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