Last updated at 12:13, Tuesday, 09 March 2010

We’re in grave danger of talking ourselves out of the freedoms, protections and democratic privileges we have held so dear for centuries.

Or should that be shouting? Very probably it should. We’re rapidly shouting our way into a place we won’t like. Collectively we’ve made up our minds it’s good to shout and we’re not at all keen on any quieter alternative.

A bit of measured shush no longer applies. Not in Parliament, certainly not at prime minister’s questions, not in mischievous tabloid headlines, not in TV debates of important issues... could BBC Question Time’s Carol Vorderman have been any more shrieking or shrill?

Yell and the world yells with you. Shout loud, shout proud – be cross, be gross, sound clever, get personal. No matter that you haven’t a clue whether you’re right or wrong – just never let any facts get in the way of a blasting, high volume tirade.

There’s a kind of method in all of this noisy, argumentative madness. The more we shout, the less we hear; the less we hear, the more we misunderstand; the more we misunderstand, the less inclined we are to spend quiet time considering options, other points of view, the possible consequences of hasty, angry, loudly indignant actions.

Nobody knows how to stop shouting anymore. Soon nobody will know anything much at all – we’ll just keep shouting over each other until the whole word is deaf. We’ve been dumbed down by our own clatter.

The clamour and din now surrounding questions about what to do with child-killer Jon Venables is a case in point. Rarely has there been greater need for quiet, careful consideration of all the complex and challenging issues testing our baser instincts, stirred by these most unusual circumstances. But even the most unusual, exceptional circumstance earns no right of silent study for solution.

Shouters demand their right to know. They insist on claiming their entitlement to make a noise about it, to make an example of it, to achieve an extreme with it.

Mob mentality drives the demands. We’ve been on the approaches of mob mentality for years. Now it looks as though we may have arrived. We’ve burst open the gates and stormed right through with a hunger for vengeance, a thirst for blood and a united angry baying for – we’re not sure what for... too busy shouting to give it much thought.

Jon Venables was a 10-year-old child when he and his friend Robert Thompson inexcusably, shockingly, horrifically mutilated and murdered two-year-old James Bulger, tossing his broken little body on a railway line when they’d done.

Both were properly tried, found guilty of murder and detained for the crime which had attracted the stunned attention of an appalled world.

Both quite properly relinquished all rights to a normal childhood the day they led that little boy away to his horrendous death. Quite properly they served time as boys and, as they became men, were released from detention on strict legal condition that any suspicion of misbehaviour of any kind in the future would see them under lock and key again – probably for a very long time.

Jon Venables is suspected of having broken his conditions. The legal arrangement of his release on licence has been triggered. He is in custody awaiting due process of long established law.

Such is still his right – as it is yours and mine and the right of anyone suspected of any misdemeanour.

If mob mentality now prevents him from being afforded that right. If he is thrown to the wolves on mob demand, we’re all going to have to start worrying about the day we too may need to rely on claiming our own entitlement to the law’s fair, quietly considered balancing of justice.

Chances are it will have gone. We’ll have shouted ourselves out of its privilege. And we won’t have a clue how we managed to do that because, having been too busy shouting for a heavy meal of revenge, we didn’t take time to consider, never got round to thinking about the chaos we were dragging into our own lives.

Much has been screamed about our right to know. In the public interest, we have a right to know what Venables – given a new identity to shield him from the mob – may or may not have done, who he is now and how he has landed himself in the precarious position threatening to blight yet further the rest of his damaged life.

It was always likely to be so. Little Jamie Bulger’s death was so unspeakably cruel, so contrary to nature, so painful, every right-thinking person’s nerve endings sizzled with desire and demand for a punishment to fit the crime.

But we should be careful not to confuse public interest with that which interests a general public addicted to consuming any and every sensational morsel of a truly terrible human tragedy.

Already large sums of money have been offered as inducements to people who may or may not have known Thompson and Venables – in or out of detention – to blow their cover and spill the beans (real or fabricated) on two child-killers.

Do we have a right to know everything or are we demanding our right to be entertained with the tawdry, base, sickness of distressing detail in other people’s lives?

James Bulger’s mother, Denise Fergus, has said Venables should lose his anonymity if he is charged with serious offences. She believes she has the right to be in court at any future trial. She feels she has the right to know who her son’s killer has turned into. Perhaps she is the only one who does have those rights.

Labour’s Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, insists the Government should not be drawn into a mob clamour for showcase vengeance.

“At the time that Venables was sentenced, it was said that he should keep his anonymity and, as a general principle, we want to make absolutely sure that nobody can get off a criminal offence by saying ‘I can’t get a fair trial, there’s been too much publicity,’” she said.

For once the woman who seldom makes much sense, made an awful lot of sense. Just who is driving what she describes as publicity – but translates into mob rule – remains as debatable as the old chicken and egg puzzle.

Do screaming media meddlings with perfectly good law – long ago created as common to the highest and lowliest of our society’s individuals – generate the worst features of mob mentality?

Or does a mob – more concerned with shouting angry odds than securing fair justice for all – end up finally with the media and justice it deserves?

First published at 11:26, Tuesday, 09 March 2010
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk