John Walsh: Tales of the City

My walk in the footsteps of Dr Crippen and the Kray twins. And I do mean walk...

I've written before about my chronic battles with speed cameras. I have thundered and inveighed against the things in every available media format. I have cried anathema against this satanic Orwellian technology which snapped my car doing a few miles over the limit in a dual carriageway in east London. My defence was simple: 1) I didn't do it. 2) I might have done it, but it was hardly speeding, for God's sake. 3) I didn't deserve to be treated like a common criminal when I am, broadly speaking, as innocent as a new-born lambkin. And 4) You can't stop me driving for six months; it's like depriving me of oxygen.

This approach won me thousands of cheering admirers, plus the odd carping Letter to the Editor ("If Mr Walsh cannot control a ton of fast-moving metal, then he should not be allowed on the streets of London" - that kind of thing) as I fought through the courts. In May, I bravely took the stand at a magistrate's court in the City, was found guilty, pleaded to be let off a six-month ban and a huge fine, and was turned down by the cold-hearted magistrates in their tragic suits and terrible haircuts.

I appealed against sentence and duly found myself in Court No 3 at the Bailey. This was serious. This was the real thing. I couldn't believe how small Court No 3 was, and how snug - cramped woodwork, battered schoolroom forms with ancient inkwells, an MC Escher lay-out of stairs and pulpits. The actual dock, that once housed thieves and murderers, is in the middle of the court, topped by bullet-proof glass. I was spared that; instead I wittered nervously from the witness-box that's tucked in beside the judge's bench, and makes you feel uncomfortably as if your nose is folded into his armpit. "What kind of car do you drive, Mr Walsh?" he asked from six inches away, as if we were neighbours chatting over a fence.

"A Chrysler PT Cruiser, m'lud," I said. Why did he ask? Did he want to buy it?

The appeal sped by. I explained that I was a decent and law- abiding cove, who had done nothing wrong until I picked up four counts of speeding. I mentioned how the children's blue eyes would fill with wobbly tears if their father lost his licence. I brought up the elderly relatives sitting in the day-room of their Twilight Home, straining to catch the sound of my arrival for their Sunday outing. I showed the Bench a (frankly alarming) letter from my boss explaining that, without my car, I was as much use to the newspaper as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.

It didn't work. "While we do not doubt the veracity of Mr Walsh's case," said the judge, scornfully, "we do not think he will suffer grievous hardship from the ban." He fixed me with a baleful eye. "With nine points on your licence, you knew what the consequences would be if you broke the law, and still you drove at 39mph in a 30-mile zone. Therefore, the ban if appropriate, and so is the fine."

I sat there, stunned. Dammit, he was right. What a fool I'd been. Suddenly, I hadn't a leg to stand on. Where I'd once thought I was Steve McQueen, a cool and sexy outlaw-driver, I was revealed to be Mr Toad after all.

"There is no need to wait," said the judge, failing to detect the humbling epiphany taking shape in my head. So I left, sharpish. Well, I had to. I had a bus to catch.

Faith and reason

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police chief, is keen on the proposed new law that will make it a crime "to glorify or condone terrorism". Note the form of words. For the past four years, he says, he has tried to prosecute Muslim extremists under the rubric "incitement to murder" but it's never worked.

Why? Because of the word jihad. We know it means "holy war" but, because it's used in a spiritual context, it doesn't necessarily mean a call to arms. Muslims can argue that it means nothing worse than belligerent Christian terms like "the church militant". It's not in itself an incitement to murder.

But when it's interpreted, in the rhetoric of certain Islamic scholars, as a divinely-inspired mission to kill, that's different. The horrible Mufti Zubair Dudha, who teaches young adults in Dewsbury, has condemned the London bombings, but once contributed a preface to a pamphlet containing a chapter called "Preparing for jihad and obtaining warfare equipment is also compulsory."

In it, he wrote that "besides the jihad of the pen and tongue, the Muslim [nation] cannot be exempted from physical jihad. No learned person and no true Muslim can deny the benefits, fruit and blessings of physical jihad for the cause of Allah."

It is to him and his like that Tony Blair was presumably referring when he expressed a desire "to talk to the Muslims community and confront this evil ideology, take it on and defeat it by the force of reason."

But the PM is wrong about that last bit. We are on the borderline of the spiritual and the material here. You can't defeat the muftis of this world by reason. You can do so only by having the leaders of the Muslim faith declare that he is wrong, that he's a misinterpreter of holy writ, a blasphemer and a false prophet, and that anyone who instils such beliefs in the mind of the young will be kicked out of the Muslim community forthwith. Only the threat of excommunication (or worse) will show they mean business.