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.