Via the Society for Computer and Law‘s email newsletter, and this blog post on the SCL website, I’ve been reading some very interesting remarks about email disclaimers.  I’m not a fan (other than for the amusement they bring), and I don’t use one.  My work email signature consists of contact details, and until recently an extra line as part of the Norwich City of Culture campaign (not successful this time, but well done Derry), and now a line about an office move (to save me explaining each time).  No disclaimer though, yet.  This issue was the subject of a lovely column by John Naughton last year, as highlighted at Cearta.

The project that the SCL reported on was in fact that of the Legal IT Innovators Group, who have been trying to find a way to eliminate the email disclaimer entirely.   They went as far as to get the advice of a barrister, and that advice has been published in full on the Ligit website.  Some key points include:

• A tight form of words that (for the question posed, in respect of solicitors) covered both SRA requirements and other general issues, such as the (regularly ignored) requirements of the E-Commerce Directive and the Companies Act – and the regulations in respect of each.
• Brief confidentiality notices are argued to be useful, but the other bits of nonsense that keep appearing like virus disclaimers (don’t-open-the-attachment) and standard this-is-not-a-contract verbiage
• Very fair criticism of the patchwork of regulations and amendments, which make it very difficult to know exactly what is required in particular forms of communication
• A thorough (but unsuccessful) attempt to find a way to justify incorporation of required phrases through hyperlinks to a web page.

It’s indeed interesting that the waffle that is found so commonly is dismissed quite quickly, whereas the statutory requirements appear, to me at least, to be less common.

Oh and also, on a point not covered in these reports, nobody cares if your email was sent from your iPhone, Blackberry, left big toe or carrier pigeon…

When I teach about the regulation of ‘standards’ in broadcasting, I tend to start with ‘that’ clip from the Super Bowl in 2004.  Over time, fewer know from the start how it’s going to end, but for me, it’s turning into the case that will always be with us!  I suppose for some, it’s our version of George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words (although give me Carlin any day).  But this week, there have been two important developments, in the US and the UK, that do move these debates on a little.  (The actual Super Bowl case, which is CBS v FCC, is itself still on the go, and will certainly be affected by one of this week’s decisions).

Starting closer to home, though,(and with much less discussion as far as I’ve found) we have the High Court decision in Gaunt v Ofcom [2010] EWHC 1756 (QB).  This decision has (to use a cliché) been ‘eagerly awaited’ by those interested in media regulation as well as free speech issues in general.  Jon Gaunt, then of TalkSport, brought the case (with the support of Liberty), to challenge an adverse finding of Ofcom under the Communications Act 2003 and the Broadcasting Code regarding Gaunt’s interview with Redbridge councillor Michael Stark (or as Gaunt put it, a ‘Nazi’ or a ‘health Nazi’).  The challenge wasn’t to the Code, but to the decision regarding Gaunt (who was able to establish standing, although the original decision was – in formal terms – directed at TalkSport as the responsible broadcaster), and the basis for the challenge was article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, through the UK’s Human Rights Act.  Indeed, a wide range of ECHR decisions were presented, particularly on Gaunt’s side.  Ofcom’s argument included the special position of broadcasting, the regulatory role of Ofcom which takes Convention rights into account, and an attempt to relocate the debate away from political speech territory due to the gratuitous abuse that Gaunt was said to have been delivering.  The actual discussion by the court is very short, and while it is accepted that article 10 has a role to play (key phrase: ‘we regard “generally accepted standards” in this context as elusive, and the concept of harmful and/or offensive material needs to be moderated in the light of Article 10 and the domestic and Strasbourg case law‘) and that the Court needs to engage in its own analysis of the matter, there is ultimately no problem: ‘the essential point is that, the offensive and abusive nature of the broadcast was gratuitous, having no factual content or justification‘.

Now on one hand, it was somewhat encouraging to see that the High Court would have a chance to say something about broadcast regulation.  In that context, it’s fair enough that some (such as the comprehensive Media Blog) would see the decision as ultimately supportive of the British approach to impartiality.  I’m not sure that I’m seeing this, though (and I do have good things to say about impartiality regulation in the licensed broadcast sector) – there is not very much in the operative parts of the judgement regarding broader principles, and in the end it seems that the issue was a failure to persuade the court of the value of the speech, rather than a principle regarding the role of regulation that will affect other areas.  Within those terms, then, the decision remains unfulfilling, as the disposition makes little attempt to engage with the Strasbourg jurisprudence discussed in earlier paragraphs, and introduces what seems like a new sort of test for what is political speech without really explaining the distinction between political and other speech.  Some reports hail the definition of some of Gaunt’s comments as political as some sort of victory for him.  I disagree – this is not much of a victory, and the test remains unclear in any event.

Anyway, over to the wonderful world of the FCC, where the decision in FCC v Fox (PDF) does appear to have something very important to say about broadcast regulation and the ongoing life of the 1978 Pacifica decision, FCC v Pacifica 438 US 726, about those seven words mentioned in the introduction to this post. This case has already been up to the Supreme Court (coverage here), which found in favour of the FCC on the administrative law ground, but sent the matter back down without resolving the First Amendment issue.  It’s a challenge to a series of FCC decisions regarding the broadcast of one-off dangerous words such as shit (as uttered by the Ms. Ritchie of this blog’s title).  This week’s decision is thus the First Amendment one, and the answer is that the court favours the Fox position and finds the FCC’s current policy on ‘fleeting expletives’ being indecent (and profane too, don’t you know?)  unconstitutional on the grounds of its vagueness, with some further comments on the chilling effect of the FCC’s approach.  The latter section is loaded with examples and is extremely well argued, concluding that “sex and the magnetic power of sexual attraction are surely among the most predominant themes in the study of humanity since the Trojan War [and] the digestive system and excretion are also important areas of human attention [...] to place any discussion of these vast topics at the broadcaster’s peril has the effect of promoting wide self-censorship of valuable material which should be completely protected under the First Amendment“.

One point of note  is that the Court would (if it could) depart from Pacifica and apply strict scrutiny to broadcast television.  This is well-reported – but not the reasons for such, which rely in great part on the existence of the V-chip.  This does sting a little – I think that there are problems with Pacifica, but the existence of this stupid required technology (most brilliantly parodied in the South Park movie) as the cause for such feels a little strange.  There’s also some very revealing phrasing from the head of the FCC as quoted in the New York Times: the agency will be “reviewing the court’s decision in light of our commitment to protect children, empower parents, and uphold the First Amendment”.  Interesting order of commitments there.  But generally speaking, a big change in the regulation debate in the US, which is more than we can say for the UK after the Gaunt case.

An unlikely topic for an article in tech magazine Wired (and Wired UK, where I saw it), but ultimately an important once. Joshua Davis’ article appears to have been published in the US as Pissing Match: Is the World Ready for the Waterless Urinal?, although my print copy of the UK edition has the more descriptive The Fight To Stop Flushing.  Anyway, the article is about inventor (and former VP of the Disney Channel!) James Krug and his work on the ‘waterless urinal’.  But aside from that, it’s actually an interesting tale about regulation, technology and innovation.  Bear in mind, of course, that Wired’s virtual house style is a type of libertarian technophilia (most memorably dissected by the underappreciated Patrice Flichy, last mentioned in this post), and the presentation of the urinal question is in this tradition.  It’s very well written, whatever your views on that issue, though.  Basically, Krug has tried to promote the urinal that doesn’t need flushing (instead using gravity and a cartridge containing liquid ‘long-chain fatty alcohol’).  Various experiments appear to verify or challenge his claims about how it is ‘better’ than the traditional water-using system.

Two aspects of the story fascinated me – the role played by plumbers’ unions (in criticising the concept on scientific grounds, but – in the views of some – also to protect jobs), and the impact of the non-binding ‘model codes’ (sounds familiar?) for plumbing that many municipal authorities adopt without significant amendment.  So for Krug, or other proponents of new technologies, getting to a point where the model code is not an obstacle to your system is an important determinant of success or failure.  And the plumbers do end up playing a significant and complex role – just like the story of the actual ‘Luddites’ is much more interesting than the trite use of the phrase in the present day would suggest.

The research commissioned by the Strategic Advisory Board for IP Policy (SABIP) in the UK has become an important part of the IP landscape over the last 18 months.  I don’t know how it’s going to fare in this age of quango-criticism, but right now there are various projects in progress.  One of them that I was particularly interested in was about copyright and contracts. This particular project was led by Martin Kretschmer, director of CIPPM at Bournemouth University and its final report, The Relationship Between Copyright and Contract Law, has now been published.  Here’s the executive summary and the full report, or options to download separate chapters.  It’s made up of three long papers / literature reviews and an overall summary.  The bibliography is – as you might expect – extensive.

It’s a very wide-ranging report.  (And bonus points for the first footnote being to Johnson & Post, an old favourite in cyberlaw).  In particular, it should be noted that one of its significant concerns is the type of non-negotiated agreement that governs the relationship between a provider and a user after the purchase of protected creative material, as well as the more conventional territory of the contractual situation of creators, performers and so on.  I intend on using it as student reading material for IT/Internet law and also for a module we teach on Commercial Aspects of Media Law.

Here are some points that I found particularly interesting or useful, in no particular order.  It’s a very thorough piece of work – although it would have been fun to see what the authors made of the contract/license debate, which is certainly coming to a head in a number of US cases (e.g. Jacobsen v Katzer, now settled), or the EULA issues raised in MDY v Blizzard and the issues highlighted through Amazon’s Orwellian mess.  But this could well have been beyond the tender, so we should turn to my recommendations and highlights, which are (with a bias towards paper 3 on end user / Internet issues given my own interests):

• Helpful ‘creator profiles’ of two examples (an electronica artist and a children’s book illustrator) (Kretschmer, paper 2, pp. 46-7 of full report)
• A table on ‘unfair DRM’ (Derclaye & Favale, paper 3, p. 139)
• An analysis of exceptions in the US and EU, with further discussion on member state transposition in UK, Ireland and Portugal (paper 3, pp. 87-104)
• A very readable summary of the role of contracts in restricting ‘user freedoms’ (paper 3, pp. 105-108)
• The wonderfully tantalising comment (after discussion of click-wrap cases in the US) that “rulings by European courts on similar circumstances are still to come” (paper 3, p. 116).  And the footnote to this point discussed the NPG/Wikipedia issue with links from Technollama (Andres Guadamuz) and Francis Davey!
• An argument about the application of ‘fairness’ criteria to copyright contracts (whether through the removal of the exclusion of copyright from the Unfair Contract Terms Act or otherwise (paper 2, p. 77 and paper 3, pp. 122-124).  [On this, note that BIS is currently consulting on the UK's position regarding fairness in the European directive, informed in particular by the Supreme Court's decision in OFT v Abbey National]
• A roundup of developments and academic work on collective societies and copyright, highlighting the cost of administration and the ultimate regulatory role of these agreements (Watt, paper 1, pp. 35-37 )

Full report from the SABIP website.

Shameful stuff from Associated Newspapers: off they went to the High Court to seek an injunction.  (I’m not sure exactly what the claim was – it appears to have been IP-related, but the Guardian report says it was about ‘trademark copyrights’, which is a new one on me).  The reason?  A spoof newspaper, the METR0 (zero instead of O in the actual METRO), the subject of a website and a small physical distribution effort in London.

There’s a fabulous transcript (PDF) of the late-night hearing, with Smith J expressing some serious scepticism about the whole enterprise and the realistic impact of the spoof on Associated’s interests.  It does remind me of the climax of that excellent film The Yes Men Fix The World (which I saw at Cinema City in Norwich, recently broadcast on TV and now available on DVD).  They produced and circulated a note-perfect spoof New York Times.  No injunctions there.  Perhaps Associated are a little more sensitive about the fine brand that is Metro.

But seriously – how can a newspaper, in good conscience, go for an injunction like this, the type of thing that if it were served on a newspaper would provoke immediate (and fair) criticism of judges stopping the presses at the eleventh hour and suppression of press freedom.  The political campaigners and satirists behind Metr0 may not have the record of Private Eye, but to be the subject of an attack from a newspaper is just bizarre.  The fact that the basis was IP rather than defamation or privacy does not change this.  I feel like Neil Kinnock’s 1985 grotesque chaos quote is hanging over this…

Many years ago, in the days of dial-up, I used to use software like PointCast (remember it?) to download newspaper stories for offline reading.  This was about 12-13 years ago, certainly before the widespread availability of RSS.  And soon after RSS came on the scene, I was subscribing to various feeds, briefly through browser/email addons but swiftly moved to Google Reader.  However, a few weeks ago, I went back to the future, with NetNewsWire for the Mac (albeit synchronised with Google Reader).  I don’t always have my laptop with me – but I’ve tried to get into the habit of going through a lot of subscriptions at once, rather than checking on a very frequent basis (not that I have time for that some weeks anyway) – and anyway the synchronising keeps things fairly well integrated.

All this is by way of an introduction to a handful of recommendations – mostly blogs that I haven’t mentioned before, or are new to me or to the Web.  I subscribe to a lot of feeds – probably too many – although not all are related to the interests of this blog and the accompanying Twitter feed (see, I’ve mentioned T*****r in three consecutive posts!).  I also subscribe to various general and public law blogs, and to other blogs that have little or nothing to do with my day job (mostly books, music and baseball – a heady mix).  The blogroll on this site is out of date, and I don’t plan on integrating my feeds into this site, but I will share some suggestions.  I should also highlight the useful aggregation of all media-related blog posts and news stories from the Guardian, found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/rss.  Links below are to homepages rather than RSS feeds.

At last…the 1709 copyright blog.  A spinoff of the prolific IPKat blog, but dealing with copyright in much more detail.

Panopticon.  This blog is about ‘information law’ – mostly data protection and FOI.  It’s written by barristers at 11 King’s Bench Walk (11KBW).

Internet Co-Regulation.  Another spinoff – this time, Chris Marsden’s documentation of his next book on this very topic.

The Symbiotic Web Blog.  This is presented by Paul Bernal – PhD candidate at LSE, who I met at BILETA in March 2010.  He’s only getting started in the blogging world, but his posts about privacy in particular are very interesting.

GamePolitics News.  Actually a lot of law here too, and links to related academic work.  Very frequent (so I tend to skim and look for particular stories), but if you’re doing work in this area, it’s a great jumping-off point.

BBC College of Journalism Blog. Some of this is primarily of interest to an internal BBC audience, but journalism students in particular will appreciate it.

Grant Goddard.  A blog about the radio industry in the UK, with lots of unique content based on ratings and Ofcom materials.  Tends to have a post or two a week, but with a lot of detail.

And finally, as I mentioned it earlier…Inforrm – the International Forum for Responsible Media.  Very quickly, a big player in the world of media law blogs.  Has a particular strength in providing access to documents not otherwise available, and also publishes regular roundups of everything that’s going on in the UK and elsewhere.  I’ll say more about Inforrm in a post about libel law reform in the near future…

So.  As I said, I only managed to make it to the second day of the fifth edition of Gikii, but it was a very full day, and shows the strength of the concept (there is definitely an emerging Gikii aesthetic!) and the wide range of contributors.  I should say that my immediate impressions and various links are on my Twitter feed, and the tag gikii has lots of other views.  This post has some remarks on my own session, some shorter remarks on the session I chaired, and some even shorter remarks on the final session of the day.  Don’t forget that you can download most of the presentations from both days at this link.

Having arrived from Dublin the night before as part of a triangular journey (Stansted-Dublin, Dublin-Edinburgh, Edinburgh-Stansted), I was first up on Tuesday morning with my own presentation.  This time around, my topic was What We Talk About When We Talk About Google (or WWTAWWTAG as it is in my notes).  The idea for this presentation came from earlier (and as yet, incomplete) work on the Google Books case, and how it seemed to come at a time when Google’s treatment by politicians, NGOs and academics was in a state of flux.  Google is also involved in some of the most controversial media and technology policy issues on the table right now, everything from net neutrality to privacy.  So it seemed interesting to dig a little deeper. My presentation (which you can download here as PDF) was therefore an attempt to explore the question in the title in a number of different ways.  For example, I looked at the ways in which both courts and parliamentarians in the UK refer to Google – and compared that with a sample of news coverage, finding not just some differences (with the parliamentary discussion still focusing on Google as a general resource for search) but also some interesting internal differences within the media (in this sample, the Daily Mail / Mail on Sunday got very upset about Google Street View).  I also illustrated the different faces of Google through various parodies/cartoons produced by others, and talked about the various friends and allies that are found in Google’s public policy activities, and the result in the Viacom case.  I do hope to do some more detailed work on this, as it was more interesting (to me, at least) than I had thought.  Curiously, it also drew quite a lot of good laughs, with Ray Corrigan giving it a joint comedy award.  This is not my usual territory.  I don’t think my students would write ‘stand-up comedian’ on their feedback forms.

Luckily, the following presenter, Trevor Callaghan, had genuine claim to the comedy tag, with a discussion of Google and social networking.  It was a really through and unquestionably unprintable exploration of the topic, made more lively by the use of Prezi and diversions into broader issues of data, identity and privacy.  It’s really interesting how he was able to get a sense of what Facebook’s business and cultural models are, and how they differ from other players often grouped alongside them.  The final presentation in that morning session was another Gikii serial offender, Andrea Matwyshyn.  Her presentation looked at issues of authorised access, with a particular focus on the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and similar legislation.  Her key arguments were the divisions between criminal and civil issues (in particular, the role of contracts and terms of service), and she mentioned a number of key US decisions (such as the Lori Drew case and Register.com v Verio) and the problems stemming from then, including a pretty obvious circuit split (e.g. the difference between IAC v Citrin and LVRC v Brekka).  She questioned the purpose of the CFAA and other legislation and whether it was meeting its aims.

The second session had yours truly in the chair, and it included a range of papers on the broad theme of intellectual property:

• Steven Hetcher, “Conceptual Art, Found Art, Ephemeral Art, and Non-Art: Challenges to Copyright’s Relevance“.  Steven’s talk (from a US point of view) considered the ‘discrimination’ against forms of contemporary art that, being ‘unfixed’, are not within the common concept of copyright law as based on fixation.  In some cases, the work is the process, with no fixed object … although if unfixed art is to be protected, does this raise questions of artistic merit as an alternative mechanism for delimiting the reach of copyright?  With a wide range of slides (including a Damien Hirst shark sighting), there was also time to talk about Christopher Lowry’s work as discussed in Satava v Lowry, a 2003 case.
• Gaia Bernstein, ”Disseminating Technologies“.  This paper was an attempt to go beyond the rhetoric of ‘IP wars’ and to discuss the acceptance and dissemination of new technologies.  It builds on the author’s recently-publisehd work on innovation (e.g. here).  She traced the differences between approaches to technology in the cases of copyright and patent, and the interaction of both with competition.  She put forward an argument that the user’s role was not given the treatment it deserves, and subsequently pointed to a number of situations of market failures where (due to network effects or the importance of time) specific intervention was necessary.  Really interesting stuff, and bonus points for talking about Minitel.
• Christopher Lever, ”Netizen Kane: The Death of Journalism, Artificial Intelligence & Fair Use/Dealing“. The third paper used some very creative metaphors and images that were both botanical and big-screen (Citizen Kane), with an introductory discussion of the future of newspapers and journalism and the relevance of fair use and fair dealing giving way to a critique of the failings of DRM and a thorough analysis of the work of Ozlem Uzuner on digital fingerprinting and unique expression.
• Chamu Kappuswamy, “Dancing on thin ice – Discussions on traditional cultural expression (TCE) at WIPO”.  The final presentation in a very busy session.  Her presentation provoked a lively online and offline discussion on what constitutes TCE in a British or Scottish context, but also offered some valuable points on differences (even where in apparent agreement) between the approaches of UNESCO and WIPO and between traditional knowledge (often patent-related) and cultural expression (often copyright-related), and the links between international legal efforts regarding TCE, folklore, and intangible heritage.

The afternoon session included an even wider range of presentations. Simon Bradshaw & Hugh Hancock talked about (and created live before our very eyes) the prospect of interesting legal issues pertaining to machinima, suggesting that the ease with which this type of audiovisual work can be created will continue to be a fertile one for legal action and academic analysis (not least the prospect of issues around new provisions in the Crime & Policing Act 2009).  Ren Reynolds (with Melissa de Zwart, who wasn’t able to join us in person) talked about online games, statutory regulation of such in Korea, analogies (and case law) from physical sports like rugby, and the relationship between the rules of the game and other laws and rules, and the contract/license distinction.  The last presentations zoomed out and looked at  developments across disciplines: Abbe Brown (presentation here) reviewed the various issues, forces and actors in Internet governance and international cooperation (highlighting different approaches and parallel debates), while Michael Dizon (presentation here) presented a post-Lessig/(Andrew)Murray analysis of ‘the network is the law’.

Also, we had cake.  And that’s it about Gikii for this year.  Don’t forget to download the presentations…

It has now been pointed out to me by three different people that this blog isn’t updated as often as it used to be (and the Inforrm Blog moved me to the Less Active category of its blogroll!).  This lack of activity is not unprecedented by any means (see for example this post at the end of May), but it’s a fair comment.  Indeed, I have been thinking about time allocation and blogging, mostly in the context of a report that I am writing as part of a professional development project.  Over the coming summer, I’ll be doing some further calculation on timing – in particular, how to reserve time for blogging within the teaching year.  Not easy!

In the meantime, I have a handful of incomplete posts – some are now too stale, but others are on the way.  During June, I posted two papers here, one being the publication in IJLIT about domain names (here) and the other being the work-in-progress on video-on-demand (all those hyphens, here).  June also included two further personal highlights, though.  The first was the viva for the PhD thesis I submitted in 2009  (discussed here).  As I posted through non-blogging means (Twitter and Facebook), it went well, and I passed subject to minor corrections.  If anyone’s interested, I’m happy to share some reflections on the viva and preparing for it.  The other highlight was my first visit to Gikii since 2007.  Gikii is an annual workshop like no other, and I attended the first version in 2006 and presented at 2007 (that presentation about net neutrality and cats).  But haven’t missed the last two years, I was particularly pleased to be able to get up to Edinburgh to attend the second day of the workshop and to talk about Google.  And that will be the subject of a post shortly after this one.

Meanwhile, I do post links through my public Twitter feed, @macsithigh (although I haven’t over the last couple of busy weeks, with the exception of live coverage of Gikii, again discussed in the next post).  Do follow me, if you are interested.  I don’t talk about my breakfast.  Unless it’s comes in virtual form and is the subject of a legal dispute.

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Somerset and the West Country are favourite retirement areas for wrinklies of all shapes and sizes, mainly from oop North, where the climate is less agreeable.

It is akin to the Elephant graveyard, where old bulls and cows come to die, and with the advances in medical science, are taking longer and longer to do so.  In the meantime, they clutter up the check out tills at their local supermarket, and drive home at 4 mph.  Bless them!

Summer time is also a time when the warmer weather brings out the worst in the Great British bull and cow, and no more so than the outfits on show in public.  Whilst this phenomenon is not confined to wrinklies, they do tend to stand out from the herd like a sore toe.  I have learnt to live with singlets, tattoos, shorts displaying legs that should never be on show, even in the privacy of the home, but I draw the line at bare horny feet, with discoloured and unclipped nails, encased in Resurrection sandals.

And where is Health and Safety when you need them most?  It cannot be hygienic under any circumstances for these feet to be paraded when food is being sold.

With this in mind, I have been researching the law on indecent exposure, and correct me if I’m wrong, but there seem to be two separate offences.  The first is the common law offence which, in general terms, covers all open lewdness, grossly scandalous behaviour, and whatever openly outrages decency or is offensive and disgusting, or is injurious to public morals by tending to corrupt the mind and destroy the love of decency, morality and good order.  These are indictable offences with unlimited fines and imprisonment.

There is also an offence of exposure under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which on the face of it, seems to be confined to the male genitals.  If I am right, then there is no offence committed if a female exposes her genitalia.  A curious distinction, and possibly sexist.

I have concluded, sadly, that neither offence covers the indecent exposure of horny feet, and more’s the pity.  But let’s not be fainthearted.  Despite the swingeing cuts in public finances heralded by George Osborne, local councils are still recruiting for completely naff jobs.  So why not a horny foot inspector with ‘on the spot’ fines?

Something needs to be done, and done quickly, to stamp out, or on, this malaise before it reaches epidemic proportions.

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It should be blindingly obvious to one and all that with the advent of the Coalition Government, there would have to be compromise between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats if a consensus was to be reached.

This meant that each Party had to abandon some of its “holy cows” which they had assiduously fed and watered during the election campaign.  With cuts in public expenditure and the priority of balancing the national books being an essential part of the agreed agenda, the change in Party policy should come as no surprise.

With this willingness to bend with the political wind comes the decision by Kenneth Clarke, the newly appointed Justice Secretary, to review our whole attitude to crime and punishment, and I for one welcome this decision.  I have argued in earlier articles that the “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality of Little England is misguided and doomed to failure, as the recent past has demonstrated.

The statistics are frightening.  In the space of fifteen years, the prison population has doubled to a record 85,000.  This is not because crime has doubled.  It is simply because sentencing courts in the recent past have been compelled to pass custodial sentences where other sentences were more appropriate.

Crime and punishment has historically been the preserve of the backwoods Tory, but not any more.  It was the outgoing Labour Government which enacted the Criminal Justice Act 2003, a disgraceful and wholly unnecessary piece of legislation, with the stated aim of making convictions easier to obtain and increasing custodial sentences by a factor of ten.

More statistics.  Approximately half of the prison population are serving sentences of 12 months or less.  It costs on average £40,000 per prisoner per annum to keep them locked up.  You do the maths as they say, and all this before you throw into the pot the enormous legal aid budget, in the region of £2 billion.

The argument advanced by Little England is that if you keep offenders locked up, it is safe to walk the street at night.  But with a few rare exceptions, every offender is entitled to release at some time in his life, before he dies of boredom in his cell, and to avoid reoffending, he needs support in the community at all levels.  Surely it is better to use our precious national resources to this end.

Allied to this root and branch review of prison law comes the clarion call to the police from Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to forget about ‘targets’ and concentrate on cutting crime.  Sadly, this message has fallen on deaf ears, the deafest being a handful of Chief Constables who clearly feel uncomfortable about any new initiative which might disrupt their cosy way of life.  Remember Ian Blair?  The enormous salary, subsidised housing benefits, an inflated pension pot, chauffeured cars, entertainment allowances and the best seats in the house, and all in the interests of serving London.

Amazingly, Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, and one of the most vocal critics of this clarion call, stated, and apparently with a straight face, that just one third of her work is about cutting crime.  She went on to say that her task was to provide a 24/7 social service law enfarcement (sic) agency.  Worse was to come.  She had spoken to half a dozen chief constables and none had differed from her view!  Perhaps she should speak to the people who really matter – the victims of crime!  And speaking of cuts, Julie Spence would be high on my list when heads start to roll.

And what exactly had Theresa May said to ruffle Plod’s feathers?  “I know that some officers like the policing pledge, and some like the comfort of knowing they’ve ticked the boxes.  But targets don’t fight crime. Targets hinder the fight against crime. In scrapping the confidence target and the policing pledge, I couldn’t be any clearer about your mission.  It isn’t a 30 point plan.  It is to cut crime.  No more and no less!”

Amen to that!