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I understand entirely that Lord McAlpine has been wrongly accused of a heinous crime. What I completely fail to grasp is how anybody thinks £185,000 of public money has anything to do with it.

McAlpine, a wealthy man, has accepted the sum from an organisation that did not allege he was guilty of a heinous crime. The organisation, the BBC, said somebody was guilty of a heinous crime. (An internal, non-independent report has suggested the BBC committed serious journalistic errors in so doing, but I’d like to hear that from somebody who’s not running scared.)

A bunch of people on Twitter, reading blogs and conspiracy theories posted on the internet, wrongly alleged that the guilty party was McAlpine. His lawyers have now vowed to pursue every single one of them.

On one hand, this is laudable: the cause of establishing that social networks need to be accountable and operate within the laws of defamation is noble. But why is this wealthy man, and why are these wealthy lawyers, placing such emphasis on the payment of damages?

I can see the argument that only by hurting the transgressor do we underline the importance of the transgression and ensure others do not follow suit. But I don’t agree with it. That argument leads to the death penalty, which doesn’t work.

McAlpine has had more public affirmations of his complete innocence than any man has ever had, certainly in the digital age. Jesus hasn’t had as much good publicity. There can’t be a single person in the country who hasn’t in some way heard the central message that McAlpine is an entirely innocent man. Why, then, does he need money too? It smacks of revenge, it smacks of wishing to be punitive. That’s understandable, given the severity of his predicament. But it’s not very noble.

McAlpine has done society a service by highlighting the dangers of unregulated social networks and now society should act to work out just what the hell it’s going to do about it.

But money paid to Lord McAlpine won’t ensure the investigation of remaining serious allegations about systematic child abuse that have nothing to do with any senior Tories of any era, but really do need to be looked at.

And money paid to Lord McAlpine won’t solve the problem of the social networks and the speed and irresponsibility with which they can transmit a message.

Do lawyers think it worthwhile to sue, for example, some bloke in an office who’d received a Tweet about Lord McAlpine, didn’t bother to check its truth and wouldn’t have had the resources to anyway, but nevertheless reTweeted it to all his friends? Do they think he was a knave – or a fool? And does bankrupting fools solve anything?

I write a blog and send Tweets and knew from my circle of friends that McAlpine’s name was being bandied about. I know others are still being bandied about.

I didn’t get involved because old habits die hard: in newspapers we had a profound knowledge of the defamation laws, in which we received formal training and had to pass exams, and that is still etched on my typing fingers. I’d never make an allegation I couldn’t back up, or justify, not in any field. But not everybody has been trained in the laws of defamation. Is that their fault?

Maybe the money Lord McAlpine has been seeking would be better spent on educating all Twitter users on the  defamation laws – or on producing a user’s code of conduct which makes it clear what account holders can and can’t do. Maybe Twitter needs properly trained lawyers or journalists to edit or moderate Tweets.

Or we run the risk that this bulldog-like ferocious attack, and this cowardly capitulation by the BBC, will be seen, in the end, as an attack on free speech.

Democracy arrested

It seems fitting to debate this democratic difficulty in the week in which we were presented with another, in the shape of the ludicrous elections for a police commissioner.

No national democratic campaign in recent times has so failed to engage the public. Never have people been so unaware of who’s standing for what. 15% is the most appalling turnout for a national election in history (local elections are no strangers to low turnouts, but not as bad as this).

Clearly, the policy is completely discredited. £100 million of our money has been spent in error. No police commissioner has a democratic mandate to do his or her job, no matter what Cameron says. Yes, it would be expensive to scrap this new, unnecessary, tier of bureaucracy – but not as expensive as it will be, in the long run, to maintain the sky-high salaries and enormous support networks required to nurture our new commissioners. So let’s knock it on the head right now, eh?

Do you think there’s any chance of that? No.

I’m with Brother Boney, who wrote last week: “Maybe instead of the ten candidates we had in Devon and Cornwall, Jethro or a member of the Monster Raving Loonies should have been approached; this would have made enough for a football team and as such would have attracted far more publicity for the individuals than this costly debacle. At least we should have been aware of their personal skills, who was good at buck back passing and own goal scoring. Outrageous wages and constant media coverage would be a small price to pay and only bring them into line with the other movers and shakers who control our lives.”

But the movers and shakers are the people to whom excess and waste are acceptable in some areas – for example, corporations that evade tax or the bankers who got us into this mess in the first place.

This wretched, corrupt government has now sold off the nationalised Northern Rock for reasons of outdated free market dogma, leaving you and I with a total bill of some £2billion, according to the Commons Committee of Public Accounts. The same committee has warned that taxpayers are unlikely, ever, to recoup the £66 billion cost of bailing out RBS and Lloyds.

Why not?

But there’s no reason why these part-nationalised banks should not stay in state ownership until every single penny piece is paid back and, moreover, they’re actually contributing to the exchequer. Is there? Go on, is there?

No comment yet from Cameron or Osborne.

Only last week somebody moaned to me about the police commissioner elections and I agreed, saying the £100 million cost was shameful. “Yes,” she said, “but what really costs is all those people scrounging a living off the state….”

You could weep, couldn’t you? You could point out the facts and figures – the billions in top salaries, tax evasions, corporate support, uncharged bills, dogmatic sell-offs, etc, etc, compared to the millions in the allegedly scrounging social security budget.

Here, again, are the figures for the way our social security budget is spent:

Pensions: £87.6 billion

Housing benefit: £23.3bn (more than half of claimants have a job).

Disability: £21.9bn

Sickness benefit: £9.4bn

Jobseeker’s allowance: £5.5bn

Income support (for people who have low-paid jobs): £5.1bn

Council tax benefit (reductions for widows and widowers who live alone, for example): £4.8bn

Maternity pay: £2.3bn

Winter fuel allowance: £2.1bn

Quite clearly, if we want to moan about social security scroungers it’s the pensioners who need a kicking. Who’s going first? (Brother Numbers is exempt from the kicking, by the way, for correcting my stupidity as noted below).

But you can make these arguments until you’re blue in the face; some people would still sooner we targeted a few penniless idlers than share in bankers’ profits or tax rich corporations or end tax cuts for top earners.

It rather mirrors the summary of the health policy of the average American Republican voter desperate to get rid of Obama’s programmes: they believe the best way of planning for long-term health needs is to get rich.

Frustrating, isn’t it?

Odds and ends and confession time

What a pleasant morning: I have been visiting a sick Brother of this place, known to us all as the Great Byte Hunter after he took his errant laptop into the garden and shot it. With a 12-bore shotgun. The good chap is going on very well, I’m pleased to say.

Then to Brother Bertie to compare moustaches (I’m losing, big time) and talk history. Fascinating.

I almost ignored the tipping rain for a minute or two.

And finally this week, I must make my confession to you all in the hope that our good Reverend Sister is waiting to offer absolution.

I’ve been having an affair.

Yes, it’s true. I have been sleeping with somebody other than Management. Several people. And I’ve been loving it.

Yes, I have been in the spare room, tucked up underneath the duvet, clutching the digital radio and listening to Aggers and Brother Blowers (I think he can be a brother now, don’t you, given the euchre trophy affair?) on Test Match Special at four in the morning, listening to wind and rain and watching dawn break while drinking in the heat and bustle of India. How it reminds me of the magic of boyhood Radio Luxembourg and the romance of distant places imagined only via the crackle of a cat’s whisker.

I was trying to see if England could engineer a great escape. They couldn’t, of course, and thus this affair ended…. But I have the taste now and do you know what? On Friday, I’m going to do it all over again.