June 2010

Keith Vaz? Chair of the Home Affairs Committee?

June 10, 2010

Like Iain Dale, I am somewhat surprised that Keith Vaz has beaten Alun Michael to the chairmanship of the Home Affairs Select Committee, by the fairly wide margin of 336 votes to 242. I’m not interested in slagging Keith Vaz off generally. But I do think MPs ought to have thought him disqualified for this [...]

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That pesky age discrimination law (again)

June 9, 2010

In January I noticed not all employers had yet “got it” about age discrimination. Now here’s more evidence, this time from an “executive search” company no less: I suggest if they want to avoid breaching regulation 7 of the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006, they should consider also looking for the next “bright middle-aged thing” [...]

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Joshua Rozenberg on the Saville Inquiry

June 3, 2010

In his piece on the “Bloody Sunday” Inquiry at the Guardian’s online law pages, Joshua Rozenberg reminds us how extraordinarily prolonged the inquiry has been: Lord Saville’s report will be too large to publish in the traditional way and certainly too lengthy to read and absorb in the seven-and-a-half hours ahead of formal publication that [...]

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Should Brown have resigned on the Friday?

June 2, 2010

I’ve been interested by a series of pieces musing on the political consequences of Gordon Brown’s decision to remain as Prime Minister for five days following the election – rather than resigning on the Friday. First to consider this was Toby Young in his Telegraph blog a couple of days later: I’ve been puzzling away [...]

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Government legal fat cats

June 1, 2010

I applaud the decision of the government to publish a complete list of the names, salaries and job titles of everyone in the Senior Civil Service who earns more than £150,000. You can save the list by clicking here. There was a time when Conservative politicians would have called this an exercise in the politics [...]

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Vera Baird on anyonymity for rape defendants

June 1, 2010

Former Solicitor General Vera Baird makes a strong argument at Progress online against the proposal to grant anonymity to defendants in rape cases. She makes the important points that the coalition has actually made the case for this proposal yet (I noticed that equality minister Lynne Featherstone signally passed on the opportunity to do so [...]

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