Common law?

To: Editor, The Daily Telegraph

Sir,

Before yesterday, I'd assumed that if you were to produce even a very small knife on Parliament Square, the dozens of armed police nearby would within 30 seconds have you prone on the pavement with a Heckler & Koch submachinegun pointed at the back of your head. Certainly MPs of every party have been vying to see who can demand the longest mandatory prison terms for mere possession of an "article with blade or point in public place", and plenty of politicians, notably the Mayor of London, have encouraged the use of 'knife arches' to allow police to evade controls on their powers of lawful search.

Yet every front page this morning has a photo of Miss Joanna Lumley holding up a Kukri, without an accompanying account of her brave arrest and forthcoming prosecution under the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006.

Is this a return to sanity about knives? Or does it just show there is one law for the famous, and another for the peaceable private citizen.


Yours faithfully

--
Guy E S Herbert

What 50p top rate?

To: Editor, The Times

Sir,

Why all the headlines about a 50% top rate of income tax? The effective maginal rate on those earning between £100,000 and £150,000 is being increased to _60%_ if you take account of the withdrawal of allowances. It seems the Chancellor has not learned from the debacle over the abolition of the lower rate. Either that or he doesn't understand what he's doing.

Yours faithfully

Guy E.S. Herbert

Rape convictions

To: The Today Programme, BBC Radio 4

Hi -

You (and the government) are on very dangerous grounds when comparing rape conviction rates in this country and others, and assuming higher is better. It is extremely unlikely that like is being compared with like. The proportion of victims coming forward, and the circumstances in which they feel it valid or worthwhile to make a complaint, will depend on different social mores in different places. And legal systems are very different (and again affected by social mores).

For instance, in the US a high proportion of those imprisoned for "rape" are actually punished for statutory rape: consensual intercourse under the age of consent, which is 18 in many states. This is not generally prosecuted at all in the UK, and not usually classified as rape when it is. It isn't at all hard to get a conviction for, since the big problem with rape trials is seldom proving sex but the question of consent, which is wholly avoided when statutory rape is tried. This alone massively increases US conviction rates. Then you need to consider plea bargaining...


Yours truly

--
Guy E S Herbert

There's no one like Macavity

To: The Daily Telegraph

Sir,

On the day Damian Green was arrested the cabinet was meeting in Birmingham, and ministers were otherwise engaged in the afternoon in a full schedule of West Midlands regional press events. On the day that charges were dropped, the cabinet met in Scotland to the same effect. The innovation in any case looks suspiciously like an exercise in electioneering rather than government, but is this a case of mere synchronicity, or 'while the cat's away' - or what?

Yours faithfully


--
Guy E S Herbert