So, this is news? Bobbies Like a Bacon Sarnie? In a Nice Comfie Station? Instead of Going out in Nasty Cold Weather catching CRIMINALS.

FURIOUS POLICE ARREST JACK STRAW

A nice cup of tea and a bun as well, please.

“Some police officers - whatever they may say - actually enjoy staying in the police station in the warm. We are dealing with human beings, but we are also dealing with the kind of discipline and culture in the police service.”

Mr Straw added: “It is very striking around this country that if you go to one police force it is up for it, getting crime down and really motoring, while the adjacent force - serving very similar communities - has not got it together.

“It is not about money, it is about leadership, organisation and culture.”

The police are of course "furious", just like MPs were when their expenses were exposed to scrutiny.

Trent Health Authority Guilty of Abuse of Power but No Redress for Victims: A Monstrous Injustice?

I am conscious of the need for a sub-editor to work on a title such as the above but read this...

Trent Strategic Health Authority* has been held guilty by the House of Lords of ruining Mr and Mrs Jain's nursing home business and causing them "serious economic harm" on the basis of a "without notice application that ought never to have been made".

[*Note: Trent's liability arises as successor to the Nottingham Health Authority, as is made clear in the judgments. But "they inherit any liability incurred by their predecessors". ]

Yet, Mr and Mrs Jain have no redress under English domestic law and will receive no compensation.

All of the law lords expressed great sympathy for the Jains and reached this second conclusion "with regret" for their "undeserved fate".

Many will be be of the view that where a government established body causes financial ruin to those subject to its authority AND is found to have behaved wholly improperly BUT its victims have no remedy THEN it follows that:

(a) something has gone badly wrong with the law; and

(b) a serious injustice has been allowed by the law to happen.

This is simply a logical proposition based on underlying assumptions concerning morality and justice. The assumptions are shared by most who live in democratic societies (of whatever religion or none). Such people may struggle to understand this decision but only if they are not also lawyers. We lot are used to the discordance between the law on one hand and justice on the other. It's one of the things that get us a bad name.

You should read the judgments by following the title link if you want to see how this discordance occurs.

Let us look at what Trent did (this is paragraphs 6-9 of the judgment of Lord Scott of Foscote):

"6. Mr and Mrs Jain's only recourse was to appeal to a Registered Homes Tribunal. This they did. But there was no procedure available for an expedited appeal and no procedure enabling a stay of the magistrate's order pending an appeal to be obtained. We were told that the procedures under which appeals to a Registered Homes Tribunal can be made lead to a minimum delay of six weeks before an appeal can be heard. In the event, Mr and Mrs Jain's appeal was not heard until February 1999, over four months after the order had been made, and, not surprisingly, by the time the appeal was heard irrevocable damage had already been done to their nursing home business, with an adverse knock-on effect on other assets that they owned.

7. The appeal, heard by the Tribunal on 8 and 9 February 1999, was a resounding success. But the success came too late to afford them more than the satisfaction of vindication. The Tribunal, having heard evidence from the Authority in purported justification for the action they had taken, did not call for any evidence from the Jains in response and were scathing in their criticism of the Authority. In the Tribunal's nineteen page Reasons For Decision one reads of the inclusion of irrelevant and prejudicial information in the statutory statement that had been placed by the Authority before the magistrate, of insinuations by the Authority of abuse of residents notwithstanding the absence of evidence sufficient to justify any charges of abuse, and of untrue suggestions by the Authority of failure by the Jains to comply with various statutory regulations. Some of the complaints made in the statutory statement about the running of the nursing home did, in the view of the Tribunal, have some substance but, commented the Tribunal, "none warranted the immediate closure of the home". They said that "there was no reason for supposing that the residents could not properly have been protected by proper monitoring by the inspectors and the provision of advice where necessary". The statutory statement had complained that building works of improvement being carried out at Ash Lea Court had produced an unsatisfactory physical environment for the residents, but the Tribunal noted that there was no evidence that the dust from the building works "posed any risk to the life or health of the residents" and concluded that the conditions at Ash Lea Court had not justified an application for an order under section 30 :

"… the respondents have wholly failed to persuade us that an application for an order cancelling registration under section 30 was an appropriate way of meeting [the Authority's concerns about the running of the nursing home]"

8. The Tribunal was particularly scathing about the Authority's decision to make their application ex parte and without notice to the Jains. While accepting that there had been "no bad faith" on the part of the officials who, on behalf of the Authority, had been responsible for making the application, the Tribunal said that they could see

"… no justification whatever for the failure to warn [the Jains] that the application was to be made"

So the Tribunal allowed the appeal, set aside the magistrate's order of 1 October 1998 and expressed, as a coda, their regret that they had no power to order the Authority to pay Mr and Mrs Jain's costs: cold comfort, no doubt, for the Jains.

9. The upshot of this sad story is that Mr and Mrs Jain's nursing home business had been ruined and serious economic harm had been inflicted on them by an ex parte without notice application that ought never to have been made".

Well, there you go Mr and Mrs Jaine. Trent are wholly discredited, have abused their powers, you have been ruined and all you get is "vindication". Oh, you can try your luck in Europe if you like. You will need to finance it if you can or get funding from the LSC.

You might also sympathise with the Jaines in respect of the finding of no bad faith. Read all of the judgments. I do.

Baby P and the Witches of Salem Part 2: More About Sharon Shoesmith

Yesterday I posted the first part of this comment series. I barely got to the point of the title.

The point is that we should not be hunting down and burning the foot soldiers. I will get to that point in Part 3.

Yesterday I focused on Haringey's Head of Children's Services and her shameful belief that she could save her hide by employing media consultants. Well, they sacked her anyway. An intelligent person should have foreseen that inevitable outcome and would, out of mere pragmatism, have gone before they were axed. Her strategy has simply humiliated her further and made future rehabilitation less likely.

Sharon Shoesmith seems to have perceived herself as being in a similar position to the Chief Executive of a private sector company that fails and fails catastrophically.

She read the newspapers and discovered that catastrophic failure and breach of duty seemed to result in lottery style payments on termination of office. She discovered that the bigger the failure the bigger the payment might be. She discovered that if they toughed it out for the longest possible time the employer would pay even more. They would pay almost anything to get rid of the problem.

What she forgot was that she is not a private sector CEO. She presumably also forgot to employ expensive lawyers to make sure her original agreement contained CEO type compensation provisions on termination of employment.

What she failed to remember was that she was a public sector employee and was therefore expected to perform a public service.

The public may resent payoff's to private sector CEOs but this is nothing to the bitterness they feel if someone responsible for protecting children cynically decides that whatever tragedy may have occurred under their watch their own financial interests are more important.

The UK's Disgraceful Treatment Of Its Iraqi Interpreters

Emulating their exemplary record (ha! ha!) in relation to the Gurkhas, the UK Government has treated its Iraqi interpreters with similar disdain. Or, as a friend commented to me 5 minutes ago, "like shit."

Her ex-husband was in the army for 22 years and was treated abysmally by the Ministry of Defence. She says that the treatment of the Gurkhas and the Iraqi interpreters is simply par for the course so far as the MOD is concerned. They use you and throw you away.

My friend has particular experience relating to the Gurkhas, who she describes as wonderful, friendly people who were prepared to lay their lives down for this country. They are also an elite force and the treatment of them by this country is therefore doubly disgraceful.

This post is simply to pay tribute to Deborah Haynes of The Times who has won an Amnesty award in relation to her reporting of the Iraqi interpreters case. Well done and well deserved. See the title link.

The Easy Solution To The Banking Crisis

It's obvious! Suck the bankers' brains out and recondition them so that when we re-insert them bankers behave like normal human beings with human emotions and a sense of morality.

House of Lords Condemns Kafkaesque UK Government

Mrs Chikwamba was ordered to go back to Zimbabwe and apply for entry clearance even although everyone accepted that the application would succeed and the requirement would have no beneficial effect for anyone. The the uk government could hardly deny that there would be serious deleterious consequences for her, her husband and her young daughter.

It was a jobsworth application of the rules that would have lead, in the words of Lord Scott of Foscote, to something that should not be allowed to happen. He said:

"...policies that involve people cannot be, and should not be allowed to become, rigid inflexible rules. The bureaucracy of which Kafka wrote cannot be allowed to take root in this country and the courts must see that it does not."

Remembering that the Court of Appeal had upheld the uk government's Kafkaesque approach, we must be very grateful that we have the House of Lords who unanimously cut through the crap. Lord Scott also thought that the lower courts (including the Court of Appeal) had approached the matter in a manner that was "clearly unreasonable and disproportionate" and was amazed that the application had got this far.

LORD BROWN OF EATON-UNDER-HEYWOOD (who has defeated my attempts to find a photograph of him) giving the lead judgment said this:

"Let me now return to the facts of the present case. This appellant came to the UK to seek asylum, met an old friend from Zimbabwe, married him and had a child. He is now settled here as a refugee and cannot return. No one apparently doubts that, in the longer term, this family will have to be allowed to live together here. Is it really to be said that effective immigration control requires that the appellant and her child must first travel back (perhaps at the taxpayer's expense) to Zimbabwe, a country to which the enforced return of failed asylum-seekers remained suspended for more than two years after the appellant's marriage and where conditions are "harsh and unpalatable", and remain there for some months obtaining entry clearance, before finally she can return (at her own expense) to the UK to resume her family life which meantime will have been gravely disrupted? Surely one has only to ask the question to recognise the right answer."

The appellate courts are clogged up with immigration appeals. Sometimes these appeals are hopeless. But sometimes, as here, it is the government decision making process that is utterly hopeless. A rational government would not pursue such matters and its Kafkaesque approach in this case should cause it shame. Fat chance!

See the title link for the full decision and backward links to the Court of Appeal decision.

But, another bloody nose for the uk government and its sychophantic, idle, gutless and anti-freeddom civil servants. Not a spine amongst any of them.

Bureaucracy For The Insane: No Smoking At Rampton Not A Breach Of Human Rights

Rampton Hospital is a high security psychiatric hospital in the UK. It is an alternative for prison where a criminal is insane.

Residents or former residents applied in this case to be exempted from no-smoking regulations.

For instance, "normal" prisoners are exempt and can smoke in their cells.

Certain persons suffering an acute psychiatric state can be exempted at mental health hospitals. The rules for this are, however, so bizarre that they probably make the exemption pretty worthless to the beneficiaries. We will come to those in a minute.

The result of the case was failure. No-one at Rampton gets exempted. And the court has effectively decided that is ok. This is not what interested me in this case so go to the main title link if it interests you.

What interested me was the regulations that do apply if you get an exemption or, more specifically, the mind of the person that drafted them. Here they are:

"5.9 The patient may only smoke outdoors. The location to be chosen should be discrete as the sight and smell of a patient smoking may upset other patients.

5.10 The Nurse will retain the cigarette until the patient has been safely escorted outdoors, when the cigarette will be given to the patient and then lit by the Nurse who will retain the ignition source.

5.11 When the patient has finished smoking the Nurse will ensure that the cigarette is extinguished in a suitable ashtray and disposed of safely in an appropriate bin.

5.12 The staff and patient will return to the ward.

5.13 Once the decision has been made for the patient to stop smoking then the remaining cigarettes will be returned to the [patients'] Shop for destruction."

QUIZ QUESTION: What kind of mind devises such a regulation or would want to devote a single minute of their working life to drafting it?

My answer is that it is the kind of person who themself requires psychiatric help and may well be criminally insane. Mind you, they probably have a double first and flew through the civil service entrance proceedure.