A reader writes to suggest that if the judges will not enforce the laws, we do not need new laws. We need new judges.

Hmmm...

Over at Samizdata, Robert Clayton Dean spotted this entry in the Wall Street Journal Political Diary. It is one of the funniest examples of how bureaucrats think and how they work.

Before deploying from Savannah, Georgia to Iraq by a chartered airliner, the troops of the 48th Brigade Combat Team, a National Guard Unit, had to go through the same security checks as any other passengers. Lt. Col. John King, the unit's commander, told his 280 fellow soldiers that FAA anti-hijacking regulations require passengers to surrender pocket knives, nose hair scissors and cigarette lighters. 'If you have any of those things,' he said, almost apologetically, 'put them in this box now.' The troops were, however, allowed to keep hold of their assault rifles, body armour, helmets, pistols, bayonets and combat shotguns.

(reported in the Air Finance Journal)

Prime Minister Tony Blair says the UK might have to amend its human rights laws so it can deport those who aid, abet and incite terrorist murders. The refusal of UK judges and law lords to allow suspected terrorists to be detained or deported is only the most recent sign of a long-term struggle by the judiciary to incorporate judicial review into the UK constitution. Specifically they wish to be able to rule Acts of Parliament themselves illegal, and acquire some of the powers which the US Supreme Court enjoys.

Former Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, chipped away for years at the powers of ministers and governments to enact legislation unimpeded. He had to use skill because a separation of powers and judicial review are not in the (uncodified) UK constitution. It has been easier of late because the Labour Government elected in 1997 made it a priority to sign up to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This recognized a higher authority than the will of Parliament, and allowed judges to rule illegal any ministerial action they deemed to be in breach of it.

Before then judges had to 'interpret' the intention of Acts of Parliament, even looking to what was said in debate when the measures went through as a guide to the intent of legislators. Now they can claim to find principles in the ECHR that can overturn legislation, whatever the intention of the legislators.

Several Home Secretaries have thought judges soft on criminals, and have accused the judges, largely protected from crime themselves by their wealth and position, of being more concerned to protect criminals, than to protect society from them. Recent ministers have said the same with regard to terrorists. It seems likely that the government will try to amend its accession to the ECHR. There is resistance in Britain to laws which originate overseas, as hostility to EU legislation shows, and the government might appeal to that feeling.

The issues are not simple. There is the question of protecting the liberties of those who might stand accused of terrorism, and whether the protections built into British law are sufficient. There is the question of whether unelected judges should have powers to overturn measures enacted through the constitutional process, or whether the legislators need more than constitutional restraints. And there is also the question of whether the right balance has been struck between allowing extremist views to be propagated, and protecting people sufficiently from murderers incited by those views. There are other issues, some equally complex.

I see that a young German who created the Sasser worm, Sven Jaschan, has escaped jail with a 21-month suspended sentence.

I suppose we have to concede that he was only 17 at the time (May 2004), so throwing the full adult penal code at him is maybe a bit much. On the other hand, he was arrested just days short of his 18th birthday, and the worm caused huge damage to internet links and computer systems round the world.

I guess Jaschan thought it was fun. But it shut down things like the coastguard computers, which could have put lives at risk. And it reportedly interrupted Delta Airlines' systems, meaning that many people suffered delays and cancellations. Australia's trains were also disrupted, with similar results for innocent travellers. Not exactly 'fun'.

Corrupting, erasing or stealing other people's data seems little different to me from theft or violence against a person's body or property. And of course, there are plenty of genuine and purposeful criminals who aim to make money by targeting big systems users. The law is tough on that kind of thing. Isn't it time to get tough on computer crime too? Even teenagers are taken into custody for violent crimes. Shouldn't we be doing the same for this kind of electronic violence, to make it plain to all of them that it just isn't actually fun at all?

I'm all in favour of justice being done, and the fact that brothers Stephen and Lee Ainsby have been jailed for kidnapping and raping a teenage girl ten years ago is a good thing. But the manner of their capture raises some concerns.

A couple of years back, Lee Ainsby was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. While under arrest, a DNA sample was taken from him. When it was compared to a database of DNA evidence from unsolved crimes, it matched.

What disturbs me is that the police can take DNA samples from anyone they take into custody, even on a pretty insignificant charge. What next? Will we be expected to give DNA samples when we're pulled over for having a faulty tail light? Furthermore, they are able to keep this on file over the years. In this case it took two years for them to make the match.

There might be a case for checking new DNA against old cases, but there should be a time limit on how long it can be kept. And there is a strong case for setting down tight limits on what kind of offence qualifies for having DNA samples taken.

Otherwise the authorities will build up and retain DNA samples from more and more people over the years, until we effectively acquire a national DNA database by stealth. What then? Will they add our DNA profile to those new identity cards the government wants us all to carry? We need to consider this carefully, not be taken down that road by subterfuge.

In 1751, at the age of 28, Adam Smith was elected Professor of Logic at the University of Glasgow. And a year later, on this day, 22 April, he was chosen as Professor of Moral Philosophy, and he would remember the period of 13 years in which he held this post as the most useful and happy of his life.

Apart from some quite detailed student notes, little more survives of his lectures than was distilled into The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. But we know that he divided his course into Natural Theology, Ethics, Justice (and Jurisprudence), and Politics.

It was this last element, Politics, that would take his thoughts into the political institutions relating to commerce that would build into The Wealth of Nations; while the Ethics section became the foundation of the book that made his name, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

On the subject of Justice, Smith aimed to write a system of natural jurisprudence, a "theory of the general principles which ought to run through and be the foundation of the laws of all nations". But too soon, he would be headhunted as private tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch and whisked off on the Grand Tour of Europe, which in turn led to him getting absorbed in the vast treatise on economics that dominated the rest of his intellectual life.

The loss of Smith's system of jurisprudence has been a costly one. For there are far too many political leaders around today, even in supposedly democratic countries, who believe that they can (and should) re-cast their laws and constitutions to suit their own particular view of justice. The cost of such conceit has sometimes been a huge increase in human misery and a huge reduction in human freedom. How different the world might be, had we been given that powerful volume by Smith, telling us in his own resonant words what justice really is.

Donna Anthony spent eight years in jail, convicted of murdering her infant children within a year of each other. She blamed it on 'cot death' but paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow testified that the chance of that happening twice in one family was so negligible as to make it unbelievable.

Now Donna has been freed on appeal, after other high-profile cases saw Sir Roy's evidence overturned when the courts re-visited them. New studies have pointed to a possible genetic link in such deaths, making repeated occurrences with a family less unlikely.

His 'evidence' was that the mothers suffered from a condition he called Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy, in which parents harmed their children to bring attention to themselves. It rather calls to mind the Cleveland child-abuse cases of 1987, where two consultant paediatricians took case upon case as supporting fashionable new tests of widespread abuse. Again, the justice system overturned it all -- though after much heartache caused to parents who had their children taken from them by the authorities.

Juries may need some help to evaluate 'scientific' evidence, especially where social science is presented as if it were as objective as physical science. We loosely accept science as 'fact' -- but the reality is that science is a process of sifting through different theories. Experts promote their own pet theories, and hold on to them possessively, even after they have been well exploded. In social science, where interpretation of behaviour is often a factor, this can be intensified.

The philosopher Sir Karl Popper quoted a conversation he had as a young man with the great psychologist Adler, in which the latter identified an inferiority complex from childhood in a patient he had not even seen. "How can you be so sure?" asked Popper. "I know it from my thousand-fold experience," replied the great man. "Which I suppose," said Popper, "is now a thousand-and-one-fold."

Before we start removing children from their parents and sending people to jail, we ought to be assured that we are not dealing with case number one-thousand-and-one in the self-justification campaign of some supposed expert.

To my surprise I see I'm quoted in a new book by Dr Hugh V McLachlan of the School of Law and Social Sciences in Glasgow Caledonian University that looks interesting.

The book beats up the popular leftist notion that 'social justice' is the keystone of public policy. It's not, says McLachlan, a reliable basis for policy formation at all. There is more to politics than ethics, and more to ethics than justice - 'social' or otherwise.

Similarly, in line with the views of Maurice Cranston perhaps, the book says that although the term 'human rights' is rhetorically forceful, its real substance is a lot shakier than those using it suppose. Since they don't entail performable duties of actual people, states or other agencies, many so-called 'human rights' are not significant rights of any sort.

Like most people in Britain I am nervous about the idea that people should be allowed to carry guns. My grandfather was a gamekeeper, so I have lived with guns, handled guns, discharged guns and cleaned guns. I just don't like the idea of any crackpot carrying them near me.

But this article by Richard Munday reminds us just how recent Britain's anti-gun legislation really is. In 1896, the police actually borrowed pistols from passing pedestrians to bring a pair of gun-toting 'anarchists' to book! Licensing came in in the 1920s, but it was not until the late 1940s that things got really restrictive.

Munday goes on:

For a long time it has been possible to draw a map of the United States showing the inverse relationship between liberal gun laws and violent crime. At one end of the scale are the "murder capitals" of Washington, Chicago and New York, with their gun bans... at the other extreme, the state of Vermont, without gun laws, and with the lowest rate of violent crime in the Union (a 13th that of Britain).

I'm not pleading to end gun control in Britain. But I do think that this is yet another example of where politically popular laws, inacted in the wake of some major misfortune - a financial scandal, a rail crash, whatever - actually seem to do the opposite of what was intended. The trouble is, by the time you have discovered that, you are in a right mess and just undoing the law is not necessarily going to get you back to where you were.

One thing is clear. Whatever the issue is, we need to study the evidence before we let legislators loose on us. Perhaps we should make it a rule that, whatever the scale of the public outrage, there should be a gap of at least two years between the introduction of a law and the incident that made people call for it. Then maybe cooler heads will rule.

The UK government reportedly plans to fine people according to their disposable income, rather than on fixed penalties. Under the new system a fine of £200 might become £750 for someone better-off.

This illustrates yet again how little feeling this particular government has for the principles of justice. I wrote in the Guardian that:

The principles which preserve between them the rule of law and the rights of individuals have been systematically subverted by recent governments…it is almost as if the government has made out a checklist of those rules, determined to strike them down one by one.

I cited the right to trial by jury, presumption of innocence, double jeopardy, limited jurisdiction, right of silence, habeas corpus, conviction before sentence, and the absence of prior restraint and retro-active legislation. All of these have been compromised to some degree. Now the government intends to remove the blindfold from justice and have the punishment fit the criminal, rather than the crime.

What is gained in return for abandoning so important a principle? Another 'stealth' tax to transfer more money from the middle classes to the Treasury. Is it worth it?

Even after a number of recent high-profile cases, Britain's government still says it won't change the law to give householders more rights to tackle burglars who invade their property. It says the law is quite adequate, and proposes instead a new 'public awareness campaign' giving people 'better information about their rights' when they come up against a burglar.

How feeble. Frankly, the time and money would be better spent on a police awareness campaign giving the fuzz better information on what to do when they come up against victims of burglary. Like not arresting pensioners because they were woken up in the middle of the night by some thug and instinctively walloped him with their walking-stick. Or threatening people with jail for following a burglar down the street and wresting their property back.

It really is time the police became accountable to, and on the side of, the innocent people they were supposed to serve. There is no chance of that as long as they are a centrally-controlled national bureaucracy, chasing their own and political 'targets' rather than what citizens really want. To make such a big change, the police would probably need counselling - but they themselves are notoriously better at offering that than real security.

Britain's new Home Secretary has scrapped plans to create the world's first privatized forensic science service. The Guardian reports that Charles Clarke MP has overturned a decision originally taken by his disgraced predecessor David Blunkett.

This is bad news on several counts. Firstly, it comes as a result of pressure from backbench Labour MPs. They are generally far more left-wing than the Party leadership, and doctrinally opposed to privatizing anything. The leadership wants to keep them sweet before a probably May election: but by giving in to your opponents, you just strengthen them. Second, a few police forces were opposed to the change too. As a recent Civitas report showed, we have the worst police in the world. They are acting like a typical nationalized industry, institutionally opposed to change.

Third, the argument is that forensic science is too important to be left to the decisions of shareholders. But in fact this and previous governments have found ways to privatize other sensitive functions - like the defence research establishments. And the result has been huge improvement and better value. Shareholders serve you better than bureaucrats, it seems.

Fourth, privatizing some tiny function like forensic science ought to be a Sunday afternoon job for any decent government. What chance of them making deep and genuine reforms in state health, education, welfare or pensions when they can't even do that?

Tony Blair and his ministers like to quote from the British Crime Survey when they claim they have done well on crime. On the face of it, the British Crime Survey is the best source because it is based on interviews with a large sample of people - 40,000 - in their own homes. This gets rid of the problem with official recorded crime that the rate at which crimes are recorded a) varies from one crime to another and b) may vary over time. So, the BCS appears to be objective and realistic.

But Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun makes the point that the British Crime Survey is deficient is several key ways:

• It does not ask anyone under 18 about their experience as victims of crime
• It obviously cannot include murder (since the victims are not around to tell the tale).
• It does not include crimes against commercial property
• It does not include rape or other forms of sexual violence on the grounds that families are reluctant to talk about such things.

These are important omissions. A great many of the victims of crime are under 18. These are also often victims of violent crimes - the sort of crimes which the officially recorded crime figures suggest are rising dramatically. Murder, of course, is the ultimate violent crime.

It is very convenient that the BCS figures do not include rape and sexual assault, too. This is another category of crime which - according the officially recorded figures - is going up. The Government likes to claim that this is because women are more willing than before to report such things.

The Sun took the initiative of commissioning a Mori opinion poll to find out just how commonplace crime has become in Britain if you cut out the Government in the assessment of it. (The present Government's willingness to manipulate statistics and turn civil servants into its propagandists is another reason for wanting to do this.)

The sample used is regrettably only 1,001 but the results are grim. Of adults, 83 per cent have been victims of one crime or another. That might not seem too bad - on the basis that many of the crimes will have been minor and older adults have been around a long time during which to experience crimes. But the remarkable thing is that 81 per cent of 15 to 17 year-olds also say that they have been victims of crime. That suggests a phenomenally high incidence of crime among the young.

Again, of adults, 30 per cent have been victims in the past year. But of 15 to 17 year olds, 52 per cent have been victims. That is a truly enormous figure. Young people, according to this poll, are more likely to have endured a crime in the past year than not.

A UN international survey - not using official figures of any Government - has previously suggested that England and Wales had the equal highest crime rate out of 12 selected countries. Australia shared this very high crime rate. Countries including the United States, France and Switzerland had lower rates.

James Bartholomew is author of The Welfare State We're In. Read the blog of the book here.

A new Cato book edited by the excellent Gene Healy says that politicians are subverting the purpose of criminal offenses. The book is about the US - but the basic argument I'm sure applies to the UK too.

While violent crime goes unpunished, an "an unholy alliance of tough-on-crime conservatives and anti-big-business liberals" have jail too easy for people who really oughtn't be there. As Healy says: "Today, it's possible to send a person to prison without showing criminal intent or even a culpable act - as when business owners or corporate executives are convicted under the 'responsible corporate officer doctrine' for negligent failure to supervise the acts of their employees. Increasingly, lawmakers are coming to view criminal sanctions as merely another item in their regulatory tool kit."

Are we facing the problem of being soft on crime, tough on "crime"?

Britain's Home Secretary, David Blunkett is facing a growing revolt from over plans to make incitement to religious hatred a crime with a seven-year jail term. Not just from MPs, but from comedians like Rowan Atkinson, who fear that they will not in future be able to tell jokes lampooning people's religious attitudes.

Blunkett himself says: "The offence will not criminalise material that just stirs up ridicule... Or which simply causes offence."

Atkinson's right, Blunkett is wrong. None of us want to see religious hatred prosper - nor racial hatred or any other sort. But laws are introduced with one purpose and before long they start being used for others. In the US, draconian laws and penalties against racketeering are now used to frighten minor criminals into pleading guilty to lesser crimes. In Britain, police prosecute householders who dare to raise a knife or a rolling-pin against a burglar. Emergency powers against terrorism are used to stop and search anyone the police don't like the look of.

If you're a comedian, you don't know where the authorities will draw the line, until you feel a hand on your collar. But the law will eventually want to test where the line between ridicule and racism stands, and one day that hand will indeed fall. So despite Mr Blunkett's fine words and intentions, under this law, comedians will simply avoid all such humour, and we will be the poorer for it. And we won't even be able to take the heat out of bigotry by lampooning it any more.

It is a popular misconception that civil legal aid means access to justice. It doesn't - many people don't qualify. Civil legal aid provides access to lawyers for the eligible minority who can bring doubtful cases without risk. This is amply borne out by the dismal success rates of cases against the health care industry. Too often lawyers and claimants simply walk away from the wreckage of failed legally aided litigation, the lawyers the only winners. We pay twice, first through legal aid and again by the damage to our health system.

All patients injured by negligent treatment are rightly entitled to compensation, not just those who qualify for legal aid; there must be access to justice for all. However, this has to be set against the health budget's purpose of treating patients. How can it be done fairly and sensibly?

There is widespread concern about the cost and conduct of clinical negligence cases. The Legal Services Commission and the Conservative Party have recently published consultation papers. They propose limiting legal aid to investigating the case. Any court action can be funded by conditional fee arrangements ("no win, no fee"). Commercial prudence provides an inbuilt incentive to pursue worthwhile claims. Moreover, the usual 'loser pays' rule applies whereby the loser pays the winner's legal costs (it does not apply in legally aided cases). This sensible rule encourages cases to resolve according to their merits: weak cases are abandoned and strong cases are settled. Successful health service defendants can recover costs, thereby protecting funds for patient care. Insurance cover is available to claimants for this potential liability.

Conditional fees and the loser pays rule together ensure that the risks of litigation are balanced between the parties, and promote fairness of the legal process. There should be no more legal aid blackmail, where speculative cases are settled by defendants to avoid high irrecoverable trial costs.

This combined public and private funding recognises the expense of investigating medical cases whilst drawing on the strengths of the conditional fee system. Access to justice will be widened, weak cases will be discouraged. No system can be perfect, but the proposed reform seems best at balancing the competing considerations of compensating victims of negligence and protecting funds for patient care.

It's something of a breakthrough in Whitehall. For the first time since the start of the Cold War, British security has recognized that there is life beyond government.

The spooks at MI5 have of course been planning for decades what people should do in the event of a nuclear holocaust, and more recently, a terrorist one. But until now, the only people they have directed their advice to (very secretly and privately, of course) have been national and local government politicians and officials.

So "the people needed to run the country" have been OK. Yes indeed. As contractors were demolishing the old Department of the Environment building in Westminster, they were astonished to discover nuclear shelters with 12-metre thick reinforced concrete walls, protected by a steel door so massive all they could do was leave it there. So the Westminster and Whitehall elites would be OK - but the rest of us could fry.

Then suddenly today, MI5 has put up on its website advice for all of us about what to do in the event of a terrorist incident. At last, they seem to be admitting that "to run the country" you don't just need politicians and civil-servants, you need hard-working individuals and businesses. Indeed, the country would probably run better if the politicians and civil-servants retired to their bunkers and never came out!

The UK government has announced plans to create its own version of the FBI, the Serious Organized Crime Agency (which will no doubt be known to this football-mad administration as SOCA). Fair enough, you might think: how can disparate local police forces fight the mafias?

But I still find it unnerving. It's not just that it's going to employ 5000 people (and where are they going to come from - yet more new public job-creation, or taken from existing hard-stretched police forces?). Nor that it will cost zillions. What really worried me is the Prime Minister saying that perhaps the burden of proof in organized crime cases would be lowered to, in order to make them easier to prosecute.

Let's face it, earlier generations fought and died to create the rule of law in what became the UK. Now we're just tearing up those rights. Already we've suspended the right of silence in fraud cases. If you call someone a terrorist you can hold them for weeks without trial. And now, if the state accuses you of drug-running or pimping, forget your ancient civil rights.

These diversions from the rule of law are too easy for the authorities to exploit. The RICO racketeering laws in the US are now routinely used against any businessperson accused of any fraud - since the penalties are so draconian, people gladly plea-bargain and admit to some lesser charge, even if they are not guilty of it. That's not justice, not the rule of law.

You'd have much less organized crime if you made fewer things criminal. The Chief Constable of North Wales has said that even heroin should be decriminalized because that would be better than what we have now. He's probably right. Same with prostitution. We don't need this new agency and this new opportunity to violate our rights. We need freedom.

Armed police in Westminster. Not an unusual sight at all. But passing one the other day made me and my colleague, Dr Madsen Pirie, reflect on how quickly things had changed in Britain - which once prided itself on having a police force that did not need to be armed with anything more dangerous than a whistle. Without any great national debate, we now have an armed constabulary.

Sure, Westminster is full of terrorist targets. But I can see why coppers everywhere else feel the need to be armed too. The latest "International Comparisons of Criminal Justice Statistcs" show that Britain now has the worst record in Western Europe for killings, violence and burglary.

In 2001, UK police recorded 870,000 violent crimes, far more than the next worst, France, at 279,000, and nearly five times Germany's 188,000. Burglaries, at 470,000, were again well ahead of France (210,000) and Germany (133,000).

You can probably suggest reasons why things have got so bad. I can think of several possibilities - and they start with a state-monopoly school system that is no longer prepared to instill in kids that some ways of living are simply wrong, because - as we are now discovering to our cost - they are socially pathological. Insist on parental responsibility and, through parental choice and competitive supply, put parents back in charge of education: that, I think, would have more long-term effect on crime than any number of razzmatazz government "initiatives".

Well, bravo! The UK government says it's undertaking the biggest review of the legal profession for years. About time this dusty, state-run, state-supported, state-featherbedded nationalized industry got a firework down its gaiters. Like all government monopolies, it's hugely old-fashioned, wildly inefficient, incredibly costly, and run for the convenience of its providers rather than the public who have to use it.

But oh, no! The first news item I read on this says that the government thinks a new regulatory agency might be needed. Oflaw, as it's being called.

We don't need more regulation of the justice system. That's the problem, not the solution. We need more competition. We need new people to come in and run courts and arbitration in completely new ways that are quicker, cheaper, more reliable, more accessible. Yes, even competing to run courts. And as we said in our report Silk Cut, we need to kill off the lawyers' cosy professional closed shops and let new people and new ideas in, so people have a real choice over who represents them. Then at last people might just get rapid access to justice at a price they can afford.

There are reports that police are so preoccupied with targets that they have little time left to deal with crime. They have quotas for speeding fines and motoring offences. They seem more anxious to pursue the middle classes who don't fight back than the rather more aggressive muggers and rapists.

We did a poll with MORI and discovered that the public's priorities are very different from those the police devote resources to. The police ones are of the easy to do and easy to record variety. What the public wants is a safer and quieter life.

The problem is that the police are reaching the stage where they are regarded as the enemy. Most people's encounter with them is not seeing them catch muggers and rapists, or bringing burglars to justice. It is after a motoring offence, and is breeding a new spirit of disrespect for the law.

Maybe part of the answer is to take police out of motoring altogether, and use upgraded traffic wardens instead. This would free huge numbers of police to concentrate on the crimes which people think matter.

So the Iraq investigators found a bit of bad chemical and biological stuff, but nothing you'd call an arsenal of mass destruction.

Why then did Saddam put up so much resistance against the inspectors? Something that made him look so guilty that invasion became inevitable?

Because dictatorships survive on reputation, not reality. Sure, there was some basis in his reputation (he did gas 10,000 people). But he couldn't admit he had no WMD. He would look weak - and no dictator can survive looking weak.

We now know that when Kruschev was blustering about Russia's nuclear strike capability in the 1950s, hardly any existed. The US could have swatted him like a fly. Moscow couldn't even rely on its telegraph office, and had to accept Kennedy's Cuba ultimatum by putting it out over Radio Moscow. Even then, the lift stuck and the messenger nearly didn't get there).

Britain expected a long campaign to shift Galtieri's army from the Falklands. It took days. So did dislodging Saddam from Kuwait.

No, dictators are all paper tigers. Free countries should be more confident about removing them and making the world safe for democracy.

Send kids to a state-run jail and they pick up all sorts of tips to boost their career of crime. We all know that. But I didn't know that the same is true of community-based punishments too. It turns out that low-risk offenders are more likely to re-offend after being sent to do community work.

And two-thirds of those on community punishment orders are... you guessed it, low risk. So we're not doing them, nor the community, any favours.

I picked this up at an Adam Smith Institute power lunch yesterday with Professor Rod Morgan (see photo), head of the UK Probation Inspectorate, and other experts from our Full Stop After Sentencing project.

Adam Smith said that all that is needed for prosperity is 'peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'. Seems we have none of them! Is it time to privatize the courts and stop them doing daft things like sending low-risk types to community crime colleges?

As I have said before, this government has no feeling for the rule of law. It has systemically violated the principles which protect us from over-mighty and arbitrary power. Now it moves spitefully to strip Lord Archer of his peerage by retrospective legislation. He is the only one affected by this vindictive extra clause. Losing his peerage was not a punishment when he committed his crime. His prison sentence might have been lighter if it had been.

Lord Falconer said that banning those sentenced to more than a year in prison "brought the Lords in line with the House of Commons." Not true. An MP who is banned can be re-elected, but a Lords ban is for life.

The government thinks, not necessarily rightly, that Lord Archer is unpopular and widely disliked; but this no reason to undermine the principle that a person should know the legal consequences of a crime at the time it is committed. It will serve the government right if their new law is subsequently overruled because it violates an important human right.

So we should clamp down on white collar crime? It turns out that the top social groups are more prone to embezzlement and fraud. The bottom ones seem to prefer mugging and burglary. Shouldn't we be equally ruthless against both groups? No we shouldn't.

These types of crime have a different impact on their victims. Burglary, mugging, rape and murder all have a devastating effect on individuals. They traumatise and leave lasting injuries or destroy lives.

Shoplifting and embezzlement often have more anonymous victims. The crimes are spread out so that many people pay their costs. The burden on each individual is usually small. To have one's valuables stolen, one's home wrecked, or to be crippled by a street thug is not the same as paying half a penny extra for a light bulb.

We do not walk the streets at night in fear of being embezzled. People want the priority to be on the crimes which have shocking impact on their victims. The police prefer to pursue middle class motorists and white collar criminals. Let shops deal with shoplifting, companies handle embezzlement and fraud, and the police deal with the stuff that destroys lives.