Society

Many have celebrated, and perhaps none will have mourned the murder of former Lostprophets frontman and prolific sadistic paedophile Ian Watkins in HMP Wakefield. But his killing in the notionally high-security Category A prison demonstrates just how little control exists in our jails. Indeed, just two weeks ago HM Inspector of Prisons published a report on Wakefield in which he noted that ‘violence had increased markedly…with a 62 per cent rise in incidents and a 72 per cent increase in serious assaults’. The inspector went on to note that ‘older men convicted of sexual offences’ felt particularly unsafe, and lacked confidence that staff would protect them. Men with a high

There are still some good judges left in England. Yesterday, one of them, Sir Joel Nathan Bennathan KC, granted Hamit Coskun’s appeal against his conviction for burning a Koran. Justice Bennathan began his decision with a forthright defence of ancient English liberties stating that ‘there is no offence of blasphemy in our law’. The judge is right, no matter how much some in the Crown Prosecution Service might wish otherwise. We should be honest – this was an attempt to create a backdoor blasphemy law under which publicly disrespecting the religious preferences of Muslims would have become a crime For, as the appeal decision says, while the CPS ‘accept that there

The conviction of Hamit Coskun of a public order offence for burning a Quran has today been overturned by Southwark Crown Court. It’s a vital victory for free speech in the UK, as well as for Mr Coskun, and the National Secular Society and the Free Speech Union, which defended him. It’s a mark of the embattled state of free expression in Britain that it ever came to this point In February, Hamit Coskun had gone to the Turkish Consulate in Knightsbridge with a copy of the Quran and burnt it, while shouting, ‘Islam is religion of terrorism’. A Muslim man, Moussa Kadri, then emerged from a nearby building and

According to a recent study at Oxford, celebrity prostate cancer awareness campaigns have contributed to the over-testing of white, wealthy men from the south of Britain for PSA – prostate-specific antigen, a marker used in the diagnosis of the disease. This over-testing, the Oxford academics say, has led to unnecessary treatment, harm to individuals and expense for the NHS. My late husband, Jeremy Clarke, would still be here if he’d been offered a test at 50. He was diagnosed at 56 after he got up one morning unable to pee. His PSA at diagnosis was 38 and his cancer had spread to three lymph nodes. Once the cancer has spread,