Andrew Tettenborn

Except for households blessed with rather generous incomes, most mothers these days have to work to keep a family decently fed and housed. Some kind of subsidised childcare is therefore an unfortunate necessity. The government recognises this, and has just introduced a new scheme. When fully up and running, it will give parents working full-time who earn less than £100,000 a free 570 hours a year of child-minding or early education for each child between nine months and four years. Plus it will (in effect) also hand them a basic rate tax deduction if they want to spend a further £10,000 per year on it. This will be over and above a free 570 hours available to any parent of any child aged three or four. Generous?

Before 7 October last year, observers had long suspected an uncomfortable symbiosis between UNRWA, the UN organisation tasked with organising aid to the unfortunate Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, and the autocratic Hamas government in control in Gaza city. The attack on Israel on that day certainly didn’t dispel these suspicions, and in January this year Israel alleged that a number of UNRWA staff had been implicated. Seventeen countries paused funding for UNRWA, including the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, the EU and several individual European states. So did the UK, which last year had provided about £35 million. The UK, which had said it would await the Colonna report before making a decision, will now face immense pressure to resume payments Will this funding come back?

It was always a racing certainty that this week’s ‘Swiss grannies’ climate change judgment in Strasbourg would spawn a new wave of environmental lawfare and give new life to that already in progress. A taste of the brave new future duly came from the High Court in London yesterday. Section 58 of the Climate Change Act requires the government periodically to lay before parliament its objectives to deal with climate change. The government has duly produced a so-called ‘National Adaptation Programme 3’, but some people say it is not good enough.

The media and the middle class may love net zero. Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear that voters are less keen. Predictably then, activists have been trying to take as much power as possible away from elected representatives, transferring it instead to international courts and judges. This morning, this programme of lawfare scored a major success in the European Court of Human Rights. Every yard gained by a well-meaning extension of the ECHR is a yard lost to the democratic process Some months ago, three high-profile cases reached the Court where the claimants suggested that climate change was a European human rights matter.

The Garrick Club affair has taken a new and slightly worrying twist, this time courtesy of – of all bodies – the Bar Council. Hot on the heels of calls for judges to resign en masse from the club because it remains single-sex, the Council now apparently wants to go even further. It is hinting that it may forbid any member of the Bar from being a member. Its menacing words bear quoting in full:  For now, it is a matter for individuals to determine whether or not membership of an institution, such as the Garrick Club, is compatible with the views they espouse in their professional lives, but this may change. As a profession it is vitally important that we retain the trust and confidence of the public.

The fall-out from Covid continues. Its latest manifestations on the international stage are a draft pandemic preparedness treaty, soon to be formally published and opened for signature by the WHO, and an upcoming vote on proposals to amend the organisation's International Health Regulations 2005 (IHR). The latter is a set of internationally binding rules for dealing with, among other things, pandemics. Neither text makes for gripping reading; both might look innocuous and almost uncontroversial. In fact, however, as a group of Tory MPs and peers from the all-party parliamentary group on pandemic response and recovery pointed out this week, they could carry considerable dangers for Britain's sovereignty, freedom and democracy.

Judge Tanweer Ikram is not your usual judge. Ikram, who has a CBE to his name for services to diversity, has tirelessly insisted that minorities need to see people looking like them in senior positions (he has Pakistani Muslim heritage). Whether you see him as an innovative radical or a dreary progressive, Ikram is now mired in less savoury controversy. Last month, he notoriously gave a 12-month conditional discharge to three women guilty of publicly displaying paraglider images supporting Hamas, a banned terrorist group. It was quickly pointed out afterwards that he had previously 'liked' a post on LinkedIn accusing Israel of terrorism in Gaza (something he says he did mistakenly).

Churches are emptier than ever since Covid. Fewer clergy have more and more parishes to look after; the buildings themselves are falling down, with little money available to repair them. In the face of these existential problems, what high-profile subject was discussed over the weekend by the General Synod of the Church of England? Encouraging more worshippers, perhaps, or possibly improving finances? Not quite. You’ve probably guessed the answer: racial justice.  The Synod ran what can best be described as a consciousness-raising session to cheer on the work of the Archbishops’ racial justice commission. It's aim, it seems, is to push race towards the top of the ecclesiastical agenda.

The largest mass trespass in a generation will take place in Devon today. Hundreds of protesters belonging to the pressure-group Right to Roam will descend on Vixen Tor, a slightly sinister-looking granite outcrop on Dartmoor a few miles from Tavistock. Since 2003, access has been banned. But given that much of Dartmoor is already open to the public, why the stress on this fairly small part, which is not? Those marching on Vixen Tor say the reason is simple: a small part of the high moor where hikers have the right to walk at will is inaccessible because it can only be reached across the Tor, which is privately owned and lacks any public rights of way across it.

‘UK’s Rwanda Bill incompatible with human rights obligations… damning report by MPs warns.’ So ran the headline yesterday morning, referring to the report released by the joint human rights select committee on the Safety of Rwanda Bill. As often happens, however, immediate appearances can deceive. Constitutionally, the UK is administered by a ministry with the confidence of the House of Commons, not by committees captured by the progressive establishment The striking feature of this report is that, even though it came from a select committee, it could have been penned by Amnesty International or another similar radical human rights pressure group. The ECHR and other human rights treaties, it insists, must be followed at all costs and to the letter.

Last week the shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook tabled an opportunistic amendment to the government’s Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill. This would require the government to closely regulate all estate agents selling leasehold properties or properties carrying management or service charges (in essence flats, or houses on managed estates).  There is a lot that is wrong with this idea. It derives from a 2019 report by a committee chaired by the crossbench peer and social housing campaigner Lord Richard Best. Featuring among its demands were a proposed licensing regime of enormous complexity more appropriate to lawyers or doctors and a dedicated governmental regulator.

Do you remember when you couldn’t get your child to school on time because of a Just Stop Oil slow march? Or when you got gridlocked on the M25 because someone had draped themselves over one of the gantries? There’s a man from the United Nations who, it seems, rather likes the idea of us going back to those times. Michel Forst, a French UN functionary with the grand title of 'special rapporteur on environmental defenders (Aarhus convention)', published a two-page report this week following a brief visit to London. In it, he referred to 'extremely worrying information' about Britain’s 'increasingly severe crackdowns on environmental defenders', by which he meant Just Stop Oil and those like them.