Getting quickly back on to theme of deliberate misreporting - and of the current tabloid hot ticket, ‘feral youth’ - we find the Daily Mail in full spittle-flecked fury mode over the ruling by an Immigration and Asylum Tribunal that Learco Chindamo cannot be deported on his release from custody for the murder of Phillip Lawrence:-

When ‘human rights’ are an insult to us all

There cannot be a decent human being who does not share her pain and disgust at what Britain has become: a land where the ‘rights’ of a killer are exalted, where crime victims matter not a jot and where a remote tribunal tramples over every sense of morality and self-respect.

The case of Learco Chindamo insults us all. A violent, truanting 15-year-old, he stabbed Mr Lawrence just for trying to stop the bullying of a younger boy.

Now that this squalid undesirable is ending his 12-year sentence, he should in the public interest be automatically deported to his father’s homeland, Italy.

Well I guess this means that I’m just not a decent human being in the Mail’s estimation because neither its by the numbers ranting or the obligatory entreaties of the distraught widow:

Mrs Lawrence said: “I am devastated, demoralised. More than that, I’m unutterably depressed that the Human Rights Act has failed to encompass the rights of my family to lead a safe, secure and happy life.

“I have always been a staunch advocate of the Human Rights Act but there is a missing term in it. It must encompass some responsibility.

“This isn’t just about me and my family. I am not solely thinking of me. I may be a mother but I am a human being as well. I feel I can’t fight any more. I feel I can’t survive this.”

… are sufficient to prompt this blogger into an unseemly bout of vicarious emoting over the High Court’s decision or the hurt feelings of Lawrence’s widow.

As is perennially the case, the headline used in the Mail’s online coverage of the story, ‘Widow’s fury as thug who knifed to death headteacher is allowed to stay in the UK’ is supplanted in it’s print edition by the altogether pithier and more overblown, ‘What About My Family’s Rights?’:-

To which the answer, as ever, is that you’ve already had them.

Chindamo was caught, tried, convicted and has served (almost) the sentence handed down by the court, and while one can always quibble about whether the sentence was long enough - remembering that for the victim (or their family) it almost always isn’t no matter what the court hands down - the fact of the matter is that that’s your lot; the criminal justice system has discharged its obligations to you once the offender has served out their sentence give or take any post-incarceration conditions that may be applied in cases such as this one where, as a murderer, Chindamo will be released under licence.

The Mail quotes Mrs Lawrence as having advanced the usual trite observation:

But she stressed that the law “bypasses humanity” and fails to take into account the views of “ordinary people”.

Does no one ever wonder if there might be a tangible reason why rulings handed down by courts/tribunals sometimes appear to deviate from what is presumed to be ‘public opinion’?

In fact there’s a very good reason for this; this being simply that these bodies deal with the full material facts in such cases, facts that are all too often omitted or downplayed in the media coverage of such cases, upon which the public has to judge the merits of their decision.

Thus the Mail initially informs its readers that:

Chindamo, son of a vicious Italian gangster and a woman from the Philippines, came to the UK at the age of six.

Which is certainly true, but some considerable way short of the full truth, which the Mail discloses only towards the end of the article and after its has fully vented its spleen:

Born the son of a Mafia hitman known as the Acid Man, Learco Chindamo seemed almost destined for a life of violence.

His mother Paquita split from her husband Massimo [and subsequently moved the UK after a brief period living in her native Philippines] after he threw her out of a window, breaking both her legs.

Little wonder, then, that Chindamo is reportedly unable to speak Italian, for all that the Mail pours scorn on this line of argument in its editorial:

But not in the view of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. These worthies decreed that it would be a breach of his human rights to be sent to that free, sunny, civilised EU nation because, among other things, he can’t speak Italian.

The ‘amongst other things’ in the case would presumably be the fact that Chindamo has had no contact with his Mafioso father or other members of the Italian branch of family since his mother came to the UK in 1988 to escape from her violent husband, and no matter how clement the weather might be in Italy one doubts that this would prove to be much consolation should Chindamo be dumped in what, to him, is an entirely foreign country, where he doesn’t speak the language and where he can have little or no expectation of picking up the threads of his life. in complete isolation from his mother and siblings, who constitute his only real family.

Unless the Mail would like to see his family deported as well, to keep him company - and never mind the risk of violence towards his mother should she be found by the boy’s father.

Its these little details that make all the difference, for all the Mail would like to pretend that they don’t exist or have no bearing on the decision of the High Court.

Picking up on the BBC’s coverage of the story we find that another minor detail has escaped the Mail’s attention:

The human rights lawyer David Enright said on Monday that under the current rules, it was impossible for people to be deported from one EU country to another.

Chindamo came to the UK when he was six. His father is Italian, his mother is from the Philippines and he has an Italian passport.

Mr Enright also dismissed the government’s protests as “posturing”, saying it had accepted the 2006 European Commission regulation into British law.

“(This) said that any EU national who had lived in the UK, even in prison, for more than 10 years, could only be removed from Britain on imperative grounds of national security - which clearly would not include Mr Chindamo or anyone like him,” he added.

So this is not just a matter of the general application of article 8 of the Human Rights Act, but one specifically covered by regulations on deportation set by the EU and incorporated into UK law more than a year ago. Hardly the most persuasive argument for the Mail and its right-wing readership but it does seem to conclusively settle the matter in terms of the legality of the decision and the scope - or lack thereof - for a government appeal in this case.

There’s a tidy little dilemma for the fiscally parsimonious right. Which is more important to them? Making a show of mounting a futile legal challenge to a decision that is politically inconvenient but legally correct, or saving a bit of taxpayers’ money by not embarking on futile litigation of a kind that is doomed to failure from the outset?

That we are debating this at all is merely a function of the Chindamo family never having taken the opportunity to become naturalised British citizens as was certainly possible up to the point at which Learco committed this offence, and why would or should they have considered such a move when under the EU’s freedom of movement/residency regulations the Italian passport obtained by her marriage to Learco’s father was good enough to permit them to build a life for themselves in the UK. Had they taken out British passports, or were Chindamo merely a common or garden domestic murderer and not one with the added frisson of an Italian passport this debate would, at best, revolve around whether the sentence of twelve years, handed down in 1996, was sufficient to fit the crime - and its well worth noting that unlike the vast majority of adult murderers, Chindamo appears to served out his sentence in full and with no remission.

But for his holding an Italian passport, Learco Chindamo would be released on licence at the end of his sentence as a matter of routine and although the profile of his case would certainly generate some media interest - and the usual bleating from the press about how sentences for murder aren’t long enough - such interest would be short-lived and, no doubt, curtailed by court-imposed restrictions designed to give the young man the best possible chance of putting his crime behind him and rebuilding a life as a useful, and reformed, member of society. Rehabilitation is, after all, part of the core purpose of the criminal justice system.

The public interest in this case, such as it is, rests squarely in the question of whether Learco Chindamo is, as he claims, a reformed character bent on rebuilding his life on his release - and the Mail does report that he has gained an NVQ in health and social care while in prison and plans to seek a career in nursing (cue yet more scare stories about ex-criminals gaining jobs in the health sector) - or whether he still constitutes a risk to public safety, this being a question for those in criminal justice system who are dealing with the practicalities of impending release. The personal feelings of Mrs Lawrence and her family are, frankly, of no consequence but for the matter of applying licence terms to Chindamo’s release designed to circumvent the possibility of his coming into direct contact with the family as a matter of basic compassion.

Beyond that, the Mail’s reporting of this story amounts to little more than the usual tabloid diet of unrestrained voyeurism, which invites its readers to indulge in the vicarious and unproductive emotional fetishising of victimhood as a means of generating sales. While the Mail may contend that ‘there cannot be a decent human being who does not share her pain and disgust at what Britain has become’ the reality is that there cannot be an honest human being who does not recognise that, in this case, the criminal justice system has done its job and served outs its purpose in full nor and independently-minded human being who fails to see the Mail’s reporting of this case for what it truly, no more than a cynical effort to manipulate the prejudices of its readers in order to generate sales.

In cases such as this one, opportunism knows no bounds, hence no such story is complete without its coterie of bandwagon jumpers:

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said last night: “It is a stark demonstration of the clumsy incompetence of the Government’s human rights legislation that we are unable to send a proven killer back to his own country, especially when that country is in the EU.”

Comments like this are, in reality, a stark demonstration of the clumsy incompetence of politicians in situations where political expediency and naked populism are thought more productive than the correct application of justice.

Once one understands the full background of the case and the history of the Chindamo family then in no realistic or honest sense can one argue that Italy is Leano Chindamo’s ‘own country’. We’re not dealing here with an individual who was born and brought up overseas and who came to Britain as an adult and of his own choice and volition but with someone who came to the UK as a young child in train with a mother escaping extreme violence. He had no choice is coming here and, like or not, Britain is the only country he knows and has provided the only life he knows, for all that he has spent the last eleven years of that life in prison.

Far from being ‘clumsy’, the Human Rights Acts requires the courts to consider cases, such as this one, on their individual merits and on the material facts at hand, as has long been one of the overriding principles of British justice.

What is actually clumsy here, not to mention crude and ill-conceived, is the politician’s marked preference, in the fact of media pressure, for ’soundbite’ justice, which manifests itself in this case as the notion that ‘foreign criminals’ should be automatically deported on release irrespective of their individual circumstance or the nature of the offence for which the individual was convicted. Follow the arguments of the likes of David Davis (and the Daily Mail) to their logical conclusion and we arrive rapidly at a situation where we start deporting people for speeding or parking offences on non-payment of their television licence, all of which are, strictly speaking, criminal offences.

Alan Gordon, vice-chairman of the Police Federation, branded the decision “absolute madness”.

Well of course he did - you didn’t expect this kind of story to pass without at least one ‘it’s all gone mad’ comment.

He said: “What about the human rights of Philip Lawrence, robbed of his life or the human rights of his wife and children, deprived of a loving husband and father. I don’t suppose Mr Chindamo had any regard for them.”

Alan Gordon may be, quite obviously, politicking here but one still cannot help but be alarmed by the obvious ignorance of his remarks. As Gordon should know full well, human rights legislation operates within a quite specific context, that of the relationship between the citizen and the state, not that of the relationship between individual citizens.

This is an all-too-seductive and deeply dangerous line of argument, one that sets up a false dichotomy between the rights of those convicted of a criminal offence and the right of ordinary citizens and, especially, those citizens who become victims of crime and advances the idea that that the rights we accord to criminals should be somehow different to and of a lesser status than the rights enjoyed by the rest of society where, in reality, the true position is that such rights belong to us all equally and that, in the case of convicted criminals, only certain rights - particularly the right to physical liberty - may be temporarily curtailed under judicial authority as a sanction for their criminal conduct.

This false dichotomy lies at the root of the political propaganda that has been used to justified pretty much every piece of illiberal legislation and every curtailment of civil liberties undertaken by the government over the last ten years and more - with some justification one can point to the watering down of the right to silence in the Criminal Justice Act 1994, piloted through the House of Commons by Michael Howard, as being the legislative starting point for the UK government’s long-term assault on civil liberties.

In terms of human rights and their application in British society the central issue in this case is not that of a supposed, and entirely artificial, ‘conflict’ between the rights of a criminal, and a ‘foreign’ criminal at that, and the rights of his victims family but the general and, I would argue inalienable right, of any individual to have their case heard and determined within the criminal justice (and immigration) system on the basis of its individual merits and by way of the due process of law, rather on the basis of crude and arbitrary ‘rules’ derived from nothing more than political expediency.

That the police appear constantly to prefer the latter rather than the former should be a matter of the greatest concern to all of us.

Finally on the list of bandwagon jumpers, and giving Iain Dale’s trite intervention the full regard it merits - none - we come to the most usual of suspects in such cases:

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said: “This is yet another case where the human rights of the criminal seem to be overriding. The short answer is to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, as we are entitled to do, and write our own human rights law.”

One only has to understand the historical background to the European Convention on Human Rights, which was written by, in main, British lawyers working to well-established British legal principle and steered through the newly created Council of Europe by a, then, former British Prime Minister - Sir Winston Churchill, no less - to appreciate the full extent to which Green and his tawdry little pressure group are a bunch of complete idiots.

To all intents and purposes and by virtue of the manner and circumstances in which it was drafted, ECHR is our own human rights law - far more so than it is a European law for all that it was first agreed and enacted in Europe rather than in the UK. But for the provisions in article 14, covering discrimination, there is nothing in the core articles of ECHR for which one will not find established precedent in British statute or common law, much of which long predates the adoption of ECHR in 1950. Indeed, if one looks at the precise wording of the articles one quickly finds that they are expressed in terms far more in keeping with the British system of common law jurisdiction than with European conventions derived from the Napoleonic civil code, for all it allows other countries sufficient ‘wiggle room’ to operate their traditional civil code systems.

It is frankly absurd, and a complete, deliberate and largely xenophobic fiction to suggest that the principles set out in the Human Rights Act amount to some sort of alien imposition on UK law, let alone an unwelcome one - what could be more British in character than the principle central to the Chindamo case, that which holds that individuals have the right to a private and family life free from unwarranted, unnecessary and unlawful interference by the state? That such principles, when applied to specific cases, occasionally throw up outcomes that are politically inconvenient or that attract the ire of the unashamedly populist tabloid press, merely demonstrates that, overall, the judicial system is operating as it should in considering cases on their individual merits and applying the law as it is either written, or as it has evolved by means of judicial precedent where decisions, of necessity, need to fall back on the common law.

As noted earlier, but for his possessing an Italian passport, the possibility of deporting Learco Chindamo would simply not arise, and against the material facts of his background and upbringing in the UK the fact that he does hold an Italian passport is entirely immaterial. Having lived with his mother and siblings in the UK from the age of six, at the age of twenty six (or maybe twenty seven) Learco Chindamo is British in everything but name and regardless of the heinous nature of the crime he committed, to seek to deport him on release is a complete nonsense, not to mention a perversion of the long-standing traditions of the British justice system.

I guess most people have seen this story from last Friday:

‘Purity’ ring case in High Court

A 16-year-old girl has gone to the High Court to accuse her school of discriminating against Christians by banning the wearing of “purity rings”.

Lydia Playfoot was told by Millais School in Horsham, West Sussex, to remove her ring, which symbolises chastity, or face expulsion.

The school denies breaching her human rights, insisting the ring is not an essential part of the Christian faith.

On Friday, judgement in the case was reserved to a future date.

The story’s certain had plenty of press coverage of late - no less than three articles in the Telegraph since April, one each in the Observer and the Guardian and two from the Daily Mail, who first picked up on the story on October last year - a date that will become all the more significant in a moment - all of which are prominently linked on Playfoot’s own website, www.purityring.org.uk.

Now. according to this report in the Telegraph, the backstory to this case runs as follows:

Miss Playfoot chose to wear the ring after an event held two years ago by an American Christian movement, The Silver Ring Thing, which promotes abstinence before marriage and has encouraged a growing number of adolescents to make “a pledge of chastity”.

The ring refers to the Biblical quote: “God wants you to be holy and completely free from sexual immorality. Each of you men should know how to live with his wife in a holy and honourable way”.

Initially it did not cause a stir at the school. But after a dozen other girls started wearing the rings Miss Playfoot was asked to remove hers on the grounds that it broke the school’s no-jewellery policy and it could injure someone if she fell and used her hand to steady herself.

When she refused she was placed “in isolation”, missing classes and studying on her own. “I was surprised because the people who get put in isolation are caught smoking and are really rude and outrageous,” she said. “I thought, why am I here? I didn’t feel as if I’d done anything wrong.”

Her family claims that the school suggested she could attach the ring to her school bag, but if that was not acceptable she might have to look for a school that would allow her to wear it.

Although Miss Playfoot has not worn the ring in classes since last April, she decided to take the school to the High Court “because I didn’t want them to think that they had won. You can’t treat Christians like this”.

Before moving ahead, I should point out that the ‘Biblical Quote’ in question - from 1 Thessalonians - is one where there is considerable debate as the correct translation from the original Greek, not least because its one of quotations that’s frequently cited by Evangelical Christians in support of their being a specific New Testament injunction against homosexuality. It could mean pretty much what the article claims, or it could mean specifically that ‘god wants you to be pure by staying clear of the temple prostitutes’, but what the hell, if Playfoot and her family want to put the ‘virginity pledge’ interpretation on the passage then that’s really up to them.

One feature in this that no one seems to be noting or commenting on is the point about the schools appearing to have no great problem over this whole ring business until a whole bunch of other girls joined in, which you might easily think is just an indication that the whole got to be a bid of a fad amongst a few of Playfoot’s friends.

However, there are a few pieces of information that haven’t made it in to print that raise one or two questions about Playfoot and this case, information that is conspicuous by its absence from the press coverage.

Let’s start with Playfoot and her parents, Heather and Phil, who, as has been widely reported, in the full time pastor at the King Church in Horsham.

So far, so good.

But what none of the articles mention is that Heather Playfoot is the company secretary of Silver Ring Thing (UK) Ltd, a not for profit company set up in the last year as the UK arm (or perhaps franchise might be a better term) of the Philadelphia-based originators of this programme.

Fans of the lies, damn lies and statistics school of thought might enjoy a page from the US website called ‘Teen STDs: Just the facts“, which omits one important statistic - 80% of teenagers taking the ‘chastity pledge’ in the US, end up having sex well before they ever get married. But then that’s not such a problem, as being a forgiving bunch, if you fall off the chastity wagon you can always do a resit (for a fee) and retake the pledge - nothing yet, however, to suggest that this mat get taken to its next logical step, the miracle of the immaculate restored hymen, possibly because they’re unsure how to price that service against stiff price competition for virgins from the greasy pervert market.

And Phil? Oh, he’s the Parents Programme Director of Silver Ring Thing (UK) Ltd.

Both work with Andy Robinson, who’s described as the head of the SRT programme in the UK and its:

…official promoter, distributor and Managing Director of The Silver Ring Thing (UK) Ltd. Andy is now the full time youth pastor for Kings Church in Horsham. Up until Dec 2005 Andy was the Sales Director for an international software company.

Robinson’s wife is, by the way, the UK programme director for… yes, you guessed it - Silver Ring Thing (UK) Ltd.

(Is it me or this all starting to sound a bit Watchdog/That’s Life?)

Robinson’s name is also on the Nominet registration for Silver Ring Thing (UK)’s website - http://www.silverringthing.org.uk - which is registered to what looks to be his home address in Horsham, and on the registration for ‘Playfoot’s’ website, although on this occasion he’s chosen to have his address omitted from the registration information on display - both trace back to the same IP address.

In fact, Andy couldn’t be more helpful and supportive of his franchise, oops, Playfoot’s human rights case, not only is he helpfully fielding all media enquiries, in conjunction with Paul Eddy of Paul Eddy PR in Bournmouth (Eddy also handles the PR and media relations for, amongst others, the Lawyer’s Christian Fellowship - who’re backing this case, of course - and other related Evangelical Christian pressure groups, which I guess makes him god’s own Max Clifford) but he’d be absolutely delighted to talk to journalists on Playfoot’s behalf:

Lydia Playfoot will not be giving any further interviews until the judgement has been handed down. However, Andy Robinson, director of the Silver Ring Thing will be delighted to help journalists. - from Playfoot’s website.

No such thing as bad publicity, eh? Especially when its free publicity, and the legal tab is (apparently) being picked up by donations - Playfoot’s’site’ has the obligatory donate button and tip jar.

No such thing as uncoached comments from Playfoot either, it seems, as Andy is also the ghost author of the press statement (pdf) issued on Playfoot’s behalf, which has been issued through Andy’s her website. Tsk - silly boy didn’t bother to clean out the document properties before posting the document to the website.

Oh, and did I mention that Playfoot’s left the school in question now (she is sixteen) so for her the whole ‘ring thing’ is a non-issue, personally, but obviously very much an issue for both her parents and Andy Robinson, as its the right of schools to enforce a uniform policy at the expense of their franchise that looks to be on trial here.

Oops, do I keep saying ‘franchise’? Silly me…

Right, let’s get to the bottom line.

Silver Ring Thing’s website doesn’t state what the cost of attending its four week ‘chastity course’ is (attendance required to get the ring) although it does ask for donations of £20 to cover the costs of those poor unfortunate kids who can’t afford to attend a course, and the ring itself is reported to cost £10 for the first one and £13 plus P&P for a replacement ring, which you can buy only if you show up on their database as having previously completed a course - at least I think its SRT’s database as there’s currently no registration on file for the company on the Information Commissioner’s Register of Data Controllers - oops.

Come on folks - £35 a year’s not that much to stump up to make your database all nice and legal. God would approve…

SRT’s online shop give a few more clues about the likely costs of their courses. It’s £40 for a ‘Leader’s Pack’ and £20 a piece for the Parent Pack and Student Pack - I guess that’s where the £20 donation for poor virgins goes - plus there’s a nice selection of t-shirts, baseball caps and beanies at £15 a time, badges and stickers (£5 for 8 ) and a hoodie for £20 -I guess this is one bunch of hoodies that Cameron won’t mind hugging, given half a chance.

But never mind all that, because it’s Playfoot’s ‘human rights’ that are really at stake here, even though chastity rings have no recognised status in the Christian religion whatsoever… well not outside SRT’s marketing department.

Now here’s a funny thing, as well.

In addition to using Phil Eddy PR for the media handling for this case, the SRT website also carries on its staff page, a photograph of a ‘media consultant’ named Denise Pfeiffer, although there’s no text profile for her at the moment, and a previous version of this page, which includes her profile has unfortunately not been cached by Google.

But not to worry, because a Google search for Pfeiffer does throw up some of the text that was picked up by Google’s spiders, text which describes her as:

a freelance writer and model based in the Midlands . She specialises in supplying wholesome, quality features to women’s magazines …

Which is obviously important as, according to her press statement, Playfoot feels really strongly about the way women are presented as sexual objects…

Increasingly, girls in particular are not looked on as human beings with value, and worth who have the right to say no to sex, or to keep sex for a loving, long-term relationship in marriage. It causes me great sadness to think that girls are often looked on as just sexual objects and others expect them to want sex and agree to sex, whatever the level of relationship.

Bit odd that, don’t you think?

The photo of Ms Pfeiffer is still on SRTs website - in fact, the photo they’re using is a cropped version of the photo below, which is by C Potter and which appears on her portfolio on the UK Model Jobs Pro website:

And very wholesome it is too, however there is also another photograph in her portfolio which, while wholesome enough as far as I’m concerned, may explain the sudden absence of any text on the SRT website referring to Pfeiffer and her modelling career…

————————————————————

UPDATE: It would appear that Ms Pfeiffer has become aware of this article and has removed the rather tasteful lingerie shot from her modelling profile and replaced it with this somewhat more demure effort.

Which is all rather a shame as now you’ll just have to make do with this photograph of Ms Pfeiffer is tasteful lingerie instead:

In case anyone’s wondering what the most appropriate quote for the occasion might be, can I recommend a slight paraphrase of this little gem, as spoken by Riddick in Pitch Black:-

“Did not know who [s]he was fuckin’ with.”

Oh, there’ll a bit more on Ms Pfeiffer on my follow-up post - Asexual Nazi’s for God - in a few minutes

————————————————————————

[Now back to the original story]

What was that you were saying Andy, err Lydia?

It causes me great sadness to think that girls are often looked on as just sexual objects…

Mmm… is Denise in the Evangelical doghouse over her lingerie shots, do you think?

But if so, why ditch the profile text from the staff page but not the photo?

Of course, there is the other possibility - that Denise is still very much in the fold (hence the photo) but that SRT figured that while the pretty lingerie shot in her portfolio didn’t quite fit the outraged moral crusader image they’re trying to weave around Playfoot, the simple expedient of removing her profile (and any reference to her modelling career) might be enough to throw journalists off the scent…

…which it seems to have done as this is yet another facet to this story that has had precisely zero attention… until us naughty inquisitive bloggers started poking around, of course.

But what the hell, its too late to be worrying about trifles like this, even if does make you curious about the full ‘why’ (and when) of this change to their website.

So where does all this leave us?

Well, with a conundrum for starters.

Why, if this ring was not apparently a problem at the outset, when Playfoot shipped up to school with it, did it suddenly become a problem later on, when the wearing of these rings started to spread to other girls.

To be honest, the whole uniform policy thing on jewellery has always been a bit vague - schools generally are not keen on kids wearing much more in the way of visible jewellery than plain ear studs, but when asked why tend to waffle on unconvincingly about health and safety and uniform policy without the greatest sense of conviction that they’re clear about why the don’t want kids wearing rings and other items of jewellery. If anything, the impression I’ve always got is that, deep down, schools just don’t want the hassle of dealing with irate parents if their precious daughter’s expensive jewellery gets lost or stolen during school time, so banning the wearing the of jewellery is a just a means to a bit quieter life and one less hassle to worry about.

What seems clear, however, is that the reports suggest that the school stepped in only after the chastity ring fad started to spread to other girls, which suggests that they may have been less concerned about the rings themselves than about our young heroine going about the school as a self-appointed ‘virgins for god’ recruiting sergeant - in which case the school would certainly have had a point in clamping down on this whole ring business. Religious freedom is one thing, Evangelical groups priming their kids to try and recruit followers during school hours is quite another and no school should be required to tolerate or accept organised proselytising in the playground.

Beyond that, one has to question not only the merits of Playfoot’s case but the motives of the people around her, especially if one factors in the ‘elephant in the room’ that the press are assiduously ignoring, the very obvious interest that both the Playfoots (Playfeet?) and Robinsons have, as directors of Silver Ring Thing (UK) Ltd, in obtaining a High Court ruling that gives their chastity campaign the legal cover of the Human Rights Act.

The more one examines the background to this case, the more one has to wonder whether what’s really being sought in the High Court is not legal support for the rights of individual teenagers to wear chastity rings in schools, but legal support for the efforts of an Evangelical Christian group to turn schools into recruiting offices for their particular US-import brand of god regardless of the wishes of schools, their governing bodies or the parents of other children.

Oh, and one more thing. Dates.

Remember right at the start of all this I mentioned that the date of the first Daily Mail coverage of the Playfoot’s case - which was this article on 17th October 2006?

Well, three days later, something else interesting happened, according to Companies House…

Company Details

The WebCHeck service is available from Monday to Saturday 7.00am to 12 Midnight UK Time

Name & Registered Office:
SILVER RING THING (UK) LTD
23 HAZEL CLOSE, SOUTHWATER
HORSHAM
WEST SUSSEX
RH13 9GN
Company No. 05973106

Status: Active
Date of Incorporation: 20/10/2006

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Now that is a coincidence, isn’t it?

As I’ve noted on a couple of occasions I have a few issues with the ‘equality industry’, the parasitical mix of Quangos and special interest groups that sits astride what is, after, a very simple idea - equality - and seeks to milk it for every last drop of advantage they can possibly get.

I have a very simple view of equality - its for all of us.

And for all that that simple idea has become hopelessly clogged with calcified, over-politicised bullshit over the years, its not something that is, or should be, very difficult to grasp. Equality means nothing more complicated or profound than treating people as people, individuals, rather than as amorphous, homogeneous masses of stereotyped cattle.

Britain is a rich and diverse country not because it contains people who are white, black, South Asian, Chinese, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Atheists, young, old, rich, poor, gay or straight. It is diverse because it has a population of just over 60 million people - all of them different. You can’t get any more diverse that that.

Because I see the world as I do, I fully support the government’s decision to replace the many special interest ‘equality’ bodies with a single Commission for Human Rights and Equality and, to take matters to their logical conclusion, will also support proposals to consolidate the UK’s existing piecemeal equality legislation into a future Single Equality Act, if and (hopefully) when those proposals emerge. In fact, such an act cannot come soon enough for me and modest though my position is in the Labour Party - I am but an ordinary member - I will advocate strongly the inclusion of just such a commitment in our next election manifesto.

Regular readers will know, also, that I am no fan of hypocrisy, and amongst the worst hypocrisies, as far as I am concerned, is that of someone who preaches equality, even makes a career out of it, but who then shows themselves to be someone who defines equality only in terms of equality for people like them.

As is often the case, Orwell said it best:

“My sight is failing,” she said finally. “Even when I was young I could not have read what was written there. But it appears to me that that wall looks different. Are the Seven Commandments the same as they used to be, Benjamin?”

For once Benjamin consented to break his rule, and he read out to her what was written on the wall. There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran:

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL

BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

After that it did not seem strange when next day the pigs who were supervising the work of the farm all carried whips in their trotters. It did not seem strange to learn that the pigs had bought themselves a wireless set, were arranging to install a telephone, and had taken out subscriptions to John Bull, TitBits, and the Daily Mirror. It did not seem strange when Napoleon was seen strolling in the farmhouse garden with a pipe in his mouth-no, not even when the pigs took Mr. Jones’s clothes out of the wardrobes and put them on, Napoleon himself appearing in a black coat, ratcatcher breeches, and leather leggings, while his favourite sow appeared in the watered silk dress which Mrs. Jones had been used to wear on Sundays.

Animal Farm - Chapter 10

Which brings me to Derrick Campbell and this recent article in The Stirrer.Derrick is - well, lets just save a little time and effort and reproduce part of the biography that accompanies this article.

Derrick Campbell is a man on a mission; he has dedicated his life in pursuit of equality and fairness.

As the Chief Executive of the Race Equality and Community Cohesion Council in Sandwell, where he works with key partners and stakeholders to achieve his goal. He already has a number of successes to be proud of, he was Britain’s first black chief officer, appointed 2001, with the Chambers of Commerce movement, in it’s 300-year history, where he led the Sandwell division in the Black Country.

Well, lets see shall we - this is an example of Derrick’s dedication to equality and fairness, lets see what you think.

GAY ADOPTION – “ACCEPTING THE UNACCEPTABLE”

Oops, that’s not such a good start is it? Still headlines rarely provide a full picture of the story that follows, so I’ll reserve judgement for the moment.

People have a right to choose and make choices in their lives; however, I argue that “Just because we can does not mean that we should.”

Well yes, Derrick, that’s fair enough as long as what you’re advocating here is the principle that people should be free to make their own moral and ethical judgements about how they live their live without undue interference from others, but is that really where you’re going with this?

This debate around homosexuals and lesbians being allowed to impose their views on others in society is wholly wrong. The discussion is not about abusing or oppressing people who have these tendencies but one of morality and what is acceptable and natural.

Evidently not.

Derrick is, of course, referring to the recent furore over the government’s as yet unpublished Sexual Orientation (Provision of Good and Services) Regulations which provide the gay community with the same basic right not to be unlawfully discriminated against as is already enjoyed by women, ethnic minority communities and religious believers.

I’ve highlight three crucial words there - same basic right. We’re not talking about homosexuals being give more right than others and certainly not talking about them ‘imposing their views on others in society’, simply afforded them the same legal protection against unlawful discrimination that we already give to others who we know to be, on occasion, subjected to irrational and unjustifiable prejudice.

As for this being about ‘morality’ and ‘what is acceptable and natural’, let’s look at Derrick’s next statement before we get into that fully.

In this so called tolerant society we spout that people have the right to express their preferences, choice and ‘free will’, but being forced to accept something that is abhorrent to true Christians, and clearly against nature, is a worrying situation.

Well, the one thing I do agree with Derrick on is that this is a worrying situation. It worries me greatly that a man who considers himself to be some sort of ‘champion’ for equality sees nothing at all wrong in spouting such errant, prejudicial nonsense.

Let’s take ‘morality’ first - and the question has to be who’s morality are we talking about here. Certainly not mine.

What two consenting adults (or perhaps more, on occasion) get up to in the privacy of their own home, and especially the privacy of their bedroom is no business of mine, nor of Derrick Campbell’s.

I see nothing morally wrong with homosexuality and while I do much care for people who do, I also accept that they have the right to hold a different opinion on this matter from myself. What I don’t accept, however, is that anyone has the right to enforce their moral beliefs on me, or society in general, if whatever it is they happen to be moralising about causes no harm - and homosexual relationships between consenting adults harm no one.

As for whether homosexuality is ‘clearly against nature’ - Derrick you are talking complete and utter rubbish.

We are here today because of a process of evolution by natural selection - as outlined by the great Charles Darwin, first in ‘On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection‘ and then more specifically in the case of our particular species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, in ‘The Descent of Man‘.

Natural Selection is a process in which the transfer of certain genetic characteristics and traits are passed on from generation to generation according to whether, and to what extent, they confer a survival advantage on the species in question.

Now, in the case of homosexuality, that may seem a rather counter intuitive statement as homosexuality would seem to preclude reproduction, which is necessary to pass on genes to the next generation, but such a view is one that takes a stupendously narrow and ill-informed view of natural selection, not least because homosexuals are perfectly capable of reproducing if they choose to, give or take the usual vagaries of human fertility.

So, in terms of the question of whether homosexuality is ‘against nature’ one has to consider two things; does it have a genetic basis and, if so, is its incidence sufficiently prevalent to suggest that it is a trait that natural selection has either favoured, or at least treated as being sufficiently benign as to not require it to be eradicated from the species in the interests of survival.

Well, on the question of whether homosexuality has a genetic basis, the answer seems to be that it does, at least in part. This is admittedly a controversial area of study and one that is not always popular with the gay community for fairly obvious reasons. If homosexuality were to be found to be based entirely on a genetic predisposition then this would be seen by some as a basis upon which it could be bred out of the species, either by eugenic means or using some form of direct genetic manipulation - a foul and wholly unethical prospect as I’m sure most rational people would agree.

So far as the evidence stands at present, it seems to suggest that things are rather more complicated than simply whether someone has ‘gay genes’ or not - other environmental and social factors do come into play - but one can say with a fair measure of confidence that it has some genetic components and these, therefore, must be subject to the process of natural selection provided that the prevalence of homosexuality is sufficiently high as to preclude the possibility of it arising by means of a chance mutation.

The question of just how many people are actually gay is a complex one, not least as social pressures all too frequently serve to cause people to deliberately conceal their sexuality for fear of prejudice and discrimination, and also because human sexuality is rather more complex than simple delineations like gay, straight and bi-sexual. My own view of human sexuality is (I hope) rather more nuanced inasmuch as I see it not as limited series of convenient little boxes in which people can be put but as continuum within which people can move around according to their particular circumstances and situation. Homosexual and Heterosexual are labels that define opposite ends of that continuum but as for people, they can ’sit’ at different points in that continuum at different times.

However, to stick with conventional labels in the interests of retaining a degree of simplicity of argument, the most commonly cited estimate for the ‘incidence’ of homosexuality (around 10%) derives from the Kinsey Reports, and more recent research now suggests this figure to be on the high side; 3-5% of the population is increasingly coming to be thought as a more realistic figure based on modern research.

Whatever. Whether its as low as 3% or as high as 10%, the base incidence of homosexuality in humans is still far too high to be accounted for by mere chance and that alone suggests that there is some survival advantage in homosexuality and that that advantage is sufficient for it to have ’survived’ the process of natural selection - as to what advantage exactly, this has yet to be determined although as a reasonable source for a working hypothesis i would venture that one would have to look to the social (and sexual) behaviour of our close relative, the Bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee) and the role this plays in cementing their social structures. As the British primatologist, Richard Wrangham as noted:

[Common] Chimpanzees and Bonobos both evolved from the same ancestor that gave rise to humans, and yet the Bonobo is one of the most peaceful, unaggressive species of mammals living on the earth today. They have evolved ways to reduce violence that permeate their entire society. They show us that the evolutionary dance of violence is not inexorable.

It seems reasonable to me, from that, that the survival advantage in homosexuality is likely to be linked to our species’s evolutionary development as a co-operative, social animal.

Where this all leads, for anyone who accepts the validity of Darwinian evolution (and I certainly do) is to a simple conclusion. Homosexuality is entirely natural having evolved as a fairly common trait in the human species through the process of natural selection - in fact you simple cannot get any more natural than that.

What is entirely unnatural, is the belief that homosexuality is ‘against nature’ based on a personal belief in an entirely artificial sociological construct - god.

This country and government has got itself into an awful mess and I am amazed at the ease in which homosexuality has now taken the high ground and all who wish to express their objection to the practice have now become the villains, being labelled as ‘homophobic,’.

Well, Derrick, if the cap fits…

Well if that is the case, the bible is homophobic, God is homophobic and all His followers are homophobic. Do we then go on to criminalize all who oppose this law? Well that will mean a whole lot of people going to prison.

Rubbish.

The Bible contains very few presumed references to homosexuality and the vast majority of those are unclear, not least in terms of the accuracy with which source texts were translated from Hebrew and Aramaic into, first, Greek, then Latin and then eventually into English.

It also relates three stories that could easily interpreted as depicting same-sex relationship - Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan and Daniel and Ashpenaz.
Without getting into a full essay on the subject of the different interpretations of Biblical texts, a fairer assessment of the Bible would be that where it appears to homophobic, by modern standards, it is highly likely (almost certain, in my view) that that is a reflection of the particular prejudices of earlier authors and translators, particularly in the case of St Paul, whose writing evidence both homophobia and a deeply marked misogyny.

Still, if you wish to debate Biblical morality, Derrick, then perhaps you would enlighten us all as to the moral message of Judges 19:14-29, a charming little tale in which a mob surrounds the house of old farmer in the town of Gibeah in the tribe of Benjamin and demands the householder should hand over to them an unnamed male Levite traveller, who the farmer has charitably given food and lodgings to for the night, so that they may ‘know him’.

‘Know him’ here is generally treated in its usual Biblical fashion as a sexual euphemism although it is entirely unclear if this is actually what was meant in the original text.

Whatever. What happens next it what matters as in order to avoid giving up his guest, the farmer offers to hand over to the mob both the visitor’s concubine and his virgin daughter. In the event its the concubine who is handed over and gang-raped by the mob until the next morning, when she manages to return to the houseand dies on the doorstep.

This results in a genocidal civil war, in which the other 11 tribes of Israel gang up on the tribe of Benjamin and slaughter all their women having first vowed not to allow the men of the tribe to marry their daughters.

However, after all this they decided that could not allow the tribe to die out altogether and as they couldn’t break their vow either, they solved their little dilemma they wiped out all the inhabitants of the town of Jabesh Gilead, which hadn’t joined in the civil war, but for 400 virgins, who were given to the tribe of Benjamin and then conspired with the tribe to kidnap girls from the town of Shiloh during a festival, the logic of that little escapade being that as the women were kidnapped and forced in marriage without their fathers’ permission, the vow hadn’t been broken.

And the moral of that story is, Derrick?

As to whether god is homophobic, in a literal sense the question is moot so far as I’m concerned as the question amounts to ‘can something that does not exist be homophobic?’.

However, in the interests of fair play let’s no dismiss the question out of hand.

Rather, perhaps we should reframe the question in a different manner - with the whole universe to (allegedly) look after, does anyone really think that god (if he/she/it exists) actually gives a toss?

Exactly where on god’s ‘to do’ list is an individual decision as to whether someone prefers Arthur or Martha likely to sit as compared to, say, a supernova or a black hole?

And as for ‘all His followers are homophobic’, I should think there’s a fair number of Christian out there who’ll look at that statement and think ‘Oi! Leave me out of it!’.

No, Derrick, all Christians are NOT homophobic. Many take a far more sensible and enlightened view of the contents of the Bible that, it seems, you do and can happily exclude themselves from any such criticism.

This behaviour has stealthily crept out on TV screens, into our theatres, advertisements, etc and the church - which is supposed to be the custodian of truth, ethics, morality and good principles - has idly sat by for many years and allowed this to happen.

I don’t know about ’steathily’, Derrick. There is a segment of society that scream s loudly enough about it any time there’s a gay (theatrical) scene on the TV and its still the case that the majority of depictions of homosexuality tend to be rather negative and depict people who are somehow ‘tortured’ by their sexuality. Positive images of homosexuality, especially male homosexuality, are still relatively few and far between and rarely does a TV programme provide a joyful picture, such as that put over by ‘Queer As Folk’.

Okay, lesbianism tends to get a slightly better ‘press’ (if that’s the right word), but then it also gets a fair-sized male heterosexual audience as well. That’s still, however, rather the exception and, let’s be honest, much of the ‘hot girl-on-girl action’ that does leak into the mainstream is far from being realistic anyway.

What interests me most, though, is this idea that ‘the church… has idly sat by for many years and allowed this to happen.’

Well, first off I’m not sure that you can safely talk in terms of ‘the church’ - this isn’t the Middle Ages and even within Christianity there is no ‘one true church’, or at least not one that all Christian agree on.

Then there’s this business of the church allowing this to happen. What makes you think its the Church’s decision - last time I looked we still live in a Parliamentary democracy and not a theocracy, so I’m not sure where you get the idea that church could or should have some sort of veto on this kind of thing.

Now that the majority of people are asking the questions “Why are we being force-fed things that are completely against our core beliefs, rights and moral principles? Why are we being pushed aside for something that what has long since been regarded as a sinful act, but which is now gaining high prominence in our society”.

Majority, Derrick? And your evidence for that claim is?

I dare say that you’re referring to the last census and the 72% of people who ticked the box that said ‘Christian’ the majority of whom almost certainly did so for no better reason than that’s what their parents put on their birth certificate. I know that that statistic has become a favourite canard of the religious lobby in this country but please, do try not to insult the intelligence of those of us who can actually weigh ‘evidence’ like that properly.

And, in any case, speaking as a man dedicated to the pursuit of equality and fairness would you not agree that one of prime tests of a civilised society is not whether it slavishly follows in the wake of the tyranny of the majority (bit of Plato, there for you) but rest, instead, in the tolerance and respect it displays towards its minority communities? At least that’s what I think - you may take a different view.

As for your claim that you are being ‘force-fed things that are completely against our core beliefs, rights and moral principles’ is that really what you think?

No one here is trying to tell what to believe - if you wish to espouse Biblically derived prejudices against homosexuals then you’re perfectly entitled to do so.

What is happening is that a democratically elected Parliament has determined that the common good of the British people is best served by the prohibition of certain behaviours that specifically discriminate against a section of society, in much the same way that an earlier Parliament arrived at the same conclusion in regards to prejudice and discrimination against individuals on the grounds of the racial/ethnic identity.

Outlawing racial discrimination has not made racism ‘go away’ - some people are still racist, but what is has done is afforded victims of racism with a legal means of redress when that racism is expressed outwardly in terms of discrimination and abuse.

How does that differ from the situation today vis-a-vis homosexuality? After all, the rights afforded to homosexuals by the Sexual Orientation Regulations are almost identical to those contained in the Race Relations Act - and I say almost because one has to acknowledge that specifically religious institutions, i.e. churches, will be given certain exemptions on regulations covering homosexuality that they do not have in relation to race and ethnicity.

A church cannot legally turn away a would-be worshipper because they are black, but it can turn one away because they are gay.

Can you justify that Derrick? I can’t, not in any circumstances.

And please, do not try and patronise me with the canard that claims that this is not about sexuality but about sexual conduct, just exactly how mean-spirited a view of the world does that evidence - you can have you sexuality just don’t you dare express it.

And that, apparently, is ‘morality’.

Speaking of which…

I am a Christian and feel that I am being forced down a road of accepting immorality, simply because the gay lobby is strong and attempting to force me to accept their behavior - which I have strong objections to. To then be expected to show acceptance of this behavior is completely against my conscience and core values.

Again, no one is asking you to personally accept homosexuality. What you are expected to accept that discrimination against homosexuals in the provision of good and services (but, alas, not church services - boom-boom) will be unlawful with the passing of these regulations.

And if you have a problem with that, then frankly you have no business whatsoever styling yourself as being ‘dedicated to equality and fairness‘.

Who stands up for me? And why should this desire for legalizing sodomy now force religion onto the ropes and put it into a position where it is seen as the great evil in our society.

I beg your pardon Derrick? Legalising Sodomy?

You are a little behind the time here, I fear - “Sodomy” between consenting adults has been legal in the UK since the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which was introduced a private members’ bill by Leo Abse and Lord Arran and, itself, based on the 1957 Wolfenden Report.

Okay, so it took until 2000 to give male homosexuals parity in terms of the age of consent - this was 21 under the 1967 Act, and dropped to 18 in 1994 before finally falling to 16 in 2000. That’s far from ideal, but at least we got there eventually, which is something.
More to the point, the 2003 Sexual Offences Act finally removed the offences of gross indecency and buggery from statute law in the UK, in addition to legalising sexual activity between more than two men (yes, right up until 2003 homosexual men could be prosecuted for indulging in group sex, while no restriction applied to heterosexuals - although quite how this might have applied to a heterosexual ‘gang bang’ is a matter on which I’m far less clear) so I’m afraid, Derrick, that your hobby horse has long since bolted anyway.

For someone who worked professionally in the field of ‘equality’ you seem remarkably ill-informed as to the contents of the Sexual Orientation Regulations, which I find quite remarkable given that, although the regulations for England and Wales have yet to be published, those for Northern Ireland were in print and freely accessible via the Parliament website - that or you’re deliberately trying to mislead the public as to the contents of the regulations, which have nothing whatsoever to do with or say on the subject of ’sodomy’.

Perhaps you might explain that, Derrick? Were you unaware or or misinformed as to the contents of the regulations, or were you simply putting your own spin on things to suit your own personal agenda?

From your comments it seems that you’d like to Britain’s law rolled back to what they were prior to 1967 - have you any conception of what that would mean?

Maybe you’ve heard of a man by the name of Alan Turing. Turing was a scientist, a war hero - at least in so far as I regard his work at Bletchley Park on the cracking of Enigma code is concerned; heroism can take many forms - and with John Von Neumann, one of the two fathers of modern computing.

Turing was also a homosexual, and in 1952 was convicted of gross indecency with a 19 year old man, with whom he had had a consensual relationship and was given the ‘choice’ of a two-year prison sentence or probation and a course of ‘hormone therapy’ that would have amounted to chemical castration, the latter of which he accepted.
Having been stripped of his security clearance, costing him a cryptography consultancy with GCHQ, in 1954 Turing found a third option - an apple laced with cyanide - and took his own life.

Have you ever looked into how male homosexuals were treated in this country in the 1950s? I mean really looked into it properly?

The lucky ones managed to keep their secret, if not from the world than at least from the authorities but for those that didn’t the choice was prison or the barbarity of being treated by the state as having a mental illness; one that the state would try to ‘cure’ either by means of hormone injections, as happened to Alan Turing, or, even worse, by use of electro-convulsive ‘therapy’.

Is that your morality, Derrick? Men, and more rarely women, strapped to a gurney while a doctor passes an electric current through their brain to try and ‘cure’ them of their sexuality? Or of not ‘cure’ them, at least render them incapable of expressing their sexuality in a physical manner. Is that your moral prescription for homosexuals - celibacy or else?
You seem to think gay men will go to hell - just what do you call chemical castration and ECT if its not ‘hell’ - and then you claim to a moral man. Well if that’s your morality then you can go to hell as well, because I want none of it.

Regardless of the super liberal do-gooders this is still a Christian country (according the 2001 census) and our laws have been built on biblical principles.

I’m not sure that that even deserves a response. It certainly doesn’t merit one that could be repeated in polite company and I’m trying real hard not to make the shift into ’swearblogger’ mode, much as comments like that deserve it.

Perhaps its enough to say that this is not about being a ’super liberal do-gooder’ but simply a human being, one possessed of reason and rational thought, and leave it at that.

The bible teaches that a man and woman should go forth and multiply, leading them onto care and nurture their off-spring.

So what! It also teaches that people should be stoned to death for working on the Sabbath - are you advocating that?

The fact that you live in Britain in the 21st century necessitates that you disregard all many of Biblical injunctions, especially those contained in some of the more prurient verses of Leviticus. How you rationalise that is down to you, but the fact is that you do it, so what the problem with taking just one more of those injunctions and saying to yourself that maybe the world has moved on over the course of 2000 years so maybe its about time that the very limited number of passages on homosexuality went the same way as those that advocate stoning people for working on the Sabbath, domestic violence (and violence against women generally) and other the other stuff that society has dropped along the way for being barbaric and uncivilised.

Homosexuality is clearly acceptable to some…but not all…but it should not be paraded about in everyone’s face as if it is the norm.

But, Derrick, homosexuality is within the normal parameters of human sexual behaviour and that makes it perfectly normal, no matter what you think?

It’s certainly not for everyone, but for those who are gay its a normal as breathing.

They’re not the problem. They’re not trying to impose their values, beliefs and lifestyle on you, me or anyone else. They just want to treated with the same basic respect and courtesy as everyone else - as equals.

I do not advocate victimization or discrimination against gay people but I do believe in fulfilling the scriptural command of teaching people who engage in these practices that God condemns what they do and calls them to turn away from it, and He will help them to be complete in Him.

Except, Derrick, that’s precisely what you are advocating. What the Sexual Orientation Regulations do is make it unlawful to discriminate against homosexuals because of their sexuality, and what you want are exemptions that would allow religious believers to discriminate against homosexuals.

No amount of semantic salami-slicing or talk of ’sodomy’ around the presumed difference between sexuality and sexual conduct is going to alter that basic fact in any way, shape or form. Nor does it alter the fact that what you taking about here is not a matter of conscience or religious ‘liberty’ but a desire to impose your values and your morality on society, whether or not people like myself are willing to accept those values.

If you dislike ’sodomy’ so much, then don’t do it. Its a simple as that.

You have the right NOT to be a homosexual, that’s your choice, your privilege and your prerogative. What you do not have, in this case, as in so many others, is the right to dictate to others what they can and cannot do and who they can and cannot be, so long as such matters remain private, cause no harm to other and take place between consenting adults.

Homosexuality is a sin and if we try to call it anything else we to become part of the move to erode the scriptural truth and then we are really in trouble and skating on thin ice.

I disagree, obviously.

What you call the ’scriptural truth’ is nothing more than a semi-coherent collection of myths and folk tales, the precise contents of which were not even agreed up until more than three centuries after the events that the New Testament purports to depict.

Little or nothing that you refer to as ‘truth’ can be backed up with contemporaneous documentary evidence and studies in comparative religion and social anthropology can quite easily trace the origins of much of the contents of the New Testament to other religious cults of the same period in which the core texts upon which what we now call the Bible were first codified, the most prominent of which was the cult of Mithras.

That’s the truth, Derrick - the historical truth, however you and those like you want to try and dress it up with claims of divine inspiration. I mean, who are you to say that what I’ve written here is not ‘inspired by god’, atheist that I am - after all if your god is all that claim him to be then he should be perfectly capable of putting these words in to my head without me even realising that he’s doing it.

That’s nonsense of course - what I’ve written here is simply the product of reason and rationality and an education that enables me to express my views in words, and nothing more. How could I ever possibly claim to inspired by something that I do not believe exists any more than I can swallow Derrick’s claim that the basic inhumanity of his views on homosexuality are defined, inspired and sanctioned by the same source.

It’s patently absurd - and yet he clearly expects to be taken seriously on precisely that basis and, more to the point, expects that he and others like him should be permitted the right to discriminate against homosexuals on that self-same basis, or rather on the basis of a dozen or so short passages in a 1700 year-old collection of myths, folk tales and creative fiction.

What was that you said, right at the very start of all this?

“Just because we can does not mean that we should”.

That is sound advice - no two ways about it. So why is it that you and others like you are incapable of applying that advice to what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, Derrick?

Just because it says (questionably) that you should be prejudiced against the gay community, it doesn’t mean that you should blindly accept that view as ‘gospel’ does it - many other Christians don’t.

Equality is for everyone, Derrick, including the gay community - if you cannot accept that then I’d suggest change your biography and drop the bits about equality and fairness as you clearly do not practice what you profess to preach.
Res Ipsa Loquitur

Via Tom Watson, I discover that yesterday the ordinarily quite sensible Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, John Denham, appears to have suffered a mental aberration of sorts and suggested in the House that offenders undertaking community service should wear uniforms and that unemployed offenders should receive longer sentences than those in employment.

Convicted offenders who are unemployed should be given longer community sentences, according to the chairman of the influential home affairs committee.

John Denham claimed offenders who had a job or cared for family members should receive shorter sentences.

This would be fairer because "the impact is clearly much heavier on someone who is already busy than someone who isn’t", he said.

The Home Secretary has said he needs solutions to overcrowding in jails.

Mr Denham, a former Home Office minister, claimed his suggestion would build confidence in community sentences - an important part of reducing overcrowding in prisons.

"If someone has more time on their hands, perhaps if they are unemployed, but not necessarily, the length of their sentence should be longer," he told the BBC.

He said punishments should have a "broadly equal impact on people".

"Giving different offenders the same length of community sentence is superficially equal, but in reality, it isn’t."

As an example, he said a worker would find a community sentence of 100 hours "really tough [because] that’s going to take a lot of your free time over the next few months".

An unemployed person would not find 100 hours so disruptive, however, he added.

And the principle of giving offenders different sentences was already accepted as higher earners could already be subject to bigger fines than lower earners, he claimed.

Mr Denham also suggested that offenders should wear uniforms while carrying out their community sentences, and that there should be greater use of attendance centres so that public saw "offenders are being deprived of some of their liberty".

The only reasonable response to both suggestion is resounding ‘NO’.

The whole business of putting offenders on community service in uniforms is one that I had thought dealt with more than adequately at the time that Hazel Blears suggested that they should wear Gitmo-style orange jumpsuit, only for that suggestion to be quickly retracted in the face of public ridicule.

The problem with putting offenders doing community service in uniform is one that is quick easily illustrated.

Earlier this year, I took my 14 year-old son to his first rock festival, the Download Festival at Donington Park - and had an excellent time, as it happens. Rock festivals, as it happens, have changed considerably over the years, more or less under the direct influence of the hugely successful Glastonbury Festival, such that where once one would have spent a couple of days camping out in a field with little else to do but watch bands, drink beer, eat hugely expensive junk food from greasy-looking burger vans (staffed by equally greasy looking vendors), today one gets all that plus a small fun-fair, skateboard/bmx displays and competitions, after-hours entertainments - Download had an over-18s only ‘cabaret club’ with stand-up comedy shows and lap-dancing (apparently… with my partner, son and 14 year-old niece in tow there was no prospect of checking out that venue) - and a sizeable ’street-market’ that was open from around 8am to at least midnight.

And if there was a ‘hot’ item for sale this year, then judging from the number of people I saw wearing it during the four days of the Festival, it was fake US prison attire; nothing quite so elaborate as the full -on orange jumpsuits but a large number of shirts (bright orange, black or dark blue) and that old favorite, the dyed-black German army-surplus combat jacket) all emblazoned with stencilled text announcing that the wearer was a former inmate of institutions as varied as Gitmo, Alcatraz, San Quentin, Attica or a variety of state psychiatric instititutions - my son went for a black combat jacket with red stencilling for a mental hospital in Philadelphia for what was the very reasonable price of £15.

Such is the nature of street fashion that any possible impact that placing offenders on community service in uniform might have would be rapidly negated by the uniforms becoming, first, a ‘badge of honour’ amongst some young offenders and then a fashion item, unless one could contrive a design uniform so deperately uncool as make such a transition impossible - which seems unlikely when one considers that for a time even pastel-coloured shell-suits were thought fashionable in some quarters.

Unless one is prepared to put offenders in a uniform consisting of brown polyester trousers with a waste-band that stretches up to a mere in ord so below the nipples, a nylon shirt and a home-knitted tank-top then there is little prospect of arriving at design that will not be rapidly - and fashionably - subverted to other purposes.

As to the matter of longer sentences for unemployed offenders, in what sense could that be considered justice?

Denham makes the point that courts already apply a form of differential sentencing in relation to fines by taking into account the income and financial status of offenders when levying fines, however a fine and a custodial sentence (or community service order) are two very different things with the result that his argument is based on an ‘apples and oranges’ comparison.

There are sound practical reasons for varying the size of fines according to the offenders ability to pay, both in trelation to seeking to ensure that such fines have a sufficiently punitive/deterrent effect on the offender as to persuade them of the error of their ways and in terms of the practicalities of collection and the need to avoid, if possible, the entirely counterproductive outcome of an offender finding themselves ‘forced’ to resort to further criminal activity in order to pay the costs incurred in being fined for an earlier offence. The classic example of this is, of course, street prostitution, where it is almost a matter of routine that, in the absence of other support, one will find prostitutes back working the streets within hours of a court appearance in order earn the money to pay off the fine.

To suggest that it may be right to increase the duration of sentences where the offender is unemployed suggests a mind-set coloured both by considerations of creating an appearance that would ‘play well’ in the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express and, more importantly, by the always problematic notion of a notional differential between the deserving and undeserving poor; one that has persistantly troubled left-wing ‘thinkers’ for the entire history of the Labour Party - as I recall this distinction certainly occupied the minds of some early Fabians even to the extent of them speculating on the possibility that the problems of dealing with the ‘worthless’ social underclass might be solved by the most extreme methods; anything from eugenics to simply culling the feckless and irredeemably indigent. It goes without saying that such musings do not show left-wing thought at its best or anything approaching its most humane.

Yes, it is true, that certain notably liberal states do employ forms of custodial sentence in which the employment status of the offender is taken into account. Again, from memory, both the Netherlands and Sweden have (and probably still does) made use of ‘weekend’ prisons for petty offenders in which the liberty of offenders is curtailed only at the weekend (obviously) so as not to cause them to lose their job as a result of having received a custodial sentence. This is certainly not an idea without merit or value, but the motivation and thinking behind the use of such a custodial system in these countries is rather different to that which appears to underpin Denham’s thinking; the intent being first and foremost to ensure that the offender can remain in gainful employment and therefore avoid the trap of poverty (and further poverty-induced criminality) rather than to impose a more punitive regime on those without employment.

The overriding question one must consider here is precisely what Denham’s proposal is expected to achieve in the context of the main functions of the post-conviction criminal justice system?

His suggestion that, on principle, punishments should have a "broadly equal impact on people", suggests that he is thinking, or at least attempting to cast his idea, in terms of a notional sense of justice, as much to suggest that increasing the duration of sentences for unemployed offenders redressed the ‘balance’ of their enjoying greater liberty by not having deal with the strictures that come with holding down a job. On the opposite side of the coin, however, one can readily argue that their economic circumstances afford them considerably less liberty than those in employment; they may notionally have more free time but are also less able to make beneficial use of that time due to the constraints of the financial circumstances. In assessing the impact of sentencing there is, therefore, a question of the relative value of the liberty enjoyed by someone who is unemployed as opposed to someone who is in work.

Does the notional value of the quantity enjoyed by of the former outweigh that of the quality enjoyed by the latter? That is far from being an easy question to answer and one that is impossible to assess in anything but entirely subjective terms and therefore a rather poor basis upon which to attempt to construct a coherent sentencing regime.

Longer sentences are certainly punitive and satisfy insatiable tabloid-driven demands for greater punishment of offenders; but then the question has to be asked as to what exactly are we punishing these people for? For their criminal conduct or for their being unemployed? The one tabloid newspaper to cover Denham’s comments (from an advance briefing), The Daily Mirror, prefaces an otherwise factual account of its content with the headline, ‘Exclusive: Top MP, Give Jobless Longer Sentences’ to which it appends the sub-heading, ‘Layabout yobs have the time, says Denham’ and appears, therefore, in no doubt that, at least in part, it is the fact of someone’s lack of a job that justifies greater punishment.

But if one takes that route, then are we not simply punishing someone more heavily simply for being poor - and if so does that not run contrary to the concept of social justice that (ostensibly) lies at the heart of Labour’s political philosophy and values?

Introducing the concept of differential sentencing for the notionally deserving and undeserving poor also creates tremendous practical difficulties insofar as it would appear to require the courts to make an assessment, in handing down sentence, as to whether the offender they are dealing with is one who is unwilling to get a job as opposed to one who is unable to get a job for reasons that may be partly or even largely beyond their control. Denham suggests that, for example, those who do not work because the care for family members would fall under the deserving side of the equation, but what of those whose lack of employment is a consequence of their own poor health, their lack of educational attainment and opportunity, or have mental health problems that limit the chances of gaining employment or even those who find themselves unable to find work because, for all that the government has expanded the scope of equality legislation, they still find themselves in a labour market where the odds of success are stacked heavily against them. The overall employment rate amongst over 50s has increased under Labour, but it remains the case that in 2004 the were still  some 27.4% of those aged between 50 and the state pension age were classed as economically inactive.

And beyond that, if having more time on your hands than someone in employment become grounds for the imposition of a longer sentence, would this also mean that pensioners, those who have already retired from work, would be looking at rather more jail-time than their more youthful (and working) criminal counterparts?

Absent in all this, as is so often the case, is any consideration of the other side the custodial coin; the rehabilitative element at which the current prision system is notably primarily for its widespread and manifest failures.

Remember that here, in Denham’s suggestions, we are dealing with sentencing for the unemployed, many of whom will be those in most need to rehabilitative support if they are to get off the criminal justice treadmill.

Not all unemployed offenders who come before a court does so because they are irredeemable ‘layabouts’; many find themselves before a court for acqusitive crimes of a kind that are, themselves, either driven by poverty or the result of behavior undertaken as a means of ‘escape’ from its depredations (i.e. drug use), and it should be noted that it is largely in the area of such acquisitive crimes; theft, burglary, fraud, etc. and in crimes in which there is no notional victim (prosititution) that the considerations outlined by Denham are most likely to apply. In the case of the violent offenders it would be absurd to suggest that considerations of their employment status might carry significant weight over or in addition to the degree of violence exercised in committing the offence for which they have been convicted.

The perennial question in dealing with poverty-related criminality is that of whether there isn’t more to be gained by directing the resources of the criminal justice system more towards rehabilitation than punishment.

Does society, in general, benefit more from banging up petty criminals whose unlawful acquistive behaviour is driven by drug addiction than it would from placing such offenders in rehabilitation programmes with the objective of weaning off the habit that drove them into crime in the first place? If an offender is found to be trapped in poverty and denied the chance of gainful employment due to their low educational attainment or lack of marketable skills, is it better, in the long-term, to imprison them or educate them? These same questions are equally applicable in terms of community sentences, which often involve offenders carrying out relatively menial (and manual) tasks; cleaning up graffiti is one particular favorite, tasks that may well satisfy the desire of the press to offenders ‘punished’ by way of a nod to the bygone days in which breaking rocks for hours on end was thought an essential component of any prison regime, but which does little or nothing to afford the offender any basis upon which they might gain employment one their sentence is concluded.

Faced with an unemployed offender with minimal basic skills (i.e. literacy and or numeracy) is it really better that they should work off their sentence clearing the local canal of dead dogs and shopping trolleys or would their time not be better spent in a classroom receiving the education they didn’t get at school, in the hope that by addressing their lack of marketable skills they might go on to escape from the cycle of criminality - in reality a downward spiral - by getting a job and escaping from abject poverty?

Or to use a medical analogy, are we not better off seeking cures for such problems rather than merely managing the symptoms in order to keep the hanging and flogging lobby from bursting a bloodvessel at the headlines in whichever of the screamsheets they read over breakfast?

As the recent and entirely artificial ‘furore’ over some prisonered being ‘paid’ to play Scrabble - a game that requires them to form letters into words and develop literacy skills - ably proved it is nigh on impossible at present to conduct a sensible and rational debate on the balance between punishment and rehabilitation in the criminal justice system without being immediately drowned out by the usual pissing contest over who’s the ‘toughest on crime’. Driven on by the screamsheets who understand that nothing sells copy better than lurid headlines, macho posturing and the scent of public fear and anxiety, however unfounded in reality, we have arrived at the sad position where the public incapable of assessing the effectiveness of a Home Secretary by any means but  the cut of his black uniform and the mirrored patina of his jackboots - any sense of understanding whether the criminal justice system is operating effectively in tackling crime is entirely lost in a cloud of media-fuelled testosterone.

The sad paradox of the Blair years is that while, overall, the level of crime has fallen year on year, even allowing for usual vagaries of official Home Office statistics, public fear of crime has grown, and continues to grow, exponentially.

The mantra of the Home Office has become ‘the rights of the victim’, as if this can somehow be separated entirely from other rights, not least the right to justice and to a fair trial before an impartial court and a jury of your peers - the latter being a right that the Home Office has been attemtping to curb for some years, now.

We are constantly being exhorted by politicans and the press to empathise with victims of crime in the much the same kind of exercise in vicarious public ‘grief’ that accompanied the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, resulting in the creation of a culture of celebrity around the more notable, and high profile, victims of crime, beginning with James Bulger and, perhaps, finding its ultimate expression to date in the Soham murders. As a society our perceptions of crime and, more importantly the risk of crime have become entirely distorted by a cult of victimhood that is little more than the bastard offspring of tabloid journalism and Warhol’s adage that everyone would one day have their fifteen minutes of fame - which today is readily achieved if one can contrive to become a newsworthy corpse.

In such a climate, the criminal justice ‘debate’ such as it is, is almost entirely driven by the impulse to punish, an impulse about which one needs always to be vigilante as its motive force is all too easily (and often) the desire not for justice but for revenge. Rarely, if even, does any thought of rehabilitation get a look in, and where it does it is there only to be derided for being ’soft’ and ‘liberal’ as if both should be regarded, themselves, as being crimes against the common good.

The bitter irony in all this is that for all the macho posturing and talk of being ‘tough’ on crime, such behaviour in government is anything but a sign of genuine strength of will and character. To fall meekly into line with the incessant and illiberal demands of the tabloid press and to respond to their own mantra that ’something must be done’ with ill-considered knee-jerk policies and ‘initiaitves’ is but a sign of moral weakness and cowardice on the part of senior politicians and, in turn, of the general diminuation of the moral and ethical character of the executive if not of Parliament itself - although, thankfully, at times such a strength of character and moral purpose may still arise from the floor of the House, as it did on the occasion of rejecting the government’s attempt to permit the police to detain terrorist suspects for 90 days without bringing charges against them.

Press-driven moral panics and demands for tough action on crime are neither a new phenonmenon nor an unusal one. One remembers clearly that for a long period of time, during the height of the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, each and every terrorist attack on mainland Britain in which lives were lost was routinely accompanied by demands from the tabloid press for the restoration of the death penalty for terrorist ‘murders’, demands that, on occasion, resulted in the matter being put to a vote of the House of Commons.

Back in the 1970s, had the Sun, Express and Mail has their way, the British state would have executed the Guildford Four, the Maguire seven and the Birmingham Six for their presumed ‘crimes’, which as we now know we not theirs at all.

That these men did not die in a British prison at the end of rope and were ultimately, and in the case of Guiseppe Conlan, posthumously, exonerated of the crimes for which they were imprisoned is in no small part due to view of successive Parliaments that, in matters of criminal justice, it is more important that governments do the right thing than it is that they take that which, for a transient period of time, they are told by the press would be the ‘popular’ course action.

Thinking back to those times, one’s memory of the politicians of the time is that but for the usual band of die-hard hangers and floggers that one found in the minority in the Tory Party (and all too easily in Unionsit ranks) there was, even in the face of the media’s most strident demands for vengeance, never any realistic prospect that the government of the day, and Parliament itself, would cave in to such ‘pressure’ and reinstate hanging. Yes, there was at least one free vote in the Common, during the Thatcher years, but even that was undertaken solely to keep her own back-benches happy and to allow those in her own ranks who supported the reintroduction of the death penalty to make a public statement.

Back then, one could be confident that whatever else happened, Parliament would do the right thing, the moral thing, and not reinstate hanging - looking at the government as it stands today and it record on pandering to demands of the tabloids, could one feel quite so confident were it not that the Human Rights Act specifically prohibits a return to capital punishment?

Sadly, there are times when one is not quite so sure as one should be.

There are times that one has to question the very sanity of some of our leading politicians, never mind their judgment and common sense, and today would appear to be one of them; as evidence by this official press release that appeared on the Labour Party website in the last hour or so…

Tory Opposition on Police and Justice Bill exposes Cameron’s hypocrisy on crime - Reid

For starters, what this headline tells us is that what follows will amount to nothing more than the usual political pissing contest over ‘who’s the toughest on crime’ - ho hum…

The Tories have yet again exposed their hypocrisy when it comes to crime today as they voted to retain measures in the Police and Justice Bill which mean criminals will be able to evade justice. Had the Tories won this vote they would have restricted the ability for the UK to extradite criminals from the USA to face justice, and put an end to important modernisation to tackle international crime.

Ah, so this is about the highly contentious extradition treaty that David Blunkett signed, using the Royal Prerogative, in 2003 and then hurried through Parliament as the Extradition Act 2003; the one that was sold as providing for fast-track extradition to the US for terrorist suspects but which has since been used almost exclusively to pursue alleged cases of ‘white collar’ crime.

John Reid, Labour’s Home Secretary, said:
 
"This is yet more evidence of David Cameron’s hypocrisy on crime. One minute he promises to take the measures necessary to address crime, the next he votes against Labour’s measures to do just that.
 
"Only last month, Cameron spoke of his desire to ‘get tough’ on white collar crime, but today his party have demonstrated how hollow those words were. And when this legislation first came through parliament he expressed his concern about the need to streamline extradition.
 
"The British public will judge Cameron and his party on their actions, not words. No amount of presentation will allow Cameron to escape the reality of the Tory record: they have continually opposed Labour’s tough measures on crime.
 
"David Cameron says one thing but he does another: he talks tough on crime, but he votes soft."

And there we have the pissing contest in full swing, long on rhetorical nonsense and devoid of reasoned argument… but the press release goes on…

END 

Notes to editors:

1. At Lords Committee stage on 11 July, the Lords made amendments to the Police and Justice Bill on three issues.

o One was to remove the United States from a list of countries which do not have to provide prima facie evidence (but do have to provide detailed information about  the facts of the case to enable the court to decide whether the offences are also crimes under English law)  

o The second was to require the judge to refuse an extradition request if any of the conduct in the request was carried out in the UK, unless he could establish that it would be in the interests of justice to extradite the person

o The third would prevent us, at any time in the future (without primary legislation) changing the evidential requirements for the US; effectively killing the new treaty.

And here we come to the nub of the issue…

One was to remove the United States from a list of countries which do not have to provide prima facie evidence (but do have to provide detailed information about  the facts of the case to enable the court to decide whether the offences are also crimes under English law)

In layman’s terms, the 2003 treaty creates a situation in which, without the Tory’s amendments, the US merely has to demonstrate that a British citizen (or resident) is to be charged after extradition with an offence that would be a crime under UK law - what we would normally refer to as ‘making an allegation’ - but without there being any requirement that the US authorities provide any prima facie evidence to support that allegation.

This second requirement, the removal of which the Home Office objects to is what in the US judicial system is referred to as ‘probably cause’ which is defined, at its most basic level, as a reasonable belief both that a crime has been committed and that the person is linked to the crime with the same degree of certainty.

Probable cause forms the basic standard by which, in the US, a police officer may make an arrest, conduct a personal or property search or apply for a warrant and should be a fairly familar concept to anyone who has ever watched a US ‘Police Procedural’ show such as any of the three CSI series, ‘Law & Order’ or ‘Homicide: Life on the Streets’.

And thereby hangs the problem, as even with this treaty in place, a request from the UK for the extradition of a suspect from the US must meet the standard of ‘probable cause’, i.e. it must show both that the offence for which the individual is to be charged is a criminal offence in the US and that there is evidence to demonstrate that they have, in effect, got the right man (or woman), and arrangement that is not reciprocated under the treaty in the case of extraditions from the UK to the US, where there is no requirement on the US authorities to put evidence to UK court sufficient to establish probable cause.

There is, in this, a clear lack of equity and reciprocity in the process; one that until recently was even more marked by the failure of the US Senate to ratify the treaty (it did so only on 30 September this year, three years after it was signed by both governments)…

… and the reason the US held of on ratification for so long? Concern for the basic constitutional rights of its citizens, no less, something about which the Home Office have shown little or no concern on this side of the arrangement.

2. During the passage of the Extradition Bill David Cameron said:
 
Mr. David Cameron (Witney): As the Minister is aware, many important extraditions have not gone ahead because of the courts’ interpretation of article 3 of the European convention on human rights. Is he aware of the Soering judgment, in which someone accused of murder could not be extradited to the United States under article 3? What will the Bill do to try to streamline such cases and make the extraditions go ahead?

David Cameron, 9 December, 2002, Hansard Column: 40

This is, indeed, true. The ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in Soering prohibits extradition from any EU country where the individual in question is charged with a capital crime, i.e. one where the death penalty could be applied.

This does not prevent extraditions to the US outright in cases of, using Cameron’s example, murder, only extraditions for crimes that carry the Federal death penalty or to individual states in which the death penalty remains on statute. Soering does not provide, therefore, to extraditions to the following states:

Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia (i.e Washington DC)

In practice, Soering does not prevent extraditions at all as all the US or an individual US state has to do is give a binding commitment that it will not seek the death penalty in a case subject to extradition, i.e. agree in advance that the maximum penalty that the state will seek to obtain is life without parole.

If the inclusion of this ‘note’ is intended to reinforce the contention that Cameron is somehow soft on crime by citing Soering in the Commons, then all it shows is that whoever put this press release together really must think newspaper editors amongst the most stupid people to be found anywhere in British society. The simple fact is that Soering, as a binding judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, is something over which neither Cameron or John Reid has any control or authority - the legal position in the UK, as in the rest of Europe, is that an individual cannot be extradited to the US to face trial for an offence that could result in the imposition of the deathy penalty, no matter who is government at any particular time.

3. In an interview with Real Business magazine, David Cameron talked tough on white collar crime:

David Cameron:  And I think a lot of business I talk to are not satisfied with the response we have in this country to white collar crime.

Question:  Will there be specific proposals for that?

DC: Yeah, get tough on it! When you see someone committing a fraud on a business and you see them then getting a few hours community service - that is not good enough.

Q: So increase penalties?

DC: Yes, if necessary, yes.

Q: An ability to fire them?

DC: Yes. As I’ve said, this important. All we’re saying is that sometimes politicians in listening to the business sector are so used to just picking up the messages about tax and bureaucracy that they don’t listen to the other things. It’s very important we listen to those things like white collar crime that is very concerning to a lot of businesses.

(David Cameron, Real Business magazine, September, 2006: www.realbusiness.co.uk/Blog.aspx)

Cameron may have ‘talked tough’ on white collar crime in this interview, but even an idiot can see that he does so in the context of the UK and the UK legal system and not with reference to the question of extradition to the US.

These are two very different matters. One is about whether the UK’s legal system treats white collar crime sufficiently seriously, the other is about whether we should extradite British citizens/residents to the US on the strength of nothing more than an allegation, a standard of ‘evidence’ insufficient to secure an extradition the other way.

4. But by voting to retain the Lords amendments on extradition in the Police and Criminal Justice Bill, David Cameron’s Conservatives are opposing important modernisation to tackle international crime, thus revealing his hypocrisy on crime. The Lords amendments which the Tories voted for today will:

o make us unable to extradite to the UK offenders in the US wanted here for modern crimes

Errm. How, exactly?

The evidentiary requirements for extradition from the US to the UK are well known and understood and have not been substantially altered by the 2003 treaty. In fact the treaty in question could not make any alterations to the core requirements on the US side of the treaty as these are defined by its constitution.

Nothing in these Lords’ amendments would appear to have any affect on such extradition requests as they apply solely and exclusively to extradtion from the UK to the US and not vice-versa.

o allow sex offenders [whose crimes were committed a few years ago but are still on the run in America ] to shelter there from justice

Again, how will adding a requirement that the US authorities show probably cause, an evidentiary standard with which they are entirely familiar as it forms a fundamental pillar of thier own criminal justice system, affect the ability of the UK to seek the extradition of sex offenders from the US?

What have sex ofenders got to do with this issue in the first place, other than as a blatant and transparent appeal to the screamsheets (The Sun, Daily and Express) to splash ‘Cameron blocks Paedo Extraditions’ headlines across tomorrow’s front pages.

o block us from adding charges to someone already extradited, even if we had strong evidence

And again, how do any of these amendments give rise to that precise effect?

You’re making claims here without a single shred of evidence to back them up, not even in your explaination of the nature and purpose of these amendments.

o mean that there was no chance of getting American lifers to face justice for other crimes committed in the UK.

Hang on a second. Aside from the fact, yet not a single one of the amendments cited in this article has anything at all to do with extraditions from the US to the UK, you’re also now suggesting that somewhere in all this we’re wanting to be able to extradite prisoners from the US who are already serving a life sentence, which can often mean a sentence without parole, to stand trial in a UK court?

Am I missing something here or are these hypothetical prisoners not already serving a life sentence, in which case why the fuck would we be trying to extradite them in the first place?

If you want to extradite the occasional corpse from the US then be my guest, but this still has absolutely fuck all to do with any of the amendments you’re complaining about at the start of this press release.

Going back to the original list of ‘charges’ against Cameron, I can’t help but notice this one…

the third would prevent us, at any time in the future (without primary legislation) changing the evidential requirements for the US; effectively killing the new treaty.

So what you’re actually is that this treaty, which you signed three years ago and are only now seeking to pass legislation to enact parts of it,  won’t work at all if any future changes to the evidential requirements for extraditions to the US are subject to full and democratic Parliamentary scrutiny?

In short, we can’t have international treaties in Parliament insists that the little matter of parliamentary democracy gets in the way?

I think you know exactly what’s coming next… you can fuck that idea for a game of international relations right from the outset.

Looks, as party member, there is nothing I enjoy quite so much as good old dig at the Tories but if and when I do that I do have one little requirement that I like to adhere to…

…that whatever it is I’m having a dig over has at least some semblance of a basis in fucking reality.

Call me picky, but I do have some standards one of which is that I try to base my arguments on logic, rational thought and the occasional solid fact - its what I tend to think of as having a little ‘personal integrity’.

Even as a Labour Party member I cannot advance the arguments put forward here, not when its patently obvious that they amount to nothing more nor less than a pile of steaming horse-shit and, to be entirely clear on this, I find that to be a complete and utter fucking embarrassment.

I am, the last time I looked, still a member of the Labour Party and not a member of the Daily fucking Express and whether you like it or not, I have certain standards and values that do matter to me, not least of which are honest and integrity, and I neither appreciate nor enjoy seeing my own party slopping around in the political gutter with press releases that are patently and obviously a work of complete and utter fiction.

Any credible list of the greatest films of all time must certainly include at least one by the great Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa, and if one is forced to choose only one of his films for such a list then that film would almost certainly be his 1950 classic, Rashomon.

Rashomon’s central theme is compelling in its simple profundity, dealing, as it does, with the difficulty (even impossibility) of obtaining the truth about an event from the conflicting accounts of witness - so profound in fact that the term ‘Rashomon effect’ has entered the lexicon of psychology to describe the effect of the subjectivity of perception on memory by which observers of an event are able to produce very different but equally plausible description of that event.

The relevance of this to a primarily political blogger like myself - aside from my personal liking for Kurosawa’s work - rests in this particular story…

A high court judge last night demolished a central plank of the government’s anti-terror policy when he quashed "control orders" on six suspected terrorists, saying the home secretary "had no power to make them under human rights law".

John Reid launched a furious counter-attack last night, saying he "strongly disagreed" with the ruling by Mr Justice Sullivan, which overturns nearly half the 14 control orders currently in force. He will try to overturn it in the court of appeal next month. Mr Reid said the control order system was needed to deal with international terror suspects who could not be deported on human rights grounds to countries where there was risk of torture.

Or more precisely in the entirely predictable response to be found in today’s Sun…

ONCE again a judge has put the rights of dangerous fanatics ahead of the safety of the British people.

In an outrageous ruling, Mr Justice Sullivan quashed vital control orders against six terror suspects.

In the process he drove a gaping hole through our anti-terror laws, leaving Britain at risk from extremists.

This is the same judge who banned the deportation of nine ruthless Afghan hijackers on human rights grounds.

His ruling flies in the face of common sense. We must count on it being overturned at appeal.

But this is the inevitable consequence of attempts to appease the human rights lobby.

Tony Blair has tied himself in knots trying to square our security with the European Convention on Human Rights.

But the only human right that counts is the safety of the British people. After the carnage of 7/7, the PM vowed to scrap the law if it got in the way of national security.

As the anniversary looms, it’s time to stop talking and take action.

I doubt very much that we need go into too much detail in relation to the general of this editorial, although at the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law one might note that its general tone would not have looked out of place in the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter circa 1934/5, otherwise its just the same old piss-poor polemic against the Human Rights Act and European Convention on Human Rights that we’ve been seeing for months.

What’s rather more interesting, however, is what happens if one seeks to deliberately apply the Rashomon effect to this case and how this might, in turn, alter perceptions of the Sun’s arguments about ECHR.

What actually happened yesterday, in terms of the ruling that was made by Mr Justice Sullivan, is summed up rather nicely in his own words:

Mr Justice Sullivan said: "The freedom to meet any person of one’s choice by prior arrangement is significant. As is the freedom to attend any temple, mosque, church as whatever you choose." He went on: "I am left in no doubt whatsoever that the cumulative effect of the order has been to deprive to respondents of their liberty, in breach of article 5. I do not consider that this is a borderline case." The judge said he had taken into account the importance of the needs of protecting the public from acts of terrorism, but "human rights or international law must not be infringed or compromised".

Article 5 of ECHR, for those unfamiliar with it, states that:

1. Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be deprived of his liberty save in the following cases and in accordance with a procedure prescribed by law:

a. the lawful detention of a person after conviction by a competent court;

b. the lawful arrest or detention of a person for non-compliance with the lawful order of a court or in order to secure the fulfilment of any obligation prescribed by law;

c. the lawful arrest or detention of a person effected for the purpose of bringing him before the competent legal authority on reasonable suspicion of having committed an offence or when it is reasonably considered necessary to prevent his committing an offence or fleeing after having done so;

d. the detention of a minor by lawful order for the purpose of educational supervision or his lawful detention for the purpose of bringing him before the competent legal authority;
the lawful detention of persons for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases, of persons of unsound mind, alcoholics or drug addicts or vagrants;

e. the lawful arrest or detention of a person to prevent his effecting an unauthorised entry into the country or of a person against whom action is being taken with a view to deportation or extradition.

2. Everyone who is arrested shall be informed promptly, in a language which he understands, of the reasons for his arrest and of any charge against him.

3. Everyone arrested or detained in accordance with the provisions of paragraph 1.c of this article shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorised by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release pending trial. Release may be conditioned by guarantees to appear for trial.

4. Everyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful.

5. Everyone who has been the victim of arrest or detention in contravention of the provisions of this article shall have an enforceable right to compensation.

Just a trifle then, nothing more significant that the right to basic liberty, a fair trial, due legal and judicial process and the right to challenge the legality of arbitrary, extra-judicial detention by the state.

Possibly the most perncious fallacy currently being heavily promoted about the Human Right Acts and ECHR, not just by the Sun of the likes of Mad Mel but by both Tony Blair and David Cameron, is the idea that human rights is somehow a foreign imposition on British society and yet more malign influence from the continent.

This is patently untrue, as even Mad Mel has to acknowledge:

But the idea that this country had no human rights — like fair trials or freedom of speech —before the European Convention was drafted just after World War Two is clearly absurd. Our traditions of justice and liberty are ingrained in British history. Indeed, it was our lawyers who drafted the Convention.

If ECHR, which was drafted largely by British barristers and to which Britain was the first signatory, could be said to have had an architect then that architect was Winston Churchill, who, for all his faults, was hardly a man who would happily surrender British liberties to foreign authority…

…and so we come to the Rashomon effect and very simple question - is there another perspective on the actions of Mr Justice Sullivan, one rooted not in ECHR but in British, or at least English, Law, by which he could, in the faced of the Home Office’s actions, have arrived at much the same conclusions and, even, outcome.

Well, yes there is - and more to the point, one does not have to look very far at all to find it.

For starters, what actually happened yesterday was that the plaintiffs, who had been made subject to a control order, went to court to challenge the legality of their detention, thereby making use of Acts of Parliament that existed in British/English law long before the advent of ECHR and of which British jurist A C Dicey wrote they they:

declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty.

And what are these most marvellous Acts of Parliament? Quite simply the Habeas Corpus Acts.

The next thing that happened was that, after careful deliberation, Mr Justice Sullivan ruled that the use of control orders, by which the plaintiffs were held under what is effectively indefinite house arrest on the basis of a ministerial edict - such orders being signed by the Home Secretary without recourse to a court of law - is incompatible with ECHR and, by extension, that the Home Secretary has no valid legal authority to issue such orders.

Again, the question is simply whether there is, in British/English law, an alternative to ECHR that could have produced much the same outcome… and, again, the answer is yes. All one need do is refer to article 39 of the much venerated Magna Carta:

No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.

Now, one could, I suppose, contend that as the Home Secretary’s power to issue control orders is enacted by Act of Parliament then there is no breach of Magna Carta as such orders are issued in accordance with ‘the law of the land’ but it has long been part of British justice that, but for times of emergency - when even habeas corpus has been temporarily suspended - that indefinite and arbitrary detention without charge or trial is unlawful.

Could Mr Justice Sullivan have, then, ruled as he did on the basis of Magna Carta - well, its certainly possible.

Article 39 is one of only four that remain in force having never been expressly repealed and as an article of constitutional law could certainly be given precedence over even powers granted by Act of Parliament as, by convention, ultimate jurisdiction in constitutional matters rests not with the Commons bit with the House of Lords. He could certainly have made the ruling on this basis, but whether that ruling would stand up would ultimately be a matter for the Law Lords who certainly could overrule the Common in this matter on the basis of control orders being ‘unconstitutional’.

Yesterday’s reports also made reference to an earlier case in the same judge struck down a separate control order for a different reason:

It is the second time in three months that Mr Justice Sullivan has criticised the orders. In April he overturned a seventh control order on a British terror suspect known only as "S", calling it an "affront to justice".

On that occasion, the issue was not the legal authority of the Home Secretary but the process by which the control order was issued. which was ruled incompatible with ECHR on the grounds that the individula in question was not afforded a fair hearing.

And again, Mr Justice Sullivan need not have relied on ECHR for his judgement in that case but could have turned, instead to the much older doctrine of natural justice and the legal maxim audi alteram partem (i.e. one must ‘hear the other side’). Natural justice is one of the central planks of the process of judicial review such that, irrespective of what statute law might say, a decision by a government minister or functionary may be challenged in court and quashed by a judge if such a decision is held to have been made without recourse to natural justice.

As should be obvious by now, one could quite easily rewrite the story of Mr Justice Sullivan’s rulling in very different legal terms and still arrive at, potentially, the same outcome by replacing ECHR with habeas corpus and Magna Carta, all of which rather destroys the idea that the government’s wishes are being overruled on the basis of principles that are somehow ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ to British justice…

…and that being the case, one has to wonder just how the Sun’s editoral might have looked had this ruling been laid down in just such a fashion - after all, surely even the Sun could have no objection  to habeas corpus and Magna Carta - could it?

Apropos of my last article on the rantings of Mad Mel on the subject of the government’s proposed Sexual Orientation Regulations (consultation document - pdf), I thought I’d take a bit of a closer look at the campaign being conducted, in the main, by a evangelical group called the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship, which seeks express exemptions from these regulations for religious believers.

Before moving ahead to look at the LCF’s campaign, its worth putting this group in it proper context - on it’s website its gives a very brief ‘history’ of the organisation as follows:

Originally founded in 1852, in London, as the Lawyers’ Prayer Union, LCF has grown to become a national organisation with around 1500 members at every stage of the legal profession. We have strong links with the Association of Christian Law Firms and also have many international links.

It’s also a registered charity, with a current annual income of around £250,000 per year, derived largely from donations and tax recovered via the gift aid system and from conferences & fundraising events and recieves no public money.

This background information is important because it demonstrates that what we have here is a pretty mainstream evangelical Christian group and not a Christian Voice-style bunch of religious wing-nuts.

Against this, however, the Law Society of England and Wales, alone, gives its present membership as being of the order of 116,000 practising solicitors, to which can be added around 14,500 practising barristers, who are regulated by the Bar Council. Even without adding in the figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland, which have their own professional/regulatory bodies, LCF represent a very small proportion of the total number of lawyers in the UK, less than 1%, and should not, therefore, be regarded as representing mainstream legal opinion.

In addition to the obligatory press releases and the LCF’s public policy officer, Andrea Minichiello Williams, doing the rounds of various Christian news websites, the LCF has produced two ‘information and action packs’, one for churches and one for non-church Christian groups (both MS Word docs), which have been promoted through the ‘Christian Concern for Our Nation’ website, in addition to submitting a formal response to the government’s consultation, and it’s these I want to look at in more detail.

To begin with, the LCF’s general position is quite succinctly summed up by this statement, which accompanies the information packs on the Christian Concern for Our Nation (CCFON) website:

Why is it [the Sexual Orientation Regulations] a problem? Firstly, we must stress that Christians are commanded to love all their neighbours (including homosexuals) equally. Christians would never want to be homophobic or discriminate against homosexuals out of bigotry or prejudice. Christians of course earnestly desire the repentance and salvation of homosexuals.

However, the Bible is clear that the only rightful sexual relationship for which we were created, is a relationship between a man and a woman in the context of a legitimate marriage. Consequently there are times when Christians need to be free to discriminate against homosexuals in order to make it clear that we believe in the Bible’s teaching that homosexual practice is wrong.

I supposed the best one can say about this group is that they’re at least open in their hypocrisy - they would never want to be homophobic or discriminate out of bigotry or prejudice (really?) but they still need (supposedly) a statutory right to discriminate against homosexuals simply because of their sexuality.

Well, let’s take a look at what the dictionary has to say on the subject of prejudice:

Prejudice:

1. a. An adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts.

The mere that an individual may be homosexual says little or nothing about the kind of person the might be or the kind of relationships they might have or be in at any particular time, therefore, to judge them and their character in an adverse manner purely on their sexual orientation would clearly fit the dictionary definition of prejudice, the thing that Christians would never want to be (allegedly).

Right from the outset, the assertion that prejudice and discrimination do not go hand in hand looks to be little more than hypocritical sophistry, not that we find this to be an uncommon feature in the LCF’s arguments as is apparent when we move on to look at the actual views forwarded to the government in response to its consultation:

Anti-discrimination legislation

The Bible teaches that all people are created equally in the image of God and all are loved by God (Genesis 1 and John 3:16). The corollary is that as Christians, we support the outlawing of unjustified discrimination, and therefore support the Government in their implementation of anti-discrimination legislation regarding race, sex and disability. Such legislation has been a helpful tool in seeking to redress injustice in the treatment of different (often marginalised) people in society.

So far, so good, at least as regards discrimination on grounds of race, gender and disability, but what about other forms of discrimination?

In the consultation it is stated that

‘By introducing these regulations, we will be treating sexual orientation discrimination with the same seriousness afforded to discrimination on the grounds of disability, sex, race and religion or belief’.

We are of the view that it is a mistake to approach the issues of religion (and belief) and sexual orientation, as directly comparable to race, sex and disability. While race and sex are fundamental to a person, unalterable, and incontrovertibly fixed at birth (disability can be fixed at birth or at a later stage), religion and sexual orientation are not of the same nature. People cannot by their volition change their race or their sex or their disability, but they can (and do) change their religion or their sexual orientation.

So the logic here is that while its wrong to discriminate against individuals in regards to factors over which they have no choice, things are very different when its come to facets of their character or lifestyle in which they are perceived to have a choice as to their beliefs and/or behaviour.

This is an interesting line of argument to say the least - for one thing it assumes that one’s sexuality is a matter of absolute choice, as if to suggest that one might arrive at the conclusion that you are attracted to someone of the same gender after carefully contemplating the alternatives or even wake up one morning and decide that you’d quite like to give being gay a try to see if it suits you.

Such a view is patently absurd and entirely contrary to the mainstream scientific position on homosexuality, which is set out here in a factsheet on the website of the American Psychological Association:

What Causes a Person To Have a Particular Sexual Orientation?

There are numerous theories about the origins of a person’s sexual orientation; most scientists today agree that sexual orientation is most likely the result of a complex interaction of environmental, cognitive and biological factors. In most people, sexual orientation is shaped at an early age. There is also considerable recent evidence to suggest that biology, including genetic or inborn hormonal factors, play a significant role in a person’s sexuality. In summary, it is important to recognize that there are probably many reasons for a person’s sexual orientation and the reasons may be different for different people. 

Is Sexual Orientation a Choice?

No, human beings can not choose to be either gay or straight. Sexual orientation emerges for most people in early adolescence without any prior sexual experience. Although we can choose whether to act on our feelings, psychologists do not consider sexual orientation to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed.

Can Therapy Change Sexual Orientation?

No. Even though most homosexuals live successful, happy lives, some homosexual or bisexual people may seek to change their sexual orientation through therapy, sometimes pressured by the influence of family members or religious groups to try and do so. The reality is that homosexuality is not an illness. It does not require treatment and is not changeable.

Is Homosexuality a Mental Illness or Emotional Problem?

No. Psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals agree that homosexuality is not an illness, mental disorder or an emotional problem. Over 35 years of objective, well-designed scientific research has shown that homosexuality, in and itself,is not associated with mental disorders or emotional or social problems. Homosexuality was once thought to be a mental illness because mental health professionals and society had biased information. In the past the studies of gay, lesbian and bisexual people involved only those in therapy, thus biasing the resulting conclusions. When researchers examined data about these people who were not in therapy, the idea that homosexuality was a mental illness was quickly found to be untrue.

The psychological underpinning of individual sexual orientation have been studied extensively over many years without producing any credible evidence to support the view put forward by the LCF despite the many attempts made by religiously motivated researchers to ‘prove’ that homosexuality could be ‘treated’ and ‘reversed’, as this overview of so-called ‘reparative therapy’ from the University of California Department of Psychology shows:

In many of these behavior-change techniques, "success" has been defined as suppression of homoerotic response or mere display of physiological ability to engage in heterosexual intercourse. Neither outcome is the same as adopting the complex set of attractions and feelings that constitute sexual orientation.

Many interventions aimed at changing sexual orientation have succeeded only in reducing or eliminating homosexual behavior rather than in creating or increasing heterosexual attractions. They have, in effect, deprived individuals of their capacity for sexual response to others. These "therapies" have often exposed their victims to electric shocks or nausea-producing drugs while showing them pictures of same-sex nudes (such techniques appear to be less common today than in the past).

Another problem in many published reports of "successful" conversion therapies is that the participants’ initial sexual orientation was never adequately assessed. Many bisexuals have been mislabeled as homosexuals with the consequence that the "successes" reported for the conversions actually have occurred among bisexuals who were highly motivated to adopt a heterosexual behavior pattern.

The extent to which people have actually changed their behavior – even within the confines of these inadequate operational definitions – often has not been systematically assessed. Instead, only self reports of patients or therapists’ subjective impressions have been available. More rigorous objective assessments (e.g., behavioral indicators over an extended period of time) have been lacking (Coleman, 1982; Haldeman, 1991, 1994; Martin, 1984).

Some psychoanalysts claim to have conducted empirical research demonstrating that their "therapies" are able to change gay people into heterosexuals. Their studies have multiple flaws, including a lack of safeguards against bias and a lack of control groups. Rather than having patients evaluated by an independent third party who is unaware of which patients received the "reparative therapy," these studies are simply compilations of self-reports from psychoanalysts who are attempting to change their patients’ sexual orientation (and who are highly motivated to report "success").

The rational, scientific view of sexual orientation is, therefore, both that it is a rather more complex matter than simply a choice between heterosexuality and homosexuality, between which there exists a state of uncertainty or confusion that is  bisexuality, but rather that sexual orientation is a continuum within which individuals find and express their sexual feelings without conscious choice as to what those feeling might be or how they might manifest themselves. Choice, in this context, is not a matter of making positive determinations about one’s sexuality so much as repressing those aspects of one sexual feelings that one is uncomfortable about expressing, most often in response to external factors particularly social pressures arising from religious, social and cultural beliefs.

The view, therefore, that sexual orientation should not be according the same status as race, gender or disability in formulating anti-discrimination legislation is not only false but also highly repressive and damaging to individual.

LCF then goes on to state:

The corollary of our view that it is wrong to treat sexual orientation as equivalent to sex, race and disability, is that it is a mistake to use legislation to try and regulate and control attitudes towards sexual orientation. In our opinion, society ought to be left to draw its own conclusions about sexual orientation, just as it has in past centuries. Whether or not one agrees with other people’s views on sexual orientation, there has always been a freedom to hold, put forward, discuss and debate any personal view about sexual orientation. This is a facet of our highly prized freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression. The problem is that the Regulations may allow someone to express a view about sexual orientation, but may equally deny them the right to live according to that view. This strips the value away from the right to freedom of expression. Only where there is a compelling justification should the state take away a person’s freedom to act in accordance with their beliefs.

Because of our opinion that sexual orientation is dissimilar to sex, race and disability, it is also our opinion that there is no compelling justification for removing from society the freedom to act according to their views on sexual orientation (subject to what we say below). For the Government to try and regulate and control people’s attitudes to sexual orientation by seeking to eliminate discrimination in the way people behave indicates, in our view, an illegitimate attempt to ‘nationalise’ a private moral issue.

This segement of the LCF’s response takes us quite neatly back to the commentary from Reynolds vs United States, from which I quoted yesterday in commenting on Melanie Phillips’ article on this same subject, specifically this statement:

Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.

This is fundamental essence of all current anti-discrimination legislation in addition to that which relates to free expression and freedom of thought, belief and conscience - one is entirely free to hold whatever views and beliefs on wishes, no matter how prurient and without risk of penalty of law.

However when one comes to manifest those views and beliefs in the form of certain actions, which can include the publication or public utterance of those views, one may be subject to certain constraints and restrictions in the interests of public order or of certain social duties; hence the existance of laws covering libel and defamation, threatening behaviour, incitement to hatred of various forms and the commission of other criminal offences and criminal conspiracies and, of course, laws that prohibit discrimination in the workplace
and in other aspects of everyday life.

LCF’s view is that ‘only where there is a compelling justification should the state take away a person’s freedom to act in accordance with their beliefs’ and in this case such a compelling justification is clearly present in prohibiting discriminatory behaviour that infringes on the civil rights and liberties of the gay community.

Somewhat more amusingly, the LCF appear to have failed entirely to recognise just how easily they can be hoisted on their own petard by their own line of argument - if society is justified in disregarding the legitimate claim of the gay community to equal treatment and the prohibition of discrimination based on their sexual orientation simply because the regarded by Christians as having the capacity to choose their sexual orientation, then one must surely be equally jusitified in taking the very same attitude toward Christianity and ita adherents, and indeed other religions, given that as the LCF state:

We are of the view that it is a mistake to approach the issues of religion (and belief) and sexual orientation, as directly comparable to race, sex and disability. While race and sex are fundamental to a person, unalterable, and incontrovertibly fixed at birth (disability can be fixed at birth or at a later stage), religion and sexual orientation are not of the same nature. People cannot by their volition change their race or their sex or their disability, but they can (and do) change their religion or their sexual orientation.

Moving ahead with the LCF’s response we come to a glorious little treatise on the nature of homophobia, which is well worth highlighting:
We are concerned that the approach taken by the draft Regulations is not focussed precisely enough on the type of discrimination which the Government seeks to eradicate, and therefore the scope of the Regulations will inadvertently criminalise the expression of legitimate views on homosexuality.

Did you follow that?

Outlawing discrimination founded in irrational prejudice (i.e. homophobia) is fine because prejudices based on Biblical doctrine aren’t (supposedly) irrational. This is a basic logical fallacy called an appeal to authority (argumentum ad vericundium), one in which, as a society, we are expected to accept the view that Christian’s should be permitted to discriminate on grounds of sexuality solely on trust in the authority of the text of the Bible.

There is no rational argument here, we are simply expected to accept that LCF and those who take a literalist view of the Bible, should be entitled to put their prejudices into practice because those practices are founded on scripture. And yet, in reality, Biblical reference have been used over the centuries to justify all manner of prejudices and discriminatory practices that are, today, prohibited; including racism, slavery and institutionalised gender inequality to name but three. If, as a society, we can reject the presumed authority of the Bible in those areas, then why should we not also reject its view of homosexuality in the same way, as being one that is woefully outdated and therefore, one that we have simply outgrown to the point that it has no further relevance.

In the same way that we have no difficulty in rejecting the validity of prejudice founded on political or cultural beliefs, we should have no problem in rejecting those founded on religious beliefs - Christian prejudice against homosexuality rests on no more solid foundations than those to be found in Fascism’s prejudice against Jews, both relief on an unquestioning belief in a highly questionable authority for which there is no concrete evidence.

The blatant sophistry continues unabated in the LCF’s next line of argument, in which they attempt to ‘explain’ Biblical teachings on homosexuality:

We are concerned that the approach taken by the draft Regulations is discloses a failure to fully understand Biblical doctrine relating to the issue of sexual orientation.

The Bible teaches that Christians (and indeed all people) should love a person irrespective of sexual orientation. Sexual orientation being defined as an attraction to someone of the opposite sex, someone of the same sex, or people of both sexes. A homosexual orientation per se is, according to the Bible, not wrong. Everyone undergoes temptation and temptation to do something is not in itself sinful. Therefore, we would endorse and support the Government’s attempt to eradicate discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation per se in much the same way as we support their desire to eliminate homophobic discrimination.

However, the Bible is clear that to act on a homosexual attraction and to practice homosexuality is sinful and wrong. The distinction may appear semantic, but in fact it is of great importance. People who discriminate based on sexual orientation are discriminating on a personal basis – because someone is attracted to people of the same sex. On the other hand, Christians following the Bible have no desire to discriminate against that person at all, but in order to obey the Bible, Christians must discriminate against that person’s conduct. Of course, discriminating on the grounds of a person’s conduct will often result in indirectly discriminating against the person themselves, but the difference in intent and emphasis is key.

Again, we are of the view that the discrimination which the Government seeks to eradicate is the unjustifiable discrimination against a person based purely on their orientation, it is not the discrimination of a Christian who discriminates because the Bible teaches that homosexual conduct is not equal to heterosexual conduct in the context of marriage.

Because of the failure to distinguish between discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and on the grounds of sexual practice, the Regulations currently make both unlawful. The onus is on the Government not to draft a law which inadvertently renders illegal a justified doctrinal view, however hard it is to frame that law to capture only unjustified discrimination. If anything, we think this difficulty further illustrates our view that this issue is not well suited to legislative intervention.

Again, the position here is one of manifest hypocrisy in which, in the case of homosexuality, we are expected to accept an artificial distinction between their sexual orientation and whether and how they express that orientation in terms of actions, but when it comes to Christians their actions are indivisible and indistinguishable from their beliefs and, consequently, they are justifed in discriminating against homosexuals - this is nothing more than purile rubbish of the highest order.

So far, we’ve covered the basic principle of the LCF’s arguments, none of which stand up to rational/logical inquiry, but what of the practical aspects of their views?

One of the LCF’s main contentions is that these new regulations will force Christians to act against their beliefs and consciences, which sounds like a matter for concern, until one starts to look at the kind of examples given by the LCF to illustrate their arguments:

Example 1: an advertising company when interviewing for a new post will have to start asking all interviewees ‘would you refuse to advertise an event that encouraged homosexual practice’. A Christian who answered ‘yes, I would refuse’ would not be given the job because the employer would understandably not want to risk taking on someone whose views might place the employer in breach of the law in the future. Therefore the Christian would effectively be being discriminated against on the ground of their religion.

Example 2: any Christian teacher working in a state school would be liable to be sacked if they refused to teach the equivalence of homosexuality to heterosexuality because this would place the school in breach of the Regulations. In the future the school would be more wary about recruiting Christians because of their religious views that homosexual practice is sinful, and so would discriminate on the grounds of religion.

The first example given is complete and utter rubbish - there is no express requirement in law, not even in existing anti-discrimination statues, which would require an employer to question a candidate at interview about their attitudes towards homosexuality, race, gender, disability or anything other field in which discriminatory conduct is prohibited, although many employers, particularly in the public and voluntary sectors, do include a generic question about candidates understanding of equality and equal opportunities.

Discrimination in employment on religious grounds is already unlawful under the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, which the LCF neglect to mention here, or in their information packs, such that one can only conclude that they are indulging in deliberate scare-mongering in an effort to artificially induce a moral panic on this issue amongst their potential supporters and so give rise to an inflated response in support of their position.

Example 2 is equally spurious in as much as it would, first and foremost, apply only to a very limited range of subjects - in most state secondary schools only science, if dealing with sex education, Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE), and possibly Religious Education - very few teachers could, therefore, be affected in the way suggested.

More importantly, teaching children about the Christian view on homosexuality should present no difficulty whatsoever if one goes about it in a strictly factual manner in which children are invited to reflect on plurality of opinions on the subject - but then that’s the real problem here, which arises because the hypotetical teacher’s objection in such a situation is not predicated on education but on indoctrination in which the objective is not to teach pupils that Christian’s believe homosexuality to be sinful but to directly teach them that homosexuality is a sin and thereby pass on theri personal prejudices, irrespective of whether they beliefs are shared by pupils, their parents, or the school itself.

Personally, if these regulations did limit the scope for Christian’s to make use of the state education system to indoctrinate children in their prejudices then this all to the good and can;t come soon enough - even if I doubt that this will be the case in practice. In any case it is well with the capacity of schools to permit a teacher to withdraw from teaching a particular element of the curriculum if that creates difficulties of conscience for the teacher, a furnish a replacement for such lesson who has no such problem. In fact from personal experience, schools and colleges have in the past also withdrawn individual teachers from lessons where it was felt that they might  go beyond education and into direct indoctrination due to their personal beliefs. This happened at the sixth form college I attended many years ago, where an openly Marxist sociology lecturer was not permitted to teach that portion of the ‘A’ level curriculum that dealt with Marxism for fear that he might attempt to indocrinate students and recruit them into Marxist politics - complete irrational bullshit, of course, but the college did it anyway and used another tutor for those sessions.

LCF follow up these example with a fairly banal exposition on the relative merits of articles 9 (religious freedom) and 14 (prohibition of discrimination) in which they argue that their version of religious liberty - i.e. the right to discriminate - trumps the rights of the gay community not to be discriminated against in the provision of goods and services, one in which they fail to notice the usual qualifying codecil, which applies to almost all the articles, excepting 3 (prohibition of torture) and 14 (prohibition of discrimination):

Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Before returning, again, to the subject of free expression and education:

Prima facie the Regulations make it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation in the content of the education given in both secular and faith schools. For example, to teach that homosexual practice was wrong and not equivalent to heterosexual practice within marriage would clearly count as discrimination against any homosexual students – it is undoubtedly ‘less favourable treatment’ which is ‘on the grounds of sexual orientation’. The syllogistic conclusion is therefore that under the draft Regulations as they stand, it would be illegal to express the view in schools that homosexual practice is not equivalent to heterosexual practice within marriage.

In fact, prima facie, it would not be unlaw to express the view in schools that homosexual practice is not equivalent to heterosexual practice within marriage in the context of explaining the nature of Christian belief, it may be unlawful for schools to proselytyse and indoctrinate on that particular subject, which would be no bad thing at all.

Frankly, if Christians, whether in the context of a church or community group, wish to indulge in indoctrination then they can do on their own time and in a context where pupils (and parents) have a choice as to whether they wish to be exposed to such ‘teachings’ - they should not expect the state to facilitate such a course of action, nor should the state support such actions.

Central to most of the LCF’s arguments is the contention that beliefs and actions are, for a Christian, entirely indivisible, this, again, being a position justified solely on Biblical authority:

The previous paragraphs have highlighted that the current proposals for the Regulations cover and render illegal discrimination even if it derives from a genuine expression of Christian doctrine about homosexual practice. On an initial reading, it might seem that a Christian who believes in the Bible need simply be given the freedom of conscience to believe homosexual practice is wrong and be given freedom of speech to express that view to others. However, it is of course trite to point out that almost all religions, and certainly Christianity, demand the devotion not just of the follower’s mind and lips, but also, critically, of their actions. There is no value to declaring that homosexual practice is sinful and wrong if your actions then run completely contrary to that view…

By definition Christianity is not a purely personal faith or private set of beliefs: Jesus’ command to all Christians is to go to ‘all nations … teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you’ (Matthew 28:19-20). This requires more than mere words. Christians are charged to live with integrity (Titus 2:6-8), which means not just professing the Bible’s teachings, but also acting in accordance with them. It would be anathema to Christianity to allow Christians to profess Biblical teaching but to force Christians to act inconsistently with that teaching. Firstly then, any law which does not provide freedom for Christians to discriminate on the grounds of the Bible’s teaching about homosexuality, denies every single Christian the freedom to live with integrity.

And yet no such consideration is afforded to homosexuals, whose sexual orientation, and therefore sexual behaviour, is an intrinsic element of their personal character - as here in their suggestion for ‘improving’ the definition of what constitutes discrimination:

…one possible way of addressing all the problems we have identified would be by defining more accurately what is meant by ‘sexual orientation’ discrimination so that the new law would only capture:

a) homophobic discrimination (where homophobia is defined as an irrational prejudice against a person based on a dislike of their homosexual behaviour or their sexual orientation towards people of the same sex) rather than discrimination based on a religious doctrine regarding homosexuality, and

b) discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, but not discrimination on the grounds of sexual conduct.

Leaving aside, for a moment, their unsustainable assertion of rationality based solely on scripture on has to wonder quite how (b) would work in practice. How, exactly, do they suggest that Christians should go about ascertaining whether a particular individual is a practising or non-practising homosexual before decided whether it would be legally permissible to discriminate against them?

One of the example scenarios about which the LCF has got hot under the collar is this one:

It would be illegal for Christian run hotels, bed and breakfasts, sheltered accommodation or community housing projects to refuse a homosexual couple a room with a double-bed (or any similar arrangement) if the refusal was based on the fact the couple were practicing homosexuals.

Even if the hotel etc. refused un-married heterosexual couples a room with a double-bed, there would still be a real danger of prosecution if they also turned away gay lovers: it is not hard to anticipate that either those gay lovers or a court might struggle to accept that the hotel was discriminating not on the grounds of sexual orientation, but on the ground of the Bible’s teaching that it is wrong to have homosexual or heterosexual sex outside marriage.

On top of this, it would be illegal in any case for the hotel etc. to refuse to let such a room to a gay couple who had a registered civil partnership, because the Regulations treat such a partnership as equal to a heterosexual marriage. There is no doubt that being forced to let a room with a double bed to homosexual lovers would be to force the owner / staff of the premises to facilitate homosexual conduct and would go directly against the Bible’s teaching.

The assumption, presumably, would be that the mere fact that the homosexual couple in question were seeking to book a double room would indicate that they are practising homosexuals, which may or may not be the case - even in this day and age, celebacy remains a valid lifestyle choice for some and, in fact, courtesy of the HIV virus, long-term celebate relationships are not all uncommon within the gay community.

So just what are the LCF expecting here? That gay couples should have to sign some sort of affidavit attesting that their celebate state on check-in or submit themselves to intrusive questioning by the proprietor before being permitted a room? Or is the expectation here that hotelliers would be permitted a legal defence based on a ‘reasonable belief’ that the couple in question were practicing homosexuals, one in which the burden of proof in demonstrating that discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and not conduct rested with the complainant?

Given that this has been drafted by lawyers, one would expect the latter to be the case, knowing full well that in such cases would be near impossible for the plaintiff to prove that discrimination had arisen out of their sexual orientation rather than their sexual conduct - there is one way to be sure if this is what LCF actually intends, which is to put forward the proposal as being one that should be considered for inclusion in the regulations, but only on the basis that the burden of proof as to whether the discriminatory action was based on sexual orientation or sexual conduct rested with the defendant and not the plaintiff, as is now the case in  race and other discrimination cases in employment.

I think it obvious how LCF would respond to a proposal.

Elsewhere the source of this groups prejudices and concerns is made more obvious:

It would be illegal for Christian housing or accommodation providers to prioritise provision of accommodation to married heterosexual couples over homosexual couples, even if the providers had genuine and logical reasons for such prioritising. For example, the accommodation providers might have a concern (based on evidence) that the homosexual couple would encourage other vulnerable (adult) tenants to engage in homosexual practice.

For a Christian housing provider to be forced by the Regulations to prioritise a homosexual prospective tenant whom they had reason to believe would lead others into homosexual practice, would be to force them to act against Biblical teaching by facilitating and enabling homosexual practice.

It could also, depending on the circumstances, be illegal for a Christian hostel etc, to try and evict a resident who had not initially declared their sexuality but who then sought to seduce or have a relationship with another adult of the same sex in that hostel. Biblical teaching about the sinfulness of homosexual practice would make it incumbent on the Christian running the hostel not to tolerate such homosexual practice within their institution and so in this example the Regulations would again conflict with the Bible.

What we have here is nothing more than good old-fashioned "backs to the wall, lads" homophobia dressed up as an allegedly legitimate point of concern and the unsustainable assumption that homosexuality equates to predatory sexual behavior as a matter of course… and of course, it doesn’t. what is clearly expressed here is the fear that contact with homosexuals may certain individuals to investigate and explore their own sexuality and sexual orientation and throw off the shackles of religious repression - that is homophobia however much this group would like to pretend otherwise.

Elsewhere in their submission, the LCf’s analysis of the proposed regulation is simply plain wrong as here:

It seems that according to the Regulations churches who use their premises for (heterosexual) weddings (this would also fall under the ‘provision of a service’ head as well) would be required to accept civil partnership ceremonies on their premises – to refuse to do so on the grounds of the sexual orientation of the couple seeking to book the venue would be unlawful.

Further, because the consultation makes it explicit that any discrimination between married heterosexuals and those with Civil Partnerships will be direct discrimination, it would clearly be illegal for a church to refuse to be a venue for a reaffirmation of civil partnership ‘vows’ whilst allowing reaffirmation of marriage vows.

And here…

It is clear from the consultation and the other Equality Enactments that churches count as service providers. As the proposed Regulations currently stand, baptisms, dedications, christenings and confirmations that take place in a church would all count as ‘services’ – they are services which offer a benefit to the ‘general public’ and which cannot be accessed other than through a church.

The Regulations could cause a number of problems in this regard. One can envisage a vicar having difficulties of conscience and doctrine in allowing the gay parents of an adopted child (gay adoption being lawful under the Adoption Act 2002) to declare in a christening service that they ‘renounce evil and sin’, and promise to bring their child up according to God’s rules and principles (this is in the liturgy of the christening service in the Church of England), whilst they clearly and manifestly do not renounce their homosexual relationship. However, the Regulations currently make it unlawful to refuse to christen based on the sexual orientation of the parents.

It is clear that the Regulations as they currently stand will make it illegal for every single Christian vicar, minister and pastor in Great Britain to act in accordance with the Bible.

Further, holy communion would count as a service according to the definition of a service given by the consultation, and a vicar would thus be breaking the law if he were to refuse to administer communion to a self-confessed practising and unrepentant homosexual who had a registered civil partnership, if the refusal was based on that person’s sexual orientation.

What the consultation document actually states is:

3.32 Churches, mosques and many other religious organisations advance their faith or belief through activities such as worship, teaching and preaching, officiating in marriage, conducting baptisms and giving sacraments to members of their religious community. We recognise that there may be circumstances where the new regulations could impact on aspects of religious activity or practice in the light of the doctrines of some faiths concerning sexual orientation and the beliefs of their followers. We need to consider therefore the application of the regulations in these areas.

3.33 We are interested to hear views on the impact that the regulations may have in these areas, particularly where the regulations may impede religious observance or practices that arise from the basic doctrines of a faith. Any exceptions from the regulations for religious organisations would need to be clearly defined and our starting point is that these should be limited to activities closely linked to religious observance or practices that arise from the basic doctrines of a faith.

And…

3.35 In line with the Equality Act 2006 provisions in relation to discrimination on grounds of religion or belief, we are not proposing to exempt activities that are provided by an organisation related to religion or belief, or by a private individual who has strongly held religious beliefs, where the sole or main purpose of the organisation offering the service is commercial.

3.36 Similarly, we propose to apply the prohibition on sexual orientation discrimination to organisations – including churches, a charities or other similar groups with a religious ethos – that are contracted by a public authority to deliver a service on its behalf.

All of which amounts to an open invitation for faith groups to suggest exemptions specific to discrimination in religious/doctrinal practices - in practice there is little or no prospect whatsoever of these regulations extending to religious ceremonies such as marriages, baptisms, etc. Not only would one expect a specific exemption to be included in the regulations but, in relation to civil partnerships, the registration process covering venues at which religious weddings take place is different from that which relates to civil ceremonies, where the licence granted covers both civil weddings and civil partnerships.

In practice, mainstream Christian churches will be largely unaffected by these regulations due to the licensing regime thet operate under - the Church of England and the Church in Wales are automatically permitted to register marriages in law while priests of other denominations and faiths can be accorded the same authority on application for a licence to their local superintendent registrar - in the case of Jewish and Quaker weddings such licences are granted automatically.

Only where such a licence isn’t granted, with the result that couples have to undergo a civil ceremony in addition to the religious ceremony could an issue around parallel rights for civil partnerships arise and then only if the venue (i.e. church, mosque, etc…) is, itself, registered for the purposes of conducting the civil ceremony - if all a particular venue provides are religious ceremonies then no such issue arises.

Nothing in the present consultation document suggests that the government intends to apply these regulations to religious services and therefore override church doctrine - it may well be that this is not clear in current draft regulations, but then these are a first public draft and, therefore, far from being a complete and full expression of the government’s intentions for these regulations.

A number of the other practical examples of where the law might impinge on religious freedom, according to the LCF, are particularly revealing as to their prejudical and homophobic attitudes, for example:

Any large churches who provide auxiliary services to the community such as restaurants, libraries, bookshops, counselling etc would be at risk of costly allegations of discrimination (costly in terms of legal fees and adverse publicity) if they sought to restrict the access of certain homosexual individuals to those services, even if they only sought to restrict them because the individuals concerned were known to be seeking to cause trouble.

Not only is this not true - discrimination law, across the board, does not provide mitigation for or protection of bad conduct - but the idea that a church might refuse to set someone a cup of coffee and a sandwich simply because of their sexual orientation does rather fly in the face of the LCF’s assertion that:

Christians would never want to be homophobic or discriminate against homosexuals out of bigotry or prejudice.

Likewise, we have…

Any Christian charity or organisation that used public money to rebuild/extend premises or provide a service will come under a legal requirement that in the use of those premises and services they do not discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation. There is already significant pressure on many Christian groups and organisations who have received crucial local authority funding (possibly including lottery funding) to allow all local groups to have access to their new facilities. There is a big danger that Christian organisations will have their freedom to decide who to support and provide services and goods to curtailed to an even greater extent and will therefore be forced to act contrary to Biblical doctrines.

To which the only valid response is to note that if any group or organisation feels itself unable to comply with extant equality regulations in any area, not just sexual orientation but race, gender, disability, age, etc then it should feel entirely free not to ask for public money and have no expectation of receiving any. You’ll have to excuse me here, but as a tax payer I object strongly to funding the prejudices of any group and so have no sympathy at all for this kind of argument.

Worse still, we have this:

Under the Regulations as they stand, a school (whether a faith school or otherwise) would be unable to discipline or exclude a child because that child was seeking to encourage others to practice homosexuality or advocating that they experiment with homosexuality.

Let’s not forget here that in the eyes of evangelical Christians, merely holding and expressing the opinion that homosexuality is a valid sexual orientation is considered to be encouragement to practice homosexuality - again were back to indoctrination and the avoidance of dissenting views but here in such a way as would permit a child to be excluded from school for nothing more than accepting, uncritically, that a classmate may be gay. Nowhere is is more obvious than in this statement that the real concern of LCF is to reserve to faith schools the unfettered right to inculcate prejudice and homophobia in children.

The LCF puts forward three specific recommendations for amendments to the draft regulations as follows:

1) Sexual orientation discrimination should be defined more accurately so that the Regulations only prohibit homophobic discrimination and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, whilst leaving those who hold genuine religious doctrinal beliefs free to discriminate on the grounds of homosexual conduct.

Alternatively

2) The protections afforded in the Equality Act 2006 Part 2, designed to guarantee freedom of religion, should be mirrored in the proposed Regulations. In addition, there must be a clause added to protect the religious freedom not just of organisations, but also of individual believers. Finally, the protections for religious organisations should extend to organisations which could be described as wholly or mainly commercial.

Alternatively

3) The protections afforded in the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003, designed to guarantee freedom of religion, should be mirrored in the proposed 2006 Regulations. In addition, there must be a clause added to protect the religious freedom not just of organisations, but also of individual believers.

The blatant sophistry of their first recommendation I’ve already dealt with - one cannot reasonably divorce sexual conduct from sexual orientation, and it is entirely unreasonable to accept arguments for such a distinction from groups who, in turn, put forward the view that their own actions are indivisible from their beliefs. In this case one, if the law is to accept that there is no separation between beliefs and actions for Christians then one must accept the indivisibility of sexual orientation and sexual conduct in the same way.

Alternatively, if one accepts the separation between sexual orientation and sexual conduct that is proposed here, then one must also apply the same distinction to matters of belief and action by Christians in the interests of equal treatment and take the view that while they may freely hold such beliefs as the Bible indicates, it is entirely right for the law to intervene where those beliefs are translated in to discriminatory actions.

However, it seems highly questionable as to whether the proposed distinction between discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and on grounds of sexual conduct is workable in law, certainly without overt and draconian intrusions into the privacy of potential plaintiffs, such that it would seem that the underlying intent of this proposal is to render the law unworkable and hopelessly biased against those whose rights the law is ostensibly intended to protect. Such a distinction could be reasonably made only if the burden of proof rests, as it does in discrimination law in employment with the respondent and not with the plaintiff, once it has been established that a discriminatory act has taken place.

The second recommendation seems largely redundant - there is no necessity to ‘mirror’ the regulations in Part 2 of the Equality Act within these regulations, which are issued under the same act. There is, however, no justification for amending the provisions of the Act in repect of their application to individuals or to extend provisions covering religious organisations to those that are largely or wholly commercial - there is a fundamental difference between excluding an individual from a religious ceremony on doctrinal grounds and refusing to sell them a cup of coffee, one may be arguably justified by belief (even though I personally disagree) the other most certainly cannot.

As regards the third and final recommendation, the protections afforded in the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003 stand unless specifically amended or repealed by Parliament. What the LCF appear to asking for here, failing acceptance of the other two regulations, is much the same kind of exemption that was slipped into employment law at the last minute, but applied to goods, services, etc. The problem here is that the two sets of regulations are not co-terminus in scope and application primarily due the lack, in provision of goods and services, of a principle analogous to that of a genuine occupational requirement in employment law, from which to judge whether the actions of the provider are proportionate and, therefore, lawful.

It would seem to me that there are few legitimate occasions upon which one could safely establish, in relation to the provision of goods and services, a genuine requirement to discriminate based on a proportionate balance between doctrinal observance and the right of an individual not to be subjected to discrimination.

Other than in direct doctrinal matters, i.e. specific religious services, there is to my mind no justification for exemptions on religious ground to the proposed provisions for prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, nor should any such exemptions be afforded to religious groups.

There seems to be an interesting, if somewhat technical, discussion brewing over at the Graun’s ‘Comment is Free’ ont he subject of Darfur, Genocide and the legal obligations on the international community arising out of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which begins with this article by Brian Brivati and continues with this response from Conor Foley - in the comments of the latter article, Brian has promised a response, which I look forward to with some interest.

Conor’s article also provoked this response from A General Theory of Rubbish, describing Conor’s article as  ‘disgusting shit’, which provides a nice counterpoint to both this debate and the wider debate on the Euston Manifesto by exemplifying the problems which arise when one sets aside rational considerations in favour of amateur polemics and half-arsed emoting - a firly common problem amongst some Eustonauts it has to be said.

Will kicks off his response in what seems to be quite promising fashion:

Genocide evokes a human responsibility upon humanity as one, to act, while legally (as usual) the obligation is muddled through lawyerly crap.

All things being equal one would expect Will to continue his argument is a fairly straightforward and matter-of-fact fashion - sadly what follows dashes any such expectations:

Under The Genocide Convention Article 8 says "any contracting party may call upon competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide." Article 1 says that the contracting parties undertake to prevent and to punish genocide, but it leaves the undertaking inchoate, not legally specific enough to be binding. So far, no nation in the international community has "officially" acknowledged the truth - and the truth being composed of - the economic, political, societal, and historical fruitfulness of thought in practice. Without directional perspectives and individuals oriented towards high moral goals which derive their significance from meta-ethical frames of meaning, the political machine with its strategic rationality has become and maintains itself as a pointless, system-inherent and alienating reality.

You fucking what? If I can try and translate into English, I think what Will is trying to say here is:

1. The Genocide Convention creates a duty to act to prevent Genocide but doesn’t say precisely when that duty to act comes comes into force or what kind of action should be taken.

2. The question of what is, or isn’t, genocide is a moral one, not a legal one.

To some extent I can sympathise with Will’s point - once I’d worked out exactly what he was trying to say - however I do fundamentally disagree with him on when it comes to defining what is an isn’t genocide in purely moral terms and, in particular,  when he goes on to state that:

Genocide is not a disagreement between competing factions - it cannot be mediated away - it is one-sided mass murder. It’s time for us to stop saying "never again," and start saying, "not this time fuckers" and put it into practice.

The problem I have is that while genocide almost always entails mass-murder (and I’ll qualify the ‘almost always’ in a second) not all mass-murder is genocide and I believe that it would be wrong, for profound historical and philsophical reasons, to conflate the two issues.

The Genocide Convention actually defines genocide as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Point (e) is primarily where the ‘almost always’ on mass-murder comes in, as one can forcibly transfer children from one group to another without murdering anyone, as was the practice in Australia during the 1950s where children were shamefully removed from Aboriginal families and put into white-run orphanages in an attempt to eradicate Aboriginal culture. This same abhorrent practice was also used in parts of the US in relation to Native American families, which I mention here not simply to get a cheapshot at the US into this article but because many years ago, while travelling in the US, I spent some time on a Native American reservation and had the opportunity to speak first-hand to people who had been subjected to this practice, all of which makes this a little more personal for me than might otherwise be the case.

Anyway, getting back to the point after that brief digression, the defining characteristic of genocide, as opposed to simply mass-murder, lies in this qualifying statement:

committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part…

This is what raises genocide above mere considerations of mass murder by one, if not, several degrees of magnitude, genocide is predictated on a deliberate intent to eradicate a particular group, and intent that need not necessarily be present even in some of the most heinous cases of mass murder.

To explain precisely what I mean here, I think its worth constrasting the concept of genocide with its more recent ‘cousin’ - ethnic cleansing.

Since this latter term came to the fore, during the Balkan conflicts that arose out of the collapse of Yugoslavia, it seems to be pretty common practice to either conflate or confuse these two terms, which is perhaps understandable as ‘ethnic cleansing’ does sound for all the world like one of those appalling euphemisms that politicians, military leaders, and governmental press officers routinely trot out in an effort to obscure unpalatable truths, terms like ‘collateral damage - i.e. Oh fuck, we’ve just bombed a children’s hospital - and ‘friendly fire’ - I’ve never quite seen the fine distinction with this last one there being something fundamentally unfriendly about getting shot at regardless of who’s doing the shooting. However, there is an important different between ethnic cleansing and genocide in terms of the intent upon which each is predicated.

In ethnic cleansing, the basic intent is to remove a particular group/population from a particular territorial area. This may result in violence and even mass murder, but not always and not necessarily - in fact violence often only enters the picture where members of the group that are being ‘cleansed’ offer resistance to being moved on. In recent times, probably the most successful and least violent example of ethnic cleansing happened in 1972 when the then Uganda president, Idi Amin, summarily expelled a South Asian population of 50,000 from the country, many of whom came to the UK and now form the hub of many Britain’s own South Asian community.

I should say here that terms like ’successful’ and ‘least violent’ are used in a relative sense, i.e by comparision to the militarily-forced ethnic cleansings of the Balkans.

The point I am making is that the fundamental basis of ethnic cleansing is the displacement of a population, not its wholesale eradication - indeed one could readily argue that NATO was in part and inadvertantly responsible for one of the largest acts of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the last 20 years or so, given that its intervention in Kosovo resulted in near 60% of the Kosovan Serb population fleeing the country, the majority of whom (estinated at around 100,000) have not returned, but while one can argue about the relative merits and rights and wrongs of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, few but the most blinkered commentators would accept or even consider that NATO were deliberately following a policy of ethnic cleansing when they intervened.

That ethnic cleansing is not genocide does not make it any less morally reprehensible but it does complicate matters when one comes to consider the circumstances in which a duty arises on the international community to intervene by means of miitary force - could one, for example, have justified mounting a military invasion of Uganda in 1972 to prevent the expulsion of its South Asian community, or would that instead be considered a disproportionate response to a situation in which the use of violence was relatively limited? The moral judgment to be made here is pretty clear and straightforward, but justifying a particular type of response a much less simple and clear-cut matter.

Even where ethnic cleansing is accompanied by acts of egregious violence and mass murder, the judgment as to what might constitute a legitimate and proportionate response - how many people need to die in order to justify and UN Peacekeeping mission as opposed to a full scale invasion and removal of a government? What happens when the violence crosses national borders and boundaries, when one is dealing with insurgencies, partilcularly those supported or condoned by a neighbouring government?

Back in the 1980’s would, for example, the Soviet Union have been justified in intervening militarily in Honduras in order to put down the Contra insurgency against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government that was democratically-elected in 1984, despite the best efforts of the US to manipulate and discredit the election process, which was otherwise certified as having been free and fair by international observers? Can one even judge such a situation on purely moral ground or does the answer one arives at depend primarily on your political views and whose side your on?

One of the debates that crops up as a matter of routine every year in the run to Holocaust Memorial Day is that of whether there should even be such an event or whether, in order to be inclusive of other communities, it should be either replaced or supplemented by a more generic public memorial to the victims of ‘genocide’.

While I have no difficulty with the idea of an annual memorial event/day for historical victims of mass murder within reason - one can take such things a bit too far and end up dealing with events that are now so historically remote than any and all apologies and commemorations become entirely meaningless exercises in unnecessary moral self-flagellation - I would not support the idea of replacing HMD with a generic event for two basic reasons.

The first is purely a matter of historical context - the Holocaust is a part of European history and has shaped, to varying degrees, the collective identity of the continent. On that basis I see no problem in a specific memorial dealing with the Holocaust as unique historical event any more than I would object to Americans holding events on the 4th of July or the French holding events on Bastille Day - its our history and should not be lost or subsumed into global events simply because some groups who, by and large, weren’t around at the time, feel that they have no part in it.

More important than that, on a moral and philosophicl level, I see the Holocaust as being, if not a unique event then at least one that as near unique as makes no difference. History is littered with the most horrific examples of ethnic cleansing and mass murder and yet, as I see it, the Holocaust stands apart from most, if not all, of these events precise due to the circumstance in which it took place and - crucially - the intent of its perpetrator. Nazi Germany did specifically set out to eradicate the Jewish, and other, populations of Europe. not displace them and move them out of their territory but actually excise everything from their culture to their very genetic characteristic from the human race - and for me that raises the Holocaust itself, and indeed the whole concept of genocide above other forms of mass murder.

Morally, ethically, philosophically and legally, I believe that genocide, as it it defined in the convention in terms of the clear intent of it perpetrators, must remain distinct from other forms of mass murder, otherwise the very concept of genocide will become so diffuse and devalued over time as to become largely meaningless - and if we do devalue genocide as a concept then, by extension, we devalue the Holocaust and everything the proceeds from it.

I’m not suggesting here that this invalidates Will’s point about the situation in Darfur - the question of whether that merits or requires military intervention is a separate one and not what I wanted to get into here - but unless it can be shown that the intent of the Janjaweed is specifically to eradicate those it has, and still is oppressing and murdering, then what’s happening in Darfur is NOT genocide and should not be called genocide - in which case Will would be better served by putting forward rational arguments which extend or clarify international duties in respect of mass murder and not seeking to redefine the concept of genocide in order to justify intervention.

At the end of a week in which the Human Rights Act has come under an unprecedented assault, both in the press and from senior politicians, including the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, it has taken the Telegraph to provide the neatest and most succinct example, to date, of everything that is fundamentally wrong about this whole debate:

The Afghans who hijacked a civilian airliner are rewarded with a judgment that they are entitled to stay in Britain at the taxpayer’s expense.

Foreign terrorists who reportedly plot the murder of hundreds of British civilians cannot be deported back to their countries of origin, nor may they be detained here. Murderers and rapists are entitled to have any decision to keep them in prison reviewed by a judicial hearing, at which they must be represented by a lawyer - and as a result, an intimidated Probation Service frees killers who go on to murder fresh victims.

I’ve already dealt with the matter of the ‘Stansted Nine’ here, but would also like to point readers to the thoughts of Brian Barder and Tony Hatfield, both of who bring the wisdom of years and an incisive legal mind to bear on this matter and on the matter of the Human Rights Act in general.

However, I would like to add one simple observation here - as far as I can see, not only are there no legitimate grounds on which to deport the Stansted Nine at the present time but the sole reason I can see for the government pursuing the deportation with such vigour derives from the fact that, at the time of the actual hi-jacking, which is now getting on for six years ago, the Home Secretary of the day, Jack Straw, made a great show of ‘promising’ that these men would be deported - this was long before their case had even been properly investigated let alone brought before a jury.

It does seem to me the, in this matter, the government are motivated exclusively by political considerations and not by the considerations of justice or the proper application of the law, which is about as shameful as it gets. One of the key rationales for separating the powers of the executive, legislature and judiciary is to prevent politicians playing god with people’s lives in the interests of political gain and their own public image, and yet it seems to me that an attempt at ‘playing god’ is exactly what is going on here.

As regards the ‘foreign terrorists’ who cannot be deported or detained here, these are, of course, the alleged foreign terrorist suspects who were formerly detained in Belmarsh Prison and who are now held effectively under house arrest using control orders, which were introduced to replace the system of arbitrary detention without charge after this was ruled unlawful by the High Court.

These men cannot currently be deported to the countries of origin because each has an extreme poor human rights record which includes the routine/semi-routine use of torture. While the prohibition on deportation in these circumstances is enforced in the UK courts under the Human Rights Act, it actually derives not from the Act itself but from the case of Chahal -v- The United Kingdom, which was heard by the European Court of Human Rights and the decision, in this case, in binding on the UK courts with or without the Human Rights Act to back it up.

The government’s response to this has been to work towards trying to bypass the ruling in Chahal by obtaining a memorandum of agreement from these states; which include Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Jordan, amongst others, in which the state gives an undertaking not to torture these people if they are sent back to those nations - except that the considered opinion of most of those who do concern themselves with Human Rights law is that such memoranda will not be worth the paper they’re written on, a fact underlined by the government’s efforts to place the responsibility for monitoring Libya’s compliance with the agreement it has already signed into the hands of a ‘human rights charity’ run by the son of Colonel Qaddafi.

Both these cases are rooted in article three of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for an absolute prohibition on the use of torture from which there is no room for derogation. As the Telegraph points out, correctly, to override the decision of the courts in these matters would require not only the repeal of the Human Rights Act but Britain’s withdrawal from the European Convention, which it signed in 1953. What the Telegraph neglects to mention however, is that we would also have to withdraw from the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which we signed in 1985 and ratified in 1998, at the same time - this would put into a select little band of nations that are outside this convention, which includes North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Syria - nice company we’d be keeping, eh?

On this matter, the Telegraph has this to say:

The only way to remedy judicial decisions that "defy common sense" (to use the Prime Minister’s apt phrase) is to opt out of the European Convention altogether: there would be few if any harmful effects. There may be claims that it would set "a bad example" - but Britain is not responsible for the legal systems of other countries.

I find it difficult to understand quite how the Telegraph can take the view that isolating the UK not only from Europe but from, in effect, the rest of the civilised world would have ‘few if any harmful effects’, not least as  it is highly likely that such a withdrawal from ECHR would also require Britain’s wholesale withdrawal from the European Union, a move which would most certainly have considerable harmful effects, at least in the short-term, on the UK economy, amongst other things…

…well, actually, it’s not so difficult as this can readily be explained in one of three ways:

1. The Telegraph simply haven’t thought through, in full, the implication of such a move,

2. The Telegraph has thought it through and decided this would be a hand backdoor route to forcing the UK to leave the EU, or

3. The author of this editorial is a complete and utter half-wit.

As things stand, any of the three seem equally plausible.

Before leaving this matter, we should also consider the one question that the government seem studiously keen to avoid - if these men have been plotting ‘the murder of hundreds of British civilians’ then why have they not been brought to trial? Conspiracy is by no means the easiest case to prove but it is a criminal offence and could be taken before a court.

The answer, so far as we have been able to glean one, seems to have to with the absence, in these cases, of any credible evidence that might reasonably be admissible in a British court, some of which, it has been suggested, may have been obtained by torture - ironically in the very countries with which the government intends to have memoranda promising that torture if we deport these people.

So who is really to blame for this situation? The Human Rights Act? Or the government and security services who, by cutting corners, lowering standards and interning people on the basis of ‘evidence’ which is not admissible in a British court, now find themselves stuck with a group of people they can legally do almost nothing with?

As a final note on this issue, the one thing that seemingly has been forgotten in the all sound-bites and fury this week is that article 3 of ECHR not only prevents Britain from deporting foreign nationals to countries which practice torture, it also prevents Britain extraditing its own citizens to such countries, and to those that still make use of the death penalty, where there is no express undertaking that such a penalty will not be applied (and, of course, where such an undertaking can reasonably be relied upon).

The second part of the Telegraph’s opening gambit relates, of course, to the case of Anthony Rice.

Now unlike, I suspect, most of the tabloid hacks who’ve been screaming about this case for the last few days and, in particular, blaming the Human Rights Act for the failings of the parole and probation systems, I’ve actually read the report of the Chief Inspector of Probation, Andrew Bridges, in full - and it really is worth reading in full as the picture that emerges is very different to that painted by the press and by senior politicians, not one of the ‘rights of criminals’ being put ahead of public safety but rather one in which those charged with such considerations on our behalf were, and maybe still are, lacking in the basic competencies required to fulfill their duties successfully.

One can, perhaps, understand how this false picture has emerged when one considers that the report contained around 15-20 references of similar character to this one::

This whole process is additionally complicated by the human rights considerations in each case which have grown in importance following a series of Court judgments. Prisoners are now legally represented at Parole Board hearings, often by counsel, who also have recourse to judicial review. It is a challenging task for people who are charged with managing offenders effectively to ensure that public protection considerations are not undermined by the human rights considerations.

Of course, however, the key line in this paragraph is this:

It is a challenging task for people who are charged with managing offenders effectively to ensure that public protection considerations are not undermined by the human rights considerations.

Which, translated into English from bureaucratic bullshit, actually means that there have been systemic failings in the workings of the Parole Board and Probation service, failings that are the direct result of a wholesale’ lack of competence in the area of Human Rights law compounded by a desire, at seeming all costs, to avoid cases being brought to judicial review, where they can be dealt with appropriately by a competent authority.

The key to sifting the real problems in this case from the semi-exculpatory smoke-screen being thrown up by the report having so heavily cited the Human Rights Act, lies in this section covering the circumstances of Rice’s release on licence:

Principal Finding 3: Management of release on Licence

1.3.1 Based on the reports received about the progress that he had made during his sentence and his proposed resettlement plan, the Parole Board made a final decision in 2004 that Anthony Rice, who was five years past his ‘tariff date’, was safe to release. We consider that in doing so they gave insufficient weight to the underlying nature of his Risk of Harm to others, and we think this happened for a combination of reasons:

They did not have full knowledge of his past offending behaviour, in particular that he had been an offender against children.

They received cautiously encouraging but ultimately over-optimistic reports of Anthony Rice’s progress under treatment.

Their own earlier decision in 2001 to transfer him to open prison conditions in our view set in motion a momentum towards release. As we see it that Parole Board decision created in this case a set of expectations that release had now become a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’. (We believe it has a similar effect in other ‘Lifer’ cases.)

It was also from 2001 that in our view the people managing this case started to allow its public protection considerations to be undermined by its human rights considerations, as these required increasing attention from all involved, especially as the prisoner was legally represented.

1.3.2 A crucial dimension to our finding is that the 2001 decision was in a sense the key decision that made the eventual release decision more likely, because the momentum towards release started from that point. Accordingly in this report we treat the entire period of open prison conditions as being part of the ‘release decision’ phase rather than the ‘period in custody’ phase of the case.

1.3.3 Hence we find a problematic ambiguity in the role of the open prison conditions phase for a life-sentenced prisoner that we believe needs to be addressed. In theory the idea is that a spell in open prison conditions provides an opportunity for the prisoner to be tested both on what he has learned from his treatment and on how he consequently behaves – leading to a final decision about his release. We understand and certainly support this principle. But we consider that in practice the expectation by the prisoner is often significantly different from this: You are now in the last phase before release, and unless you blow it completely you will be out before long.

What this tells us is not the Human Rights Act was at fault in this matter, but that it was a largely peripheral issue that, at worst, caused the Parole Board to momentarily take their eye off a ball that had already been dropped. of much greater concern in this matter should be the manifest failings of the parole system, itself, which meant that those considering whether Rice continued to present a risk to public safety were not adequately appraised of his past offending behaviour and were provided with ‘encouraging but ultimately over-optimistic reports of Anthony Rice’s progress under treatment’, matters which would have cast any human rights considerations in his case into an altogether different light.

This seems to me the central issue in this whole case - why was Rice released in the first place - and it is certainly the one in which the public has the greatest interest as everything that followed proceeded from this one decision.

What needs to be noted here is that:

a) The Parole Board that met and approved Rice’s release under licence would have consisted of a chairman, who is always a judge, a psychiatrist and an independent lay member, and

b) The test that a Parole Board is required to apply in considering an application, such as that submitted by Rice is:

"whether the Lifer’s level of risk to the life and limb of others is considered to be more than minimal”.

All things being equal, it would seem to me that human rights considerations should only come into play after the Parole Board as reached a conclusion on whether a prisoner satisfies this test - in this case, hindsight tells us that Rice did not but that, crucially, the Parole Board reached its decision based on incomplete and inaccurate information, which has nothing whatsoever to do with consideration of Rice’s human rights at all.

This being the case, there is no need for a change in law to address this issue, as this a simply matter of ensuring that Parole Boards apply the correct procedure in the right order and are provided with the right information and any talk, by politicians, of the need to revise the Human Rights Act arising out of this case would be no more than the usual political grandstanding to the tabloid press.

While this report is by no means a whitewash, the key issues it raises - those relating to the systemic failures in the parole system that led to his being released in the first place - have been almost entirely lost in the media-generated furore surrounding the supposedly malign influence of the Human Rights Act in this case, which politicians have, of course, seized upon for either the own political gain (Cameron) or to deflect attention from incompetence and maladministration for which they are ultimately responsible (Blair). It would be easy to be cynical about the dual-pronged assault on the Human Rights Act that has been made by the right-wing press and senior Labour/Tory politicians, to respond simply by observing that ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they’ were it not for the fact that this report lays open a growing and disturbing trend amongst those working in the criminal justice system in which public servants are as much inclined to blame the Human Rights Act for their failings as their political masters.

Reading Bridge’s report one cannot fail to be struck by the extent to which it offers a rather political commentary on the circumstances of the release of Anthony Rice, most strikingly in this passage in the final section section of the report:

If our analysis of how Anthony Rice came to be released is accepted, some people will ask: “Does this happen in other cases too?” The answer is possibly yes. We know that over the last 15 years there has been a series of test cases and judgments that have eroded the Home Secretary’s powers to determine release decisions for lifers by executive action. We observe that life-sentenced prisoners now have the right to be heard and to be represented at Parole Board panel hearings. We note that they are regularly represented by counsel, while the interests of the public, victims, and Home Secretary are represented by a Prison Service official. In this context we are not alone in identifying the increasing challenge for all involved in managing offenders to ensure that public protection considerations are not undermined by the human rights considerations of each case.

Yes, the Home Secretary’s executive powers in relation to release decisions for individuals serving discretionary life sentences have diminished over the last fifteen years as a consequence of judicial rulings, the main body of which either pre-date the introduction of the Human Rights Act or, as with the present legal constraints on deportation of foreign nationals, derive from rulings made in the European Court of Human Rights and not by a UK Court acting on the provisions of the Human Rights Act - and with good reason. In handing down these rulings, what the courts have correctly recognised is that the practice of assigning responsibility for judicial decisions on the release of prisoners from custody to a politician is entirely inappropriate and inconsistent with the demands of a fair and equitable criminal justice in which individual cases are treated entirely on merit. It should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that the practice of assigning responsibility in such matters to a politician introduces an unacceptable conflict of interest into the consideration of exactly how long a prisoner should be detained, having been given a discretionary life sentence, and when they should be considered eligible for release - in short it is all too easy for a politician to be swayed in their judgment by the question of how a decision to release a particular individual might play in the press and whether it might leave them open to a charge of being ’soft on crime’ from political opponents, rather than treat such a case sole on its merits, a risk that increases substantially in cases where a prisoner has attracted particular public notoriety.

Bridge’s reference to the powers of the Home Secretary having been ‘eroded’ is, to say the least, unfortunate and gives a wholly biased view of the actual situation; one in which the authority of the system in dealing with the release of prisoners from discretionary life sentence has not been eroded at all, merely transferred from a politician (the Home Secretary) to an independent body (the Parole Board) - in fact his central complaint throughout seems to be that the buck has been passed to a system that is currently ill-equipped to cope with such complex and difficult decisions and that it is, therefore, somehow unfair to expect the Parole Board and Probation Service to ‘carry the can’ for its failings this case. To be fair, this may not be quite what Bridges intended - one cannot entirely tell - but it is certainly what has been made of his report over the last few days and, as such, he has to be bear some responsibility for what is, at best, a lack of care in his choice of how to present certain matters; for example the passage cited above could be readily interpreted as a call for the restoration of the Home Secretary’s executive powers in relation to the release of prisoners serving life sentences despite the fact that what is actually required to address many, if not most, of the ‘legal’ issues raised in the report is merely that the system ensure that such decisions are dealt with by a competent authority.

In actual fact, the obvious and, to my mind, most effective response to that Bridges raises here would be simply to ensure that the interests of the ‘the public, victims, and Home Secretary’ are also represented by legal counsel, ensuring a level playing field for both sides, although whether this would have assisted in this particular case is another matter entirely, given the main problem here was the failure to adequately assess the risk that Rice continued to pose, even after 15-16 years in prison.

Bridges’ report seems, to me at least, to consistently overplay the significance of the Human Rights Act in relation to this case and as a result one cannot quite shake the feeling that there is more to this than meets the eye. There is a growing culture both within and outside the criminal justice system which seems to hold that ‘it’s because of the Human Rights Act’ is an acceptable response to any and ever criticism of the system’s failure to live up to public expectations ranging from release of prisoners who constitute a risk to the public to the failure of community police to stop kids playing football in the street - yes, I have actually been a community meeting where a police officer has cited the Human Rights Act in response to just such a question from one householder.

Only today the Sun leads with the usual screaming headline ‘Raped by the Law’ as a result of a case in which a now convicted rapist carried out one of the attacks for which he has been sentence to life imprisonment after being freed on bail while awaiting for two other attacks, and while the Sun’s report makes no direct reference to the Human Rights Act - it’s not as if such cases didn’t happen before the Act was introduced, there have been bad calls on bail applications for as long as the system has existed - the Sun still manages to implicitly link this case by running the following two ‘Sun Says’ editorials one after the other:

Crime Chaos

AS CRIME statistics go, they are truly terrifying.

Each month, 7,846 criminals on probation are committing an average 10,206 new offences.

Worse still, the true figures are likely to be even HIGHER as these numbers refer only to crimes that have been solved.

What is the point of releasing prisoners supposedly under the watchful eye of the probation service if they carry on murdering, raping and robbing?

The Home Office has forgotten it is supposed to protect the public from violent criminals.

If our prisons are too full, there’s a simple solution: Build more.

Former probation officer David Fraser, who has written a book on the crisis, warns: “The service is supervising offenders who are engaged in a constant orgy of re-offending. Why does the Government allow this to continue?”

It’s a good question.

One which new Home Secretary John Reid needs to answer.

Before he sorts out this sorry mess.

And…

Time to Act

AT LAST Tony Blair admits he needs to do something about the ludicrous Human Rights Act.

He wants the Government to have the power to overturn judges’ barmy rulings where a criminal’s so-called rights come ahead of their victim’s.

The PM says this is one of his “most urgent policy tasks”.

He’s not kidding.

While this is certainly a step in the right direction, we’ll wait to see if these pledges turn to action.

And rest assured, The Sun will continue to fight for the scrapping of this disgraceful piece of legislation.

Obviously the full significance of permitting politicians to overrule a decision taken by a court - political interference in judicial matters being one of the hallmarks of a totalitarian state - is completely beyond the understanding of Rebekah Wade et al.

It is categorically not the ‘Human Rights culture’ that British citizen’s should be concerned about but the growing anti-Human Rights culture that is being spread by the media, politicians and public servants, a culture that is based on the lie that our fundamental rights and liberties can be neatly packaged and parceled up into contending ‘rights for foreigners/criminals, etc’ and the rights of everyone else - the two are one and the same as people will inevitably find out the hard way if we permit things to continues down the road that politicians and the press seem, currently, to be set upon.

At times like this we would all do well to remember the words of Pastor Martin Niemoller*

When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church — and there was nobody left to be concerned.

* This version of Niemoller’s oft-quoted speech appears in the Congressional Record, 14, October 1968, page 31636, which appears to be the only contemporaneous record of his having made this statement. However even the accuracy of this version has been disputed by an employee of the US House of Representatives who claims that "stuff is just put into it [the Congressional Record] by Members of Congress and is not checked for accuracy, or even truth.".

Niemoller’s comments are more commonly cited in this form:

In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me - and by that time no one was left to speak up.

The source claimed for this version is a speech by Niemoller at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decautur,  Georgia in either 1959 or 1960 and is frequently cited as the definitive version on the basis that the order given; Communist - in some versions given as ’socialist’ or followed by a separate reference to the Nazi’s coming for the socialists - Jew, Trade Unionist and then Catholic more accurate reflects the historical order in which these groups were targeted by the Nazi’s.

It seems likely that Niemoller gave this speech on several occasions - why waste a good line - giving rise to these variations on his central theme.

I am deeply endebted to Leo McKinistry, as author of the Thunderer column in today’s Times, for providing the following example of complete and utter illiberal crap, which I present today for your general edification - with annotatations, naturally

MR JUSTICE SULLIVAN is lucky he is not facing a prosecution for perverting the course of justice after his extraordinary decision to give a bunch of Afghan hijackers the right to settle in Britain. The High Court judge’s ludicrous ruling makes a mockery of the law, treats the public with contempt and sends out the message that our country is a haven for gun-toting hostage-takers.

Actually it does nothing of the sort; Mr Justice Sullivan’s ruling concerns the correct application of UK immigration law in line with Britain’s duties in International, European and UK law in respect of refugees/asylum seekers, but we’ll let that pass for the moment and see what else Leo has to say…

Any normal, morally self-confident system would hold that a gangster who smuggles guns and explosives on to a plane and then threatens to kill all the passengers had abnegated any claim to have his human rights treated seriously. But our bewigged, complacent judges seem to inhabit an alternative moral universe, a place of legalistic quibbling and abstract theorising, where all common sense has been abandoned and the rights of foreign criminals are given priority over the interests and security of the public.

Leo has clearly forgotten the circumstances in which this hijacking took place. The nine Afghan nationals to which this ruling relates, hijacked an internal flight in February 2000, which was eventually flown to the UK, via Moscow, landing at Stansted Airport where, after four days of negotiations all passengers and crew on the plane were released unharmed.

The actual hijackers were arrested, tried and, subsequently, convicted for the hijacking, receiving sentences of between 5 years and 27 months, which may seem rather lenient, however in handing down sentence Judge Sir Edwin Jowatt had this to say about the case:

The judge conceded the initial hijacking "was brought about by fear of death at the hand of a tyrannical, unreasoning and merciless regime".

He said: "This was a case which was different to other hijacking cases.

"I accept you were fleeing Afghanistan in fear for your own lives."

He added: "But for that the sentences for all of you would be much longer."

BBC News Online - 18 Jan 2002

Any morally self-confident society would consider the circumstances leading up to the hijack to provide considerable mitigation for their actions - it does not excuse but it does explain and in terms with which any reasonable person could, and should empathise - it should be noted that of the 150 Afghan passengers taken hostage during the hijack, 60 claimed asylum on release.

The nine hijackers susbsequently appealed against their convictions, which were quashed in July 2004, when the Appeal Court ruled that the original trial judge had misdirected the jury in the application of the principle of ‘duress’ - a technicality, yes, but an important one. However due to time it took to hear the appeal, all but two of nine had served out their sentences without - as far as I can ascertain - without incident and equally I can find no suggestion anywhere that any of these men have been involved in any further criminal conduct since the hijacking itself.

These men are not gangsters, and while one cannot condone their actions in hijacking the plane, one can legitimate ask the question of what you would have done had you have been in their situation - would you hijack a plane if you were in fear for your life and it was the only way you could see to escape from a brutal and murderous regime like the Taleban.

This is, as the judges who have dealt with this case throughout have stressed, an exceptional case dealing with exceptional events - and not a matter of simple criminality.

Indeed, it is sometimes hard to know whose side the civic authorities are on. Citizens are constantly bullied and threatened with imprisonment for driving too fast, failing to pay a TV licence, falling behind with the council tax, dropping a crisp packet or holding unfashionable views about cultural diversity and homosexuality.

What a wonderful euphemism we have at the end of this sentence - ‘holding unfasionable views about cultural diversity and homosexuality’ - or to put it more simply - ‘being a racist, homophobic twat’.

Yet a gang of Afghan Muslims, without any connection to Britain, can hijack a plane and threaten mass murder, only to find themselves rewarded not only with the right to live here, but also with a string of welfare benefits. It is estimated that the British taxpayer has been forking out at least £150,000 a year to feed and house the hijackers while their legal cases were processed. In total, more than £10 million, including the usual exorbitant legal fees, has been spent on this wretched gang.

There are several points to pick up from this paragraph.

First, having a prior connection to a particular country is not a pre-requisite for seeking asylum in that country and never has been - or perhaps Leo believes we should only accept asylum-seekers from Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

To be granted asylum is not a ‘reward’ for their having carried out a hijacking - the two are entirely separate matters. Nor is their entitlement to welfare benefits a reward either - they have had no choice but to claim benefits due to the government’s decision to hold them on what amounts to an indeterminate residency status, which denies them the right to work - this is a classic ‘you can’t have it both ways’ situation, if you are going to deny asylum-seekers the right to work and earn a living for themselves then you can’t complain about them receiving benefits. The same argument applies in respect of the legal costs incurred in this case - if you deny people the right to work then you really have no ground for complaint when they claim legal aid, unless you believe that foreigners should not be accorded the basic right to adequate legal representation and are happy to undermine one of the core principles of the British justice system.

This grim saga encapsulates so much that has gone wrong with the governance of Britain: pathetically short sentences for criminals; lawyers earning a fortune by parading their synthetic compassion; epic welfare profligacy; and thugs laughing at our craven surrender to their brutality.

Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

Tony Blair is now ranting against the judiciary, but his Government is largely to blame for making such a fetish of human rights, symbolised by the Human Rights Act 1998 that acted as the catalyst for this judicial revolution. Only a fortnight ago, Mr Blair promised to “hassle, harry and hound” foreign criminals out of the country. How laughably hollow those words now look.

And, as usual the Human Rights Act gets the blame - except that all HRA 1998 actually does in encapsulate in the UK law, the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is binding on the UK anyway.

The net effect of the Human Right Act, which Leo clearly fails to, or refuses to, understand is merely to speed up access to justice and reduce the costs incurred in human rights cases by enabling the vast majority of them to heard within the UK system, rather than have them go to the European Court of Human Right, where proceeding take considerable longer and costs are substantially greater.

In this case the Government is to blame, not for making a fetish of human right but for failing to deal with these nine men fairly, equitably and within the law. Instead they chose to concoct an ad-hoc system which appears to have been pretty much pulled out of the collective arses of the Home Office, in irder to deal with these men - a system which has rightly been ruled unlawful.

Ultimately, this is not a matter of human rights but a simple matter of justice - these men were arrested, tried, convicted and served time in prison for having hijacked a plane to get to the UK - in all but two case, the time spent on remand and in prison following their initial conviction more than adequately covered the sentences they were given, long before those convictions were overturned on appeal.

These men have already been punished, in accordance with the law, for their part in the hijacking in 2000, so how is justice to be served by punishing them a second time by repatriating them to a country who President has authority only in so far as the boundaries of its capital city, where corruption is rife, where the rule of law has but a tenuous hold and where the very people that these men were fleeing from, the Taleban, continue to murder and maim seemingly at will across large sections of the country.

If one is to blame the government for anything, it is for being too ready and too inclined to give credence to the illiberal, venomous and xenophobic media rantings of reactionary twats, like Leo McKinisitry, rather than stand up for civilised values and plain, old fashioned justice.

Time and again in recent times, the judiciary have weathered the storm of such rantings and done what is right, proper and in the best interests of British justice, while the real hijackers of British justice - the Home Office, The Mail, Sun and Express - go largely unpunished.

*Actually the article is 391 words in length, but 400 sounds better as a title.