Guest Post

Like most of you, I don’t yet have a clear account of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Like anyone with a critical or even curious mind (I supposed) there are questions to which I’d like to know the answer and blanks that I’d like to fill. That the ‘official’ account is still incomplete, that the initial reports were confused and contradictory, that many pertinent details await public scrutiny – these are surely banal truths.

So I would just like to say how struck I was, partly as regards the press but also very much in the blogosphere, by an eager credulity to accept the very first version spun from the presses and by a subsequent impatience with any sustained questioning of the version of events made available to the public. There were those (self-styled leftists even) who, even before the dead man had been identified, pre-emptively barked at civil liberties ‘fuckwits’ and human rights do-gooders for asking questions.

There was nothing at this stage, absolutely zilch, even to licence the conclusion that the dead man was a suicide bomber. But there was an alarming will to believe. This carnival of credulity did not come to an abrupt end when it was discovered that an innocent man had been killed. There was no embarrassment or compunction in the relevant quarters at the foolish readiness, the jettisoning of inquiring, and in some cases the audible enjoyment, with which they had greeted what was now obviously tragic.

Instead, the dismissal of any attempt to point out inconsistencies or holes in the official narrative continued. The ‘bulky winter jacket’, ‘the vaulting of the ticket barrier’ had quickly become impatient and defensive facts pointing unilaterally to the required conclusion. Those who dawdled with their doubts were diverting attention from important government work.

Now, the questioners have been of all political persuasions. And the questions asked are ones that should be asked in any democratically accountable state. And yet the implication, the ‘rumour’ is that even to raise questions is to declare a political position, or is to be guilty of certain unacceptable political allegiances, or to be some kind of ‘conspiracy nut’. What should be the duty of any thinking citizen is instead evidence of an ‘agenda’, the genuine need for information and answers construable only as hostility to the state.

A more general point, and certainly not original: there is a tendency to assume that anyone who does question the official account, which in this case seems self-evidently wanting and question-provoking, must somehow have another - often ‘sinister’ - account up their sleeve with which to replace it, i.e., those who interrogate and ask questions about the state are at once under suspicion.

That the mere existence of critical questioning is thought to denote a political programme is, needless to say, profoundly inimical to democratic debate and accountability.