December 12th, 2012 by Marcos
Capita interprets the Ministry of Justice as ‘Great Big Cash Cow’
We have all done or said
things we are ashamed of: ignominious deeds and utterances of such excruciating
fuckwittery that the mere act of remembering them is enough to make our palms
sweaty and our bottoms feel funny.
In more extreme cases these
distressing episodes manifest themselves as a mild form of Tourette’s, a sort
of pang of remembered shame that compels the unfortunate sufferer to groan
loudly or briefly shout something as a way of blocking out that embarrassing
thought, which, like a bully in the school toilets, has a habit of turning up
to taunt us at our most private moments.
At the Ministry of Justice
nothing these days makes the dicksplashes in charge of it hot with shame quite
as quickly as the mention of court interpreting. And with good reason, too. For
it took a service that, albeit not perfect, worked smoothly enough, and converted
it into a dark comedy currently played out daily in courtrooms across the land.
Previously, courts would
book interpreters directly from the National
Register of Public Service Interpreters. For a small fee interpreters would
turn up on time, appropriately dressed, and demonstrate great knowledge and
fluency with legal jargon in at least two languages. The MoJ decided that what
the service was really clamouring for was to give most of that small fee
interpreters were earning to an agency,
Applied Language Solutions
(now Capita TI), who would take on the responsibility of booking the
interpreters. Needless to say, those knowledgeable and well-turned-out
interpreters decided they would rather starve than hand over their hard-earned
cash to a pimp, and Capita TI replaced them with people whose previous
experience of a courtroom was mostly acquired sitting in the dock as
defendants.
The situation, which
continues to cause alarm and distress to defendants, witnesses, court staff, as
well as judges’ wigs to fall off from time to time, finally came to the
attention of Parliament, and the Justice Select Committee set up an inquiry
to investigate the whole disturbing saga. In its gathering of evidence, the
committee requested that those who have first-hand accounts of interpreters
cartwheeling into the courtroom in clown outfits to submit it anonymously via
their website.
But a government department
doesn’t become the Ministry of Justice without picking up a trick or two along
the way – you know the sort of thing: witness intimidation, duress and other
sinister threats. The MoJ’s Tourette’s kicked in and it immediately circulated
an email
expressly ‘discouraging’ court staff and members of the judiciary from spilling
the beans on Capita TI’s shit service on pain of coming around to their houses
and setting chickens on them. Or something.
And who can blame them for not
wanting to have it out with the Justice Select Committee? People will point and
laugh. It’s already bad enough that the massive bell-ends at the MoJ can only
discuss the issue amongst themselves from behind sofas or looking at each
another through the gaps between their fingers. They are embarrassed. And those
of us fortunate enough not to be languishing in some prison waiting for an
interpreter to turn up in order to tell the court we’re innocent, really, Your
Honour, almost empathise with them.
But enough is enough. The
government simply must find another way of siphoning public funds into their
mates’ coffers – one which doesn’t involve turning our courts into the current
Kafkaesque dystopia. Yes, it will hurt for a while and for years to come those
responsible for this fiasco will probably wince and cringe every time they hear
the word ‘interpreter’ or watch a movie with Nicole Kidman in it, but the
alternative is a justice system that is not merely blind but deaf and
monolingual, and Lady Justice may as well have her scales and sword replaced
with an ambidextrous flicking of ‘V’s at all comers.
As the saying goes, it’s
all fun and games until an interpreter gets in a muddle and we end up with a
15-year prison sentence.
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