It is true that a woman can’t have a penis, but it is just as true that Britain, where Parliament is supreme, can’t have a Supreme Court. In fact, we jolly well shouldn’t have one. Don’t let’s get carried away by a rare sane decision from this horrible Blairite tribunal.
Rejoice all you like over this outcome, but it’s just the victory of one Left-wing faction over another. The moderately mad Leftists, who want to abolish husbands and fathers, are still rushing about, mopping up what remains of the married family and private life. Their aim is the total triumph of the state over the individual, and they are quite near their goal. The transgender frenzy was just a tiny ultra-crazy fringe faction of this cause.
The serious revolutionaries are willing to put this aside for a bit while they get on with the main event. But I doubt that it has gone away. The people who squashed it are themselves mostly Left-wing radicals. Tory males wisely stayed out of it – they would have been chewed to bits.
Susan Smith and Marion Calder, co-directors of For Women Scotland, celebrate with campaigners outside the Supreme Court
But it pains me to watch patriots and Christians blowing up balloons because of a decision by the ‘Supreme’ Court. The very title of this body is an outrage against the rule that our elected, adversarial Parliament is supreme.
It is a power grab, carefully prepared and put into action by the cunning Left-wing lawyers who were and are the inner core of the Blairite project. Remember the former head of the court, Brenda Hale, bossing about the elected government over the EU? These over-mighty judges are not elected, or even approved by any part of Parliament.
The late Tony Benn used to ask any powerful person: ‘How can we get rid of you?’ It is a key question, and the ‘Supreme Court’ cannot answer it.
We can only get rid of it by abolishing it before it gets too powerful. If not swiftly cancelled, it will come to be a sort of tyranny, making all our votes worthless. This danger is so vastly more important than the transgender controversy that our descendants will marvel that we did and said so little about it when we could. Why do we use all our energies instead on whether women can have dangly bits or not?
One of the main reasons for the absurd, crude view of the Ukraine war in this country is the BBC, which portrays the battle as a simple good versus bad conflict. It isn’t.
This is the BBC which promises viewers: ‘The more you try to drown out reality, the harder we’ll work to verify the facts.’
Recent BBC coverage of Russian bombing in the Ukrainian city of Sumy had a major impact, as well it might, as the deaths of civilians in war are horrible. But was there comparable coverage on the licence-fee-financed channel when, last June, Ukrainian bombs fell on a Sevastopol beach, killing Russian civilians?
They killed four, including two children, leaving 150 more injured. Kiev said at the time the Crimea was a legitimate target. I obtained all these facts from the BBC’s own website, but not from any broadcast material. Perhaps it was mentioned on air, but certainly got nothing like the prominence given to the Sumy horror.
39 steps back to a great era
Taina Elg and Kenneth More in the 1959 film The 39 Steps, directed by Ralph Thomas
As so often these days, I could find nothing I wanted to see on TV, so decided to watch the 1959 Kenneth More version of that enduring thriller The 39 Steps, which I last saw 65 years ago. It’s not very thrilling, but it is instead an amazing documentary about a vanished Britain.
Apart from the wonderful trains (an actual dining car appears!) people were more polite, humour was kinder, bureaucracy more flexible, children more articulate and (in one key scene) a policeman readily admits to exceeding his authority when firmly challenged.
No, it wasn’t a Golden Age, but neither is this.
Email that could blow up the Letby case
Whatever are we to make of the current state of the Lucy Letby affair? The former nurse is still seeking the reopening of the case in which she was branded a mass murderess and sent to prison till she dies.
Did she get a fair trial? Not according to my esteemed colleague Glen Owen. He reported a week ago that an email sent by the consultant Dr Ravi Jayaram seems to contradict a vital chunk of the prosecution case.
Former nurse Lucy Letbyis still seeking the reopening of the case in which she was branded a mass murderess
An email sent by consultant Dr Ravi Jayaram seems to contradict a vital chunk of the prosecution case against Letby
In short, this 2017 email said Ms Letby had asked Dr Jayaram for help in treating a seriously ill baby (Baby K). But in court Dr Jayaram had said she did nothing about this baby. Dr Jayaram’s evidence led to prosecution claims that Ms Letby had been caught ‘virtually red-handed’. This must have had a major impact on the jury. For they never heard any actual objective evidence that Ms Letby had done anything wrong. If Dr Jayaram’s testimony is now in doubt, it blows up the prosecution case against Ms Letby with the violence of an H-bomb.
Then, on Monday, my esteemed colleague Richard Marsden quoted a source close to the case as saying: ‘The email was disclosed to the prosecution, Letby’s defence team and the judges at the Court of Appeal before her application to appeal her conviction in relation to Baby K.
‘There is no material contradiction between the email and Dr Jayaram’s evidence, so it was deemed irrelevant.’
We don’t know who did this ‘deeming’. Judge for yourselves whether the email contradicts the evidence, though the answer is quite plain to me. But did the Appeal Court judges know about the email before they heard
Ms Letby’s plea for leave to appeal against her conviction for the attempted murder of Baby K?
I spent some days last week asking official sources. I could find nobody who would confirm that the Appeal Court judges were informed of the email. The defence were definitely told, as the law required. The prosecution presumably knew from the police who, I think, discovered the problem. But the judges? Nobody could or would say that they had been informed.
In their judgment in October those judges said: ‘We could not identify any matter relating to Letby which significantly departed from the evidence he [Dr Jayaram] gave in the two trials.’ Could they have said that if they had seen the email? I think we will be hearing more about this email before too long.
