Andrew Tettenborn

Just when things couldn’t get much worse for Keir Starmer’s premiership, they have. Last week the Telegraph exposed Lord Hermer’s continued support for the Al-Sweady claims between 2008 and 2013 against our forces in Afghanistan, despite clear indications that they were a try-on aimed more at devilment than justice (as established in the 2014 inquiry under retired judge Sir Thayne Forbes). Now more correspondence has emerged. This time it reveals embarrassing details about the real Lord Hermer. This week’s disclosures demonstrate something vastly more damning about Lord Hermer After the inquiry had heard damning evidence about the Iraqi claims, Hermer made abundantly clear his personal view.

There is much to like in the Fulford report on the Southport affair. It is spot-on in damning the pressure on teachers and police to treat an aggressive knife-toting schoolboy as a black victim in need of help rather than a public menace calling for firm action. And Sir Adrian had the courage not to mince his words about Axel Rudakubana’s parents. If attentive child-rearing is the best antidote to juvenile devilment, their supine condonation of his ghoulish bedroom activities gave about the worst example possible. Go beyond this, however, and doubts start to creep in.

When Labour came to power, it assured us that Brexit was safe. It never promised, however, to refrain from efforts to sabotage Britain's departure from the European Union. Leaked plans revealing that EU single market rules could be imposed on Britain without a full vote in Parliament expose Keir Starmer's true colours. Jars of marmalade could have to be sold as 'citrus marmalade' under the government's planned EU food deal The Prime Minister’s so-called EU reset involves a series of agreements to align ourselves once more with EU rules covering large swathes of our commercial life.

As you may have noticed, we’ve seen rather more wokery than greenery from the Green party since Zack Polanski took the helm. If you’re wondering why, a party policy document on transport, revealed by the Mail, might give you a clue. The party wants to reduce motorway and dual carriageway speed limits to 55 mph, impose Welsh-style 20 mph limits in towns and (according to some sources) slap on a default 40 mph elsewhere. The party would hike fuel taxes, make parking more difficult even outside one’s own home, and bring in a more demanding driving test including such things as knowledge of how a car works, and impose it on drivers every five years. Driving would explicitly be made a privilege and not a right.

Immigration has come back to bite the government big time. Shabana Mahmood’s sage campaign to set up Labour as the party of effective immigration control by making it much more difficult to get indefinite leave to remain apparently got official approval and certainly showed signs of electoral promise. But the Home Secretary's plan seems to have been carefully sabotaged. Keir Starmer was tellingly noncommittal about it this week, suggesting that the proposal to require ten years of reasonably well-behaved residence would be ditched – at least in favour of those already here and approaching the current five-year deadline.

Last week Reform UK scandalised Whitehall. If they take power, they said, they would take a hard look at the top civil servants they inherited, and if necessary swap them out for their own external or internal hires. Although this idea is not entirely new (something like it was floated in Reform’s 2024 manifesto and trailed again last year by Danny Kruger), it has caused predictable outrage. Critics immediately labelled it an ideological purge – a Trump-style attack on traditional civil service political neutrality. Parts of Whitehall are excellent. Much, however, is bloated, obsessed with process and diversity, and highly unproductive These critics have a point – up to a point.

Yet another immigration and human rights story scandalised the right-leaning press yesterday. Thirty-odd arrivals who came by boat in 2020 have, according to the Home Office, received damages totalling around £200,000. This came after a 2022 decision by the High Court which found their human rights had been infringed when on arrival they had been searched, and their mobile phones forcibly seized and trawled through. Police and immigration officers were looking for leads on the racketeers who had organised migrant journeys and anyone who might have helped them. Over 40 other similar claimants are still negotiating over compensation; the ultimate bill to the taxpayer could easily top half-a-million.

You have to watch the House of Lords carefully these days. Whenever a Bill on some fairly general subject, like crime, is passing through it, pressure groups regularly intervene and slip in their own pet amendments. This week it is the turn of a legal ginger group called Art not Evidence. They have got sympathetic peers Shami Chakrabarti and Doreen Lawrence to put forward an amendment to the otherwise fairly unexciting Victims and Courts Bill. This amendment would prevent any 'creative or artistic expression' from being used as evidence against a criminal defendant unless its literal meaning directly implicates them in the crime charged.  Still none the wiser? There is, as you might imagine, more to this than meets the eye.

Five out of six Palestine Action protesters on trial in relation to a break-in at the Elbit Systems factory in Filton in 2024 were released on bail on Wednesday. The verdicts handed down to them at Woolwich crown court over events at the UK subsidiary of the Israeli defence manufacturer – reported to have caused over £1 million's worth of damage – will not have pleased the government. Labour has been desperate to show its zeal in fighting violent protest and assure supporters of Israel that it hasn’t abandoned them. Nevertheless, despite whoops of delight from left-wingers including Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Polanski – together with others who ought to have known better – the result was very far from a vindication of the defendants’ actions.

Just as a cash-strapped administration looks for ways of streamlining justice by curbing jury trials, by a nice coincidence academic researchers have come up with the idea of holding jury hearings remotely over the internet. According to a study just released by academics from Exeter, El Paso and Cornell, volunteer mock jurors from New York State seem to have maintained roughly similar levels of concentration and enagagement whether deliberating remotely or in person. The current difficulty with jury trials is not so much inefficiency as the unsuitability of many of the cases subject to them You can hear the suggestions already: might this let the Government solve the jury conundrum without tinkering with the immemorial right of the citizen to be tried by his peers?

Did you read the big news about Reform? No, not its scooping-up of Tory MPs Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell; but rather Nigel Farage’s announcement of a new regime for future defections. Reform may once have jauntily set up what must be a first for any political party, an online defection application form: but the whole exercise is now to be strictly time-limited. As from 7 May, the date of such local elections as the government have not seen fit to cancel, Reform will entertain no further applications from any existing politician. Even for those who do apply in time, there are going to be no shoo-ins. I have already turned away several people, says Farage; and will undoubtedly turn away more.

It is easy to forget that, under a quirk of the UK legal system, if you want to get the law changed it is often not enough simply to get legislation passed. Most Acts of Parliament state that their provisions come into force not immediately, or even on a given date, but when a ministerial order is issued. Supposedly aimed at flexibility and the ability to squish boring bureaucratic bugs before they bite, it also gives governments an effort-free way to annul legislation they don’t like. No need to repeal it: just don’t activate it. It will remain in limbo: law, yes, but still legal dead wood.

Another new year, and another controversial human rights victory for a criminal. Fuad Awale was a violent thug and Islamist serving a life sentence for drug-related murder. In 2013, he took a prison officer hostage in an attempt to force the release of Islamic hate preacher Abu Qatada. After this episode he was moved to a close supervision centre, a unit meant to contain fanatical prisoners like him. There, his rights of association with other prisoners were understandably severely restricted, particularly as regards other Islamists (he had asked, for example, to chum up with the Islamic fanatics who had murdered Private Lee Rigby, a request that did not go down well). The result was that he spent a great deal of time on his own.  In 2024 Awale sued the Home Office over this.

The Church of England’s House of Bishops met to discuss the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project yesterday: that is, the project to change the rules about blessings of single-sex relationships so as to allow stand-alone services (such blessings being currently permitted only as an incidental part of some other service) and, additionally, to eventually open the door to priests being able to enter into single-sex civil unions.  At yesterday's meeting the bishops, as expected – although much to the fury of LGBT campaigners – confirmed their decision made in October to mothball the project. Though their precise formal statement has been left until after Christmas, it is now clear that LLF will not proceed in the near future. Many thinking Anglicans will rejoice.

David Lammy clearly spotted that he had set the cat among the pigeons when his plans to cut back on jury trials were leaked last week. Realising how many noses he had put out of joint by proposing to go further even than Sir Brian Leveson’s ideas of last July, in his speech to the Commons today he essentially returned to the Leveson scheme.  Under the new rules, fraud trials will largely become judge-only. In addition, the aim is for anything with a likely sentence of three years or less to be tried by a judge alone in a new crown court bench division. For offences currently triable either way, where currently the defendant has an absolute right to a jury trial – even for (say) the theft of a Snickers bar from Aldi, they will now be decided by a judge alone.

David Lammy’s plans to prune the right to trial by jury are certainly drastic. Juries would remain only for murder, manslaughter, rape and cases deemed to be in the public interest, with other offences carrying sentences up to five years tried by judge alone. Lawyers are predictably unhappy at these proposals. They see them as seriously compromising the traditional rights of defendants to be tried by their peers, not to mention revealing the hypocrisy of the man who, under the Tories, robustly defended the right to trial by one’s peers. They also think, rightly, that Lammy is now acting not so much from principle as from a desperate need to find a way to clear the backlog of criminal cases (up to five years in some cases) without much money to do so.