Readers like to ask writers “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s such a common question at book readings that I’ve noticed writers (on blogs) making fun of people who ask it. Yet it’s rather silly to ridicule someone for asking a question most writers can’t answer themselves.

So here’s my answer: I get my best ideas by walking.

Just lately I’ve been plotting my next book, which is going to be a thriller set in Iraq and New York. I’ve done a good deal of thinking about it in my office, standing in front of my computer or slouched in my bean bag. But when I’m in front of the computer, I find myself thinking about what to write for this blog. And on the bean bag I get distracted by the little white polystyrene balls which seem endlessly to leak out of it onto my Iranian kilim.

The best ideas for this new novel have come to me as I walk home from the gym. It’s not because I’m walking through the prettiest part of town. I walk along a busy dual-carriageway linking two other noisy, busy roads. I sweat like a pig, too – I remind you that I live in Jerusalem, which is a mountainous desert town.

But all the way I’m chattering into my digital voice recorder, setting down my ideas. The reason is simple: relaxation and lack of distraction. I have nothing else to do but walk. Nowhere to go but where I’m going. Nothing to see but fast-moving traffic and a deserted sand lot. My mind is free to be creative, because it’s unhindered by anything else. (I’m quite capable of walking and doing something else at the same time, fortunately.)

In my meditation classes, I’ve sometimes practiced a walking meditation. If you pay attention to each step, the way your foot falls, you’ll soon find your mind entirely clear of any distraction. The same thing is happening on my way home from the gym.

There’s also the fact that by the time I walk from the gym, I’m rather relaxed and perhaps also feeling the brain benefit of exercise. The previous two hours have been spent running, swimming, lifting weights and doing yoga stretches, after all. That puts me in a good, clear frame of mind – and I reap the benefits on the walk.

I used to do this walk with headphones, listening to BBC podcasts. It was educational and informative, and I did find ideas bubbling up. But they’ve come much faster and more frequently since I turned off the cans.

Still, to get the idea for this blog post, I didn’t go walking. I resorted to my tried and true blog-brainstorming method. I asked my wife, Devorah, and she told me to write about my idea walks – because she has had to hear me babble enthusiastically about them so often. Which brings me to next week’s subject: why writers should always ramble to their spouses about whatever enters their heads. That’ll be Writing Tip #94.

I am currently commuting between Lancashire and London and, as a result of this, I’m having very little time to myself. It’s all work, research, tasks around work, talks, etc., etc. Don’t get me wrong, with most of my family out of work right now, I am grateful. But I am also aware that I have to organise my life, and my blog for this week, in short pitstops that generally coincide with a completely blank head.

So I haven’t a clue what to blog about this week. Other people’s social doings are not very interesting even if you have outre friends, as I do. Recent research forays have been esoteric to say the least and the subject actually dominating my life right now I can’t actually speak or write about at the moment. And I’m so tired I can hardly breathe. So hello and welcome to the ‘Self Written Barbara Nadel Blog’. Basically you write it yourself.

‘Well, that’s a bit of a sodding con!’ I hear you protest. Well yes it would be except for one truly astonishing innovation which is the amazing ‘Barbara Nadel Supplied Title Bank.’ This is a uniqe product which consists of titles generated by me for you to blog about in my name. Simple and effective genius, I trust you will agree.

So here goes. You can choose any one (or more) from the following list. Jolly good luck and merry blogging to you all!

Blog Titles

Writing for Stoats

Fictional Sex in the Workplace

What to Buy in Harrods When You’re Dead

The Prime Minister’s Bum

Frottage as Olympic Sport

10 Painful Things to do With a Premier League Footballer

10 Cities Not to Have Tourette’s Syndrome in

Criminal Feet

Idiocy Through the Ages

The Recluse, the Traffic Warden, the Penguin and her brother called Stan

Cigarettes, Whiskey and Wild, Wild Toilets

I sometimes wonder if the emotionality of crime has changed over time. Do we feel the same about crime as our fathers, grandfather, or ten, twenty generations back, felt about crime, punishment, judges, police, hangings, prisons, or torture? In other words, have our modern sensibilities given us a different perspective when we think about crime? How often do we come across something that evokes thoughts about conduct and relationships within the world of crime?

Another question that sprang to mind is whether the way we perceive criminal justice system is changed by our cultural experience and how connected we are to technology, which allows us to share the experience of other cultures.

Is there more aggression, violence and moral indifference than in the past? I am not sure how we can answer that question. We can look at the violence in films, TV, and YouTube and it looks as if we glorify aggression. That may be a justifiable conclusion but it still doesn’t answer the question: are we wearing different moral lens than the ones our ancestors wore?

I think that twenty generations ago my ancestors (and yours) would have had a much harder life. The idea of safety net, social justice, protection and security wouldn’t have meant much to them. We have become softer, more fearful, and more insecure even though on any objective scale we are far more secure and safe than our ancestors.

I have a theory—it is nothing more than that—for the reason we feel less secure when we should feel the opposite. There is a sense in many places in the world that the elite classes have turned their backs on ordinary people, and not only that, they have rubbed ordinary people’s noses in the fact they can commit acts of violence and escape punishment. So long as there is a class that is cloaked inside an institution and that institution is semi-autonomous, not under the rule of law or the main democratic infrastructure, those outside that institution are vulnerable to violence that has no legal recourse.

In other words, we accept the idea of violence might hit anyone at any time. What is difficult to accept is the fact that certain agents of violence are above the law. A recent example occurred in Thailand. According to The Bangkok Post,  a 34-year old Major, a doctor in the military, was the victim of what appeared to be an intentional hit and run.

The driver is thought to be an influential military officer and may also have an influential father who is also a high-ranking officer. The facts according to news reports are: a young female major arrived at her house to find her driveway blocked. She thought it might be a patron at the restaurant next door. The doctor wrote a note with the registration number of the car and gave it to an employee of the restaurant to ask the owner to move his car from her driveway.

Later, she came out of her house, saw a car parked across the way, it honked its horn at her, drove straight at her, dragging her thirty meters. She’s in a hospital in coma. There are indications in the press report that the police are very slow to proceed in this case, and that the military was slow to return the car involved in the hit and run. And, indeed, there are circumstances to indicate a different car was returned.

The colonel allegedly involved in the incident “surrendered” to the police, claiming that the woman was at fault and injured herself when she “ran into” his car. Something along the same lines was circulated not long ago in Thailand in connection with assigning responsibility for the April/May 2010 gunshot deaths of protestors in Bangkok streets: they were said not to have been shot by the military, but had “run into bullets.”

The Bangkok Post also said the colonel had tried to ring the emergency phone number 191 to request that they intervene in the quarrel between him and the woman but couldn’t get a connection. It is difficult to get the doctor’s side of the story as she’s in coma.

Here is the YouTube video of the car striking the doctor taken from a CCTV camera at the scene:

This incident occurred at a time when Thailand is going through a bitter election campaign and questions of social justice, equality and fairness are at the forefront. In the distant past, powerful elites no doubt did this kind of thing to our ancestors. What is different now? The way and means of communications have fundamentally changed. You can read this report and watch the YouTube video anywhere in the world. You can judge yourself by watching the video as to whether the doctor ran into the officer’s car.

It’s not just public record; it’s part of universal public record. People can read, discuss and debate such a case from Berlin to Toronto to New York and beyond. They can write about it. Tell their friends about it. What would have been whispered about in candlelit coffee houses and homes now is caught in a spotlight.

Add that to the aspirations of people for a more accountable government. By that I mean, a government that removes the autonomy from autonomous institutions, places which traditionally have shield their members against legal recourse even though they’ve committed acts of violence.

Institutions are incredibly slow to change. They rarely change voluntarily. Their members feel entitled to their privileges, benefits and immunities. The struggle of democracy is to bring all citizens under the same set of laws. That struggle will be a long one. Our ancestors wouldn’t have thought it worth the fight. They had a point as they could be easily isolated and picked off, one by one, until that deafening silence would have sent a powerful message to leave the powerful alone. Social networks have changed that. WikiLeaks created the possibility for accountability for official misconduct. It is a start. People don’t feel so alone in the face of social injustice. Our expectations about this sort of thing are evolving beyond anything our ancestors thought possible.

The ordinary person on an iPhone or computer is equipped to fight back with the most powerful weapon in the modern arsenal—an Internet connection to the world, a pipeline that ensures the worst incidents of criminal violence committed by members of the elite are photographed, documented, reported to a larger audience. Once that image circulates, it sears deep into the memory, and become one more piece of evidence that the privileged institutions of the past are in for a bumpy ride as they try to justify their immunities to a world tired, worried and insecure about a world where such things can happen. To anyone.

I’ve seen two things in the last week that allowed me to compare something
of the way crime writers used to appear in public and their present avatars.
It only made me wish for the good old days even more than I used to.

The comparison is between a delightful radio chat on the BBC in 1958 between
Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming and a load of paranoid
weirdness from Henning Mankell.

First, Chandler and Fleming. Listen to their talk. I rarely bother listen to
an entire half hour of anything online, but I’m telling you this is
beautiful. Both of them are unpolished as all hell. For anyone who’s been to
a book fair and seen the well-honed wisecracks and personae of today’s
authors, this’ll be refreshing.

When Fleming asks Chandler to explain how a hit is done in America (which
surely seemed like a very dangerous place to the average BBC listener of
half a century ago), old Ray puffs on his pipe and spins an unlikely tale of
gunmen brought to New York from that den of iniquity, Minneapolis. It
impresses Fleming so much that he refers to it in summing up the broadcast
as something very enlightening and shocking and underground that Chandler
has given us.

But most of all from Chandler’s side there’s the news that he intended
another Marlowe novel in which the great shamus would be married (see the
end of “Playback”) and, though he’d love his wife, he’d be frustrated by her
friends and the ease with which he lives.

Fleming, meanwhile, is very British and self-deprecating, pointing out
several times that his novels are pale shadows of what Chandler writes. In
turn, Chandler is amazed that Fleming writes a novel in two months during
his annual Jamaica vacation, having never written one faster than three
months himself. He then opines that “you starve 10 years before even your
publisher knows you’re any good.” Amen to that.

This truly beautiful conversation – hearing the voices of these fellows is
priceless in itself – was in stark contrast to Henning Mankell’s appearance
in an Israeli newspaper last week.

The starting point for Mankell’s piece was his deportation from Israel a
year ago. He was among the pro-Palestinian activists aboard a flotilla of
ships headed for Gaza, which was intercepted by Israeli commandoes. Aboard
one of the ships, the commandoes and activists fought and nine activists
were killed. Mankell was among those brought back to Israel on the boats and
then deported.

His article in Ha’aretz last week goes through the story of a Facebook page
opened in his name. It declared support for the Lebanese Islamists of
Hezbollah and other positions he claims not to share. Facebook took the site
down twice at Mankell’s request. Mankell wonders who was behind the Facebook
page.

To anyone who’s been in the Middle East, the most obvious answer is: a
Palestinian supporter saw that Mankell was on their side and decided to
hijack his name for some other causes to which he or she thought Mankell
might be inclined. Or at least that they’d be causes to which readers might
assume Mankell was inclined, knowing his position on Palestine.

But no. With a circuitous logic never apparent in his plodding Wallander
novels, Henning tells us that he heard the Israeli government wanted to use
social media to attack its enemies. Is this behind the “Henning Mankell”
Facebook page? Twice he writes: “Who would benefit from this?”

“Obviously I cannot and will not claim that it is either the Israeli regime
or the Israeli embassy in Sweden that is responsible for my kidnapped
identity and the attempts to spread lies in my name. But the question
remains: Who would benefit from this?”

In other words, he said it was the Israelis.

Well, now that you mention it, Henning, of course Israel is so threatened by
Henning Mankell that its agents spread active propaganda in favor of
Hezbollah, which kills Israelis and may indeed benefit from the propaganda
on the HM FB page, just so that they can neutralize the danger of HM.

Anyone who reads my blog or my Palestinian novels will see that I’m no shill
for Israel. But Mankell’s article is the kind of paranoid crap that makes me
see why he was attracted to the Middle East in the first place. It’s a place
where conspiracy theories abound.

When you listen to Chandler and Fleming, you hear them thinking through
their positions and ideas as they speak. Fleming is clearly altered as a
writer after half an hour with Chandler. If only Mankell had as open a mind.

It isn’t often that I find myself actually gagging to get my hands on a particular book but Jon Ronson’s ‘The Psychopath Test’ is an exception. The thesis of the book is that psychopaths are not only amongst us, but they run most of our blue chip companies and indeed, in all probability, run our governments too.

Jon Ronson is an acclaimed author, journalist and film maker and so he hasn’t just plucked this out of the air. Also, as a graduate in psychology and having worked in mental health services for many years, I am fully aware of this idea and have been so for a very long time.

According to the UK classification of mental disorder, psychopathy is not a mental illness. Lack of empathy with others, complete self absorption and the kind of ambition that will not brook dissent will only land you in hospital for psychiatric assessment if you kill or rape someone. Otherwise you are entirely free to work in a bank, run a country or even judge the odd TV talent contest. And this is how it should be. Not long ago the previous government mooted the idea of incarcerating all those who scored highly on the psychopath scale just in case they ‘did something.’ That was, and remains, patently absurd. Either we live in a society where one is innocent until proved guilty or we do not. Also, ‘the state’ would have to incarcerate many of those who actively implement its policies. Well according to Jon, myself and a lot of those who work in mental health they would.

There is an argument for the idea that most politicians are psychopaths. A brief jaunt into history will help to bear this out. How much empathy for others do you think Josef Stalin had, or Hitler or Richard Nixon or Margaret Thatcher? It was ‘all about them’ which is typical of those who have a diagnosis of psychopathy. Even more worryingly, take a look at all the bankers and financiers who have rendered much of the world bankrupt and see how much of a toss they give. I think the word ‘zero’ is what we’re looking at here. Scary? I think so. But before we get too carried away with the fact that ‘they are amongst us’, doing dastardly things, there is another side to psychopathy too.

Sometimes the drive to fame and fortune that seems to fuel so many people who could be described as psychopaths can work in society’s favour. Driven people do stuff – they write great and powerful books, they discover cures for terrible illnesses and they often make us laugh until we cry. I’ve met diagnosed and dangerous psychopaths and many of them have been quite charming. In terms of the great tapestry of human diversity, they add colour, edginess and many benefits to life. In no way do I think these people should be automatically incarcerated. I don’t think anyone should be. But I do also think that knowledge is power and that we need to be aware that many of our leaders, movers and shakers could very well be psychopaths. We need to bear that in mind when they look at us with puppy dog eyes and tell us they care. This happens generally just before an election.

Back in 2000, I wrote a book called ‘A Chemical Prison’ which featured a ‘classic’ psychopathic killer called Muhammad Ersoy. Charming, attractive and utterly ruthless, Ersoy was eventually arrested by my detective Çetin İkmen whilst playing a very dangerous mind game with one of İkmen’s colleagues. Currently he is in prison. But that was a long time ago and he could be up for parole soon. I am, I admit, wondering what to do with Mr Ersoy. Or rather, possibly, Mr Ersoy may well be wondering what to make me do with him.

Somehow Iceland always scores somewhere near the top of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, even taking the top spot in some years. How do I know? Because it’s always proudly reported in the Icelandic media, as if this will convince Icelanders that they live in a corruption-free utopia.

Through the boom years leading up to 2008, Reykjavík sprawled in every direction with new housing estates shooting up like mushrooms and new roads were built at the same time, hardly keeping pace with the speed of new houses everywhere.

I’d taken a wrong turn and swung the tin box of an economy rental Toyota hurriedly off the roundabout that wasn’t there the last time I came here. That was a mistake. Turning off the roundabout and regaining my bearings, I saw the flash of blue lights in the mirror, let fall a suitable expletive or two, turned onto the forecourt of a filling station and waited for the police to start asking what the hell I’d been thinking.

I wound down the window (by hand, I said this was a cheap rental car) and was stunned by a smiling blonde apparition in uniform and mirror shades. It was as if Miss World had leaned into the car to speak to me personally.

‘Speak English, speak English, speak English,’ I muttered to myself as the goddess offered a cheerful hello.

‘Good morning, officer,’ I babbled in my finest bewildered English tourist mode. ’I’m really sorry if I took a bit of a sharp turn. I’ve managed to get lost. I’m heading for that factory over there.’ I waved towards to a grey building on the other side of the road and the goddess nodded, clearly understanding this hapless foreigner’s confusion.

‘Your driving licence and passport, please?’

I handed both over, repressing the urge to shove both hands out of the window and yell ‘go on, cuff me! I’ll do whatever you want…’ as she examined my documents.

‘You are here on business or for pleasure?’

‘Er, both, actually.’

The ‘actually’ made me sound like a muddle-headed Englishman played by Hugh Grant, but without the floppy hair. The goddess nodded and handed back my documents.

‘Have a nice time in Iceland,’ she said, unleashing another heart-melting smile and was gone. I consoled myself with the thought that if I’d spoken Icelandic, then I’d probably have been given a whopping fine for a traffic infringement.

Iceland is in fact a startlingly corrupt place, but with a unique brand of corruption that presumably doesn’t register on Transparency International’s sensors. Saying that, I’d be interested to shadow one of their researchers around Reykjavík one day.

Icelandic corruption doesn’t permeate society as a whole. It starts at the top and doesn’t seem to trickle all the way down. While Jón Jónsson probably wouldn’t go out of his way to point out to the taxman that he didn’t deserve quite that much of a tax rebate – not that Iceland’s tax authorities are keen to let go of cash these days – if I’d been ill-advised enough to slip a $100 bill into my passport that day, at best it would have been frostily handed back and at worst I’d have found myself in a cell.

But if the situation had been different, if the amount had been a telephone number and dressed up as a consultancy fee, and the ice-blonde goddess in mirror shades had been a high-ranking civil servant, a member of the government or the banking establishment, then things could have been very different.

Government at every level has for decades been riddled with a peculiar Icelandic brand of corruption that ensures that to get ahead, you have to belong to the right party, or have been to college or university with the right people, or be related to the right families. There used to be talk of the ‘Octopus’ and its tentacles stretching through every facet of business and politics, with the close links a handful of influential families had with prominent political figures. In a little country with a population the size of Croydon’s, conflicts of interest are almost unavoidable, but instead of making efforts to steer clear, cronyism and nepotism have long been standard practice.

In the last decade, many of the Octopus’s many tentacles were severed, or simply lost, but instead of withering away, the fresh, brisk wind of neo-liberalism just paved the way for a brash young Octopus and the desperate need to privatise and harness every iota of capital.

The mandarins of government had already gone as far as they could to privatise fishing rights, and followed this by selling off a trio of largely state-owned banks. The results could almost have been predicted. The banks weren’t sold to people best qualified to run them or with impeccable track records in business, but handed to the ‘right’ people with their party loyalties in the right place.

It sounded fishy at the time, but as Iceland was an affluent country with booming employment and a top-rate standard of living, nobody took a great deal of notice. Jón Jónsson didn’t bother reading the small print and took the loans offered to buy a second home, a new kitchen, a smart jeep, a horse or two and a stable, a caravan, a couple of holidays in the sun – or that abiding symbol of overstretched borrowing, a monster flat screen TV with surround sound.

It wasn’t until interest rates started to soar that the Icelandic public realised what was happening, as it had taken less than a decade for these smart guys to bankrupt all three banks, while the authorities carefully looked the other way and absolutely refused to heed any warnings.

It makes you wonder if there is anywhere else where corruption is so pervasive at the top, as most Icelanders will cheerfully agree that the governmental class as a whole is riddled with people on the take, while Jón Jónsson stoically accepts it, swallows his pride and does his best to keep up the spiralling mortgage payments?

What is remarkable is that while some of those who are responsible for the Crash have taken the money and run to live abroad, mostly in London, there are a good few who still live in Iceland. Shortly after the Crash, one of them was jostled by a few angry people in the street. Recently another was insulted in a restaurant. But that’s as far as it goes. It’s a testament to how honest, peaceable and law-abiding Icelanders are that the people who robbed them blind can live safely in their midst.

The New York Times ran a travel article last weekend about things to do in Jerusalem during the Jewish Sabbath when most things are shut. The article was fairly typical of shorter travel writing in that all the experiences described were unlikely to surprise anyone. Eat hummus at the restaurants. Browse for ceramic bowls. Take a hike through lackluster scenery. Yet each item, through no fault of the writer who is a noted foreign correspondent, had to be described as though it would all add up to a thrilling afternoon.

It got me thinking about all the guff that tourists have to swallow. How often do visitors stream to must-see attractions which are actually unattractive – and which are only worth seeing so you can tell other people you’ve been there. I decided to apply this theory to Jerusalem, a city that’s a major tourist attraction and where I’ve lived 15 years. Here’s the Honest Tours guide to a selection of sites all of which are listed in most guides as delightful spots for tourists.

The Israel Museum:  Just completed a $100 million renovation. Ho-hum. Makes you wonder what at least $90 million of the budget went on. But the donations included a major one from the Marc Rich Foundation, so perhaps the whole thing was just a money-laundering scheme. Though the museum has some interesting archeological bits and pieces, give the art galleries a miss unless you thinks a pile of old school desks nailed together in a white room ought to be called contemporary art.

The Old City:  I felt deep sympathy for businessmen who suffered during the economic deprivations of the second Palestinian intifada during the last decade. Except for the nasty traders of the Old City. They’ve been fleecing tourists in a particularly mean manner for years and it was time they got a dose of karma. If you like bad hummus and surly service, try the couple of hummus restaurants listed in all the guides as “the best hummus in Jerusalem.”

The Western/Wailing Wall: Prepare to have your mystical communion with the ancient stones interrupted by a guy who looks like he stepped out of Vilna circa 1822. He’ll shove his hand in your face and ask for charity. Not for nothing does Yiddish (which many of these guys speak) have the best word for “sponger” in any language (“schnorrer”). The place is a Mecca for them.

Yad Vashem: Who doesn’t want to relive the Holocaust when they’re on vacation? A relatively new addition to the site of Israel’s “Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority” has made it at least an interesting museum. But unless you’re determined to shed tears the eternal flame and the older elements aren’t worth schlepping out to Mount Herzl.

Dome of the Rock: Now this is a genuinely unmissable experience. Too bad you’ll have to miss it, unless you’re a Muslim. At the start of the intifada in 2000, the Muslim authorities closed the Temple Mount to all non-Muslims. A big yah-boo to the whole world, which they thought was ganging up on them, like a bawling kid taking his ball home to spoil everyone’s game. Some years later they opened the platform of the Temple Mount during certain hours. But non-Muslims can no longer enter the Aqsa Mosque or the golden Dome of the Rock. Of course, you can hang out at the doors to catch a glimpse inside and be told (often rudely, as if your intention was to burst inside and desecrate the place) that you mustn’t enter.

Mea Shearim: Talking of rude, Jerusalem’s main ultra-Orthodox neighborhood has become increasingly a law unto itself. One Israeli newspaper reported that yeshiva students have been chasing the police out, thus making it a no-go district patrolled by gangs of weedy little men in black hats who think that spitting on a woman because they can see her shoulders is a good way to protect the Torah.

Jerusalem Forest: If the Norwegians knew that the hardy Norwegian pine would one day spread across the hills of Jerusalem and destroy all the natural undergrowth, they’d surely have chopped down every last one. Don’t worry, though: Yad Vashem is expanding its “campus” and eating into the forest, and there’s a housing/land shortage in Jerusalem, so this particular “attraction” won’t be around much longer.

If you have suggestions for the Honest Tours Guide to World Travel, drop me a note. I’d like to formulate a post featuring all the top worthless or disappointing sites in the world. I think it’d be a very popular feature. Let me know.

I first went to Spain when I was a kid back in the 1970s. It was still ruled by the dictator General Francisco Franco back then and, although tourists were only vaguely aware of it, there was widespread and ruthless suppression of dissent. Franco was a Fascist, a religious conservative and a man who ruled his country with an iron fist for almost four decades. After that first visit I have been back to Spain four times since the death of Franco and, on every occasion, I have been heartened by how enthusiastically and how totally the great majority of Spaniards have broken from the past. No-one gets dragged out of his or her bed at four in the morning to be tortured in some filthy cell any more and people can and do say what they like.

However the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s is still a sore point for many. Thousands died on both sides and many, including the Granadan poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, still lie in unmarked mass graves. For better or worse the Spanish government is currently excavating some of these sites and giving relatives of the missing the chance to have their DNA compared to that of recovered bodies from the mass graves. Similarly, Franco’s great monument to his Fascist army, the Valley of the Fallen, is under review. Some of the men buried there were basically war criminals and the modern Spanish state would like their remains to be removed to ordinary cemeteries. Only the giant cross that stands at the head of the valley will, eventually, remain. It is too hard to dismantle and besides it is a religious symbol which is apolitical and therefore benign.

But Spain will come to terms with its past because when it comes to events that go back hundreds of years, it has already acknowledged what happened and moved on. I had never been to Andalucia until this current trip. I had mainly roamed in the north of the country and so places like Granada were completely new to me. Of course it rained like a wet day in Manchester when we went to see the Alhambra, but then that was no surprise to one who saw the Eiffel Tower for the first time through a sheet of rain in mid-July. However on the day we went to the mountain town of Ronda the sun shone gloriously.

Ronda is an ancient and stunning white town high up in the mountains above the Costa del Sol. Cut in two by a deep, but narrow gorge called the Tajo, Ronda was once an Arab town ruled by the Granadan Caliphate. In spite of its very Christian appearance now, it still retains many exquisite buildings from its Islamic past. A town loved by Gustav Dore and Ernest Hemingway, Ronda is also the birthplace of bullfight with one of the oldest working Plaza de Toros in the country.

However much as all of this was very fascinating, my interest was caught by a museum called the Museo Lara. Housed in a cool and attractive palacio, the Museo Lara represents a lifetime of random collecting. There are exhibitions of clocks and watches, fans, bullfighting ephemera, carriages, film posters, porcelain, surgical instruments, I could go on and on and on. Museo Lara actually reminded me of a weird little museum of ‘everything’ I once went to in Ilfracombe, Devon – with some exceptions. Down in the basement of the Museo, well sign-posted and on recommendation from the curator, my family and I entered the ‘Inquisition’ exhibit. This was a collection of instruments of torture as used by the ‘Holy’ Inquisition. Blood curdling descriptions of what these things actually did were displayed alongside a life history of the Inquisition’s most famous member, Tomas Torquemada. As the great Monty Python once said, ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ And indeed I hadn’t been expecting to find their ignoble trail while I was in Spain. But I was wrong. People were very open both about the existence of the Inquisition and about the horror of what it did. It is a nightmare that has been come to terms with and exorcised. That was then, this is now and we no longer kill people because of their beliefs.

The Civil War, however, is still within living memory and the scars that surround it are still sore. That said, Spain can and will eventually come to terms with what happened in the 1930s and exorcise it just as surely as it has exorcised the Inquisition. Everyone expects even that particular wound to heal up eventually.

Iceland’s politics exist in a bizarre, incestuous little world with a rulebook all of its own. The odd politics are one of the things that put the country out of step with its Nordic neighbours. While Sweden, Norway and Denmark have rock solid Social Democrat traditions that have been major forces in their politics for decades, Iceland’s governments have been dominated by a staunchly conservative tradition that appears to owe more to Margaret Thatcher than any of the Nordic region’s traditional middle-of-the-road figures.

Iceland’s political landscape is as wind-blasted and volcanic as the country’s physical landscape. Currently out of office for the first time in years after the election following the Crash, the Independence Party has been the dominant force in Icelandic government with a history that goes back to the movement pushing for independence from Denmark that was finally achieved while Denmark was occupied by Germany, and Iceland first by British and then American forces. The conservatives of the IP have been part of practically every government for the past sixty years, trading on the old-fashioned values of honesty, reliability and a perceived opposition to outlandish change that are starkly out of kilter with reality. Alongside them for years in an undignified push-me-pull-you relationship have been the Progressive Party, traditionally stalwarts of the agriculture lobby that has seen its influence fade, and the Progressives’ fortunes with it.

There’s a Social Democrat tradition as well, but with nothing like the gravity and respect that the SDs command elsewhere in the Nordic region. These days the Social Democrats are a roughly centre party, currently the dominant partner in government, along with the Left-Greens in an unhappy alliance that is bound to run aground.

The left wing of Iceland’s politics could make a chapter all to itself, a strife-ridden grouping of odd personalities that has managed to include some genuinely statesmanlike figures as well as more than a few outright fruitcakes. After twenty years in the wilderness of opposition, the Left-Greens are the junior partner in government and are still busily tearing themselves apart – threatening their own tenuous hold on power in the process. It’s as if now they’re finally in government, they’ve decided they don’t really like it after all and would prefer to be back in the relative comfort of opposition.

‘For years we’ve been waiting for just this combination to be in government, but they’ve taken over under the worst imaginable set of circumstances,’ one longtime Left-Green supporter said just after the 2008 election, knowing deep inside what was to come; a government with a thin majority, hamstrung by the opposition snapping at its heels at every turn.

Today Iceland is split on a whole raft of issues, including the thorny one of EU membership, still clouded by the IceSave furore. The Social Democrats are solidly pro-Europe and have forged ahead in applying for EU membership, unceremoniously dragging their anti-Europe Left-Green partners to the shops with them. But the others are divided on Europe. Although it’s not widely mentioned, both the Independence and the Progressive parties have pro-Europe factions that could even split them into smaller parties if push were to come to shove – something the Social Democrats are undoubtedly aware of and keen to cash in on. A fundamentally split Independence party would be a gift that could keep the SDs in power as the heavyweight element of any future coalition.

While government bickers and squabbles, with the Social Democrats and the Left-Greens doing some uneasy horsetrading, while the opposition parties take every opportunity to shoot them down at every turn, scoring political points but doing nothing towards making any genuine progress, Jón Jónsson, Iceland’s version of Joe Public, sits in limbo while prices continue to rise and his earnings drop.

Icelanders don’t tend to complain, at least, not out loud. They grumble that their elected representatives are all on the take, but when it comes to polling day, the cross generally goes next to the candidate for the party Grandad voted for. The demonstrations that effectively ended the old guard’s government in 2009 and ushered in the present coalition were a rare example of Icelanders voting with their feet.

But a welcome side-effect of the Crash and the exposure of what everyone unconsciously already knew has been a new brand of humour. Icelanders have made the long overdue discovery of satire. Spaugstofan, a weekly comedy TV show, creakingly predictable after a twenty-year run, suddenly grew a sharp satirical edge as the Crash hit, while half a dozen scurrilous websites with startlingly realistic and frequently hilarious spoof news and comment have sprung up.

Taking satire to extremes, last year’s municipal elections saw the off-the-wall Best Party appear, headed by comedian Jón Gnarr and with candidate list of largely artistic types unencumbered by political baggage. The elections pledges were magnificent. Jón Gnarr promised free towels in municipal swimming pools and a polar bear for the zoo, as well as what he termed ‘sustainable transparency’ and ‘allskonar fyrir aumingja’ roughly translated as ‘all kinds of stuff for useless people.’

Tellingly, Jón Gnarr is now mayor of Reykjavík after the Best Party took more than a third of the vote. The ‘Best factor’ is a brooding unknown for Iceland’s established politics. Taking into account the rock-bottom level of trust that Jón Jónsson has for politicians of every hue, there is every chance that a grass-roots movement such as the Best Party could make a serious dent in the other parties’ followings.

Jón Gnarr’s avowed policy of twinning Reykjavík with Moomin Valley and stunts such as appearing in drag to open Reykjavík’s Gay Pride parade have grated in some quarters, but by and large the Best Party don’t seem to be doing a significantly worse job of running the city than anyone else. When parliamentary elections come round again, Jón Jónsson’s logic could well be that political outsiders could as well run the country no worse than career politicians who have already proved they haven’t made a great job of it.

Three cases stand out this week in the world’s criminal justice system. One was a police raid, helicopters, cars, reporters all descending on a rural farmhouse outside Houston, Texas on a psychic’s claim of having a vision of a mass grave on the premises. The second and third cases arose in China. In one, a music student from a wealthy family was executed for stabbing a cyclist 8 times after slightly injuring her in a driving accident. In the second Chinese case, a truck driver ran over an ethnic Mongol herder, dragging him under his truck. The driver given the death sentence; his passenger life imprisonment.

We tend to think of the West as having a criminal justice system that is rational, logical and based on tangible evidence; and that the supernatural is not part of the Western system. In the East, we have the image of soothsayers, psychics, shamans and other mystics as embedded in all levels of society, including the justice system.

How did the Houston police find themselves, based on a psychic’s prediction, digging holes around someone’s house, searching for a mass grave? It seems there were traces of blood and the smell of rotting meat. Only it turned out the reality was far less exciting. The blood came from a drunk session where someone cut their wrist, and the rotting meat from a broken down freezer.

Has any psychic ever having solved a single crime—using their psychic powers? The answer is zero. The police have little choice but to follow up all reports even though they may suspect the informant is a liar, stupid, mentally ill, or delusional.

The upside after the Houston case is police departments in Texas and elsewhere—the Internet has spread the image of ‘egg-faced’ Houston cops across the web—will likely mean that the next psychic who phones with reports of dead bodies will have a hard time convincing the police to fire up the helicopters and swoop in on the crime site.

It doesn’t take a psychic to predict that the rich and connected are dealt with differently than members of the working class when they have a run in with the law. A basic premise of criminal justice in any society is a central state must contain the predatory class. A state that fails or refuses to do so quickly loses legitimacy, citizens take to the streets, and unrest and violence rolls out faster than tanks from third world barracks.

The problem is a conflict of interest. This occurs due to the fair amount of overlap between the predatory class and the elites who are the politicians who exert pressure on other institutions including the police and courts. No doubt we all know individuals who are not predators by inclination but find that their success aligns their interest with the predator class. Predators, as a class, are rich, connected, powerful and influential. Predators are among the most successful rent-seekers, monopolists, cartel members, and politicians orbit around them like the earth revolves around the sun. And for much the same reason: the pull of gravity. In the case of predators, the gravity is money.

Predators, as a class, wish to live above the law secluded in their private Valhalla secure in the knowledge their wealth protects them and grants them virtual immunity. When a son or daughter of a member of the predatory class breaks the law, the central question is whether the state authorities will dish out punishment or protect such a person.

When Chinese university music student Yao Jiaxin drove into Zhang Miao, who was riding a bicycle, was slightly injured. Yao, described as the offspring from “second-generation wealth,” believed that Zhang cause trouble over the issue of compensation. Rather than facing the prospect of such a negotiation, he stabbed her eight times. Even though he turned himself into the authorities, admitted the crime, and his motive for killing the young woman, the People’s Court sentenced him to death. The judge called Yao Jiaxin’s motive for the murder despicable.

This is a variation of the Thai proverb to kill the chicken to scare the monkey. Rather than allow a child from the elite to murder a poor cyclist because she might cause him trouble over compensation sends a loud and clear message to the elites: Don’t think that your status, wealth and privilege grants you an automatic entitlement to immunity. There are limits. Yao Jiaxin just crossed on such limit. The vast bulk of the population in China will be reassured with the execution of Yao Jiaxin, that the central state will not tolerate law breaking by the elites.

Whether this is a precedent, a one-shot (no pun intended) warning, or larger political statement with ramifications in other spheres, remains to be seen. As Francis Fukuyama’s The Origin of the Political Order suggests, the Chinese have an underdeveloped rule of law based system. The execution of Yao Jiaxin may be an indication the Chinese authorities wish to strength the rule of law.

The elites might also belong to the ethnic group with the power to oppress a smaller ethnic group. A good example of the use of the rule of law to diffuse bad feelings running hot between the dominant Han and Mongol minority also occurred in China. Li Lindong was given the death sentence after a six-hour trial at the Intermediate People’s Court in the region’s Xilingol League. His passenger (another driver) Lu Xiangdong, who rode in the cab of Li’s truck when he drove over the herder, found himself convicted of homicide and received a life sentence.

The political circumstances surrounding the Mongol herder’s death seem to have been a significant factor. The dead man had been involved in a protest at the time he was hit and dragged 145 meters. His death along with another Mongol killed in a confrontation between locals and Chinese coal miners resulted in demonstrations in northern Mongol pastureland. Herders and students went into the streets with demands for justice and cultural protection for their traditions and lifestyle.

Neither the circumstances nor the severity of the sentences handed out to the truck driver and his passenger are found in a normal criminal case. The political dimension—ethnic conflict, cultural oppression, and demonstrations—is significant, making it difficult to treat the prosecution and sentence handed out in isolation. And here’s where the rule of law should come into play. This looks like an outcome in a system where the rule of law yields to political considerations. In such a politicized system, even the Predatory Class may not receive protection, and arguably would be better off under a rule of law system separate from the political decision-making. Using the criminal justice system to advance a political agenda is incompatible with the Western notion of rule of law. It is one thing to rein in the elites and their children as in the case of university music student Yao Jiaxin. But it violates the rule of law to prosecute and sentence individuals from the dominant ethnic group to relieve the political pressure created by another competing minority ethnic group.

From Texas to China we can confirm our bias that criminal justice systems are flawed. That is of course a given. All institutions have weaknesses, gaps, and inconsistencies because they are made and run by us. When the wheels come off the wagon is when officials in charge of the criminal justice look to the supernatural or the prevailing political winds before making a judgment. Justice without an underpinning of fairness, equality, impartiality, independence and reliability becomes a punch line on Jon Steward’s Daily Show or a cause to take to the streets in protest. The elites must be fenced in or they will eat everything including what is on your plate. It is here the predators lurk.

At the same time, the political class must leave the criminal justice system to work through the evidence without interference or favor. This is a tall order. Many countries have a culture of political interference. We live in an ideologically divided world, one where everyone wants justice, and many states fail or refuse to administer justice in a manner that is judged as equal and fair by a large segment of the population. Around the world the TV news brings you eyewitness accounts of the consequences in places the justice system has broken down. These accounts demonstrate that the predators understand the collapse of a legitimate state means there is no longer anyone to stop them.