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