Latest from Coffee House

Farewell then Sunny Hundal. The libellous blogger and tweeter has announced that he is no longer going to keep up his self-published website ‘Liberal Conspiracy’. One reason – far beyond satire – is that he is going to go to the University of Kingston to lecture on journalism. Sunny is perhaps not best placed to inform them on basic journalistic standards. As I have written here before, some years ago Sunny had to pay out and publish a wholesale apology to me after libelling me on his website. On that occasion he published outright falsehoods, though his more typical style has been to settle for selective quotation, misquotation and misrepresentation.

Sir Brian Leveson, who has ascended from his inquiry podium to President of the Queen’s Bench Division and Chairman of the Sentencing Council, seems to be getting a taste for public appearances. Last week he frustratingly stonewalled two parliamentary committees who had the temerity to ask for some post-publication thoughts on his report into the press, saying ‘I am a serving judge. It would be absolutely inappropriate for me to come back into the question of my report or regulation of the Press.’ A parliamentarian, Philip Davies, called him a ‘berk’ in consequence. Mr S has heard a few of the good judge’s learned friends express a similar view over the years.

As Edmund Burke wrote: ‘Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend.’ Testify, brother – and if our lawmakers have no manners, then we are really up a creek. As Spectator columnist James Forsyth noticed yesterday: ‘Quite remarkable that no MP has offered Jo Swinson, who is seven months pregnant, a seat. Really shocking manners and decency.’ Swinson didn’t help matters when, according to the Mail, she said it would have been ‘quite sexist’ to suggest she was not capable of standing. I wonder how damaging that sort of attitude is to feminism in general? One of the persistent grumbles I hear

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, yesterday declared that it was right not to prosecute doctors who authorised abortions which, according to a Telegraph investigation, were requested because of the gender of the foetus. It seems that the women mentioned more than one reason for the abortions so it wasn’t possible to isolate the gender selection element from the other factors. ‘The only basis for a prosecution would be that although we could not prove these doctors authorised a gender-specific abortion, they did not carry out a sufficiently robust assessment of the risks,’ he said. And just what might a ‘robust’ assessment of risk amount to? As Mr Starmer made clear it’s

The High Court has rejected the “bedroom tax” claimants’ case. In a ruling issued earlier this morning, Lord Justice Laws said that ‘the PSED [Public Sector Equality Duty on the benefit reforms] was fulfilled; and the effects of the HB [Housing Benefit] cap were properly considered in terms of the discipline imposed by the requirement of proportionality.’ On the point of the government providing additional help for disabled people affected by the cap, the judge wrote: ‘provision of extra funding for DHPs [‘discretionary housing payments’] and advice and guidance on its use cannot be said to be a disproportionate approach to the difficulties which those persons faced.’ Laws added that certain arguments of the claimants

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling in the Snatch Land Rover / Challenger II cases, which allowed the families of four soldiers who lost their lives while serving in Iraq to sue for damages, has provoked some strong opinions. Some say that the MoD is in all ways different from other employers and that it should not therefore be held accountable in the courts. Of course soldiering is not ‘just another job’, but surely it does not follow that we should tolerate the deaths of young British citizens if those deaths are caused by the Government’s failure to provide adequate training or equipment. Soldiers should be no less entitled than the

The verdicts have been delivered in the Operation Bullfinch trial. Seven of the nine men have been found ‘guilty’. The case involved the highly organised sexual and physical abuse of underage girls in the ‘care’ system. This was carried out by a gang of men in Oxfordshire over the course of nearly a decade. As I wrote of one of the most shocking aspects of the case: ‘One of the victims sold into slavery was a girl of 11. She was branded with the initial of her “owner” abuser: “M” for Mohammed. The court heard that Mohammed “branded her to make her his property and to ensure others knew about

Nadine Dorries said during the debate on same sex marriage last week that ‘This bill in no way makes a requirement of faithfulness from same-sex couples. In fact, it does the opposite’. Her rather surprising claim stems from the government’s plans to maintain the current definition of adultery in the equal marriage bill. Although not defined in statute, case law defines adultery as sexual intercourse between persons of the opposite sex. So while a heterosexual man can be divorced on the basis of unfaithfulness with another woman, a homosexual man could not on the basis of unfaithfulness with another man. The definition of adultery has caused legislators a collective headache

What freedoms we have in Britain have not come as a rule from revolutions and thunderous declarations of the rights of man. More often than not, our liberties have come because bloody-minded and obstinate men and women have squared their shoulders and decided to fight an arbitrary decision, when others would have surrendered. Paul Chambers has the right to claim a good deal of credit for compelling the Director of Public Prosecutions to stop treating offensive but harmless remarks as crimes. I won’t go through his case in detail because I have told his story elsewhere. But in brief Paul was planning to fly to Belfast to visit a woman

Given that David Cameron, rightly, seems to believe Lord Leveson’s recommendations are a crock of shit, what was the point of the inquiry in the first place? To show that something was being done? To give people like the hilarious Coogan a day in the sun, and that smug prolix lawyer who thought he was James Mason in The Verdict? We have to stop handing things over to lawyers and judges. Journalists are bad enough, but these people are even more thieving, grasping, self-righteous and utterly out of touch with public opinion. Too much time is given over to what they have to pronounce, too much weight given to their

‘Clearly she has morphed somewhere in her career from social worker to political commissar.’ These are the words of Minette Marrin, writing of the social worker at the centre of the fostering scandal at Rotherham Council in the Sunday Times. Marrin’s article unpicks Rotherham Council’s position, turns it over and concludes that: ‘[The] thoughtless, obstinate political correctness of the Joyce Thacker (Rotherham’s senior social worker) variety is rampant throughout social services. Many of them are highly politicised in plain party-political terms as well. It’s a national disgrace and a national disaster. In adoption, for instance, it is such misguided attitudes that make it so very difficult for a child in

Just last month I wrote about the inverted priorities of our judiciary and police who busy themselves with the arrest of individuals for things posted on social networking sites. Earlier today police bailed a 19 year old man after he was arrested for posting a video of a burning poppy on Facebook. The video was allegedly accompanied by a statement which read: ‘How about that you squadey c****.’ The sentiment is undoubtedly crass and offensive, but I suspect few would support his prosecution for offences under the Malicious Communications Act 1988. In itself this is a remarkable indication of just how inverted the police’s priorities have become. Yet, he is