A trouble shared is a trouble halved

Well that's the idea of John Reid, the British Home Secretary, anyway who has decided to split the massive Home Office into two separate departments, the existing Home Office retaining responsibility for the prevention of terrorism and for immigration control while the newly created Ministry of Justice will deal with offending, prisons and probation.



I have grave doubts about whether this will stop the downward spiral in the current Home Office which, over the past 12 months has a) admitted they didn't know which Britons had been convicted of serious offences abroad b) Had no idea how many probation offenders were violating their orders c) Failed to check whether over 1000 foreign born prisoners were suitable for deportation before releasing them.

I don't believe this is done in the public interest at all, simply a ruse by Read to hive off the bits of his job which are so inefficiently run that they drag him down politically. And anyway couldn't they have thought of a less sinister name for the new department than the 'Ministry of Justice' ?

It smacks of some secret police HQ in one of those authoritarian states where human rights have been subordinated to the demands of state control, where people are monitored by phone taps and CCTV 24/7 and where you can be arrested for just being from the wrong religion! Oh yeah right, of course, sorry! Fits the nation perfectly!

A murder that defies belief

I know that many people, particularly my friends in the United States, cannot understand my love of cricket, that so very British Empire game with its history of men in white flannels, the slow languid pace of the game and the weird apparently incomprehensible rules. But I think even they understood it to be a game of gentlemen, played by gentlemen, the very epitome of all that is good about sport.

But all that has been changing for quite a few years. The old county game watched by the proverbial one man and his dog, the clubs supported by local raffles and lotteries, and the players wives making the cream teas has long gone. Some one decided there was money to be made in cricket and a whole new marketing drive was created to sell the game to the masses. First one day cricket came in with a limited length of innings for each team, loud coloured clothing and a definite result at the end of the day. Out of this was spawned competitive leagues and eventually the World Cup, currently being played in the West Indies.

Money began to circulate in the game - an awful lot of money. Lots of people got very rich..and some people got rich illegally. Maybe the first high profile casualty of greed and corruption was the South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje. A man of God, known for his strict Dutch Reform Church beliefs, and a man who has coached youngsters throughout the world, Cronje was found guilty in 2000 of organising match fixing with bookmakers and making a lot of money from crooked results. He was banned from cricket for life.



In 2002, a light plane on which Cronje was travelling crashed in the mountains near South Africa's western cape and Cronje and the two pilots were killed. There were voices then who said that the plane had been tampered with and Cronje killed by a betting syndicate to shut him up, but few believed them.

Since then other players from various countries have been found guilty in betting and match fixing scandals and a sense of discomfort has grown that something is far from right in the cricketing world but that a lid has been shut on how bad the situation is.

Then the World Cup began this month in the West Indies and, after an extraordinary defeat for Pakistan, the 4th ranked team in the world, against Ireland, a team of part-timers, the Pakistan coach, Bob Woolmer, was found murdered by strangulation in his hotel room. So far the guilty party has not been caught but it is hard to believe, particularly after the Pakistan defeat, that his murder is not related in some way to more disreputable goings on involving some kind of betting scandal. No one has been charged and I am not suggesting any particular party is to blame.

I have met Bob Woolmer when he was coach of my county team, Warwickshire, back in the mid nineties and the fact that his life could end in this way is almost beyond belief.




What is now clear for all to see is that the game of cricket, though a game for the cognoscenti with its strange traditions, was always a game played in the very finest spirit of sportsmanship. Apart from the tragedy of Woolmer's murder, the tragedy for the game of cricket is the now clear loss of that image. It is in fact a game that currently smells alarmingly of something very unpleasant indeed!

Hurray for the American committment to free speech!

A U.S. federal judge sitting in Philadelphia has struck a resounding blow for free speech by striking down a 1998 law designed to put the onus on web operators to protect children from extreme material.

Judge Lowell Read Jr. was quoted as saying, "Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if (free speech) protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection." Instead he suggested that PARENTS....(Glory be, remember them? Those taller people who used to be responsible for their own children?).should employ cheaper and more effective solutions like software filters and not put all the onus on other people.

This has undermined a substantial tranche of Federal law designed to stop internet pornography at source rather than leave it to individual families to take action.

Well Judge Read you'd have my vote! Living,as I do in a Nanny state 3000 miles to the east of your own I just love this decision to put the responsibility for adult material and who sees it back where it belongs....with the parents.

Will this blast of judicial freedom for the individual encourage a similar sentiment on this side of the Atlantic. Somehow I doubt it. With Child Protection obsessions now paramount it is not in the interests of any Member of Parliament to suggest that anything but the most draconian approach should be taken in this area. Already there are new tougher rules on the way about what can be viewed on the internet. When these were submitted for an apparently 'democratic' consultation to the public, more people voted against than for - but they are still going through. That's how British democracy works you see, they ask your opinion and then ignore it!

An Israeli who understood the Palestinian problem

The Israeli linguist and scholar, Tanya Reinhart, has died at the age of 62. Ms Reinhart was a former professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University and wrote articles for several Israeli newspapers. She finished her distinguished career as Distinguished Global Professor at New York University.



Her Emeritus Professor when she received her Doctorate of Philosophy from the MIT in 1976 was Noam Chomsky, who remained a close friend and political ally for the rest of her life. He commented, on news of her death that "..she would be remembered not only as a resolute and honorable defender of the rights of Palestinians, but also as one of those who have struggled to defend the moral integrity of her own Israeli society, and its hope for decent survival."

Ms. Reinhart was the subject of much opprobrium in her native Israel for her continued criticism of Israel's retention of the territories occupied in the 1967 war and argued that Israel should abandon the West Bank and Gaza. She said:-

"Israel should withdraw immediately from the territories occupied in 1967. The bulk of Israeli settlers (150,000 of them) are concentrated in the big settlement blocks in the center of the West bank. These areas cannot be evacuated over night. But the rest of the land (about 90%–96% of the West bank and the whole of the Gaza strip) can be evacuated immediately. Many of the residents of the isolated Israeli settlements that are scattered in these areas are speaking openly in the Israeli media about their wish to leave. It is only necessary to offer them reasonable compensation for the property they will be leaving behind. The rest — the hard-core "land redemptions" fanatics — are a negligible minority that will have to accept the will of the majority."

She pointed out that such a settlement would still leave between 6 and 10%, plus Jerusalem, in Israeli hands and these territories should be the subject of serious negotiations.

In 2002, Tanya Reinhart was heavily criticised in Israel for signing a petition which was heavily critical of the Israeli government's Palestinian policies. In the same year she published a book Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948, in which she analyzed what she saw as the breakdown during the preceding three years of constructive engagement over the Palestinian issue and the hardening of the Israeli position.

Tanya Reinhart was only 62 and I think the world has lost an intelligent and compassionate woman, and the state of Israel (though she was resident in America), has lost a genuine patriot, a woman who was not prepared to take a myopic culturally insular view of a complex and difficult problem. She was prepared to take a lot of hostility and criticism in outlining a future in which she believed both Jewish and Palestinian peoples could live side by side within a political framework that was fair and just.

A date which will live in infamy!

Well it could be President Roosevelt declaring his judgment on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but it is more immediately relevant to the actions of another US President when on, 20th March 2003, George W. Bush ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq. Acting in concert with the snivelling, conniving British the Americans engineered a situation whereby war was inevitable regardless of the reports -subsequently proved to be correct- from the United Nations weapons inspections team that no weapons of mass destruction -the so called raison d'etre for the war - existed.

Undaunted by the intelligence reports, America simply manufactured the evidence it needed, a hapless Colin Powell having to pretend that a domestic gas manufacturing plant was a secret weapons manufacturing plant. At this point, simply because the British people wouldn't swallow it and Blair needed to keep his job, the pretence continued that the invasion was all about weapons of mass destruction. Once American troops had more or less combed every square inch of sand so that the excuse no longer stood up, the Americans smoothly changed the plot so that it was always about 'regime change'.

Had the British had that fed to them on day 1, I suspect that would have been the end of our involvement and possibly the end of Blair, had he stuck to his guns and gone ahead.

The 'war' began, you may recall with the obnoxious Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary, boasting about his 'shock and awe' tactics when American bombers pounded Baghdad and other key cities causing something like 8,000 innocent civilian deaths as a result of the bombing.



But it was all worth it, said the grinning, laconic Mr.Rumsfeld, because it would bring the Iraqis to their knees in weeks and hasten the end of Saddam Hussein's rule. On May 1st of that year, President Smirking Chimp visited the USS Abraham Lincoln dressed in full combat uniform and announced 'Mission Accomplished' to the cheering hordes of sailors.



Well indeed Saddam had fled and in December of that year, one of Bush's chinless wonders, one Paul Bremer who was supposedly in charge of the provisional government, but who no one in their right mind would trust to run a whelk stall, was able to have his moment in the spotlight with his immortal 'Ladies and Gentlemen! We goddim!' His day in the sun didn't last long and he left Iraq with questions being asked about where $9 billion earmarked for Iraqi rebuilding had disappeared to. The question still hangs in the air!



Well Saddam was indeed in custody so this invasion of a sovereign nation which had constituted no threat to the US or Britain had been successful, had it?

Er..well not exactly. Whatever one might have thought of Saddam's harsh authoritarian rule, extreme Islamic factions had no part in it. Now as a result of the destabilisation and America's total ineptitude at producing a post war plan of consolidation, indigenous Shia and Sunni factions, with help from Iranian and Syrian guerrilas, swept into the vacuum and reduced Iraq to a place where no one was safe to go out on the streets.

So four years on President Chimp chooses to 'celebrate' the war. One might think he would don a niqab and burkha himself and try to slip away anonymously, so crass, evil and inept has been his foreign policy but apparently not.

So far, after four years of dedication in producing chaos out of order, the cost of so doing is approximately as follows:-

The medical journal 'The Lancet' estimates the total number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000

The number of American dead is in excess of 3,000

Contractors and other US Allies dead; over 1000

Journalists and other media: 201.

It would be hard to argue that this carnage had been justified even if Iraq was now a model of western democracy. But its not. In fact its a living nightmare. Bombs are exploding daily. 30 or 40 people a day on average are being murdered. The insurgents are now flooding the country. The newly elected government is riddled with corruption in its army and police....

...and Smirking Chimp is still celebrating the war. Oh admittedly, his jaunty cockiness has gone and American objectives have come down faster than a runaway elevator, but Bush is still trying to sell some kind of success story, rather than the heinous international crime it actually was and for which he and Blair should be facing a War Crimes Tribunal.

Now readers of this blog may think this article is not constructed in the measured, rational and objective prose with which you have become familiar. Well you're goddam right it isn't!

Because this invasion changed my whole perspective on my own national leader, Tony Blair, of the lick spittle wimps who backed him and who prompted me to leave politics altogether. Because British participation in this crime made me sick to my stomach. Bitterly, furiously angry because this is the most heinous foreign expedition the British have been involved in during my long life time. For the rest of my life I will be ashamed, bitterly ashamed, of the British participation in this and, if there is a God, I ask Him to forgive all of us who couldn't do, or didn't do, enough to stop it.

The Witch of World War II

One of those true stories re surfaced today which is in the 'too bizarre even for fiction' bracket as a result of a renewed campaign to pardon a convicted criminal - nay worse - a convicted witch!

Was this back in the days of Cromwell or earlier one might ask? No it was 1944, towards the end of World War II when Helen Duncan became the last person in Britain to be convicted of witchcraft.

Born in Scotland in 1897, Helen Duncan made a part time living as a medium. She earned a reputation of sorts for summoning the spirits of the dead by emitting 'ectoplasm' from her mouth. She had been arrested a number of times for suspected fraud but her fame ( or notoriety) stemmed from one seance she gave in Portsmouth in 1941.





Just prior to the seance, the British battleship H.M.S. Barham had been sunk by German torpedoes with the loss of two thirds of the crew, nearly 900 sailors. The Admiralty realised from intercepting German radio that the enemy did not know they had sunk the ship. So they went to great and elaborate lengths to hide the news of the sinking from everyone, even going to the lengths of sending greeting cards from the dead crew to their wives and families.

Some days later, Helen Duncan gave her seance at which she announced that H.M.S. Barham had been sunk and that she was contacting the spirit of one of the dead sailors. No one knows to this day how Mrs. Duncan obtained this knowledge that the Admiralty had gone to such lengths to keep secret.

She was not arrested immediately but, though its hard to believe, some British intelligence officers believed that Helen Duncan was possessed of some extraordinary power and, when the D-Day landings were planned, British Intelligence remembered the uncanny message 'from beyond the grave' some three years before and had Helen Duncan arrested.

Any charge they could reasonably throw at her would have resulted in a fine and freedom but they were terrified that her 'power' might put the D-Day landings in jeopardy, so they dug out the British Witchcraft Act of 1735 and charged her with sorcery under that Act. Unbelievably ( though probably with connivance) she was found guilty and sentenced to nine months in prison - thus off the streets of Britain during the lead up to the invasion.

Now her relatives are petitioning Tony Blair in order to get her pardoned and this smear as a witch removed from her record. By all logic and reason it should of course succeed but who knows with this government.

I feel a little better now, knowing that our Intelligence Services were running around only 50 years ago prosecuting witches, for the ritual I always undertake when visiting my Manx homeland. Just outside Douglas, on the way to Castletown, is a little hump backed bridge and when your bus or car goes over it, you have to say 'Good Day to You, Fairies' for if you don't, the Little People will visit you in the night and do you grave harm. Do I repeat this mantra? Well of course I do! No of course I don't believe a word of it but, like the brains of British Intelligence in 1944, better safe than sorry, eh?

The tragic consequences of 'expert' opinion

Sally Clark, the Cheshire solicitor, who was wrongly jailed for life in 1999 for murdering her two children, has died in her sleep at the age of 42. Although there has, as yet, been no coroners inquest, family members have said that, while Mrs. Clark was not known to be suffering from a specific illness, her health was in ruins as a result of the conviction and the traumatic experience she underwent at the hands of British 'justice'.

Her first child, Christopher, was found dead in his cot aged 11 weeks by his mother in 1996 and she discovered her second child, Harry, aged 6 weeks, to be dead in his cot two years later. The second child was found to have a brain inflammation consistent with, paediatricians claimed, severe shaking.

What was NOT said at Mrs. Clark's trial was that there were other circumstances which could have led to the brain deformities and, in fact, Home Office pathologists had found lethal doses of a meningo-coccal type bacteria in the child's system about which the defence team was not informed.

The final nail in Sally Clark's coffin was the testimony of Professor Sir Roy Meadow who claimed, testifying for the Crown, that the chances of two siblings dying of 'cot death syndrome' were 1 in 73 million. He appears to have plucked that figure out of the air and, given his paediatric stature, the jury believed him. It was the death knell for any chance Sally Clark had of being found innocent.

Later the Royal Statistical Society wrote to the Lord Chancellor asking for any evidence to back Sir Roy's estimate and of course there was none. The figures were off the top of his head.

Poor Sally Clark was jailed for life and I can still recall the face of her husband after the trial was over, a man in shock convinced that the truth would have come out before the jury reached a verdict.

Well th truth DID out, but not before Mrs. Clark had spent three years in prison, abused as a child killer by fellow inmates, having already suffered the tragedy of losing her two children. Sir Roy Meadow was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and struck off the medical register but both decisions were overturned on appeal and he is free to continue exercising his 'expert' opinion.

Sally Clark was released from prison in 2003 after all this deception and hypothesis came to light. I remember seeing her standing on the steps of the appeal court with her husband, a young woman of 38 whose hair was prematurely grey, her eyes were sunken and she looked many years older than her age. She was free but her life had been ruined both by tragic personal circumstances and by the British legal system.



Now, four years later, Sally Clark is dead, maybe the last act in a tragedy that should never have happened on such slender circumstantial evidence. I believe the real villain here is the adversarial system of justice which places more emphasis on the prosecution and the defence outwitting one another than it does in getting to the truth of the matter. It is always hoped, in our system of justice, that this adversarial conflict gets to the right result in the end. I have long had my doubts about the wisdom of this assumption and, particularly in child death cases where so much weight is placed on expert testimony and medical probability, it is clearly gravely flawed.

Sally Clark is not the only young woman to have been convicted - and then cleared - of murdering her children based solely on expert evidence which has subsequently proved to be unreliable, but she is perhaps the first to have so clearly and so tragically suffered the ultimate consequences of stress, depression and ill-treatment that such a miscarriage of justice can engender.

Let us hope that this is a wake up call to the legal system and a motivator to ensure that considerable changes are implemented in child death cases before a mother can be sent away for life on the supposition of a so called expert and the vagaries of believing medical probabilities.

A tyrant who continues to sneer at his critics

In 1979, on recognising that white rule in British colonial Africa was doomed to defeat, Britain forced the white ruler of what was then Southern Rhodesia, Ian Smith, to the negotiating table through sanctions and other pressures to concede power to African leaders. Three men, Abel Muzorewa, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe were key figures in the power struggle eventually won by Mugabe and his Zanu-PF Party.



In the first free elections in the new country, now called Zimbabwe, Mugabe won by a landslide and was hailed as the new reforming force in the African continent. That day, as the song goes, was the day the music died. Using primarily North Korean Communist troops Mugabe, a member of the Shona tribe, spent the first decade of his heinous rule silencing any opposition from the rival Ndebele people killing an estimated 20,000 of them in that period.

Mugabe has regularly ethnically cleansed his country and accusations of genocide have been rife. One of the fundamental platforms of his policy has to been to remove land ownership from white farmers compulsorily and redistribute it to the Africans, which he has done on the basis of preference for his own supporters. Without any programme of education or gradual assimilation of farming knowledge, the once prosperous farm land of Zimbabwe has become barren , factories have closed down and the country now has the world record level of inflation, running at nearly 2,000% per annum.

Although Zimbabwe has preserved the illusion of a supreme court which makes independent decisions,and has indeed bravely ruled that Mugabe's land grabs are illegal, the Government rides roughshod over these rulings and does what it likes. In 2005, Mugabe instituted a programme of urban clearance, purportedly to drive out drug dealers and illegal markets, but which left thousands of urban poor homeless.

Demonstrations have been staged against the regime but all end in violence, the Government run police cracking down hard on demonstrators. The west has frequently 'expressed its displeasure' at Mugabe's illiberal regime but, as recently as yesterday, the ageing dictator announced that his western critics could 'go hang'.

It does put into perspective though the altruistic claims by western leaders that they have a humanitarian incentive to further 'regime change'. Now there is a regime crying out to be changed if humanitarian considerations were paramount. However its in the heart of Africa, not seen as an area of strategic interest - and of course it has no oil! So sorry Zimbabwe, you'll have to get rid of this obnoxious man all on your own!

Sandbagged by the Olympians!

Damn it, I should have guessed that all this apparent shock and misery in Paris when they 'lost' the 2012 Olympics to London was all a sham. I bet the French paid the judges to award the vote to us. Who on earth would really want to host this giant monkey on the back of every taxpayer, in the face of which governments appear to be hypnotised by the glitz and the glamour so that all common sense accounting flies out of the window?

A mere eighteen months ago we were all told that the cost of the London Olympics was going to be £2.35 BILLION...a mere drop in the ocean if you say it quickly enough..but all justified for the prestige and pride it would bring to England.

Well I had my doubts even then but now Tessa Jowell, our red-hot ace on-the-ball Culture Secretary announced, with some embarrassment, in the House of Commons that the bill was now estimated at nearly £10 BILLION!! A four fold increase in eighteen months? That is ineptitude bordering on the criminal. We are now told that the cost of constructing buildings alone is around £3.5 BILLION - 50% more than the ENTIRE project was costed back in late 2005!! How can this be?



They have now added £2.7 billion in contingency costs - no contingency being included in the original estimate! Why not? Oh and another laughable element omitted from the previous account - £840 million in taxation! Well you'd think the Government would have remembered that of all things!!

Miss Jowell has stated that the Games will 'bring huge financial benefit to the whole country'. I can't see the evidence for that and on the basis of past Games, the host cities have struggled to avoid something close to bankruptcy.

But the prime issue here is the degree of cost escalation. Either the Government lied to everyone about the cost in order to secure the Games or it is financially incapable of running a whelk stall. Either I can believe.

The awful worry of course is that cost estimates have quadrupled in eighteen months when hardly a brick has been laid in preparation. The London Games are 5 years away. What the bloody hell will the cost be by then? I believe the inept and insipid Ms. Jowell should hand the entire financial management of the Olympics to a team of battle hardened financial consultants who have the power to crack the whip and make some hard choices.

And finally if it's seen that the costs are going higher and higher, as I suspect the ceiling has not yet been reached, someone who is tough enough to pull the plug on the whole damn fiasco. There are much better things we could spend ten billion pounds on!

Why keep taking this humiliation?

When I was a young boy at Grammar School, they employed the 'fagging' principle, (No this is nothing to do with homosexuality - at least not overtly) where a first year boy was required to run errands for an older sixth former or prefect. Some perverse British idea about 'character building' and a willingness to recognise one's betters. If you failed in a chore you might be summoned to the prefect's common room, ordered to bend over and be given a boot up the backside for your failure. A humiliating reminder of your humble place in the scheme of things.

Such must be the state of mind in which Tony Blair finds himself at present - and for the forseeable future as long as he remains Prime Minister. Despite - or sadly for him, because of - putting his personal stamp on the programme to replace the Trident nuclear missile, so many of his own M.P.s rebelled against the decision yesterday that the vote was carried only with the support of the Conservative Party. What an abject humiliation for a sitting Prime Minister to rely on the opposition to carry his policies!

Blair must feel he is subject to the metaphorical boot up the arse every time he commits himself to a policy initiative. Everything he does is now openly questioned, frequently condemned and openly derided. The man has lost every ounce of credibility and the sad decline from the hero of Dianagate and 911 is almost pathetic to watch. Why does he continue to do it? His stubborn refusal to resign is handicapping not only the work of government but the future of Labour in power.

Frankly, Blair has asked for every brickbat he has got but my fear is for what remains of the Labour Party. I don't have a lot of time for Gordon Brown but as a politician he is streets ahead of the anaemic Cameron - the souffle in a suit. My fear is that Britain will get a Conservative government at the next election simply because Labour will still be trying to overcome the Blair handicap. Gordon Brown, if he is to be Labour's choice, needs some time to 'bed down' and create his own leadership image before a General Election arrives too late to set his own agenda.

If someone as respected as the much loved former Speaker of the House, Baroness Betty Boothroyd, is prepared to come out publicly and say that Blair's authority is completely shot then, Dear God, surely the man can read the signs himself? He is neck deep in the 'cash for honours' issue, he has been lambasted over the state pension failures, he is deeply wounded by Iraq - Britain's worst foreign policy decision for over 50 years - and much of his Party hates him with a loathing which is visceral.

It is surely time for the Whips to exercise their authority, demand a meeting with Blair and , almost to the sentence, echo Oliver Cromwell's words to Parliament in 1653:-

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

'Ghost' flights highlight current airline tax problems

For the last 6 months a British Mediterranean Airways plane has taken off from London's Heathrow Airport every day except Sunday and has flown the 140 miles to Cardiff and then returned the same day. The plane's departures have never been advertised on the departure boards and on each of those 124 seater flights not one single ticket has been sold and not one single passenger flew on any of them!



Why on earth would an airline spend an admitted £2million pounds on empty aircraft flying pointlessly between two cities every day of the week and, at a time when environmental issues are high on the agenda, deposit 5 metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere on EVERY single flight?

The answer is because, although flights in the winter are not economic for British Med, it is vital to their summer trade that they retain their airline parking 'slots' at Heathrow Airport. Like most international airports Heathrow operates a 'use it or lose it' principle. In order to guarantee the preservation of those vital slots for their summer holiday schedule, British Med have to guarantee that at least one plane will take off every weekday all the year round. It is cheaper for British Med to waste £2 million on empty flights than to see the coveted Heathrow Airport slot go to a rival company, the consequence of which would be to lose a whole lot more in terms of coveted key holiday routes. The value of such slots is seen as between £10 and £20 million

This is nonsense. Not only is it a waste of money which is bound to be reflected in the cost of airfares, it is an almost criminal environmental scandal. There has to be a re think on the way airport slots are allocated to prevent this kind of thing. In Britain at least all the political parties are thinking up new forms of airline tax they can sell to the electorate which both encourage conservation and are not swingeingly prohibitive for the holiday traveller. No one has yet found the perfect balance and in fact the airlines are howling with horror at David Cameron's proposals to be enacted by any future Conservative government but if this ludicrous British Med airlines situation is an example of the sort of idiocy which prevails under the current framework, something needs to be done and done quickly!

What Katie did - or one up to the fuller figure

British actress Kate Winslet has just won a libel suit -and a grovelling apology - from the British fashion magazine 'Grazia' for suggesting that Miss Winslet was consulting a dietary specialist when she visited a Chinese healing institute in Santa Monica. Miss Winslet produced convincing proof that she attended the centre for treatment to a niggling neck ailment.

Kate Winslet has long been hostile to the attitudes of fashion magazines like 'Grazia' who forever harp on about the body weight of women and who constantly put celebrities in the spotlight when they appear to show a little surplus 'spare tire' when on vacation. She has long said that such attitudes are responsible for the increase in anxiety and depression among growing girls with their insistence on the slim hour-glass figure as the norm to aspire to. She has blamed the fashion industry for the rise in anorexic and bulimic conditions among young girls and has even said that such magazines create such a warped mind set among young girls that she won't have them in the house with her young daughter, Mia, now old enough to read and absorb such propaganda.

Sensing an opportunity to get their own back, 'Grazia' appears to have fallen flat on its face and , turning the screw nicely, Miss Winslet has demanded that the substantial libel damages are paid to a charity which specialises in treating eating disorders.

Katie, my sweet, bloody good for you!!!

Things are not always as they appear.

It's the kind of CCTV footage we have all seen before. A policeman grabs a suspect, this time a 19 year old black girl named Toni Comer, and as the camera rolls the two of them fall, wrestling down a fire escape steps. As they hit the ground three more officers are seen rushing to assist. They try to grab the girl while the arresting officer, seen clearly on the CCTV footage punches the girl four or five times as hard as he can. After that the melee clears and the girl is seen being dragged to a police van with her trousers down around her knees. An obvious case of horrendous police violence, that is clear!

Or is it?

It transpires that the girl has committed £3000 of damage to a car in a nightclub car park and then storms back into the club fuelled with anger, drink and drugs to confront , presumably, the car owner. Police are called and the arresting officer tries to escort Miss Comer out of the club. She is furiously angry and resists arrest violently, to the extent that a slightly built girl wrestles and hurls a six foot policeman down a flight of fire escape steps as he hangs on to her and they both tumble down.

As they hit the ground she kicks, bites and scratches like a tigress trying to claw at the policeman's genitals so, remembering his training he aims four or five hard punches at the muscle of her arm in order to deaden it.

As his colleagues arrive, Miss Comer starts to kick out at their genitals and, again following disarming procedure in these circumstances, the police unfasten her trousers and pull them down to her knees, rendering her unable to kick out.

Then finally she is arrested. When they arrive at the station, the arresting officer volunteers a statement to the duty officer that he has punched Miss Comer quite hard on the arm and that a doctor should check whether she requires medical attention.

As I write, the officer PC Anthony Mulhall has been put on desk duties but NOT suspended while a police enquiry continues.

It is clear though from the evidence thus presented and the unblemished appearance of Miss Comer that first impressions are so often misleading and that the police have an ever more thankless job in arresting people, particularly when they are high on a lethal cocktail of fury and alcohol.

Don't you just love stubborn old buggers!

You may not always agree with them, you may not take their causes to heart but there is always a tiny wave of the metaphorical flag for the old timers who, when faced with the intransigent face of 'Laura Norder' say 'bollocks!' and do exactly what they think is right.

We've had two examples of this today, the first and comparitively minor one being 70 year old Brian Hollingworth from Huddersfield who has styled himself 'The Yellow Pimpernel.' Faced with never ending potholes appearing in his road, and tired of calling his local council only to receive the response 'Its all due to be done in the next financial year', Mr Hollingworth armed himself with a pot of luminous yellow paint and, in the dead of night, crept out and painted huge circles of garish yellow around every pot hole in his area.

The local council was hopping mad and accused Mr Hollingworth of 'irresponsible graffiti' and that 'his actions had no influence on the programme of works undertaken by the council'. But guess what, all the holes have been repaired!


The case which has attracted more national attention is that of Mrs. Patricia Tabram, aged 69, who has been found guilty today of growing her own cannabis plants with 'intent to supply'. This elderly lady is not a supplier of dope to the masses but a chef who has long suffered from a rheumatic condition which was considerably eased by the medicinal use of cannabis which she ground down into a herbal mix or chopped up and put in cake. So effective was it that she supplied her cuisine to all the grateful pensioners in her area.



She was arrested in 2005 after proudly advertising her produce on TV, and given a 6 month suspended jail sentence. The current conviction comes following a breach of the conditions of her original sentence when police, acting on a tip off, raided her home and found cannabis plants growing in the wardrobe.

Mrs. Tabram is totally unrepentant and told the police they might as well take the cannabis based cooking powder while they were at it. She maintains that the law is an ass and that some legislation should be enacted to allow the use of cannabis for conditions such as arthritis and rheumatism.

The courts and the law of course have no choice but to enforce the current law as it stands.

Like I said, you may think some of these old timers go about making a protest in the wrong way but somehow you have to admire their grit and determination in the face of great opposition. Maybe being a stubborn old bugger is what keeps 'em alive!

Are Britain's divorce settlements fair?

For many years, wives who suffered the experience of an often painful divorce were given scant recompense for their contribution to the marriage, despite being wife, house-minder, mother and all the intangible unpaid qualities that any woman brings to a relationship. In the 80s and 90s the proverbial worm began to turn and legal changes were made which recognised the unfairness of the system and strove to improve the legal settlements given to a divorced woman.

This came to a head in the landmark case of White V White in 2000, where a precedent was set that a wife was entitled to 50% of the assets of the relationship, regardless of who had earned the money and such has been the basis of our legal judgments ever since.

I am compelled to ask, as has Mr. John Charman, the former head of Axis Capital Holdings, whether we have now reached a position which has gone too far the other way. Mr. Charman was ordered, two years ago, to pay his wife, Beverley, £48 million as a divorce settlement. This is the highest divorce settlement in British history. The couple had been married for 26 years and had two children and it was clear that Beverley Charman had been a committed wife and mother until the time Charman met another woman and told her the marriage was over. He offered her £20 million but she fought for 50% of his assets using White v White as precedent, and the Law Lords agreed with her.





Now I don't know Mr. Charman but from what I read he is a nasty piece of work, certainly hard and aggressive in the way he does business and I have no real sympathy with the monied rich. I do have concerns however, on a point of principle, for this 50/50 split on the ending of a relationship. John Charman has challenged the courts award saying surely £20 million is enough for anyone to live out their lives in luxury, that despite his wife being a fundamental and key element in their partnership it was he who had the business brain, took the risks and made the money. He has also claimed that if the award is confirmed he will have to sell off part of his business as much of his assets are contained therein and are not liquid.

I do have some sympathy with his argument and I do think if we have reached the point where a wife, no matter how loving and supportive she has been, can walk off with 50% of the joint assets of a relationship, much of which she had no practical hand in generating, then we are creating an opposite injustice to the one we have tried to rectify.

Another couple watching developments in this saga very closely are Sir Paul and Heather Mills McCartney. Sir Paul must be hoping that 'Can't buy me love' is very much reflected in the decision of the appeal court.

Oh what a tangled web we weave...........

The cash for honours scandal is tightening its grip on an ever more discredited British government which has seen Lord Michael Levy , the Government's chief fund raiser, arrested and interviewed under caution, likewise Ruth Turner the Head of Government Relations. Ms Turner was subject to the humiliation of a dawn raid on her home and was forced to dress in front of a policewoman. Tony Blair has been interviewed as a 'witness' - but has become the first serving Prime Minister to be interviewed in connection with a criminal investigation which has now been going on for over a year.







The basic question is whether the Blair government offered the promise of peerages in exchange for sizable donations to the Labour Party, a criminal offence under the 1925 Act. It now seems to have spiraled from that to investigations into perverting the course of justice.

The BBC was thwarted last Friday in its attempts to broadcast some breaking news on the issue as the Attorney General took out an injunction to stop the programme being aired. However since the Guardian newspaper successfully appealed against a similar injunction, the BBC is now free to air its story...and a squalid story it seems to be.

It transpires that an e mail was sent from Ruth Turner to Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister's Press Secretary saying she was 'uncomfortable' with a request made to her by Lord Levy concerning a statement she had made to police. One suggestion coming from this cryptic exchange is that Levy tried to get Ms Turner to change her statement. He denies this and says there have been 'distortions and misunderstandings' but there is growing evidence that Levy could well be charged by the police in connection with this matter.

All this leaves a giant egg on the face of Tony Blair - and so it should. Almost from the start of his Premiership and the hidden donations from Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One car chief, Labour's financial dealings have been mired in sleaze. The question being asked tonight about the 'cash for honours' issue is did the Prime Minister know? I believe he damn well should have known....and if he didn't it was because he didn't WANT to know, provided the money for his political party continued to roll in. His 'See no evil, hear no evil' approach to this issue has led him down a tawdry path of being a suspect - or at least an involved witness - in a criminal investigation.

Blair must wonder what is coming out of the woodwork next because an angry Lord Levy feels he is the government fall-guy and I don't think he will go quietly. He is a high profile figure in Blair's scheme of things too, being a major contributor to Jewish causes and the central figure in The Labour Friends of Israel. He has been described by The Jerusalem Post as the most significant figure in British Jewry. The Jewish fraternity in the UK is furious at his treatment and there are even mutterings of an anti-semitic undertone to the way Levy appears to have been hung out to dry.

Whether this is true I have no idea but without doubt the fall-out from this affair must be a nightmare for the Prime Minister and deservedly so. He has given the green light, overtly or otherwise for the Labour Party to acquire funds by whatever means were possible and he employed Levy, former pop star manager and owner of Magnet records, for just that purpose. Blair has clearly not set rules in place and boundaries which should not be broken, or if he has then he has neglected their enforcement and I fear that he and his government are soon to reap what they have sown.

Once again, let's salute our judiciary!

Today the High Court once again has produced a judgment which will upset the establishment and has fearlessly upheld the rights of an unpopular litigant to be heard in public. They ruled that Muhammad Al-Fayed, the father of Dodi Fayed, had the right to demand that the inquest into the deaths, 10 years ago, of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed be heard in public.



At an earlier hearing Baroness Elizabeth Butler Sloss, the Royal coroner, announced that she would sit alone to determine the outcome of the hearing.



In a stinging rebuke to their extremely respected colleague, the High Court ruled that she was 'wrong in law' to announce that she would sit and determine the verdict alone and that she was also wrong to adopt, for the purposes of the hearing, her mantle as 'Royal Coroner'. The High Court ruled that such a decision might 'give the impression' that the inquest was being stage managed by the Royal Family.

Give the impression? Damn right it would - particularly given the accusations against the Royal Family - and it is great to see the High Court fearlessly opting for a full public hearing, despite the fall-out that may occur from such a hearing.

Muhammad Al-Fayed has publicly claimed, and continues to do so, that Princess Diana and his son, Dodi, were murdered by the British Intelligence Service, MI6, on the instructions of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The motive is claimed to be a fear that Princess Diana, once married to Fayed, would take her children, the heirs to the British throne, out of the country, creating a constitutional crisis.






Al-Fayed has demanded that Prince Philip be called to give evidence and has given authorities the names of two MI6 agents he claims were present in one of the vehicles at the time of the fatal Paris crash.

I don't suppose for a minute anything conclusive will come out of this, and Dame Butler Sloss still has the right to determine which witnesses are called, but at least the greatest conspiracy theory in recent British history will be examined in public and not in camera. Once more I thank heavens for our independent judiciary!