When a woman sought justice on harassment, the Lords closed ranks

Jasvinder Sanghera has spent her life fighting sexual abuse. But the upper house has shielded Lord Lester from punishment writes Kate Maltby in The Guardian

 

Jasvinder Sanghera: “How can I suggest that victims of sexual harassment and bullying should complain to the Lords? I don’t want them to go through what I’ve been through.”


When the #MeToo movement hit Westminster last year, some didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Those of us who had put our names to complaints of sexual harassment were presented as over-privileged women operating in elite institutions: if we were miffed by the odd indecent proposal, or the occasional lunge from a politician, perhaps we needed an education in real suffering. 

No one can similarly accuse Jasvinder Sanghera of being sheltered when it comes to sexual violence. At 14 she ran away from home to escape a forced marriage, sleeping rough at first. Her sister Robina was less lucky. At the age of 24, Robina fatally set herself on fire after being told the family would disown her if she walked out on her husband’s physical violence. Since her sister’s death, Sanghera has spent 25 years campaigning against sexual abuse in traditional communities. Her charity, Karma Nirvana, helped make forced marriage overseas a criminal offence.

Last week, Sanghera outed herself as the woman who had made a complaint of sexual harassment against the Lib Dem peer Lord Lester. She would have felt like a “phoney”, she says, if she had continued campaigning against sexual violence in the family while allegedly tolerating harassment in the workplace.

Sanghera claimed that, while lending his support to her work, Lester had groped and harassed her and eventually promised: “If you sleep with me I will make you a baroness within a year”. He allegedly threatened to retaliate when she refused. Lester strongly denies all the allegations, though an investigation by the Lords’ commissioner for standards found against him. That investigation has since been scrutinised by two committee reviews, both of which again found against Lester. Overall, two law lords, two former lord chancellors, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and 15 other peers have examined the case and ruled in Sanghera’s favour. But according to Lester’s friends in the House of Lords, this isn’t good enough.

As soon as the last appeal failed, Lord Pannick, a respected QC who is a close friend and supporter of Lester’s, launched a media campaign to discredit the investigation process in which he had just participated – including making the astonishing claim that Lester should have been allowed personally to cross-examine a woman who had accused him of sexual assault. Pannick’s campaign against Sanghera’s credibility read like a textbook case of establishment mobilisation: a column in the Times, where he is a regular columnist, and an appearance on the Today programme, where he called Sanghera “vague and contradictory”. There are, he alleges, errors or discrepancies in her memory. No doubt there are, at a distance of 12 years. But crucially, six witnesses gave evidence that Sanghera had confided in them about the alleged harassment at the time.

In his newspaper column and on the radio, Pannick drew our attention to a friendly note that Sanghera had inscribed to Lester in a copy of her book, after the key incident. Yet on neither occasion did Pannick acknowledge that Sanghera had been heavily questioned by the commissioner on this point, as she had been on every “challenge” made by Lester’s team. Sanghera’s side of the story is that Lester had requested the inscription at a large public setting “at the front of the queue of around 100 people”. She was still reliant on Lester’s help for her policy campaigns. She repeatedly told friends at the time that she still felt uncomfortable. But from Pannick’s media interventions, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a smoking gun that had never been put to Sanghera in the investigation.

It is profoundly depressing that after a year of public discussion about sexual harassment, educated men still claim not to understand the pressure women feel to show harassers that there are no “hard feelings” . A female barrister at Pannick’s own chambers had the guts to point this out on Twitter, writing last week that: “I was sexually harassed by a Crown Court judge whom I spent a week work shadowing. At the end of the week I not only thanked him profusely for the opportunity, I actually sent him a Fortnums hamper to show my appreciation. Such is female socialisation in the 21st Century.” Harvey Weinstein’s victims were famously photographed grinning with him at parties.

The #MeToo movement has often been accused of disrespecting due process. Yet last week we saw a woman vindicated by an established process, and still denied justice when the Lords refused to pass a sanction against Lester on the grounds that it doubted the results of its own process.
Peer after peer turned up in the Lords on Thursday to swear that they had known Lester for donkey’s years and that he wouldn’t harm a fly. In court, an admission of lifelong friendship with the accused would immediately lead a juror or adjudicator to be recused from the case. Only in the House of Lords, it seems, does being a mate of the man in the dock particularly qualify a chap to try his case.

Many in the Lords were concerned that this case had been tried “on the balance of probabilities”, instead of “beyond reasonable doubt”. But the former is the civil law standard used in any employment tribunal: Lester was facing suspension from a job, not a jail sentence. In rejecting that standard of proof, the Lords has shown that it expects to be held to lower professional standards than any other place of employment. This cannot be right. If the Lords feels its own procedures are not fit for purpose, it must accept that modernisation is likely to be tougher, not easier on it. The Lords should be careful what it wishes for.

The callous cruelty of the EU is destroying Greece

Peter Oborne in The Telegraph

For all of my adult life, support for the European Union has been seen as the mark of a civilised, reasonable and above all compassionate politician. It has guaranteed him or her access to leader columns, TV studios, lavish expense accounts and overseas trips.

The reason for this special treatment is that the British establishment has tended to view the EU as perhaps a little incompetent and corrupt, but certainly benign and generally a force for good in a troubled world. This attitude is becoming harder and harder to sustain, as this partnership of nations is suddenly starting to look very nasty indeed: a brutal oppressor that is scornful of democracy, national identity and the livelihoods of ordinary people.

The turning point may have come this week with the latest intervention by Brussels: bureaucrats are threatening to bankrupt an entire country unless opposition parties promise to support the EU-backed austerity plan.

Let’s put the Greek problem in its proper perspective. Britain’s Great Depression in the Thirties has become part of our national myth. It was the era of soup kitchens, mass unemployment and the Jarrow March, immortalised in George Orwell’s wonderful novels and still remembered in Labour Party rhetoric.

Yet the fall in national output during the Depression – from peak to trough – was never more than 10 per cent. In Greece, gross domestic product is already down about 13 per cent since 2008, and according to experts is likely to fall a further 7 per cent by the end of this year. In other words, by this Christmas, Greece’s depression will have been twice as deep as the infamous economic catastrophe that struck Britain 80 years ago.

Yet all the evidence suggests that the European elite could not give a damn. Earlier this week Olli Rehn, the EU’s top economist, warned of “devastating consequences” if Greece defaults. The context of his comments suggests, however, that he was thinking just as much of the devastating consequences that would flow for the rest of Europe, rather than for the Greeks themselves.

Another official was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that Germany, Finland and the Netherlands are “losing patience” with Greece, with apparently not even a passing thought for the real victims of this increasingly horrific saga. Though the euro-elite seems not to care, life in Greece, the home of European civilisation, has become unbearable.

Perhaps 100,000 businesses have folded, and many more are collapsing. Suicides are sharply up, homicides have reportedly doubled, with tens of thousands being made homeless. Life in the rural areas, which are returning to barter, is bearable. In the towns it is harsh and for minorities – above all the Albanians, who have no rights and have long taken the jobs Greeks did not want – it is terrifying.

This is only the start, however. Matters will get much worse over the coming months, and this social and moral disaster has already started to spread to other southern European countries such as Italy, Portugal and Spain. It is not just families that are suffering – Greek institutions are being torn to shreds. Unlike Britain amid the economic devastation of the Thirties, Greece cannot look back towards centuries of more or less stable parliamentary democracy. It is scarcely a generation since the country emerged from a military dictatorship and, with parts of the country now lawless, sinister forces are once again on the rise. Only last autumn, extremist parties accounted for about 30 per cent of the popular vote. Now the hard Left and hard Right stand at about 50 per cent and surging. It must be said that this disenchantment with democracy has been fanned by the EU’s own meddling, and in particular its imposition of Lucas Papademos as a puppet prime minister.

Late last year I was sharply criticised, and indeed removed from a Newsnight studio by a very chilly producer, after I called Amadeu Altafaj-Tardio, a European Union spokesman, “that idiot from Brussels”. Well-intentioned intermediaries have since gone out of their way to assure me that Mr Altafaj-Tardio is an intelligent and also a charming man. I have no powerful reason to doubt this, and it should furthermore be borne in mind that he is simply the mouthpiece and paid hireling for Mr Rehn, the Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner I mentioned earlier.

But looking back at that Newsnight appearance, it is clear that my remarks were far too generous, and I would like to explain myself more fully, and with greater force. Idiocy is, of course, an important part of the problem in Brussels, explaining many of the errors of judgment and basic competence over the past few years. But what is more striking by far is the sheer callousness and inhumanity of EU commissioners such as Mr Rehn, as they preside over a Brussels regime that is in the course of destroying what used to be a proud, famous and reasonably well-functioning country.

In these terrible circumstances, how can the British liberal Left, which claims to place such value on compassion and decency, continue to support the EU? I am old enough to recall their rhetoric when Margaret Thatcher was driving through her monetarist policies as a response to the recession of the early Eighties. Many of the attacks were incredibly personal and vicious. The British prime minister (who, of course, was later to warn so presciently against monetary union) was accused of lacking any kind of compassion or humanity. Yet the loss of economic output during the 1979-82 recession was scarcely 6 per cent, less than a third of the scale of the depression now being suffered by the unfortunate Greeks. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 per cent, just over half of where Greece is now.

The reality is that Margaret Thatcher was an infinitely more compassionate and pragmatic figure than Amadeu Altafaj-Tardio’s boss Olli Rehn and his appalling associates. She would never have destroyed an entire nation on the back of an economic dogma.

One of the basic truths of politics is that the Left is far more oblivious to human suffering than the Right. The Left always speaks the language of compassion, but rarely means it. It favours ends over means. The crushing of Greece, and the bankruptcy of her citizens, is of little consequence if it serves the greater good of monetary union.

Nevertheless, for more than a generation, politicians such as Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Nick Clegg and David Miliband have used their sympathy for the aims and aspirations of the European Union as a badge of decency. Now it ties them to a bankruptcy machine that is wiping out jobs, wealth and – potentially – democracy itself.

The presence of the Lib Dems, fervent euro supporters, as part of the Coalition, has become a problem. It can no longer be morally right for Britain to support the European single currency, a catastrophic experiment that is inflicting human devastation on such a scale. Britain has historically stood up for the underdog, but shamefully, George Osborne has steadily lent his support to the eurozone.

Thus far only one British political leader, Ukip’s Nigel Farrage, has had the clarity of purpose to state the obvious – that Greece must be allowed to default and devalue. Leaving all other considerations to one side, humanity alone should press David Cameron into splitting with Brussels and belatedly coming to the rescue of Greece.