R

  Today, it is being widely reported that a protest from fishermen on 25th November attempted to stop a lifeboat from launching to save people in distress in the sea in Hastings. This is a move that has seen considerable support on social media from a great many people, usually on the right. But it is safe to say that those who were shocked about this event were in the minority. This raises one question. Have we lost our minds? Given other events that the news has focussed on in recent weeks, it does not take a genius to figure out that the fishermen were trying to stop the lifeboat because those that it intended to rescue were migrants. For some reason, this is seen as completely acceptable and not literal attempted murder. If protestors tried to block ambulances from leaving hospitals because they feared that the paramedics were to tend to immigrants, would that be acceptable? It is surely not different for any other emergency service. There is an obvious solution to stop the sma...

  Jury nullification is when the defendant is guilty beyond reasonable doubt, but the jury chooses to return a not guilty verdict anyway. This used to happen a lot in the United States, when Northern juries would refuse to convict escaped slaves, and, quite darkly, when Southern juries would refuse to convict KKK lynch mobs. There is some process to choosing a jury - indeed, entire television shows, such as CBS’s Bull, are devoted to it. In Bull, a talented lawyer picks the jurors he believes is most likely to return a not guilty verdict. Jury selection is shown in this show to be a science - yet the decisions made by the titular character seem to be made on little more than gut instinct. Either way, it is a showcase in how flawed a system must be to allow someone who is being prosecuted to have a say on who will have a say if they are guilty. Kyle Rittenhouse shot two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, dead at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. He did not act in self d...

  When I was a child I remember how nearly every adult wore a poppy in the days leading up to remembrance Sunday. Now, as an adult, I look around and see that it is far more common for someone to not be wearing a poppy than wearing a poppy. Is this some kind of dramatic collapse in respect for our troops? Is this the woke brigade going too far? No, it is not. Rather, when I was a child you could buy a poppy from nearly every till point in every high street shop in the week leading up to Remembrance Sunday. Now, I scarcely see them for sale at all. Simply, poppies are much harder to get hold of. Which then begs the question of where on Earth did Scott Benton MP (CON, Blackpool South) get the monstrosity that he proudly placed on the front of his bicycle? After posting a photograph on twitter of the oversized plastic poppy, many twitter users were quick to point out that such a gaudy display was surely in bad taste, even if his motivation had originally been to help raise money for t...

It might seem like an unusual set of decisions for a government to take. After Owen Paterson MP (CON, North Shropshire) was caught taking a bribe from Randox - a “health and technology” company according to its website - in order to influence public policy to the company’s benefit, the government, rather than let him lie in the bed very much of his own making, instead forced a vote to reform the standards commission so that Paterson would not be punished. Normally, “MP takes bribe and is caught” is a news story that is over in a matter of a few days, and happens more regularly than would perhaps be desirable in a functional democracy, and it’s frequency does cause consideration for the number of MPs who have done this and have not yet been caught. In this case, the government’s insistence that Paterson should not merely accept his original (astonishingly lenient) punishment of a 30 day suspension from the House of Commons has caused the story to linger for a while - and if there was ev...