Mrs Justice Lang - moronic judgement on homeless East Europeans

If I was homeless and sleeping rough in a foreign country and one night someone touched me on the shoulder and said  -I've got good news for you - we will pay for you to go back home to the bosom of your family -well I would be bloody grateful. Not apparently though if you hail from Eastern Europe.  They complained that us paying for them to go home to a nice warm bed  breached- 'you've guessed it - both their human rights and their rights under 'free movement of people' within the EU.

Something called the 'Public Interest Law Unit (PILU) of the Lambeth Law Centre - which says on it's web site that  "it is particularly interested in using law as part of the process to effect social change through test cases" and is - yes -you've guessed it again -funded by us - the poor bloody tax payer - through Legal Aid -decided to take up their case  and went to court.

Luckily for them they found themselves in front of a particularly moronic judge -of which there are -alas - all too many - called Mrs Justice Lang who decided -yes the poor rough sleepers had had their human rights and their rights of free movement abused and  yes - they should all receive large dollops of Tax payers money - for their supposed pain and suffering -£10,000 for one Lithuanian so far!

You can't make it up. But Mrs Justice Lang said in her judgement that "rough sleeping even accompanied by low level offending such as begging and drinking in a public space should not be grounds for removal." Sadly I don't have her address to give out nor that of Paul Heron a socialist and founder of the PILU.  Because wouldn't it be fun to recruit a gang of homeless and bribe them to set up camp on the doorsteps of both these people and let them really enjoy the results of their stupidity.

 

the House of Lords and Brexit- A solution

The House of Lord's attempt to wreck Brexit through a series of amendments is causing Mrs May all sorts of grief. There is though an easy solution at hand which has a blue ribbon Constitutional pedigree - just create more peers to vote through the Brexit Bill.

Back in 1911 Asquith - the then Prime Minister - went to the King - George V - and requested him to do just that if the House of Lords rejected his Parliament Bill - which was designed to curtail their powers. The King reluctantly agreed and- when the peers where informed of it - they backed down and passed the Bill.

So what was good for a Liberal government (without co -incidentally, like Mrs May, a working majority. It ruled in coalition with the Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists; plus ca change, plus c'est meme chose ) must surely be good for today's Conservative Government.

So come on Mrs May -get your act together - inform the Lords that either they pass the necessary Brexit legislation without amendment or you will create enough Lords to do it anyway.  As an added bonus may I put my hat in the ring and offer to be one of the new Lords.  Many people assume - because I live in a big house surrounded by acres of land and because we have lived here for some 800 years - that I am a Lord anyway and are very disappointed when I tell them that I am not.  So making me a peer would cheer a lot of people up  as well as helping you to achieve the aim of passing all the necessary legislation through the Lords hassle free. 

The National Trust - & Mrs McGrady the DG

Two of my least favourite phrases are 'reaching out' and the 'the need to be relevant.'  So it was dispiriting to hear the new Director General of the National Trust trot out both of them in a BBC interview.

Here is Mrs McGrady in full flow:

"I want to reach more people, and more people live in urban areas. The days of walking into one of our beautiful houses and saying that a family lived here, that's not going to do it

We need to think of what's relevant -why would someone in the middle of Birmingham say that's interesting. What is it in Birmingham that they would get more interest from? "

Well actually that's an easy question to answer. Just at the moment the good citizens of Birmingham -or a least a sizeable majority of them -are praying that Aston Villa wins promotion to the Premier League and that their other team, Birmingham City, avoids relegation to League One.  So perhaps, if she is serious about 'reaching out' and being 'relevant to urban people' she ought to -seriously -consider spending some of the National Trust's £600 million annual income on sponsoring a football team -like Birmingham City -who -judging by their performance this year -are urgently in need of a cash injection.

But actually why does she want to 'reach out' and why 'be relevant?'  Surely the whole point about the National Trust is that it's success was built on NOT BEING RELEVANT. So, when big houses were being pulled down and no one thought they had any future in the 'relevant' modern post war world the National Trust stepped in and saved them and their contents for future generations. Equally when the coastline was being raped and pillaged with caravan parks and bungalow developers (for -I am afraid to say -urban people) the National Trust stepped into the breach and bought and saved many miles of coastline.

So-learning from the past -if I was Mrs McGrady I might just ask myself the opposite question to the one she has posed.  What is irrelevant -or thought to be so -in modern society?  Well here is a thought for her -Pride in British History.  In it's ownership are many houses which are intrinsically linked to many of the great names of British history. So let's celebrate their contribution to our and the world's culture and stop making grovelling apologises for their occasional lapses into behaviour which today would be unacceptable.