Have they resigned?…

I have just seen this pic on the net. Have they resigned?
I am out of circulation for a bit. But… I have given posting rights to a number of undisclosed people and a few nominees / proxies, including a Sudanese judge, so it may be that I will not be able to [...]

Brothers-in-war?….

Dermod O’Brien QC has criticised The Bar Council. He complains that the Bar Council has shirked its responsibilities in declining to support litigation (in connection with Pensions for Recorders) in the Employment Tribunal against the Ministry of Justice.
Geoffrey Vos QC writes to all Heads of Chambers to explain why he will not use Bar [...]

Mon dieu.. if, of course, there is such an entity…

Whatever next? Police Community Support Officers, the ” Eliot Ness Untouchables” of the modern police service, are at the very forefront of crime fighting again. This time they are called to an incident by some witless shopping centre security guard to stop young children singing carols. According to The Sun, the children [...]

Donations…donations…donations…

Head of Legal has a fascinating analysis of the Labour Party donations scandal and considers, inter alia, whether Harriet Harman has committed any offences. If you are interested in “Donationsgate” this is worth a read. Quite a few posts on Head of Legal’s blog about this… scroll down!

The General Quagmire… Pakistan and the Rule of Law.

I received this note today from a lawyer in Pakistan. I am delighted to be able to post it here:
The General Quagmire

For all his rhetoric of enlightened moderation and vows to ensure that democracy would see the light of day again in Pakistan, General Musharraf has proved to be no better than the other [...]

Singing in the rain…

The Ant & Dec double act of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition must be singing about the rain pouring down on the increasingly beleaguered Prime Minister.
The latest news about failure to report donations made to the Labour Party correctly has claimed the scalp of the General-Secretary of the Labour Party.
Listening to Radio 4 this morning, [...]

Judges and lawyers at risk…

The Sun reports this morning:
BRITAIN’S top judges have been put at risk after two CDs with their personal details were sent out in the POST.
The discs, containing 55,000 separate files, also had highly sensitive information about hundreds of barristers and solicitors.
Magistrates were also named along with county councils, government departments [...]

Free speech…

Are the students of the Oxford University Union wrong to invite convicted Holocaust denier David Irving and BNP leader Nick Griffin to speak?
Certainly, there are some who think they are wrong. The Guardian reports that “Trevor Phillips, the chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, yesterday branded the invitation a disgrace, and anti-fascism campaigners [...]

Saturday Review: 24 November … Why?

At 4.30 am this morning I looked out of the window to see frost on car windscreens. It was quiet. Christmas is but a month away. It was time to consider my annual E-xmascard. Not having any children or wife to photograph as a festive family group outside my Staterooms (not that [...]

There is an elephant in the room…

I had the misfortune, some years ago, to spend one night and a morning at a ‘conference’. It bored me rigid. Unfortunately, given that I was was one of the visiting ‘unpaid’ speakers, I had no choice but to attend. The setting was an old country house, turned into [...]

You just can’t have a conversation with them…

An interesting article in The Times today about barristers.
“In summary, solicitors should probably have the last word. They are prepared, the survey finds, to put up with what they say is barristers’ eccentricity and lack of people skills because they value their expert knowledge and advocacy.
It’s a profession that seems to draw those kinds of [...]

That was what a week that was….

“Events, my dear boy, events”.
It was, of course, former PM Harold Macmillan who used this memorable phrase, but Gordon Brown seems to be being driven by events rather than driving events.
What an extraordinary week. 25 million records lost by HM Revenue & Customs, the Northern Wreck statement in the House, England crashing out [...]

Resignation… various meanings.

Of course, we all know the meaning of the word ‘Resign’. There are some quite interesting synonyms: 1. withdraw. 3. abdicate, renounce; quit, leave. 4. give up, surrender, cede, forgo.
One may, of course, be ‘resigned’ to something.
So… this week the Chairman of HM Revenue & Customs resigned - as did a 23 year old [...]

And they want us to have identity cards?…

I watched the statement by the Chancellor…. 25 million records lost by HMRC… just imagine what they could do with biometrics and ID cards…. A cheap and easy jibe, I accept… and hardly original. But it does make one think.
Extraordinarily, The Chairman of HMRC fell on his sword and resigned.  This is fairly [...]

I must stop reading tabloids…

Waking early, and after dealing with a few matters, I visited The Sun Online. I didn’t expect to find any useful news, but I did discover that The Sun had run a campaign to ban Gordon Brown from going to Wembley to watch the England v Croatia EURO 2008 football match because they think [...]

The Putsch against our freedoms…

Henry Porter, writing in this Sunday’s Observer, stated “A few journalists and MPs are prepared to fight the government’s sinister anti-libertarianism. More people should join them”.
Our rights and civil liberties are being eroded away, bit by bit. We live in a country with CCTV cameras pretty well everywhere in towns and cities, [...]

Saturday Review 17 November 07…

In a week where we have had a High Court judge telling a Saudi Sheik (Below), he could choose “to depart on his flying carpet” to escape paying costs, but that he should be in court so that “every grain of sand is sifted” and that his evidence was gelatinous…like Turkish Delight, it is difficult [...]

Blawging away…

It is 3.08 am. What does a blawger do at this time in the morning? A quick trip to the blawgers to see what they have been up to this week.
First up is a story from Family Lore about flying carpets and turkish delight in the Family Division. Mr Justice Singer [...]

Europhile top shelf…and Downing Street matters…

Like many, I read EU Law because I have to keep up. It is not bedtime reading for me and, as with others in the UK , I like the ‘idea’ of Europe, because I enjoy going there, but do not spend a great deal of time wondering about what they are up [...]

Saturday Review on Sunday 11 November…

The News of The World reports that Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair now has to explain away a £6 million fraud on the part of Met officers racking up private spending on their police issue AMEX cards. Some ‘three thousand cards’ are to be scrutinised for evidence of misuse. Two cops have already [...]