Andrew Tettenborn

Traditionalists in the Church of England and the Catholic church don't, of course, always see eye to eye. But on the issue of gay marriage and same-sex relations they may have found some common ground. In a landmark ceremony last week, the Church of England blessed a same-sex couple's relationship for the first time. Prayers for two women – Catherine Bond and Jane Pearce – were held at St John the Baptist Church, in Felixstowe, Suffolk. As if by chance, this week we also heard about the same issue from the papal Dicastery, the Vatican body tasked with maintaining sound doctrine. Five conservative cardinals had submitted a dubium (i.e. awkward question) about whether blessings of same-sex unions were reconcilable with either scripture or church teaching.

Threats to free speech can come from unexpected places these days. A law passed in Northern Ireland has troubling implications for what can be said or reported about serious sexual misconduct, not only in Belfast, but also in London. Victims of sexual offences are granted lifetime anonymity in the UK. The law bans publications from printing anything that could publicly identify them. But since September, the Northern Ireland Justice (Sexual Offences and Trafficking Victims) Act goes way further. It extends the gag to 25 years after the victim’s death unless a court decides otherwise, and allows any relative down to a great-grandchild to petition the court to prolong it if it thinks this in the public interest.

A couple of weeks ago, according to a story broken last Friday in Le Monde, the French government did the unthinkable. ‘MA’, as he has been dubbed by the French press, is an Uzbek exile and alleged radical Islamist who has long been a thorn in France’s side. Allegedly linked to the Islamist party Hizb-ut-Tahrir (which he denies), he had fled Uzbekistan after facing criminal proceedings in 2015, and was denied refugee status in Estonia. France, having found him to be someone ‘embedded in the jihadist movement’ with a desire to fight in Syria, followed suit and served him an expulsion order.

The Conservative party used to be the party of individual liberty. No longer, it seems – at least if the Criminal Justice Bill just introduced in the House of Commons is anything to go by. It’s not simply the worrying powers it promises that will interfere with people at home (for example, it contains police powers to enter homes without a warrant to search for items of stolen property, or to seize the knives you keep at home, potentially without compensation, on the mere suspicion that they might be used criminally). Discreetly lurking in the Bill (in schedule 6, since you ask) is something much more serious: something which comes very close to a power in the police to legislate permanently for what you and I are allowed to do in public.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Ian Fry, the United Nations’ rapporteur for climate change and human rights, has waded in on the jail terms handed to Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists. The UN has a growing habit of muscling in and trying to micromanage states' internal affairs, especially in cases where there’s a progressive point to be made. Fry said he was ‘particularly concerned’ about the sentences received by the two activists who scaled the M25 bridge over the Thames at Dartford last year. Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland were convicted of causing a public nuisance, with Decker imprisoned for two years and seven months and Trowland for three years.

This morning, the Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal’s judgment on the Rwanda plan and declared that the scheme is unlawful. The Court of Appeal had said that the principle of sending asylum seekers to foreign countries was unexceptionable. But the courts had to decide if Rwanda was likely to be a safe country which would not mistreat asylum seekers, or send them on to third countries where they would face mistreatment. It determined that Rwanda was not safe. The Supreme Court’s decision was, broadly, that the Court of Appeal had been right to take that line, and that the justices agreed with it.  This decision is not particularly good news for believers in democracy, or those who believe elected authorities should have the right to police borders.

One problem clearly emerged after an Islamist fanatic blew himself up at a major pop concert in the Manchester Arena in 2017, killing 22 other people. This was that no one there had a clue about how to react to events of this sort. The government promised action. Action we now have, in the form of the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill announced in the King’s speech. Unfortunately, as with many well-intentioned 'something must be done' measures, this Bill, aimed at requiring a degree of terrorism preparedness at events like this, could well go too far the other way. If enacted as suggested, the cure could end up being worse than the disease.

What does Iran have to teach the world about human rights? The United Nations appears to think we have plenty to learn from a pariah state which backs Hamas, arrests and beats women for failing to wear a hijab, executes protesters and hangs gay people. In Geneva, the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights Council – essentially a human rights jamboree – opens today; its chair is Ali Bahreini, Iran’s UN ambassador, who will oversee a conference discussing the contribution of science, technology and innovation to the promotion of human rights. Iran, which has used facial recognition technology to identify dissidents, is likely to have some expertise here. It's beyond a joke, of course.

The function of the police, one might have thought, was to protect the weak against the overbearing and the bullying. Unfortunately, a by-product of the Gaza crisis has been to suggest that, at least on the streets of London, a bit of carefully targeted thuggery against your political opponents can pay useful dividends. For some days now, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) has been raising awareness of the plight of abducted Israelis in Gaza by driving display vans around iconic parts of London. These vans are fitted with electronic billboards on the sides and back containing the names of children taken by Hamas from Israel a couple of weeks ago, and still holed up (assuming they are alive) in the Gaza Strip.

It is understandable that Suella Braverman has swiftly written to chief constables demanding them to take a tough line on potentially anti-Semitic protests. She pointed out that while it was true that explicitly supporting Hamas, a proscribed terrorist body, was ipso facto a crime, the police could go much further in discouraging demonstrations of this kind. Waving a Palestinian flag could in suitable circumstances be taken as amounting to a glorification of terrorism, another serious offence; the mere act of chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ might in some cases be a public order crime; and so on. And, she added, something had to be done about what people were saying on the internet. Online offending, she said, ‘is as serious as offline offending’.

What, you might ask, has Rishi Sunak been smoking? There is no way to spin as conservative the idea of working towards a complete ban on cigarettes by legislating a progressive age-related bar on buying tobacco. This is not conservatism as libertarianism or as the Scrutonian practice of not taking the axe to existing social institutions. The only serious precedent is not happy: think supremely bossy Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand premier who brought in a similar draconian ban last December before abruptly leaving politics. Rather like Prohibition, this will open the door to bootlegging and racketeering Admittedly, there is on one level a kind of abstract logic here. A lacklustre Keir Starmer, seeking a shiny new health policy.

It’s easy to see the thinking behind Suella Braverman’s plan announced in Manchester today to prevent sex offenders changing their name. In a country without ID cards or universal means of identification, it is fairly easy discreetly to disappear if you are at the margins of society, and possibly even to find a way of claiming at least some form of social security. This obviously defeats much of the object of having a sex offenders’ register, since it can in too many cases reduce the official record to something more like Gogol’s rentroll of dead souls. True, it is already technically a crime for anyone on the register not to tell the police of any change of name, address, or other details.

There’s a long list of academics, some of whom are on the right, who have had their lives made difficult by fellow academics. Now, for a change, a left-wing academic is feeling the heat.  Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a history lecturer at University College London (UCL), has been accused of ‘undermining the history of Britain’ without evidence. The allegation came after Bulstrode claimed in a paper that an English ironware maker, Henry Cort, stole his invention from slaves. Before conservatives engage in too much self-congratulation, however, they should stop and think carefully about whether this attack against Bulstrode is really something to celebrate.

Drivers could soon be prosecuted for travelling 1 mph over the speed limit, at least if some MPs get their way. The all-party parliamentary group on walking and cycling (APPGWC) also proposes stiffer penalties for drivers of heavy cars like SUVs involved in accidents, and an invariable requirement for a fresh driving test for anyone disqualified. However well they may go down among a certain class of activist, it’s not difficult to see that these are all fairly terrible ideas.  First, speed limits. Current informal guidance from police chiefs, pretty widely observed in England (though not in Scotland) is '10 per cent plus 2': in other words, ignore speeds up to 35 mph in a 30 mph zone, 57 in a 50 mph zone, and so on. This must go, the APPGWC say. Why?

We all recoiled when Lucy Letby, a nurse of all things, was convicted of killing seven babies in cold blood. But this murderess had one more card up her sleeve. When called to court for the last time to receive the inevitable sentence – not only life, but in her case whole-life – she casually declined to appear. By doing so, Letby added insult to injury, constraining the grieving parents of her victims to watch the judge address an eerily empty dock.  Under the present law she was arguably within her rights. But not for much longer. The government, with it seems the full backing of Labour, has promised to change things.