Keir starmer

The dynamics of Labour’s other ongoing election appear to be shifting. While Tessa Jowell remains the favourite to be the party’s candidate for the 2016 London Mayoral election, Sadiq Khan is making some headway. Firstly, Survation has released a new poll that suggests he can beat Zac Goldsmith — the most likely Tory candidate. 50 per cent said Khan would be their first preference, compared to 37 per cent for Goldsmith and 13 per cent for another candidate. Plus, 58 per cent said they had heard of Khan, compared to 55 per cent for Goldsmith. Khan’s wider appeal is in part a result of his ability to appeal to voters of all ethnicities.

Last year I met Ben, a British man who’d been made homeless and had been living on the streets. Collecting food at a soup kitchen one evening, he was approached and offered a job by a man and woman. Having nobody to call and nothing to pack, Ben got in the car. What followed was months of abuse as Ben was forced to work paving driveways, paid little and kept in squalor. He was threatened, intimidated and forbidden to leave. Working alongside others, some of whom were so totally broken that they called their boss ‘Daddy’, Ben endured horrendous abuse at the hands of men who saw him as a cheaper option than buying a machine. This is modern slavery in the UK.

In his five years as Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer  has shown a striking appetite for (self-) publicity and given the job a higher profile than ever. He’s just informed the world, from Andrew Marr’s sofa, that he’s opposed to plans by the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, to tear up the egregious Human Rights Act which is playing havoc with the English justice system. I can see why he's alarmed: the confusion caused by superimposing European law on English law gives huge power to people, like him, who adjudicate. It has encouraged, in England, the emergence of American-style judicial activism.

There’s been much chatter today about Keir Starmer’s declaration that it was right not to prosecute doctors who authorised abortions that were requested because of the gender of the foetus. You won’t read a better piece on the subject than the article by our new regular blogger Melanie McDonagh. She describes the full implications of Mr Starmer’s thinking: ‘As Mr Starmer made clear it’s possible for doctors to authorise an abortion without actually ever having seen the woman concerned. On this basis, pretty well any abortion is justified, on the basis that any pregnancy, carried to term, would be worse for the mental or physical health of the mother than not carrying on with it. Which may of course be true.

What freedoms we have in Britain have not come as a rule from revolutions and thunderous declarations of the rights of man. More often than not, our liberties have come because bloody-minded and obstinate men and women have squared their shoulders and decided to fight an arbitrary decision, when others would have surrendered. Paul Chambers has the right to claim a good deal of credit for compelling the Director of Public Prosecutions to stop treating offensive but harmless remarks as crimes. I won’t go through his case in detail because I have told his story elsewhere. But in brief Paul was planning to fly to Belfast to visit a woman friend. He saw on the news that snow had closed Robin Hood Airport and tweeted to his friends, “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed.