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Leading article

A travesty of justice

Wednesday, 22nd August 2007

On Tuesday, Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, claimed that, in the case of Philip Lawrence’s murderer, Learco Chindamo, ‘we were misled by the system’. That is true: it is monstrous that the 26-year-old Chindamo, who stabbed the head teacher to death in December 1995, will now escape deportation to Italy, the country of his birth.

It was he, after all, who as home secretary in October 2000 hailed the Human Rights Act as ‘a major step-change in the creation of a culture of rights and responsibilities in our society’. True, the Act only incorporated into domestic law the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, to which Britain was already a signatory. But the convention’s formal passage into statute has dramatically accelerated a trend that has debased the language of human rights to the point where it is now little more than the grotesque Esperanto of those seeking to escape natural justice or exploit our contemptible compensation culture.

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.