A funny thing was said when the BBC reported the verdict in the trial of the ‘plane bombers’ at Woolwich Crown Court.
This was the second trial of a group of Muslim men accused of making liquid bombs concealed in soft drinks bottles. The first trial, which found the principals guilty of conspiracy to murder, which already carries a life sentence, had not got guilty verdicts that the prosecution wanted on charges of planning to blow up planes. So a second trial, at an estimated cost of £30m, was held.
In the middle of strenuous efforts to adlib shock horror drama in their reporting of this second round of verdicts, one reporter noted that the convictions on the charge involving liquid explosives ‘vindicated’ the chaos that descended on UK airports at the time of the arrests in 2006. This led to the irritating ban, ever since, of taking liquids on board planes in hand baggage.
Is that really why the second trial was held?
The reporter’s argument seems to be this. Because the jury found the men guilty of planning to use liquid explosives to blow up planes, airport security is therefore justified in confiscating your shampoo, baby bottles of lactating mothers’ breast milk, and tinnies of your fave bev.
Had the jury found them not guilty, then all this palaver at the airports would not be ‘vindicated’, i.e. it would be waste of time.
This confuses two questions.
The question the court verdict answered was ‘Did these men plan to manufacture and use liquid explosives to blow planes out of the sky?’
The question that airline security is asking are ‘Is it possible, for anyone, to smuggle onto an aircraft liquid explosives disguised as shampoo, mother’s milk, etc., that are capable of turning said aircraft into bits of wreckage floating on the surface of the North Atlantic?’
The answer to the first question tells us nothing about the answer to the second. And the second question was adequately answered long ago when various experts gleefully showed what a big bang you could get from the kind of contraptions the bombers were said to be assembling.
The BBC was illogically applying the first answer to the second question.
Let us now turn to the accusations that numerous Ministers, Senators and MPs should be disqualified from Parliament because, contrary to the Constitution, they or their immediate family members own shares in media or telecoms companies or companies with government concessions.
Now a number of those who have been found guilty by the Election Commission, such as Deputy Public Health Minister Manit Nopamornbodee, have advanced the argument that the number of shares they held was small and they held no executive position in the companies involved. They could not, therefore, influence the decisions of the company.
But is that the point?
The constitutional provision is an attempt to prevent conflict of interest affecting the decisions of elected officials.
But are these decisions made in their capacity as law-makers, or as shareholders?
What did the drafters of the constitution have in mind? that shareholders would improperly make decisions that affected the companies’ influence over the government? or that MPs and Senators would improperly influence the way the government dealt with the companies?
Now the opportunities for companies to influence the government are limited and mostly immoral, illegal or both. Companies can make campaign contributions to parties: legal within limits. They can hire lobbyists: legal but morally a bit whiffy. They can get their people elected to parliament where they will act as lobbyists on the inside: probably legal but definitely whiffy. Or they can give out bribes: illegal.
But companies can do all this (and do it with depressing frequency) with or without MPs holding their shares and egging them on. And, it is true, an MP or Senator with a couple of hundred shares would have infinitesimal influence over the companies’ decisions.
But the opportunities for government to influence media and telecoms companies and companies under concessions are large and potentially dangerous to the public good. If MPs have a stake in these companies, then the decisions they make as lawmakers could greatly affect the value of these companies and by implication the value of the shares the officials hold. No matter how many shares that might be.
The real danger is not MPs’ and Senators’ influence over companies, which would be proportionate to the number of shares they own, but their influence over government, where the size of their shareholdings is largely irrelevant.
The accused MPs and Senators are giving a valid excuse to a question that is insignificant, while ignoring the real question.
But on the whole, I think the BBC’s case is more reprehensible. We expect the media to try to get things right. Whereas we normally expect politicians to miss the point.
About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).
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