If you didn't catch it last night on BBC Four, I recommend watching the writer Rob Penn travel the world buying components for his dream machine (which ends up costing over £4,000). Ride of My Life: The Story of the Bicycle also gives a short history of the bike, which remains the most efficient mode of transport ever invented — possessing a fuel consumption equating to about 630MPG.

Labels: cycling, television

Remember what I was saying about the power of sport to "break down barriers"? Yeah, that.

Labels: politics, sport

A court hearing has been set for Phil Woolas, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth. On 13 September, in the Oldham Civic Centre, an election court will hear corruption allegations for the first time in 99 years. Woolas, who retained his seat by just 103 votes, stands accused of publishing false information about his Liberal Democrat opponent, Elwyn Watkins. Woolas's campaign literature posed the question "Why are the extremists urging a vote for Watkins?" and alleged that Watkins had received "illegal" foreign donations. If Watkins' challenge is successful, Woolas will be automatically stripped of his position as a Member of Parliament, and will be barred from office for three years.

While in government, Woolas was one of the more odious Labour ministers (and that's saying something). His political career will be marked by his contemptible handling of the settlement of Gurkhas while he was Immigration Minister in 2009. This culminated in a face-to-face confrontation with Joanna Lumley, and the government's comprehensive climbdown over the issue. Before that, Woolas grabbed headlines in 2008 by publicly attacking lawyers and charities working on behalf of asylum seekers, accusing them of "playing the system".

Woolas has a record of slandering and penalizing the most vulnerable people in British society. I'll be looking forward to his appearance before the election court in September; it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Labels: politics

This article has been cross-posted at Rush to the Centre, a new political blog. I'll be posting some liberal-themed commentary over there, so be sure to bookmark the new site.

The Ministry of Justice confirmed today that the law will not be amended to guarantee the anonymity of defendants in rape cases. This is contrary to the text of May's coalition agreement and contrary to both the established policy and 2010 election manifesto of the Liberal Democrats. This volte-face means the perpetuation of an unjust asymmetry between defendant and accuser in rape cases, and serves only to compound the other unjust asymmetry concerning rape in England and Wales, namely, its sexist legal definition:

A person (A) commits an offence if:

(a) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis,
(b) B does not consent to the penetration, and
(c) A does not reasonably believe that B consents.

For the record, this is the current Criminal Prosecution Service guidance on prosecuting the offence:

Definition of rape section 1 Sexual Offences Act 1956 (Archbold 2004, 20-5)

The offence applies to the rape of a woman or the rape of another man.

The offence of rape was restated in Section 142 of the Criminal Justice & Public Order Act 1994 to include anal sexual intercourse with another man without consent. Where anal intercourse takes place without consent, you should charge rape contrary to section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956 and not buggery contrary to section 12 of that Act.

Following R v R [1992] A.C. 599 and the removal of the word "unlawful" from the definition of rape it is clear that a husband may be prosecuted for raping his wife.

A boy under 14 is now capable in law of sexual intercourse - Sexual Offences Act 1993, sections 1 and 2 Archbold 2004, 20-23.

A woman may be convicted as an aider and abettor.

Rape is legally defined as a crime only a man can commit. This is out of step with contemporary understandings of the term, with the central importance of consent, and with the principle of sexual equality. But let's put those issues to one side for now, as they concern complex legal definitions, the technicalities by which such definitions can and cannot be amended in a common law system, and the most important question, "what's in a word?"

Instead, let's just consider the issue at hand. Since the current law concerning this offence is so imbalanced, we are bound to ask "what is the most just way for the law to be enforced?" As things currently stand, when a woman makes an accusation of rape, her identity is protected from public view, but the identity of the defendant is not. This is, prima facie, in violation of two familiar moral principles about how crimes should be prosecuted.

First, equality before the law: everyone living under a particular legal system should be subject to its provisions, its enforcement, and its prosecution equally, ie, with no regard for their race, sex, sexuality, status, etc. In a court of law, this is reflected in the convention that both defendant and claimant identify themselves to the court and have an equal opportunity to make and defend the case. The present situation contradicts this principle, because it allows a woman's identity to be protected while at the same making an accusation in the full knowledge that the accusation alone will have an impact on the defendant's public profile that it will not have on hers.

Second, innocent until proven guilty. Granting anonymity to an accuser but not a defendant is a very strange implementation of this principle. It seems to prejudge a case simply based on the fact that an accusation has been made, but with no regard for the fact that there has been no conviction. Objectors will say that in other criminal prosecutions, defendants do not get anonymity simply because they are yet to be convicted. This is true: "equality before the law" does not imply "anonymity before the law," and similarly, "innocent until proven guilty" does not mean "anonymous until proven guilty". However, neither does this principle of "anonymity" apply to accusers or claimants; where the prosecution of rape currently differs from all other criminal prosecutions is that the accuser does receive such legally mandated protection.

There is, of course, an area of complexity here that I have skated over. The woman who makes an accusation of rape is not the claimant in any criminal action that follows. The case is brought not by the accuser, but by the Crown; so the status of the accuser becomes one of a witness. This goes some way to explaining the dilemma that the government is currently experiencing; after all, protecting the identity of witnesses is a well-established practice, and one that is generally in the interests of justice.

But this technicality is not a good enough excuse for the current state of affairs. For a start, witness protection generally kicks in where there is a specific threat to a witness of physical intimidation or murder, for example in the prosecution of violent drug cartels. In the absence of these threats, it is in the interests of justice that witnesses be identified, because it makes the legal process more transparent and publicly accountable. And since these threats do not usually exist in the prosecution of rape cases, a better reason needs to be found for granting anonymity to the accuser.

Now, I have not said anywhere in this post that I disagree ipso facto with anonymity for women who accuse men of rape. There are good arguments for it: encouraging women who have been raped to report the crime to the police being the strongest. Yet what I hope I have begun to indicate here is that the current law and its implementation is hopelessly asymmetrical in this respect. It establishes a double standard of treatment between defendants and claimants which only compounds the general unfairness of rape law itself. If it is considered justified for the identity of accusers to be protected under these circumstances, the same protection must be given to defendants for the sake of the fairness of the legal process. The current convention exposes only one side of a case to public scrutiny; this is achetypally unfair and unjust.

Labels: law, politics