Andrew Tettenborn

There is much to like in the Fulford report on the Southport affair. It is spot-on in damning the pressure on teachers and police to treat an aggressive knife-toting schoolboy as a black victim in need of help rather than a public menace calling for firm action. And Sir Adrian had the courage not to

When Labour came to power, it assured us that Brexit was safe. It never promised, however, to refrain from efforts to sabotage Britain’s departure from the European Union. Leaked plans revealing that EU single market rules could be imposed on Britain without a full vote in Parliament expose Keir Starmer’s true colours. Jars of marmalade

As you may have noticed, we’ve seen rather more wokery than greenery from the Green party since Zack Polanski took the helm. If you’re wondering why, a party policy document on transport, revealed by the Mail, might give you a clue. The party wants to reduce motorway and dual carriageway speed limits to 55 mph,

Immigration has come back to bite the government big time. Shabana Mahmood’s sage campaign to set up Labour as the party of effective immigration control by making it much more difficult to get indefinite leave to remain apparently got official approval and certainly showed signs of electoral promise. But the Home Secretary’s plan seems to

Last week Reform UK scandalised Whitehall. If they take power, they said, they would take a hard look at the top civil servants they inherited, and if necessary swap them out for their own external or internal hires. Although this idea is not entirely new (something like it was floated in Reform’s 2024 manifesto and

Yet another immigration and human rights story scandalised the right-leaning press yesterday. Thirty-odd arrivals who came by boat in 2020 have, according to the Home Office, received damages totalling around £200,000. This came after a 2022 decision by the High Court which found their human rights had been infringed when on arrival they had been

You have to watch the House of Lords carefully these days. Whenever a Bill on some fairly general subject, like crime, is passing through it, pressure groups regularly intervene and slip in their own pet amendments. This week it is the turn of a legal ginger group called Art not Evidence. They have got sympathetic

Five out of six Palestine Action protesters on trial in relation to a break-in at the Elbit Systems factory in Filton in 2024 were released on bail on Wednesday. The verdicts handed down to them at Woolwich crown court over events at the UK subsidiary of the Israeli defence manufacturer – reported to have caused

Just as a cash-strapped administration looks for ways of streamlining justice by curbing jury trials, by a nice coincidence academic researchers have come up with the idea of holding jury hearings remotely over the internet. According to a study just released by academics from Exeter, El Paso and Cornell, volunteer mock jurors from New York State seem

Did you read the big news about Reform? No, not its scooping-up of Tory MPs Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell; but rather Nigel Farage’s announcement of a new regime for future defections. Reform may once have jauntily set up what must be a first for any political party, an online defection application form: but the whole

It is easy to forget that, under a quirk of the UK legal system, if you want to get the law changed it is often not enough simply to get legislation passed. Most Acts of Parliament state that their provisions come into force not immediately, or even on a given date, but when a ministerial

Another new year, and another controversial human rights victory for a criminal. Fuad Awale was a violent thug and Islamist serving a life sentence for drug-related murder. In 2013, he took a prison officer hostage in an attempt to force the release of Islamic hate preacher Abu Qatada. After this episode he was moved to a

The Church of England’s House of Bishops met to discuss the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project yesterday: that is, the project to change the rules about blessings of single-sex relationships so as to allow stand-alone services (such blessings being currently permitted only as an incidental part of some other service) and, additionally, to

David Lammy clearly spotted that he had set the cat among the pigeons when his plans to cut back on jury trials were leaked last week. Realising how many noses he had put out of joint by proposing to go further even than Sir Brian Leveson’s ideas of last July, in his speech to the

David Lammy’s plans to prune the right to trial by jury are certainly drastic. Juries would remain only for murder, manslaughter, rape and cases deemed to be in the public interest, with other offences carrying sentences up to five years tried by judge alone. Lawyers are predictably unhappy at these proposals. They see them as

Shabana Mahmood is a bright minister among a cabinet of duds, dealt a difficult hand and playing it rather well. There was a good deal to like about her speech this afternoon, launching the document describing the government’s plans to deal with refugees and deportation. The idea of reviewing refugee status every 30 months, with a