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Our political class is incapable of joining dots, a criticism made by the Home Secretary in Parliament on Monday about several public sector institutions. She really should look in the mirror. However, this week and last provide other examples of a failure to use information painfully learnt in one context to prevent the problem happening again elsewhere. It is a story about two Private Members Bills. The first is the Assisted Dying (“AD”) Bill. The other is the Powers of…

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Finally – FINALLY – I have something to live for: reading the final national report on the statutory grooming gangs inquiry just announced by the PM (ahead of this week’s Casey report recommending this) which should be published ….ooh, I dunno …. anything from 7 to 10 years hence. Or longer. Starmer seems unable to think more than one step ahead. Bizarre for a lawyer. It is one thing good lawyers should be able to do and having worked on…

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“Never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer” is cross-examination’s golden rule. It means asking just what you need to establish the facts or argument necessary for your case. Described as forensic, lawyers-turned-politicians are over-praised for this skill, often undeservedly so. Political persuasion is about crafting a story resonating with ordinary people, not making clever points to impress judges. Investigations are different: asking questions to which you don’t know the answer is essential. Curiosity is a much-underrated…

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How does the state treat those it has wronged – whether through its actions or failures to act? Badly. Some examples: Blood Contamination The majority of the victims have died while waiting for compensation. Why? “could not in conscience add to the decades-long delays many of you have already experienced due to failures to recognise the depth of your losses. Those delays have themselves been harmful.” Despite some interim payments made in October the judge went on: “My judgement is…

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In September 2019 just after the Supreme Court’s decision on whether the then government’s decision to prorogue Parliament was lawful (it wasn’t), a prolific commentator on legal affairs, a KC no less, wrote this: “As a legal matter, if the Supreme Court says it is the law it is the law. Saying “this is the law” is what it is the Supreme Court’s job to do.” Well done. He went on:  “Johnson and Cummings and the other moral detritus they…

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“The powerful tendency for public discussion of gender issues to drift, inexorably, back to the male point of view.” As on here. And in the media. Take Channel 4 news: after interviewing Maya Forstater, they interviewed men from trans groups and 2 sad trans-identified males. What about other trans people interviewed about a judgment which, in paragraph 248, stated: “we have concluded that a biological sex interpretation would not have the effect of disadvantaging or removing important protection under the…

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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…

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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…

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