Andrew Tettenborn

Richard Tice of Reform may not be the most charismatic party leader, but he has impeccable timing. The ink was hardly dry on Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith’s joint resignation letter following their support for Robert Jenrick’s amendments to the Rwanda Bill, before he openly propositioned them to defect. Predictably Anderson told Christopher Hope straight away

Cheers! You will soon once again be able to buy champagne and wine in pint bottles – Winston Churchill’s favourite measure. It will be possible for the first time since an overbearing Common Market (as it was then) effectively put an end to the practice in 1973. This is very good news, and I’m certainly looking forward

Who’d be a teacher these days? Until about 50 years ago, your outlook didn’t matter very much provided you were reasonably competent. Today the profession is coming close to saying that anyone who doesn’t profess progressive and morally relativistic views shouldn’t bother applying. Glawdys Leger, an experienced Catholic teacher in a Church of England state

Traditionalists in the Church of England and the Catholic church don’t, of course, always see eye to eye. But on the issue of gay marriage and same-sex relations they may have found some common ground. In a landmark ceremony last week, the Church of England blessed a same-sex couple’s relationship for the first time. Prayers for

Threats to free speech can come from unexpected places these days. A law passed in Northern Ireland has troubling implications for what can be said or reported about serious sexual misconduct, not only in Belfast, but also in London. Victims of sexual offences are granted lifetime anonymity in the UK. The law bans publications from printing

A couple of weeks ago, according to a story broken last Friday in Le Monde, the French government did the unthinkable. ‘MA’, as he has been dubbed by the French press, is an Uzbek exile and alleged radical Islamist who has long been a thorn in France’s side. Allegedly linked to the Islamist party Hizb-ut-Tahrir (which he

The Conservative party used to be the party of individual liberty. No longer, it seems – at least if the Criminal Justice Bill just introduced in the House of Commons is anything to go by. It’s not simply the worrying powers it promises that will interfere with people at home (for example, it contains police powers to

We shouldn’t be surprised that Ian Fry, the United Nations’ rapporteur for climate change and human rights, has waded in on the jail terms handed to Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists. The UN has a growing habit of muscling in and trying to micromanage states’ internal affairs, especially in cases where there’s a progressive point to be

This morning, the Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal’s judgment on the Rwanda plan and declared that the scheme is unlawful. The Court of Appeal had said that the principle of sending asylum seekers to foreign countries was unexceptionable. But the courts had to decide if Rwanda was likely to be a safe country

One problem clearly emerged after an Islamist fanatic blew himself up at a major pop concert in the Manchester Arena in 2017, killing 22 other people. This was that no one there had a clue about how to react to events of this sort. The government promised action. Action we now have, in the form

What does Iran have to teach the world about human rights? The United Nations appears to think we have plenty to learn from a pariah state which backs Hamas, arrests and beats women for failing to wear a hijab, executes protesters and hangs gay people. In Geneva, the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights

The function of the police, one might have thought, was to protect the weak against the overbearing and the bullying. Unfortunately, a by-product of the Gaza crisis has been to suggest that, at least on the streets of London, a bit of carefully targeted thuggery against your political opponents can pay useful dividends. For some

It is understandable that Suella Braverman has swiftly written to chief constables demanding them to take a tough line on potentially anti-Semitic protests. She pointed out that while it was true that explicitly supporting Hamas, a proscribed terrorist body, was ipso facto a crime, the police could go much further in discouraging demonstrations of this kind.

What, you might ask, has Rishi Sunak been smoking? There is no way to spin as conservative the idea of working towards a complete ban on cigarettes by legislating a progressive age-related bar on buying tobacco. This is not conservatism as libertarianism or as the Scrutonian practice of not taking the axe to existing social

It’s easy to see the thinking behind Suella Braverman’s plan announced in Manchester today to prevent sex offenders changing their name. In a country without ID cards or universal means of identification, it is fairly easy discreetly to disappear if you are at the margins of society, and possibly even to find a way of claiming at