Barrister who breached Supreme Court embargo: “I felt I had no choice.”

I am grateful to Matthew for allowing me to reply to his blog-post regarding my contempt of court in breaking the embargo on the Heathrow judgment.

Imagine it is 2016 and you are in possession of a confidential report implying the cladding on Grenfell Tower meets appropriate fire-safety standards. You know that to be untrue. You might feel an obligation a) to sound the alarm; and b) to do so as loudly as you could (regardless of the breach of confidence).

What has that got to do with breaking the Supreme Court embargo on the Heathrow judgment? These were the key facts of our claim: Continue reading “Barrister who breached Supreme Court embargo: “I felt I had no choice.””

Piers Corbyn may be a crank but his treatment should worry us all

A “whiteout” is meteorological condition in which snow falling from the sky and snow whipped up from the ground is whirled by a gale into a disorientating blanket of whiteness in which there are no visual bearings and it is all but impossible to navigate. It is an apt metaphor for the blizzard of coronavirus regulations which have cascaded out of Whitehall (and of course Cardiff and Holyrood too) since March. A search of the www.legislation.gov.uk website reveals a mind-boggling 133 (albeit each Welsh regulation is counted twice in English and Welsh versions) separate pieces of UK legislation, nearly all of them statutory instruments. Thus we have such delights as the Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (Amendment No. 7) Regulations, The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Leicester) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2020, The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Blackburn with Darwen and Bradford) Regulations 2020 and so on. And on and on. It is enormously difficult to find ones bearings amidst all these constantly changing rules and regulations. As David Allen Green put it on August 14th:

There is not a lawyer or police officer in the land who any longer knows what is legal and not legal under coronavirus regulations. An absolute mess of a legal regime.”

Since August 14th matters have only got worse.

Piers Corbyn

It is not often that I have much sympathy with Jeremy Corbyn’s weather-forecaster brother Piers (or to give him his own rather baffling description LongRange WorldLeading weather+climate forecaster BIEuUsa. SolarLunar Method NotCO2! AmericanThinker Climate Predictor2010. Bro #JC4PM), or with any of the anti-vaxx, Qanon, and 5G conspiracists who participated in a rally against masks and coronavirus restrictions in Trafalgar Square on Saturday 29th August. As well as Mr Corbyn, they included the antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke and a small group who deployed a flag remarkably similar if not identical to that of the British Union of Fascists. These are not easy people to like, although no doubt there were some more reasonable folk amongst them as well.

Corbyn: £10,000 Fixed Penalty

Nevertheless the £10,000 Fixed Penalty Notice issued to Piers Corbyn as someone “involved in” the demonstration is disturbing. Mr Corbyn’s “FPN” requires him – strictly speaking one could argue it “invites him” but it is an invitation backed by a threat – to pay £10,000 for breaching Regulation 5B of The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) Regulations 2020, as amended. Continue reading “Piers Corbyn may be a crank but his treatment should worry us all”

Sir Roger Scruton RIP

There is often a mismatch between a person’s public image and their private behaviour.

It is sometimes forgotten that Sir Roger Scruton, who died yesterday, was a barrister. He was rightly honoured as a  bencher of the Inner Temple. He held strong and often unfashionable views on human rights – he believed that they were better protected by the common law than by conventions and statutes – and on the criminal law, where he sometimes advocated more severe punishments.

Yet in private Sir Roger belied this hard-line image. He made friends easily and without regard to political persuasion, colour, religion or sexuality. Nor could you have met a more decent, forgiving and – although he would absolutely detest the word being used of him – liberal man. A conservative, of course, should be pessimistic about human behaviour, indeed it is often pessimism that leads to a belief in conservatism. Roger even wrote a passionate defence of pessimism. Continue reading “Sir Roger Scruton RIP”

Do we need a Victims Commissioner?

On hearing the words “Dame Vera” most people will think fondly of the 102 year old golden-voiced Forces’ sweetheart. Those in the legal world, however, are more likely to conjure up a picture of the 69 year old flame-haired Fabian firebrand Dame Vera Baird QC, formerly a barrister in the chambers of radical lawyer Michael Mansfield QC, then a Labour MP and Solicitor General, then the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria and now The Victims Commissioner for England and Wales.

Baird: poacher turned gamekeeper

In her early career Dame Vera usually defended those accused of serious crimes, but in more recent times she has used her various offices to campaign vigorously for changes in the law that make it easier to convict and imprison them. The former poacher has metamorphosed into a ferocious gamekeeper; it is not hard to imagine her prowling round the estate, setting man-traps, loading the spring-guns and inspecting the rotting cadavers of corvids gibbeted on the boundary fence.

For those who are not familiar with the office of Victims Commissioner, it is a statutory appointment of a person charged with the duty of “promoting the interests of victims and witnesses” and taking “such steps as she considers appropriate with a view to encouraging good practice in the treatment of victims and witnesses.” Continue reading “Do we need a Victims Commissioner?”

The many lies of Carl Beech and the folly of his supporters

It all started with Sir Jimmy Savile.

The platinum-blond disc jockey with a taste for shell-suits needs no introduction to British readers. To others it is enough to record that when he died in 2011 he was at first treated to obituaries that would have made St Theresa of Calcutta blush. He had been a television institution for decades, and when he had not been on television he had been visiting the sick in hospitals or raising huge sums of money, including according to some estimate up to 90% of his own earnings, to charity.

Then, within a few months of his death allegations started to emerge that he had abused children and women on a vast scale. Because he was dead, none of the allegations were ever tried in court but the press, so adoring of him while he was alive, now turned on him with the vehemence of a betrayed lover. The Guardian spoke, unusually, for the majority when it ran an extraordinary editorial comparing him not altogether favourably with Pol Pot, and calling for a public ceremony of commination, as “a ritual expression of public condemnation and disgust.”

The institutions with which he had been associated – mainly hospitals and the BBC – fell over themselves to apologise for his behaviour. Accounts of Savile’s wickedness were collated in various official reports and they were all accepted, without question, by a press that was now as indignant about his criminality as it had been fulsome in his adoration. Anyone – and there were a few – who dared to question so much as a single individual account was considered beyond the pale, even though some of the allegations against him bordered on the incredible. Continue reading “The many lies of Carl Beech and the folly of his supporters”

Lessons from the Ipswich Family Court: 7 mistakes that litigants in person often make

If only I had the near miraculous ability of Gordon Exall, editor of Civil Litigation Brief, to convert complex and often rather turgid case-law into manageably-sized blogposts of crystalline clarity. Sadly he hasn’t yet done that to the extraordinary matrimonial case of VW v. BH, and I doubt that he will because Gordon’s posts tend to be aimed at legal practitioners. The lessons of VW v. BH, a divorce case recently heard by HHJ Lynn Roberts at the Ipswich County Court, are more for those attempting to litigate without lawyers.

HHJ Lynn Roberts

Before we dive into the detail of the case, a warning: I really don’t know a great deal about family law. I tried my hand at it many years ago and found that I was pretty hopeless. If you want to read a blog by someone who really knows about family law, I would recommend either Lucy Reed’s Pink Tape (Lucy has also written the fantastically useful Family Court without a lawyer, a handbook for litigants in person), or David Burrows, who likes to concentrate on broader questions of family law policy.

What I do know is that the disputes are usually about money or about children. The days when the evidence from the latest celebrity defended divorce could fill the Sunday papers – seedy Brighton hotels with private eyes examining the sheets, hoping that the Queen’s Proctor would not smell a rat, and so on – have long since gone the way of co-respondent shoes. Continue reading “Lessons from the Ipswich Family Court: 7 mistakes that litigants in person often make”

No, Ann Coffey, we should not tamper with juries in rape trials

You can read this in The Spectator, here:

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/author/dummy_lr7gb9ly4qieb6kjx3pfnuddn91example-com/

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Huge pay rises for judges may stave off disaster, but where will the judges come from in 10 years time?

The Top Salaries Review Body has announced that judges should receive a stonking pay rise. High Court judges – who sit near the pinnacle of the profession – should get an extra 32%, which works out at about another £60,000 per year, while middle-ranking, Circuit judges, who sit in most Crown and County Courts should get a smaller but still very helpful 22%, taking their salaries to a basic £165,000.

Some years ago Barristerblogger decided that he had slogged around the criminal courts long enough. He had imbibed enough of the elixir of wisdom that comes from prosecuting burglars in Bournemouth, mitigating the transgressions of sex mini-beasts in Swindon, and eating army packed-lunches in military courts from Bulford to Bielefeld. More to the point, with no pension provision beyond a mis-sold critical illness policy that would, at best, pay for 2 weeks off work if I was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, the time had come to rise above the blood and dust of the arena, to don a purple robe and to accept elevation to the judicial bench. Continue reading “Huge pay rises for judges may stave off disaster, but where will the judges come from in 10 years time?”

Prosecuting Boris Johnson over “Brexit lies” would be an ill-conceived publicity stunt

A 28 year old Norfolk man called Marcus J Ball is trying to bring a crowd-funded private prosecution against Boris Johnson. He says that Mr Johnson lied while campaigning for the Leave campaign in the Referendum. Since he was at the time an MP (and until 9th May 2016 also Mayor of London) he was the holder of a public office. Mr Ball believes that lies told in the campaign mean that he has committed the offence of “misconduct in public office,” a serious criminal offence carrying an unlimited fine and potentially life imprisonment.

Ball: Private Prosecutor

Continue reading “Prosecuting Boris Johnson over “Brexit lies” would be an ill-conceived publicity stunt”

Abi Wilkinson should be ashamed of her abuse of Danny Finkelstein

Danny Finkelstein – or Baron Finkelstein of Pinner to give him the title he hardly ever uses – has become the latest person to be the object of a twitter hate campaign.

He is, according to Abi Wilkinson, a Corbyn-supporting journalist, “a racist scumbag” who is “chill with ethnic cleansing.”

It may seem surprising that Finkelstein, former member of the SDP and since that party’s demise a leading voice of “moderate” Conservatism, should be so characterised, even by Wilkinson who believes that “incivility isn’t merely justifiable, but actively necessary.”

His columns in The Times are typically reflective, considered and measured. This has not prevented him sometimes receiving the most appalling online abuse, accusing him of defending paedophilia, for example, because he expressed scepticism about groundless allegations levelled at politicians. Continue reading “Abi Wilkinson should be ashamed of her abuse of Danny Finkelstein”