Carwyn Jones is the odious First Minister of Wales. He was trained as a barrister, and is a member of the Privy Council.

He recently sacked a Welsh Assembly (a sort of toy parliament) Cabinet Member, Carl Sargeant,  following unspecified allegations being having been made against Mr Sargeant. Within days, Carl Sargeant committed suicide without ever knowing the nature of those allegations.

Jones issued a statement, which contained the following

“I quite properly did all that I could to make sure that everything was being done by the book. I had no alternative but to take the action that I did and I hope that people will understand that.”

and

“He was a great Chief Whip and a Minister who served his country with distinction”

On the basis of the limited facts at hand, the confluence of these two statements  is gag inducing. If Jones believed that Sargeant was guilty as alleged  (as presumably he did, and hence should have been sacked and not simply suspended pending investigation), Sargeant did not serve with distinction, He was a sex abuser who disgraced public office, and Jones should have had the courage of the belief which led to his termination, and not issue this sanctimonious and mendacious  statement. He presumably did this because, whatever the real motivation for the sacking, he was terrified of the impact on his own career of any backlash.

In the current febrile atmosphere surrounding  any allegations of any sexual impropriety, the de facto modus operandi has become to abandon the bedrock of our legal system –  the notion  of due process. The prosecuting authority has become any female who makes any allegation regardles of the severity or veracity thereof; the jury is now the media together with the general populace fed a diet of salacious details; and the judge has become a motley band of employers, clients, and anyone else in a position to grant favour or enforce sanction.

The sentence is common to all such instances, and bears no relation to the severity or validity of the offence, given it were proven, and is as a minimum the ending of the accused’s professional life or, as so tragically in the case of Carl Sargeant, his physical life.

Carl Sargeant had not been found guilty of any offence when he was sacked; he was not even aware of the nature of his unknown accuser’s allegations. He was found guilty by Carwyn Jones and sentenced without due process – the actions of tyrants through history, and the antithesis of the principles  of English law as articulated in “The Rule of Law” (Bingham 2010).

For a barrister and a member of maybe the most powerful structure in British Governance to dispense with due process, and then claim that there was no alternative to so doing,  is a disgrace to his profession and to the very concept of justice in the UK. Carwyn Jones has acted like a medieval village head in days of yore in his miserable and insignificant apology for a country.