So, yet another Conservative constituency will be added the Liberal Democrats' list of "winnable" seats.  At the next General Election the Conservative candidate Bob Neill should expect to be the target of the now standard campaign literature bar chart showing that the Liberal Democrats are on course for winning a victory of historic proportions in his formerly safe, Conservative seat.

Not too much should be read into any by-election result, including this one.  The Liberal Democrats, whose resources are so often stretched when contesting six hundred plus Parliamentary seats, are ruthlessly efficient in garnering their supporters from all over the country when contesting single seats at by-elections.  It would be a fair guess that the number of Liberal Democrat supporters "on the ground" at Bromley and Chislehurst easily outnumbered those of their opponents.  Neither is it an unreasonable presumption that traditional Labour support went obligingly soft and transferred to the Liberal Democrats in a typical protest gesture against their own Government.  A high profile UKIP candidate Nigel Farage again showed how easy it is to drain Eurosceptic protest votes away from the Conservatives in a contest that "does not really matter".

The Conservatives fielded a traditional, white, middle-aged lawyer, Bob Neill.  The Liberal Democrat candidate, Ben Abbotts, was a young, good-looking professional politician.  Mr Neill provided hostages to fortune by contesting the election whilst being a serving member of the London Assembly and holding an office that he would be prescribed from retaining once elected and "sworn in".  This enabled his opponents to claim that he was not the best candidate because he could not concentrate on the job of being a Member of Parliament.  It was spun further by the suggestion that by virtue of holding a prescribed office, any poll victory by Mr Neill could be overturned by the High Court, so a vote for the Conservative candidate would be a wasted vote.

All these factors and more, deflated the Conservative vote. The slump in the Labour vote, the presence of Mr Farage and the Liberal Democrats fielding a very strong, highly professional politician in the person of Ben Abbotts contrived to inflate the Liberal Democrat share of the vote.  The Liberal Democrats will be very happy today and the glow of that euphoria will last for a long time to come but  it is a false dawn. That red glow in the sky more is likely to portend the bonfire of their dreams.

Come the General Election, with diminishing support in terms of manpower and finance, the Liberal Democrats have to defend their seats against a resurgent Conservative Party that has reconnected with the electorate.  They will have to target their seats very carefully or else lose more seats to the Conservatives than they gain.  No doubt Nigel Farage and Ben Abbotts will drift to constituencies identified as more likely to yield success than Bromley and Chislehurst.  Labour support will "firm up" when a "real" election is held.  Conservative Eurosceptic voters who flirted with UKIP yesterday will not likely do so at a General Election, particularly if to do so might ensure an historic forth-term victory for Labour, or hand the seat to the rabidly pro-European Liberal Democrats.

At the next General Election, the Liberal Democrats would be wise to concentrate their efforts upon their own marginals, for example Romsey, Winchester and Eastleigh, leaving alone such phoney marginals of the likes of Bromley and Chislehurst. 

As the Home Office research conducted by the usual suspects has now begun to appear in the liberal legal press with the expected wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, it was fortuitous that this article appeared in the press.  True to my promise, I shall continue to highlight the dangers of weighting the trial process against the presumption of innocence or by well-meaning but misguided procedural devices, rigging the evidence against the defendant.

Elvira Fairhurst, a teacher who was aged forty-nine years, had a four-month affair with a fourteen year old pupil in her charge.  The boy suffered from learning difficulties.  The affair came to light when a crane driver witnessed her having sexual intercourse with the boy in her car, in a car park.  She was jailed for four years after pleading guilty to eleven counts of sexual activity with a child.

By all accounts, until her frolics with the boy, Mrs Fairhurst was a regular churchgoer who had led a constructive and exemplary life.  The point of this article is not to dwell on her criminality.  The poor woman will be punished enough for her four months’ of madness.  It was perhaps a small mercy that she was a woman.  Had a male teacher so ravished a fourteen year old girl, we know that public reaction would have been wholly different; hysterical and disproportionate, in fact.  The point is this: when first interviewed by the Police, Mrs Fairhurst claimed initially that the boy had sexually assaulted or raped her.  On this occasion, the male had an independent witness who could testify to the contrary.

The Law Society has been supportive of the Government’s plans to introduce Home Information Packs into the house selling process and has constructively contributed to the whole process of implementation.  Now it appears that even the Law Society feels constrained to raise doubts concerning the recently published regulations prescribing the contents of these Home Information Packs. These regulations are said to have ‘serious defects’  which could leave consumers at risk.

It might be expected of  Government that these defects would be remedied in the face of such constructive advice, but in fact the criticism is just brushed aside, along with warnings from estate agents, lenders and others who could be expected to provide sound, reliable advice.  All are “vested interests” says the Government, bereft of any principled argument in reply.  It  will reap the whirlwind for its arrogance.

Home Information Packs: More Bad News for the Consumer

The Great Home Information Pack (HIPs) Swindle

This is a complete and absolute disgrace.

Let me state my position very carefully.  I believe that an effective Criminal Justice System should convict and punish[1] the guilty.  It follows that such a system must acquit the innocent. Any system that convicts the innocent cannot be described as a Criminal Justice System at all.

Alan Travis of The Guardian reported today that Home Office sponsored research indicates that barristers and judges are undermining rape reform.  According to Mr Travis,

“The research, published yesterday, says that rules introduced in 2000 to ban defence barristers from depicting rape victims as promiscuous have been “evaded, circumvented and resisted” with the result that the reform has failed to have any impact. The finding will be a further blow to Home Office ministers and the law officers, who have tried for years to find ways of boosting the low 5.6% conviction rate in rape cases (my emphasis.) The study of the case files of more than 400 rape trials says that defence barristers used “devious tactics” to ensure that evidence of the sexual history of the victim was raised in two-thirds of the trials that were observed.”

Also,

“the difficulty is compounded by the fact that almost half the judges interviewed by the researchers were unaware of the crown court rules setting out how the ban should work: "Some judges had only a vague knowledge of section 41 [of the 1999 legislation which contains the ban] and few non-legal practitioners and no complainants understood the new law.”

Worse still,

“Findings from case files, trial observations and interviews raise the possibility that both prosecution and defence share stereotypical assumptions about ‘appropriate’ female behaviour and that these continue to play a part when issues of credibility are addressed in rape cases”

and,

“defence lawyers still used evidence and “rhetorical devices” to impugn the character of rape victims and make their testimony less credible, and were often unchallenged by the prosecution or the judge.”

The authors of this Home Office sponsored report were Liz Kelly, Jennifer Temkin and Sue Griffiths.  Professor Temkin features in one of my posts late last year.  Since 1982 she has spent a considerable amount of time researching and writing about the crime of rape.  I suspect that she has a thing about the subject.  Certainly a Channel 4 Dispatches programme to which she contributed in March 2002 unquestionably made some people angry because of its perceived bias.

As a result of this research the Solicitor General Mike O'Brien has written to the criminal law procedures committee asking it to tighten the rules. Apparently the Bar Council has been put upon also to set up a training course for barristers involved in rape cases to ensure they deal with the issues involved with “greater sensitivity”.

I shall not revisit my thoughts about the issue of he purportedly low 5.6% conviction rate in rape cases.  Neither shall I make great play of the fact that since 1997 and the gradual politicisation of the Civil Service; research sponsored by Government departments seems to have been sought in the main from trusted sources known to be sympathetic to the view of the New Labour Administration.

Professor Temkin might be very learned and well researched in her chosen specialist subject but I detect the myopia of single issue-ism.  The findings of Ms Temkins’ research reported by Mr Travis’ are hard to believe.  We are told that “…almost half the judges interviewed by the researchers were unaware of the crown court rules setting out how the ban should work.”  It took me just seconds to access the relevant sections and narrative on my electronic version of Archbold, the Crown Court bible, the tome that each and every judge who sits in a criminal Court possesses at his fingertips.  If I can check the rules so easily and grasp their import, it is a fair bet that learned counsel and judges do routinely, too. Whilst I accept that applying the rules and ensuring that a defendant had a fair trial might prove a little fraught, particularly as ensuring a fair trial is the judge’s foremost duty, it is utterly implausible to suggest that almost half the judges were unaware of the Crown Court rules.

The weakness of nearly all academic lawyers is that not having had the opportunity to spend years at the “coal face” they never develop any significant insight into the human condition or any deep or meaningful understanding of what a real live trial involves.  It is not sufficient to attend a handful of specially selected trials here or there, making copious notes, poring over the transcripts and exhibits and picking holes in the advocates’ cross examination, submissions, speeches or the judge’s decisions or closing summary. It helps if you were present in the Police Station when the defendant was detained, interviewed and charged.  You might have to attend numerous preliminary Court appearances or make a succession of unsuccessful applications for bail. Proofing witnesses including the defendant, attending identification parades, examining and cross-referencing prosecution witness statements, appointing forensic experts on behalf of the defence, all provide an opportunity to gain that insight that allows you to make sense of the system and why it works the way it does.  It is whilst performing these functions that you might develop a sense of unease about the prosecution case.  On paper the defendant might look as if he is bang to rights but you might have a sense of there being something that isn’t quite right. That sense of unease may arise because having become acquainted with the defendant over a course of months (and probably having met his family, friends and girlfriend) it becomes incongruous that this defendant behaved in the manner alleged by the victim.  To the defence lawyers, the defendant is a human being whose life, career and future become worth defending. Thus whilst it is easy for some academic lawyers to form a view that the low rape conviction rate is irrefutable evidence that heinous monsters responsible for routinely raping thousands of  women each year are “let off” by the Courts, those involved in the process, including jurors, know different.

In a rape prosecution, it is almost invariably the case that the defendant must claim that the complainant is a liar.  For that reason, the cross examination is very robust and must be robust.  The judge understands this as does counsel for the Crown. The “character assassination” the feminists complain of arises from this process.   The complainant’s credit is being challenged, so when the defence cannot be conducted without being hamstrung by being barred from raising the sexual history of the victim (as will very often be the case) that evidence has to be heard.  It is insulting to the intellect of the jurors to suggest that a defendant can effectively destroy a prosecution case by falsely besmirching a truthful complainant’s character.  If the Crown’s case is strong, any character assassination will rebound upon the defendant.  Suggesting horrible things about the complainant has no effect unless there is something else about the evidence (the Crown’s evidence, not the defendant’s - he would say he didn’t do it, wouldn’t he?) which makes the jury think twice.

This discredited Government will no doubt continue to tinker with the rules in a vain attempt to increase conviction rates for rape and indeed all other offences.  The judges and barristers (both for the defence and Crown) will continue to use or allow evidence and “rhetorical devices” to impugn the character of rape victims and make their testimony less credible in an endeavour to ensure a fair trial.  Harry will become even angrier and just to prove our point people like me will increasingly flag and highlight cases where women are convicted of making false allegations of rape.

I am beginning to feel sorry for Gordon Brown.  In the unlikely event that he is crowned Prime Minister, he is not going continue in that Office for very long.

Not only do one in four Labour voters want the party to lose the next election but Labour’s core support in Scotland seem determined to present themselves as so anti-English that those of us south of the border cannot help but notice.  This can only have the effect of highlighting the West Lothian question, remarked upon in The Sunday Times today by Michael Portillo.  This is particularly irksome for Mr Brown given the Government has been at great pains to fudge the issue.

The risk for Labour is that the English are going to find it increasingly hard to swallow being ruled by a Government in which many of the major players will have been elected by Scottish voters.  Amongst those English supporters of Labour who have little in common with the unreconstructed socialist Scottish Labour Party and little sympathy for their ways, there will be a growing disinclination to turn out to vote. Even worse for Labour, these erstwhile supporters in England might transfer their allegiance to other parties, turning England even bluer.  There is little Mr Brown can do.  The political tide currently favours the Conservatives.  Following the next General Election, Labour is going to have to rely even more heavily upon its Scottish MPs.

Following the repeated failings of its football team, England-hating is becoming the national sport of Scotland.  In The Times yesterday, a writer mused whether the Scots would now cheer on England against Sweden, given that if their adopted team Trinidad and Tobago then defeat Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago would progress through to the next round of the World Cup.  I think not.  The enmity appears to run too deep.

Towards the end of May 2006, animal rights activists discovered the secret location of the accommodation in the Cotswolds village used by builders working on the construction of Oxford University’s new £20 million laboratory in South Parks Road.  Speak, the group responsible for the Oxford University anti-vivisection protests, posted the address on the internet. The group had intended to demonstrate outside the men's quarters today. The demonstrations were already restricted at the building site by an injunction granted to the University. Furthermore, to prevent the activists from harassing the workers at their living quarters, the injunction had forbade anyone from following vehicles ferrying contractors to the site.  Now a High Court Judge has extended the injunction to cover the workers' living quarters. Although Speak says it uses only legal means[1] to protest against vivisection, there are concerns that high profile sympathisers such as Morrissey will encourage hard line activists to go beyond peaceful protest. However, Thames Valley Police seem unimpressed by such an argument.  They are reported to have said that they were not investigating the singer's comments because there was,

 "no reasonable prospect of getting anything out of it in terms of a conviction".

This limp response from the Police is unimpressive, not only because it is of dubious validity and will be seen as carte blanche by the protesters but also because as is so often the case, the Police forget that their brief is to not only to detect crime, but to deter it.  They can make their presence felt and show that they are not putting up with any harassment or intimidation against the workers by these “protesters”.

No one will have been upset by the twenty-eight year minimum sentence imposed upon two ruthless, sadistic killers who beat Jody Dobrowski to death for no better reason than because they disapproved of his lifestyle.

This is the first occasion upon which a judge had weighed the issue of homophobia in determining a minimum term.  As reports Dominic Kennedy of The Times today,

“The sentencing heralds a new era when murderers motivated by their victims’ sexuality will be jailed for twice as long as those convicted of other murders. Similar heavier penalties apply when the ground for murder is race, religion or disability”

It now seems that Stonewall, the gay rights group which campaigned for heavier than usual penalties for crimes involving homophobic hate crime, will now press for incitement to hatred of gays to be outlawed.

Call me self-centred, but I feel distinctly undervalued by virtue of the fact that had the defendants beaten and kicked me to death, the extinction of my life should have resulted in a substantially shorter life sentence being imposed, because I do not fall within one of those self-certified, minority, perceived victim groups.  Murder is murder.  It is discriminatory for a murder to be deemed more serious simply because the victim was singled out due to the fact that he was of a different race or gay.  Though single issue activists will argue that the murder of a victim simply because he was gay or of a different ethnic background is worse than when the killing was just because the victim wore the wrong football supporters’ scarf or was wealthy or whatever, they are utterly wrong.  The killers Thomas Pickford and Scott Walker richly deserve their twenty-eight year prison term, but that sentence should have applied no matter who they had killed in that manner.

The BBC Television News breathlessly extolled the virtues of Home Information Packs  (HIPs) earlier this week, as one should expect from New Labour’s media arm. Nonetheless, as more information gradually comes to light, it is becoming clearer by the day that the whole hare-brained idea  is going to be one huge, costly, failed experiment, the expense  of which will be borne solely by the consumer.  The Government knows that it is right, so it will plough ahead, regardless.  I suppose we shall have to console ourselves with the thought that this disastrous policy will represent one more nail in the coffin for this arrogant, self righteous, incompetent administration.

Such has the stock of the New Labour Government fallen, that it is only a matter of hours before someone has examined its spin and found it wanting.  So it has transpired with John Reid's attack upon Judges concerning their being purportedly "soft" on sentencing criminals.  Instinctively jumping on the "soft judges" bandwagon with a view to earning some undeserved public approval, he promptly rolled back off again when it was pointed out that the judges were applying laws passed and guidelines approved and issued by his Government.  Alice Miles  destroys neatly the whole edifice of (or at the least puts into context) the soft judges argument in her article in The Times, today.

For all lovers of the wider concept of freedom of expression, this should make us warm to Mr Moyles, for a start.  It is not the first time  he has been singled out and criticised for amongst other things, being allegedly homophobic.  In an article in The Guardian on 7^th June 2006 he was roundly condemned by a contemporary, Tim Lusher.  A cause of Mr Lusher’s angst appears to have arisen not so much by virtue Mr Moyles’ perceived homophobia but rather his use of the word gay to mean rubbish.  Apparently, to the under-twenty-eights, this is the current meaning of the word gay.  I can understand Mr Lusher’s irritation in this respect.  I was more than a little miffed when the meaning of gay transmuted from “full of or disposed to joy and mirth; light-hearted, exuberantly cheerful, sportive, merry”.  Mr Lusher’s Guardian article leads me to imagine him to be a rather po-faced, humourless, politically correct  individual.

By all accounts, our Mr Moyles behaves occasionally in a coarse, insulting and rude manner to all and sundry during his radio programme and worst of all, he swears.  This makes me like him even more. His target audience appear to think he is good and worth tuning into, insulted or no.  The ratings certainly prove it.  He is very popular.  Some people have felt constrained to complain about him, but not that many.  Curiously, the BBC has shown remarkably good sense and judgment by avoiding censuring Mr Moyles, but giving a general warning to all of its Radio 1 DJ’s concerning “watching their language”, as reported in The Times today.

There are numerous, vociferous minorities who are all too ready to tell us how to think and how we should behave, so as not to upset their sensitivities.  They should be told to grow up and get a life, whoever they are.

How ironic that whilst our servicemen and women were trying to help create a democratic Iraq, most were denied the chance to vote in our last General Election;

“…a damning indictment of the Government”

says Liam Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary.  Quite.

It is time for the local constabulary to have a word in Morrissey's  shell-like.  Whilst it is true that he is all mouth and trousers and utterly harmless, what he is saying is not unlikely to give succour to or even incite others to undertake criminal acts against individuals who are performing a lawful activity.

Jasper Gerard reports today in The Sunday Times that when attending Oxford in support of animal rights activists last week Morrissey said,

“Make no mistake, for anyone working in the labs, we are going to get you.”

This is wholly unacceptable.  Should any member of Joe Public threaten harm to another person, whether or not it was just hot air or a statement of intent, the Police would investigate.  Morrissey should not be exempt from the discipline of self-restraint merely because he is a has-been celebrity.  It is no excuse that all he intended to do was show solidarity with a handful of similar thinking individuals and in reality he doesn't intend to “get” anyone.  There are members of his wider audience, who do.[1]

In spite of Anatole Kaletsky's cunning plan to extricate Gordon Brown from New Labour’s all too obvious malaise, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a man with substantial, serious, previous form.  It was always going to be a very hard, almost impossible task to put clear, blue water between him and the failed policies of New Labour and his erstwhile co-conspirator, Mr Tony Blair.  A reinvigorated Official Opposition is not about to let him slip off the hook, for a start.  Worse (for Mr Brown, but not for us) like all good, old fashioned villains he managed, to use the vernacular, to “stitch himself up” in an interview, whilst trying to be clever.

Mr Brown was “verballed” during an interview by Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post on 14^th May 2006.  He was trying to convince the Americans that he was a regular sort of guy,  just like Blair, a man they could do business with.

“If you become Prime Minister, what will be the main difference between you and Blair?” 

asked the interviewer.

 “It's not so much that the method will be so different as the challenges…”

replied Mr Brown.

Well that’s fairly clear, then – we shall receive more of the same.  When asked,

“What do you think of the war in Iraq?”

Mr Brown replied,

 “I was a supporter of the war in Iraq.”

And so the interview continues.

It has been a favoured myth of the pro-Brown lobby that their hero really never had anything to do with the worst excesses or mistakes of “Blairism” or its methods and much has been made of the differences of opinion, constant battles of will and “feuding”.  In fact it has been plain all along that Gordon Brown was Blair’s willing accomplice in the New Labour project.  The evidence is overwhelming.  Any defence just won’t wash. The public are no longer blinded because the scales have fallen from their eyes.  We have it from the horse’s mouth.

As cross-party opposition to the imposition of the Home Information Packs (“HIPs”) scheme begins to grow, the press is becoming increasingly aware of its weaknesses and the misinformation upon which the whole HIPs edifice is built.  What appeared to have a hopeless cause when I posted my first article concerning the issue is proving to be anything but.

In her article in The Times entitled “Don't be fooled by a pack of lies” on 27^th May 2006 Alice Miles reports,

 “Estate agents hate the HIP. Chartered surveyors hate it — understandably, as it takes their business away. Building societies, mortgage lenders and lawyers are dubious about it. Various professionals claim that it will slow the market; that those being trained to carry out the tick-box home condition reports are “people like taxi drivers”, as one put it to me this week; that not enough of these inspectors are being trained; and that, although the minister claims that 40 per cent of sales that fall through do so because of problems thrown up by the survey weeks into the process, the figure is in fact 12 per cent: in other words, the HIP wouldn’t make any difference in nine out of ten sale collapses” (my emphasis.)

Ms Miles continues,

 “But the central argument against the HIP is that if mortgage companies and buyers are not able to rely legally upon the home condition report, and have some form of legal redress if it turns out to be inaccurate, then they will still have to pay to have their own surveys carried out. This would mean that the Government had introduced a new layer of complication and expense to the process rather than simplifying it. At the moment, in law, usually only the person who pays for a survey can rely upon it.”

In an earlier report in The Times on 18^th May 2006 entitled “Home Information Packs branded as 'ridiculous'”, Rebecca O' Connor reported the views of  The Building Societies Association (BSA) which is calling for the packs, which will cost home sellers as much as £1,000 each, to be made voluntary when they are introduced in June 2007.

Building Society chief executives say that HIPs will be costly and will not achieve the Government's objectives to reassure buyers or speed up housing transactions. Ms O'Connor reports that Adrian Coles, director general of the BSA, said at the Association's annual conference in Manchester:

“People's homes represent their most important asset. As such it is imperative that they can have confidence that there will not be any unexpected fluctuations in the market”

and

 “It is ridiculous that someone selling their home without a HIP will be punished by a fine. If people feel that HIPS will be of benefit, they will opt to have one without the need for compulsion.”

The Law Society, which is endeavouring to be supportive of the HIPs project[1], is more specific about unsavoury facts involving cost and criminal penalties for non compliance. Anyone marketing their property for sale after 1 June 2007 faces a fine of £200 per day if they do not provide potential buyers with a HIP. The Law Society also estimates that the true cost of producing HIPs, which will be borne by the seller alone, could range from £600-£3,000, depending on the size of the property, far more than the “modest” sum the Government would have had us believe.

New research shows most people are totally ignorant of the biggest ever shake-up of the property market which is only one year away.  Sixty four percent of people questioned by ICM have never heard of the term "home information pack" (HIP). To deal with this lack of awareness, The Law Society has created a question and answer page on its Website, which can be found here .  I have updated my webpage concerning HIPs which can be accessed here.

It is to be hoped that once the general public comes to realise what is being foisted upon them, the howl of righteous indignation will be too loud for this Government to ignore.