The animal rights movement in this country has a bit of a PR problem. I am sure it has some reasonable, well adjusted individuals within its ranks. Yet it also seems to harbour quite a number of demented window lickers, who come to the fore when incidents like the cat-in-bin scandal occur. I am glad [...]
Today seemes to be a bit of a Theresa May special on The Third Estate. But not all of it’s negative. Who’d have thought the Conservatives – the party which brought us Michael Howard and the Criminal Justice Act – could actually be better than Labour on civil liberties? Well, looking back at the last [...]
So today the blogosphere has been wrring and grrring over Con Dem plans to grant anonimity to rape victims. Harpymarx and Jess McCabe on the F word, and others have articulated their opposition to it. I must say that in some ways I have been disappointed with the scope of the discussion so far. This [...]
Guest post by Richard Symons We came to “The Fear Factory” via an unusual but (as we discovered) incredibly astute request. The Nationwide Foundation’s steering committee brief was simple enough, “give us a tool to change minds” – a regrettably necessary first step in making the treatment of young offenders something you could convince the [...]
This is a guest post by Selena Gablah. A couple of days ago Paul Mendelle QC, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, wrote an angry letter to The Times in response to Jack Straw’s proposal to cut rates of pay for legal aid barristers by 18%. In it, he claimed that legal aid barristers take [...]
When I received my review copy of Spirit Level Film’s latest documentary, The Fear Factory, through my letterbox a few days ago, I had little idea what to expect. A few seconds in, as the ominous music begins to play and the image of a foetus looms into view accompanied by the voiceover telling us [...]
So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of ‘failures’, the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it. – Michael Foucault, 1975. Just got back from a protest outside the Danish embassy, in solidarity with the climate prisoners. This week, [...]
As I write this on Saturday evening, news sites are all abuzz over the…er…shocking news that the Children’s Commissioner doesn’t think we should try ten-year-olds as adults, while the government appparently thinks it’s perfectly OK, despite the fact that no other country in Western Europe does so. So far, so predictable. But in all the [...]
Right, let’s make one thing clear. I don’t give a flying fuck what Jon Venables might have done to land him back in prison, and there’s not one single plausible reason why it might be in the public interest for me or anyone else not directly involved to know. The popularity of the campaign to [...]
This is a response to Reuben’s post from a week and a half back. I realise that’s quite a long delay (I meant to write about it last weekend, but unfortunately I’ve been away for the past week, and frankly a bit rubbish at posting for a few weeks before that) but I think the [...]
