ROBERT MILLIKEN

Papeete
With a nuclear test seemingly imminent, the French naval commander in the South Pacific issued a stern warning yesterday after commandos arrested four Greenpeace campaigners who tried to raid one of the two atoll test sites.In the environmental group’s second attempt in three days to occupy Mururoa Atoll, France’s main testing ground, a French Polynesian and three American activists rode into the lagoon in two inflatable dinghies in the early hours of Monday.According to Greenpeace officials in Papeete, the French Polynesian capital, they planned to go to the headquarters of Vice-Admiral Philippe Euverte, the French armed-forces commander in the South Pacific, and deliver a protest letter over France’s plan to conduct seven or eight underground nuclear-weapons tests at Mururoa and the neighbouring Fangataufa Atoll from this month up to May.Commandos seized the dinghies and arrested their occupants before they could get anywhere near the commander’s headquarters.Admiral Euverte, meanwhile, turned his attention to other vessels in the international protest flotilla which has gathered in the ocean near Mururoa and Fangataufa, about 600 miles south of French Polynesia’s main island of Tahiti. Many lay magistrates see their appointment as an opportunity to make useful social contacts. Any disquiet about the way in which they carry out their duties, or failure to obtain a position within the bench, is regarded by many of them as discrimination against their particular group.An appointment as a stipendary magistrate can be seen as progression within a chosen profession. Appointments to the lay bench are driven by a desire to obtain a “balance”, to reflect the composition of the local community, which can have bizarre consequences.Some lay magistrates from particular groups or organisations, have been known to feel that they have been appointed to represent their particular body, and not because of their suitability to discharge the duties of a JP.

This can cause resentment on the part of older people appointed to the bench when they have to work with senior magistrates who may be 10 years younger. Such older junior magistrates have been known to refuse to accept advice or explanation on court matters from younger seniors and to have objected to sitting with chairman younger than themselves.The criteria for appointment as a stipendary magistrate can be simply aptitude and qualifications. The “training” given to justices of the peace, both initial and refresher, is undemanding and would not enable them to pass any examination of which I am aware. Rather than rely upon constant advice from the court clerks to make up this deficiency, such clerks should themselves become stipendary magistrates.The lay bench relies upon experience (seniority), in the absence of a professional qualification. If there is a demand from the public for lay involvement in magistrates’ courts, then this can be done by appointing lay people to magistrates’ court committees.
Lay involvement in schools is established by appointments to the governing body, not by appointing unqualified, unpaid people to act as teachers once a week. Lay involvement in hospitals is established by appointments to the boards of NHS trusts, or as members of community health councils, not by appointing unqualified, unpaid people to act as surgeons once a week.The stipendary magistracy is superior in practice to the lay bench in every respect (eg, training, professional conduct, method of appointment, motivation).The “training” given to lay magistrates cannot possibly be equated with that of stipendary magistrates, who have studied for professional examinations.

Lay magistrates are not necessary in principle and are unsatisfactory in practice. Their duties should be taken over by stipendary magistrates as soon as is practically possible. Ruling Britannia is published by Michael Joseph tomorrow, price pounds 16.99. There is no role for a lay bench in the administration of justice in the magistrates’ courts. Yet pressure groups raise money too, and are influenced by commercial considerations; their internal politics has an effect on the body politic; their rivalries and different strategies are becoming as important to much policy-making as the internal rivalries of, say, the opposition parties.

There are signs that this may be changing – scandals in some campaigning organizations have hardened attitudes, and there is a more general understanding of the power of the lobbies spreading through the system If so, not before time.Friday: The rise of communitarianism. It is that they – we – have been too naive and unquestioning about the rise of the pressure groups and single interest groups which manufacture and manipulate so much news. It is remarkable how often their spokespeople are treated as unpolluted sources of information and light. Their funding is rarely questioned, their ’surveys’ are faithfully reported, their leading figures rarely subjected to hostile and critical questioning. Most weeks show a high proportion of press stories and broadcast news which originates from pressure groups, either through the release of reports, or opinion polls commissioned by them, or because they have achieved some high-profile publicity coup.If the Labour Party launches a survey of poverty and proposes to change the benefits system, the event is analysed in terms of its internal party politics, its campaigning programme and the cost of the proposals This is considered routine. It flattens and equates those seen on it, so that a rebel backbencher can seem as important as the Foreign Secretary. If one relied on television as a guide to which politicians mattered, one would be badly informed, because the ‘rentaquote’ MPs who are always willing to ‘do a turn’ and work up a vivid sentence or two are often those who have failed to make their mark in the formal political hierarchy and who, in an earlier age, would be unknowns.There is one final and serious flaw in the idea that the mass media, on paper, amplifier or screen, are a sufficient system of political scrutiny.

Cheap points sound as cheap as they are.As with the press, though, the power of the broadcast media in the political process is not an unqualified good.As compared to newspapers or books, television allows no reflection, no re-reading, no comparison of one thought against another Similarly, television has no sense of hierarchy or history. But the orators of forty years ago relied on tricks which have changed little since Ancient Greece, tricks like repetition, the use of alliteration, exaggeration, pathos, mocking humour, and so on. If we want to have a serious discussion about some important matter of public policy, then a television or radio studio, too small a place for histrionics, too informal for the deceits of oratory, is a better format than any public meeting. And in the real world, the fact that ‘X is a creep’ is a valid personal assessment and matters to most of us just as much as his speechifying It is a useful thing to know. It is far closer to what would happen if an ordinarily intelligent and reasonably well-informed voter was able to question the political leaders directly Evasions glare. One can make a personal judgement about an individual minister or leader in a way that earlier generations never could, unless they were part of the privileged political elite. If before, one could read X’s speech given verbatim in The Times, and treat X solely on the basis of his language and arguments, now one can conclude that X’s grandson, the new minister, is a sanctimonious creep.