John Hemming's Web Log

Given that Brexit is now certain the UK has a challenging negotiation. It was to be expected that the UK would not immediately give notice to the EU under Article 50. What the UK needs to do ideally is to negotiate the settlement in substance before giving notice. Time and delay is in the UK's interest as is obvious from the comments by the EU Commission. The challenges to negotiate is how much the UK has to pay to the EU for access to the Single Market and what the continuing rules on freedom of movement will be. If the UK were to cease being a member of the EU without some solutions to many of the major issues then it would cause considerable economic disruption (beyond what is in the financial markets). On the other hand this would not really impact the EU that much. Hence the UK needs to avoid being forced into the corner and delaying on giving notice is the only solution for this. Interesting articles Nick Cohen James Strong Experimental Traffic Alerts System...

The Vienna Convention on the law of Treaties 1969 A European Parliament briefing on withdrawal from the EU

Because the UK's realistic alternative to the EU is membership of the EEA it is worth comparing Norway's situation to that of the UK. This is a relevant story about how being in the EEA (not having to follow the CAP or CFP) can mean countries having to follow laws and regulations the setting of which countries have not participated in. However, there is also the question about cash. Full fact have looked at the issue of what our net contribution to the EU is. They conclude it was about £8.5bn in 2015. Norway was a lot less. Their contribution according to This page from the Norwegian government is around 388+447+6+25 Million Euro per year. (ie 886 million Euro - see page for detailed breakdown. However, Norway has a population of only 5m and we have a population of 64m. If you look at the per capita contribution it is £132 in the UK and 177 Euro in norway. The Euro Sterling Exchange rate has varied recently from almost 1.5 to 1.25. Yesterday was 1.267. Converting £...

"I am surprised that the Supreme Court have upheld this injunction. The logical conclusion of this is that gossip about anyone with children will become a criminal offence subject to a potential penalty of 2 years's imprisonment. "It is important to note that the injunction covers people talking in pubs, gossiping over the garden fence, or twittering on the internet. All of these could potentially see an application for committal for contempt of court. That comes with large amounts of legal costs and up to 2 years imprisonment. One would assume that it would not be assumed that this would only apply to claimants who have a large amount of money, but also everyone else. Such a constraint on freedom of speech is something that the House of Lords Judicial Committee of the last millennium would not have supported. I am surprised that the Supreme Court does. "It is to be recognised that injunctions are still being used to cover up malpractice by public officials....

I have been having a debate with various Family Court barristers as to what the rules are in respect of a barrister taking on a case for a parent when they previously have taken on a case for the local authority the parent is facing in the court. The rules on the Bar Standards Board website are difficult to link to clearly. The basic rules can be found from here . The relevant rule is: rC21 You must not accept instructions to act in a particular matter if: -3. there is a conflict of interest between the prospective client and one or more of your former or existing clients in respect of the particular matter unless all of the clients who have an interest in the particular matter give their informed consent to your acting in such circumstances; or If, therefore, we consider the case of a barrister considering whether they should accept instructions to act for a parent Mr Smith against the Huntingdonshire County Council. This particular barrister had earlier acted for Huntingdon...

It has been suggested to me that the UK's membership of the EEA is separate to its membership of the EU. The EEA agreement is here and the UK is a signatory rather than the EU on behalf of the UK. This actually means that leaving the EU without leaving the EEA has no effect on freedom of movement - one of the big arguments.

What is good about the video below is that it simple takes part of the arguments of the people who wish to leave the EU and puts them together. I have looked at this issue before. UKIP used to propose the EEA which means not having a vote and just being consulted on the rules that the UK has to follow.

It is interesting that Barack Obama has been clear about what is entirely obvious in terms of trade agreements. The EU is a Common Market. It starts out as a trade agreement. It has rules as to how the trade agreement's detailed rules change, but it is a trade agreement. There is a debate about establishing an agreement between the EU and the US which is called TTIP. However, the UK should not expect to establish trade agreements before the EU has completed its agreements. More importantly the terms of any agreement the UK has with other countries is likely to be essentially the same rules as in the larger regional trade agreements. Hence we end up in a situation in which we are subjected to rules that we have no control over.

Comment by John Hemming: "The Court of Appeal are right to strike down the injunction. They are also right, however, to give leave to appeal to the Supreme Court. This issue needs to be resolved such that it is not subject to an almost immediate challenge. People generally need to know that they do not face jail for joking and gossiping. The media need to know what they can write without having to spend shedloads of cash with legal advisers before they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). The powerful need to know that if they don't want something on the front page of the newspaper they should not do it." "In the end it is more important that this issue is properly resolved than it is resolved quickly. We need an answer that allows people to go about their daily lives knowing what the law is. There have been too many injunctions recently and that needs to come to an end." "Additionally there is a difference between the way in which the Eu...

What is interesting about this guardian article is that they have decided that naming the Sunday Mail is potentially in breach of the court order (which I have not seen). They do, however, reveal that if you want to confirm the names involved you have to go to Scotland. Hence as that is the hardest part of the process I would presume that if they are right about naming the outlet they are wrong about naming the country. Still it is all a bit silly really. My big worry about the legal aspects here is that the people who are being gagged (not the newspapers, but the people who want to talk about what happened to them) cannot sensibly take the financial risk of defending their position in court. Unless there is a guarantee costs won't be awarded against them they are forced into a legal corner.

There is no sense me writing much about The Streisand Effect . It suffices to read the wikipedia article I have linked to and note that as with Ryan Giggs taken legal action to prevent something being publicised can actually draw attention to it. We have that now with an injunction that has been sustained by the Court of Appeal on privacy. It always seems a bit odd that such relatively minor things are made state secrets ... for those with enough money to spend on the lawyers. What would be a one or two day story at the most then becomes a running sore that gets far more attention than just having the one day story. The House of Lords decision in Spycatcher was clearly right. I have linked to the judgment. " If Mr. Wright were to publish a second book in America or Australia or both and it were to become readily available in this country, as has happened in regard to his first book, newspapers which published its contents would have as good a defence as the responden...

This is an interesting thing to look at. UK history has been relatively static particularly since 1700. However, the continent has historically been quite fluid. Not so much since 1945, but still some changes.

Justice for Families has been publicly campaigning on the issue of the law in respect of children left at home without parental or other adult supervision. Our biggest concern is that the law is not clear. The government claim that parents are allowed to decide whether their child is mature enough to be left alone. That, however, is not true. What happens is that either the police or local authority social workers decide whether in their opinion the parents have neglected their child. What is most unfair is when parents are prosecuted or have their children taken off them for something which they have done reasonably and with the best intentions for their child/children. There is, in fact, no published information about what does happen and when action is taken. Some of the cases are covered by family court secrecy which makes it much harder to review the case. Others have injunctions on the criminal cases which make looking at the case harder. However, here are a few exam...

The debate about the EU has in many ways similarities to that in respect of the Scottish independence referendum. The SNP argument could in essence be summarised as "we can do a lot better on our own our problems are caused by London." The Leave argument is "we can to a lot better on our own our problems are caused by Brussels". In any rational sense the wheels fell of the financial argument for Scottish independence as the price of oil plummeted.  Although I expect oil prices to go back up (and there may even be a spike as a result of the cuts in investment) it remains a really tenuous argument. The narrative on this issue, however, is difficult because it is easy for the Scottish Executive to blame everything on the UK parliament.    The fundamental political debate that creates much division is about how to respond to the financial crisis of 2008 and the cut in GDP that resulted.  There are many people (myself included) who do not like the consequences o...

The English Boundary review was launched today. These are the boundaries for the next General Election. We will know what they are in 2018. What is interesting is looking at the division of English seats as proposed in 2013 to now. Region 2010 Seats 2013 Proposal 2016 Eastern 58 56 57 East Midlands 46 44 44 London 73 68 68 North East 29 26 25 North West 75 68 68 South East * 83 81 81 South West 55 53 53 West Midlands 59 54 53 Ykshire/Humber 54 50 50 (Isle of Wight) 1 2 2 I would expect this mainly to have arisen from individual registration. To be fair there is an issue about people who are properly multiply registered in more than one constituency in that they should ...

"May I ask the prime minister to reject the view that sees terrorist acts as always being a response or a reaction to what we in the West do? Does he agree that such an approach risks infantilising the terrorists and treating them like children, when the truth is that they are adults who are entirely responsible for what they do? No one forces them to kill innocent people in Paris or Beirut. Unless we are clear about that, we will fail even to understand the threat we face, let alone confront it and ultimately overcome it." Whereas there is conflict in the world. Even though some of that conflict is caused by errors of foreign policy by the UK and other Western nations - that does not warrant the intentional murder of innocent people. I do intend writing a summary of unjust acts of war looking how there is a continuum including what are called acts of terror and those which are called war crimes. Indeed those things overlap. However, for the Labour Leader to sack a mini...

It remains that until the courts allow independent experts who are not employees of the local authority or otherwise beholden to the local authority that parents will very often (but not always) not get a fair trial. Simply put the bias in the evidence results in an almost inevitable bias in the conclusions. I will update this post with more detail when I get some time, but I thought it would be useful to put two links in to two of the organisations that help people once they have left the UK. In Ireland we have: Ectopia In the Czech Republic there is: Children of the voiceless

This is one of a number of stories about the high numbers of babies taken at birth in England. Any reader of this blog will now that this is not news. There is a well written research document that looks at this. It particularly looks at repeat removals. The original paper is here The question that needs to be answered. However, is why other countries with exactly the same set of facts end up sending mum home to look after her baby when England takes the baby at birth. We know that this is the case because people leave the country to avoid children being removed at birth (aka Forum Shopping).

The government produces an annual statistical report of the numbers of children that are looked after by local authorities as at the end of March. This comes from the SSDA903 return produced by local authorities. They compare this number to the number of children adopted from care each year. That, of course, is a statistical error as they are comparing numbers of children to numbers per year. However, it is worth looking in a bit of detail at the numbers anyway: The total number of children in looked after by local authorities (apart from short term placements) as at 31st March 2015 was 69,540. Of those 19,850 were voluntarily in care under S20 placements. 290 were in the youth justice system. That leaves 42,030 under interim or final care orders - I assume that also includes an EPO, 20 "freed for adoption." That means they were identified as needing adoption by 30 December 2005 and still have not been adopted. (See A&S v Lancashire County Council for an examp...

In The Telegraph today it is reported that the government are going to try to legislate to collect internet Metadata again. This cropped up I think two years ago and there were a number of meetings in the Commons about it. I pointed out the technical problems. The basic technical problem is that encryption is designed to prevent what is called a "man in the middle" attack. Encryption operates from client to server and no-one in the middle is supposed to find out anything about the communication. Hence if people are using proxy servers outside the UK Jurisdiction it becomes impossible to garner any useful information from this beyond which proxy server is being used. It was reported that some in the security services did not want a generalised recording of metadata as this would result in more people using encryption, not just those who knew they were breaking the law. I thought these simple facts had kicked this proposal into touch, but clearly not.