Thursday 21 December 2017

Once More Unto The Breach?

David Davis has not resigned even though Damian Green has been sacked. So that's the Brexit negotiations screwed, at least this side of a General Election. No one can possibly take Davis seriously after this. But then, once a principled campaigner, he has been regressing for years to the days when he was a Whip on the Maastricht Bill, and after that John Major's Europe Minister. You would get none of that here.

If parents can block Internet pornography, then the technology exists. It beggars belief that that technology is not applied to the Palace of Westminster. Or, indeed, to the country as a whole. Let's not even start about Kate Maltby, who inherited a place on the Question Time panel ahead of women journalists of far greater distinction.

But the Police do not come out of this at all well, either. That said, those currently shrieking at them seem to be in no hurry to hold an inquiry into Orgreave. Let there be none into this affair without one into that. Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, Richard Burgon and Shami Chakrabarti must be absolutely insistent on this point. I would be.

Meanwhile, as Sam Armstrong is acquitted in the midst of yet more questions about disclosure (a subject on which I am very much keeping an eye), the offences of rape, serious sexual assault, and sexual assault, ought to be replaced with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, enabling the sentences to be doubled. The sex of either party would be immaterial. There must be no anonymity either for adult accusers or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not.

In this or any other area, there must be no suggestion of any reversal of the burden of proof. That reversal has largely been brought to you already, by the people who in the same year brought you the Iraq War. The Parliament that was supine before Tony Blair was also supine before Harriet Harman. Adults who made false allegations ought to be prosecuted automatically.

Moreover, how can anyone be convicted of non-consensual sex, who could not lawfully have engaged in consensual sex? If there is an age of consent, then anyone below it can be an assailant. But a sexual assailant? How? Similarly, if driving while intoxicated is a criminal offence, then how can intoxication, in itself, be a bar to sexual consent? The law needs to specify that it was, only to such an extent as would constitute a bar to driving.

Be the change.

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