Law

Steve Hilton, one of David Cameron\’s most senior advisers, has suggested that Britain should abolish maternity leave

And why not?

The newspaper quoted a source close to Mr Hilton suggesting that he thought that maternity leave rights were \”the biggest obstacle to woman finding work\”.

This is true, it\’s also one of the leading causes of the gender pay gap.

So why not abolish the legal right to it?

I am interested in Mr Miliband’s radical idea that we might need tighter rules on media ownership and market shares. It will be interesting to see how he defines unacceptable levels of control, as it appears  that the BBC has the largest share of the TV and radio market, and also has a very powerful position in web provision and related publishing. Rules that he thinks of in connection with News International could not be hyrbid or company specific, and would have to be fair about any concentration of media power. Thoughts on what constitutes too much media power and if it should be regulated better would be welcome.

What fair and impartial rules about media concentration could you have that did not limit the BBC?

If, just to pluck a figure from the air, 30% of the newspaper market is too much, why wouldn\’t 30% of the TV market be so?

Or 30% of the radio market?

If cross media ownership is to be limited, newspapers and broadcast licences cannot be combined, then why can radio and TV licences be combined?

Hang the bastards and hang them high.

Currently, section 16 of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 gives courts the power to award costs that are \”reasonably sufficient to compensate the defendant for any expenses which he has properly incurred in the proceedings\”.

The last government wanted to introduce a scheme that limited these costs to legal aid rates, which would mean those who hired their own lawyers would be able to reclaim only around a quarter of their estimated costs.

And the current government wants to do this again.

Fuckers.

Get accused, don\’t have a decent lawyer, go to jail.

Get accused, have a decent lawyer and prove your innocence, go bankrupt.

This makes being accused the punishment. Whereas the whole point of the justice system is to sort the guilty accused from the innocent accused and punish only those proven to be guilty. And the reason we set it up this way is to protect the innocent from false accusations by the State.

This is the point of juries, of defence lawyers, of double jeopardy, of Habeas Corpus.

They\’ve already got rid of, or at least tried to get rid of, three of the four (juries in complex fraud trials, double jeopardy, Habeas Corpus for those accused of terrorist crimes) and now they want to take down the last, defence lawyers.

The move is part of wide-ranging initiatives to curb the Ministry of Justice\’s budget…………..Ministers expect to save £40m under the proposals.

You miserable, ghastly, little cocks. There is no better use of the taxpayers\’ money than defending the freedom and liberties of the taxpayers. That\’s the first, foremost and primary duty of government itself.

Look though at what the money is actually spent upon:

The Ministry of Justice has been accused of wasting a \”colossal\” amount of taxpayers\’ money after spending more than £130 million refurbishing an old office block for its new headquarters.

Opposition politicians and union leaders have expressed astonishment at the cost of the project to create a new home for Justice Secretary Jack Straw and his staff.

The remodelling of the concrete tower block, next to St James\’ Park in London, cost £915 a square foot to complete – around 18 times more than a standard refurbishment would cost in the private sector.

In addition to the refurbishment costs, £2,745,000 was lavished on new furniture and fittings for the offices and £290,000 was spent on artwork.

I used to work just down the road from that and from memory Boris has kindly provided a plenitude of lamp posts in the area. And rope is cheap.

Innocents will be bankrupted so that Jack Straw could sit in a comfy chair and look at pretty pictures.

Who would begrudge me the return of capital punishment?

I bang on and on here about the necessity of the rule of law. We cannot, if we are to retain any shred of liberty, be ruled by whims and opinions, it must be written down, in advance, what we may and may not do.

However, finance is different:

Had the incoming regulatory regime been in place in 2007, he said, RBS would not have been allowed to push ahead with its £50bn ABN acquisition. Labelling the takeover \”a shocking failure of regulation\”, he added: \”After the bank run at Northern Rock, after the credit markets had frozen, the UK regulators allowed RBS to buy ABN Amro.

\”The reason they allowed the merger to take place is because there was nothing that RBS was doing wrong. It ticked every box. There didn\’t seem to be anyone saying, \’Hold on, are we going to allow RBS to buy this enormous Dutch bank?\’

As a result, the Government says that it can\’t wait for the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling: it wants to legislate immediately. The trouble is, when governments legislate in haste, they usually end up with something that has worse consequences than the problem they meant to correct. From dangerous dogs to the prevention of terrorism, the record of emergency legislation is dismal: Acts passed at high speed are usually dismantled just as quickly.

It\’s not so much that bad laws do get passed when laws get passed quickly.

It\’s that they don\’t get unpassed when we realise that they\’re bad laws.

Take, say, the European Arrest Warrant. Even Chris Bleedin\’ Huhne realises that he and his Lib Dem mukkers voted for an appallingly bad law.

Still got that law though, don\’t we?

And yes, this does go to the heart of the whole government/market thing as well. What markets are merciless at is persecuting fuckups. Governments and politics not so much.

It sounds like a scene from Come Fly With Me: a badly disabled young boy, excited about what is likely to be the last foreign holiday of his life, is prevented from going because the budget airline from which his parents have bought tickets decides his wheelchair is too heavy to put on the plane. It isn\’t, though, a cringe-inducing comedy sketch, but instead the cringe-inducing news of easyJet\’s conduct towards Declan Spencer, a 12-year-old with muscular dystrophy.

Some will be outraged, some will not give a shit.

I\’m not going to call for a boycott of easyJet: potential passengers can decide for themselves whether they want to give their money to a company that treats handicapped children the way it treated Declan Spencer.

Quite, the glory of a competitive marketplace. Declan and family are flying on another airline.

You, us, the general public, can decide whether that threatment is worthy of seeking an alternative to Easyjet or not. Our morals, our money, our choice as to whether to deploy our money in pursuit of our moral aims.If enough of us care then Easyjet will change its ways. If not enough of us do then it won\’t.

The problem with this system is what?

The alternative system of course being a change in the law: but if enough of us care then we don\’t need to change the law and if not enough of us care then why change the law?

Last week, Energy Minister Charles Hendry said in public for the first time what had thus far only been said in private – that it is UK policy to support drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic.

Since when did this become UK policy? And why has the House of Commons never debated it?

Hendry told an energy conference that Arctic drilling is \”entirely legitimate\”

Newsflash for the Low Carbon Kid.

In the English system of law you\’re allowed to do anything that there isn\’t a law against.

Is there a law against drilling in Arctic waters? No.

Has there been a debate in the Commons about it? No, which is one of the reasons why there isn\’t a law against it. For if it\’s not been discussed there cannot be a law, can there?

So, drilling in Arctic waters is legitimate because there\’s no law making doing so illegitimate.

And yes, this is a very basic point about the freedoms and liberties of the English. We do not need to ask politicians for permission to do what we desire to do. We only have to be careful not to do what our elected representatives have decided we should not do.

(One leading geneticist noted in 1989 that clinical and forensic labs have to meet higher standards to diagnose strep throat than to put a defendant on death row.)

Good.

A police officer will face trial for manslaughter over the death of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests.

PC Simon Harwood, 43, a Metropolitan police officer, will face a criminal prosecution for striking Tomlinson with a baton and pushing him to the ground in April 2009.

Maybe he hit him and maybe he didn\’t. Maybe his hitting him led to his death, maybe it didn\’t. Maybe hitting him and killing him was justified and maybe it wasn\’t.

And now we\’re going to find out. For that is the function of a trial and of a jury.

We currently don\’t know the answers to most of these questions and that\’s what we have this whole system of justice for.

So yes, of course there should be a trial.

What a complete scumbag.

Even accepting, for the case of argument, that Huhne committed a speeding offence eight years ago and then persuaded his wife to take the points on his licence, is it a serious enough matter to require Essex police to conduct an investigation now? If you take an absolutely fundamentalist position that every infringement must be thoroughly investigated in every case, and every possible offence arising from it turned into a prosecution, then you will say yes. But not in my view. This isn\’t rape, or robbery or assault or serious fraud.

In many ways it is worse than those crimes. For it\’s perverting the course of justice. And the law cannot work if people pervert it.

Further, that he is a Cabinet Minister, a politician, is even more, not less, reason to prosecute, if there is indeed anything to prosecute. For he claims the right to make the laws that the rest of us live under. And it\’s a part of, heck, we invented the damn concept, the English system that no man is above the law. Be they ever so high.

Perverting the course of justice not a serious crime? Tell that to both Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken….they served time for exactly that.

The Prime Minister announced that he was setting up a committee urgently to consider how to address the issue, but he immediately came under pressure to act more swiftly and issue new instructions to the judiciary.

The law may well be an ass but that really isn\’t how it works.

Judges implement the law that the politicians have passed into law. If the politicians have managed to make some godalmighty cock up (as they have here) then the politicians don\’t get to just say \”No, do it differently\”.

They have to go back and change the laws that they themselves made in the first place.

Which is going to be very fun to watch as the tension here is between free speech, a free media, and the right to privacy.

The first is something we rather pride ourselves on, the second is a relatively new right implemented under the Human Rights Act. And if we reopen the HRA then all legislative hell could break loose.

But bak to the first point: if David Cameron were sufficiently stupid to \”issue new instructions to the judiciary\” I for one would love to see the response. For I would expect senior judges to abandon their Latin and resort to choice Anglo Saxonisms.

Politicians do not \”issue instructions\” to judges. They either change laws or they do not.

Yesterday the Sunday Herald, which is not bound by the terms of the injunction because it is published north of the border, intensified the row by publishing the footballer’s picture on its front page and naming him inside.

The injunction only covers media based in England and Wales.

This blog may or may not come under that definition and that\’s something I\’m not about to test.

You would think that someone who had access to US based media, say, one of those would be volunteer generated newspaper sites, could therefore make a bundle by announcing the news there and cleaning up on internet traffic and advertising.

Strangely, I know someone who has done that and have seen their traffic. So many people actually know the result that it\’s not worth it. Weirdly.

And as to the success of Mssrs. 5 p, as one wag over at The Register pointed out, more people now know who he is than know what a footballer is.

You\’re surprised, right?

We find it extremely difficult to understand why the judges cannot appreciate that, when the Home Secretary makes a determination that an individual\’s presence is not conducive to the public good, the decision has been made after careful consideration of all the relevant facts. There should be a presumption against overturning it – even if there is some interpretation of the statutes which suggests that she did not exercise her power precisely as conferred.It is notable that Britain\’s judges appear to be alone in Europe in their determination to overturn decisions by government officials about the dangers posed by individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism. In France and in Italy, there is no question of someone whom the state wishes to deport being allowed to remain in the country because he has to be able to launch an appeal.

That\’s because we have the rule of law and they have the rule of the State.

And yes, that rule of law really is there to protect us from the State.

Yes, slightly odd that a monarchy protects the rights of its subjects better than a republic those of its citizens, but that just goes to show you that the revolution was deeper in this country than it was elsewhere. We\’ve kept the form but not the reality of absolutism, other places not so much.

The majority of the country\’s woods, especially in lowland areas, are in private hands, and walkers are systematically excluded from most of those.There is no good reason why this should be so.

The reason being this rather ancient English idea of \”private property\”.

What\’s mine is mine and I might and may decide to let you have some of it but that is my decision, not your\’s or the law\’s to force me to do so.

What could be wrong with having a thorough look at the overgrown regulatory forest and hacking back a few trees?

Quite Mr. Kettle, quite.

In the past, even Conservative governments have tended to see most regulatory frameworks as an accumulation of rules and sectoral improvements in which an occasional winnowing is necessary. This government turns that on its head. Its explicit default presumption is that regulations will go unless they can be justified. \”If ministers want to keep them, they have to make a very good case for them to stay,\” says the site.

Here is where we can glimpse, even if it\’s not well explained as yet, the ideological divide.

Let\’s agree that we all do indeed agree that we\’ve got to do the winnowing. Without such we\’d still have the law that you can kill a Welshman inside the walls of Chester after nightfall.

OK, fine.

Now, here comes the ideology: why do we have regulation (or legislation, for that matter). Two conceptual positions:

1) There\’s got to be a law about it otherwise how will people know what they\’re allowed to do?

2) Where\’s there\’s a specific problem that is solvable by law or regulation let\’s solve it. Otherwise, no law or regulation. And what exactly is the problem this regulation is trying to solve, is it important enough to involve the State and does it solve the problem?

Yes, they\’re broad brush caricatures and as all such contain a germ of truth.

Position 2) is the traditional English response. 1) is the more \”Roman Law\”, continental, perhaps we might even say social democratic response.

We are English and I\’ve no problem with the idea that we might trawl through that thicket and lay flat many of the laws, saving only those we can hide behind when the Devil turns on us.

I also agree that there are others who insist that no, there needs to be rules \’n\’ regs about everything for how otherwise will the poor lambs know what the beneficient rulers have allowed them to do?

But then again we\’re English so fuck those prodnose bastards.

There are things that have to be done and that can only be done by government. This is why we do in fact need to have a government. There are also problems that must be solved and which can only be solved by the law and regulation. So let us have those laws and regulations. But anything which does not solve a problem, does not solve a problem which can only be solved that way and also that actually needs solving, get rid of it.

So that\’s about 90% of the rules \’n\’ regs for the bonfire then, eh?

And quickly denied, of course.

No, I\’m afraid it doesn\’t quite work like that:

An American woman released from prison in Iran has said she will not return there to stand trial alongside two fellow hikers charged with spying for the US.

Sarah Shourd said she has post-traumatic stress disorder and going back to Iran would be \”far too traumatic after what I\’ve already been through\”.

You see, extradition, people turning up in court to answer charges, these are reciprocal things.

You get to take only those privileges and excuses that your own government offers to those it wants to see in its own courts. Turn and turn about sort of thing, d\’ye see?

And the US does not offer an \”it\’ll be too stressful\” get out of court free card to those it wishes to prosecute: see Gary McKinnon for details.

So, stressful though you may find it, you don\’t get to have such a card either.