I feel sorry for Harriet Harman
Dear Harriet Harman,
Despite the Guardian and BBC’s best efforts to bury the story, the news that you are to be prosecuted over a minor car accident in your south London constituency is to be welcomed. Even so, I have this bizarre sense of sympathy for you all the same.
You face prosecution for allegedly driving without due care and attention and driving while using a mobile phone, as the Crown Prosecution Service has said there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest to prosecute. “I’m Harriet Harman – you know where you can get hold of me” is what you allegedly said to a witness who approached your car after you hit a parked vehicle while talking on your mobile phone. The accident happened in Dulwich, south-east London, not far from your home on July 3rd. Your car is said to have collided with another vehicle, which was parked beside the kerb. The sound of the collision drew a small crowd of bystanders, and witnesses saw you ending a phone conversation and a neighbour of the person whose car was damaged then approached your car. The 1988 Road Traffic Act states that drivers must stop and give their name and address, details of the vehicle’s owner and its registration number, but instead you drove off. Your spokeswoman said that you ”strongly refutes the allegations and will deny the charges”.
My first instincts was, naturally, to smile at your indifference to the law and astonishing arrogance. However, it wasn’t long before I was overcome by a flood of sympathy for you. The evidence strongly suggests that you have broken the law and have subsequently been found out. Anyone with even the remotest sense of morality and decency will now expect to see you charged and appropriately punished by the courts. Nevertheless, there is a certain amount of bad luck about all this. Let us not forget that your Labour colleagues have spent the past decade claiming thousands of pounds for mortgages that don’t exist or houses that don’t belong to them, dodging tens of thousands of pounds in capital gains tax, abusing their government positions to secure favours for friends, wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money with reckless abandon, lying to and deceiving the British public on a regular basis – even starting wars on the basis of lies and deceit, shagging secretaries in government offices, burying bad news, accepting crooked donations, offering peerages in return for cash – and yet you are the only one who gets prosecuted by the police for a traffic offence. You didn’t send this country to a phoney war and kill tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of innocent civilians, you weren’t personally responsible for the worst recession in history, you haven’t buried this country in the highest levels of debt in living memory, you haven’t defrauded the taxpayer for years, you haven’t been caught up in sleaze scandals and backroom dealings, and yet somehow you now face what your colleages have somehow evaded: justice.
I don’t think for a second that you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law as politicians have an uncanny nack of being treated rather charitably by the police and the courts. That said, this incident could inflict permanent damage on your political career while others sitting at the Cabinet table around you have committed truly appalling crimes but remain unscathed. My sympathy for you will no doubt fade, seeing as it is only right that you accept the consequences of your actions, but the fact that many of your Labour buddies, both past and present, have never and will never face up to what they have done – including breaking national and international laws – leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
I have NO sympathy for her. After all, Al Capone was eventually prosecuted for tax evasion, not murder. I don’t care what they prosecute Labour Ministers for, as long as they are punished in some way. They all deserve any punishment for anything we can pin on them for what they have done to the country.
I’ll take whatever I can get, and if that means it’s only Harriet in the dock, well, that’ll have to do…
Tut Tut Tut Women drivers, think they can multi task.
Feel sorry for Harridan Harperson?
Hold on a second……………
No, just not getting it at all, were I to do something similar I’d expect a prosecution and wouldn’t have the super duper uberlawyer on expenses either.
I might feel some sympathy if she hadn’t been the arrogrant piece of sh1t over this incident that she is over everything else.
Looking forward to her day in court already. Thats sympathy with a goodly helping of popcorn.
BREAKING NEWS:
‘Mobile Phone Driving Law to be Repealed‘.
D
If, for even the slightest moment, I thought she may get equal treatment (oh the irony) to any of us proles hauled up in court for breaching the laws on driving and reporting accidents, then I may have found in within myself to have some sympathy.
As it’ll be a slap on the wrist, a dash of whitewash and some po-faced comment from her, than I hope a grand piano flattens her as she exits the court.
Looks like that sympathy doesn’t extend far beyond the reaches of this blog!
Sorry LFAT,
No sympathy at all. I cheered when I heard this as I thought that finally the law was being applied to everyone in this country.
Then I read your blog and was reminded of the very opposite.
Harman’s actions are the lesser of goodness knows how many Labour evils, which is why I feel a rather odd (and arguably misplaced) sense of sympathy. She deserves to be torn to shreds for breaking the law, but she must be gutted at how much her colleagues have got away with before her little altercation.
She has achieved at least one of equality goals.
She has managed to make herself hated in equal measure to Brown.
The offence itself is relatively minor, the serious matter is that either she or the witnesses are lying about the facts. If it’s her (and I know where I’d place my bet), the unhesitating and instinctive way in which she resorted to brazen lying when challenged by events is truly breathtaking.
But these days dishonesty is standard procedure. Hardly surprising in a culture where truthfulness merits greater punishment.
Isn’t it strange that the most serious offence of ‘leaving the scene of an accident’ has already been discounted.
Using a mobile phone behind the wheel is an offence of strict liability. She cannot be found innocent under any circimstances unless she can prove that she did not use the phone. They would not even bother to charge her on this unless the examination of the phone had provided enough evidence.
Why then, after causing an accident has she not been charged with ‘dangerous driving’. Had she just been spotted driving erratically while using the hand held phone, she could have been charged with ‘Driving without due care & attention’, how is hitting a parked car not ‘dangerous driving’?
It would have been if you or I did it.
Spot on, Tony (at #14)
I’m not sorry for her. She should clearly also be prosecuted under the Road Traffic Act for not stopping at the scene of an accident to leave her details, if only to resolve in English law if ‘you know who I am and where to find me’ meets that requirement.
I rather suspect that it does not. So as with but for a token 6 of our fraudulent MPs, she’s not getting charged for an offence based, presumably on her rank which makes ‘don’t you know who I am’ a perfect defence to traffic crimes…
Good Post! But is she not conspiring to get Mr Harman, aka Mr Dromey, (you know the heavy trade unionist and Labour party treasurer who just happened not to know the extent of their debt and the source of their funds – just like Mr Brown and the Robinson funded private office he never knew about but propmtly brough the thieving sod into government)into a ’safe’ Labour seat after that nice east end chap got caught with his fingers in the til?
Why should Ms Harman have to prove her innocence? I loathe the woman, but the prosecution should have to prove their case.
I understand what you’re saying, but instinctively I side with Boudicca in the first comment.