Wednesday, 2 September 2009

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rom The Times
September 2, 2009

Diana was right to be worried, says top QC, Michael Mansfield

CCTV footage of the Princess of Wales at the Paris Ritz on the night she died

CCTV footage of the Princess of Wales at the Paris Ritz on the night she died

Frances Gibb, Legal Editor

The fears of Diana, Princess of Wales, for her safety and her preoccupation with surveillance were “entirely justified”, Michael Mansfield says today.

The QC, the best-known brief at the Bar, says that the predictions of the late Princess “came to pass” and that Britain has slid seamlessly into George Orwell’s “Big Brother” society.

In an extract from his autobiography published in The Timestoday, the QC says that it was “utterly reasonable for the Princess to suppose that Big Brother was looking over her shoulder, that her telephone communications were being tapped and her movements by car were being tracked”.

She had a “credible and understandable basis for her belief”, he says in Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer.

Times Archive, 1997: Prince comes home with 'the People's Princess'

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There is now “CCTV on every corner”; traffic cameras track car numberplates; credit and debit cards reflect movement and use; satellites track mobile phones; and there are “vast databases”, he writes.

“There is now the prospect of a cashless, chequeless society in which the mobile phone alone will be used as the mechanism of payment for goods, so every purchase will be monitored.

“And then we have the ‘toolkit’ issued to teachers for the purpose of the ‘Prevent agenda’ by which pupils’ behaviour and thinking are to be reported to the authorities, should it disclose Islamic radicalisation. And don’t forget the ID card.”

Mr Mansfield acted for Mohamed Al Fayed, the Harrods owner, whose son Dodi was killed in the Paris car crash with the Princess, at their inquests.

In his book the QC, 67, who is stepping down from full-time work at the Bar, condemns the “surreal proposals” for a centralised database monitoring every call or e-mail. “That these surreal proposals should even be contemplated shows how far beyond Orwell’s worst fears we have travelled.

“The whole idea of Big Brother is now part of mainstream cheap light entertainment . . . this is both sinister and symbolic.It’s Jim Carrey’s film The Truman Show for real.”

Elsewhere in his book, which spans many highly publicised trials of recent decades, Mr Mansfield gives his views on his own profession; on the state of the criminal law; on how he became a hated lawyer facing death threats whose mission was to fight for the underdog and pursue miscarriages of justice.

Writing about acting for suspected IRA terrorists, Mr Mansfield, who is from North London, states: “Although my own upbringing in suburban Whetstone was a world away from the experiences of the young people whose civil rights had been severely oppressed in Northern Ireland — bad housing, unemployment, prohibited protest marches, internment, and so on — I have always been fascinated by Irish history, and a new world opened up when I started representing Irish clients.”

In 1973 Mr Mansfield’s own car was blown up in the Old Bailey bomb. A few days later he was asked to defend the Price sisters, two of those charged over the explosion, which was the first Irish bomb attack on the mainland since the 1890s.

It was not easy to find a barrister to take the case. “I was filled with trepidation about taking on a case that had generated so much public hatred . . . but that didn’t stop me,” Mr Mansfield writes.

He recalls visiting those accused, in prison, and then feeling a “tide of rising anger on hearing how their basic human rights were being denied as Catholics”.

His mother had thought it “unthinkable” that he should represent Irish terrorists. “It was as if I had become Irish myself.”

Posted by Britannia Radio at 20:40