a large crowd, there was confusion, even amongst security personnel, because the shots didn't sound loud enough to be real. (And the Israeli public fires probably handguns more often than any other population, except, possibly that of Finland.)

When Jill Dando was shot, a man, working (at a drawing board?) at the front upstairs window of the house opposite, didn't hear a thing, even though he glanced out just before, and just after, the shooting. Gowan Avenue may be fairly "upmarket" by London standards, but it is not a wide boulevard with mansions either side with sweeping drives and acres of front lawn. The houses are Victorian Terraces, albeit fairly large, the front gardens are just a couple of paces wide, and the slightly-recessed front doorway of Miss Dando's house ought, if anything, to have focused the sound of the shot right at the man working opposite.

The .380" ACP (also known as 9mm Browning Short) does make a bang. Years of Gun Magazine articles comparing it against more powerful calibres, such as the 9mm Nato, .38" Colt Super and .357" Remington Magnum (revolver) cartridge may have created an impression of it being relatively less powerful, but it produces almost exactly the same muzzle energy as the .38/200 revolver round that was standard Commonwealth military issue duringthe second world war, and Medawar has never heard anyone describe that as "quiet".

The .380" ACP, in its standard form, projects a 95-grain bullet at 955 feet per second, the .38/200 fires a 200 grain bullet at around 650 feet per second: energy the same. If anything, the .380" ACP makes a sharper noise as the lighter bullet is moving more quickly. This helps to make the .380" ACP accurate, although the close-range "stopping power" of the heavier bullet is well established. The powder charge in a .380" ACP cartridge is between 3 and 4 grains of a fast-burning smokeless propellant.

(A grain is a unit of weight, common to both the Troy and Avoirdupois scales. A Troy pound is 5760 grains and a pound Avoirdupois is 7,000 grains. Troy pounds divide into twelve ounces of 480 grains, a pound Avoirdupois divides into sixteen ounces of 437.5 grains.)

Although the .380" ACP or 9mm Short was a common service cartridge during the Second World War and with European Police Forces thereafter, and has been used in quite a lot of crime over the years, especially in the past, it hasn't been used in all that many professional killings in recent years. To some extent it is being displaced as firearms manufacturers find solutions to the difficulties of making smaller pistols compatible with the higher-pressure 9mm NATO ammunition. After the NAZIs captured the Polish Radom factory, making an improved version of the Walther PPK of James Bond fame, the .380" ACP version of the Radom pistol became standard issue for the Gestapo and other Nazi intelligence agencies. The .380" Radom was about the most powerful, accurate and reliable handgun available at the time that would fit reasonably unobtrusively inside smart civilian clothes of the thirties and forties, although Savage, in Canada, made a similar pistol. (Bond's PPK would have been the smaller .32" version, the Metropolitan Police did issue the .380" Version to some detectives and protection officers in the seventies and eighties.)

So, a generic .380" ACP pistol is probably a sound enough choice for an assassination, mainly, normally, because it is powerful and accurate for its size. It is pretty loud for its size, too. The ammunition used to kill Miss Dando is known to have been customised in some way, presumably to reduce the noise. What was done in Mr Rabin's case isn't publicly known, but many witnesses didn't think the gun was real because the noise wasn't much at all.

Adjusting the ammunition in this way takes a certain amount of expertise (and Miss Dando's alleged and then acquitted killer is mentally retarded) and it's the specific expertise which Medawar sees as a link between two crimes with, otherwise, nothing much to connect them. Certainly not motive.

Unless, of course, one starts looking at Jewish Extremist groups (Mr Rabin's convicted killer was a Jewish Extremist) and what they want to achieve. Everything they, or their financial supporters, want to achieve.

Everyone knows, Jewish Extremist Groups are against any sort of peace deal that surrenders any territory to Palestinians in return for peace, but there is actually a much longer list of things, about which they have very rigid views. More work needs to be done, on what it is they are after, apart from being beastly to Arabs.

It would be bitterly ironic if any conspiracy to murder a prime minister of Israel, was able to hide behind claims that any investigation or debate about it was anti-semetic. Mr Rabin's murder, and with it the denial of any chance for the peace that so many Israeli jews crave, was one of the most anti-semetic acts for a generation.