Perhaps the biggest irony around the 15+ Netflix drama “Adolescence” about a 13-year old boy who knifes to death a girl at his school is not that it is being foisted on schools in a collaboration between the government, Netflix and Tender (one of those charities largely funded by the taxpayer – £3.4 million so far) with seemingly no consideration of whether it is suitable educational material, how it is to be taught or discussed, what the impact of it…
Why is it that the US’s vaunted constitutional protections, separations of powers and independent institutions we have heard so much about over the years have just dissolved like wet tissue? Putting them in a Constitution, in founding documents may make them seem important and venerable. But stripped of all the historical baggage, they are like all procedures. They work because it is assumed that everyone understands their point, acts in good faith and with a modicum of good judgment (or…
Picture: Coffin from the walls of Kirstall Abbey It is not often we knowingly get to watch the start of a scandal unfold in real time. But this is what’s happening with the Assisted Dying Bill. This is a serious societal change with huge implications for our approach to death, suicide, illness, palliative care, the doctor-patient relationship, society’s taboo against killing and much else. Whatever your views on the substance, something as important and sensitive as this needs the fullest…
“Nothing in life became him, like the leaving of it.” Substitute “job” for “life” and it is what those leaving an important role should aim for. Not so Helen Pitcher, the now ex-Head of the CCRC whose self-pitying interview about being made a scapegoat for the CCRC’s failures in the Andy Malkinson case can be read here. A summary of the Malkinson case: After publication of the report and in response to the Justice Minister’s view that she needed to…
Our Parliament is filled with new MPs with little or no experience of how to legislate. Or experience of the consequences of getting new laws wrong. There is, however, one law they need to understand above all…. It was LBJ who said: “You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.“ Wise advice….
This is what I wrote in a header in July 2021 about the Online Safety Bill – now the Online Safety Act 2023. This introduces the novel and alarming principle that internet companies should have a “duty of care” to remove content which “may” cause “psychological harm”. Not will cause. Not content which is criminal. Not a “harm” which is clearly defined. But this vague catch-all which treats the public as little babies to be coddled rather than as sentient…
With all the demands for yet another inquiry, let’s look at the history of previous ones. Five days after the Aberfan tragedy, a Tribunal was set up. It sat for 76 days – the longest inquiry for its type until then and, as its report tartly observed: “much of the time …. could have been saved if …. the National Coal Board had not stubbornly resisted every attempt to lay the blame where it so clearly must rest – at…
The Taliban has issued its latest pronouncement on women. Women must not be visible from house windows. If they’re in a kitchen with a window, they must stay away from it. On no account must they be seen from the outside. Not content with depriving them of all political and civic rights, imprisoning them from head to toe in cloth, preventing them from being outside at all, other than with a male relative, forbidding their voices from being heard –…