Anyone who has read a few of my posts will know that the Grauniad is not likely to be my newspaper of choice. However, my housemate is a writer and since all the luvvies advertise in the Grauniad on a Monday, she buys it.

With an interest in the law, it's difficult to ignore a front page like the one on this Monday's Grauniad. The headshots of 10 new High Court Judges were splashed up with the headline "First 10 high court judges under new diversity rules". Apart from the usual cavalier attitude to grammar, this is simply not true; these are some of the first judges to be appointed by the Judicial Appointments Commission, which, granted has diversity as one of its aims, recruits in more or less the same way as any employer - i.e. without regard to colour, creed, sex or sexual preferences. What the article sought to do was rubbish the new appointments system, claiming that it was no better than the oft-quoted "secret soundings".The main problem that the Grauniadista who wrote the piece has is that the judges are all white males, from mainly independent schools (or, horror of horrors, a Grammar School!). The reader has to persevere into the bottom of the third column to discover that in fact only 3 people from an "ethnic minority" applied. At no stage in the article are the full numbers of applicants given. By the Bar's historic nature, the majority of senior lawyers will be white males from public school and Oxbridge. The article does grudgingly allow the JAC to put its case which is quite sensibly:

"Improving diversity is a complex challenge, and can't be achieved
overnight"

Never mind the time required for the fresh crop of ethnically diverse and mixed sex barristers and solicitors to reach the top of their preofession, even when they get there it is a clear requirement that they be good enough. I couldn't care less if all the judges in the country were lesbians of Hong-Kong Chinese extraction if they were the best available candidates, but then the Grauniad has never been about true equality...

Hypocrisy is another of the newspaper's favourite hobbies. Witness at page 11 a surprisingly balanced and liberal piece about upholding the rule of law, praising Munby J for his comments about the Governments failures in the recent case of SK, the Zimbabwean illegal immigrant who should by rights be on the next plane to that unfortunate country. However, the Home Office have totally screwed up the case by failing to follow their own protocols. The piece ends with the sentence:

Mr Justice Munby has rendered a service by reminding the government - and us -
that our laws are for the benefit of all, not just for nice people.

However, if one turns a page and looks at the story on page 13, there is a slightly different emphasis. The article there concerns a family of 7 from Nigeria living in Plymouth, one of the children has sickle-cell anaemia and the mother cannot afford the medication, they fear persecution if they return home. My first problem with the way this is reported is that they are said to have been "threatened" with deportation. If they were born in the UK, it would be a threat (and one of unprecedented force) to deport them, however, they were considered at the time to be illegal immigrants. Therefore it cannot be a threat, but a duty for the authorities to repatriate them. Semantics aside, the story is that this family is loved by its adoptive community and the local students got together a campaign which has forced the hands of the powers-that-be and the case is being looked at once more. As yet there is no indication that there was anything wrong with the way the case was dealt with originally, so this represents a victory, albeit temporary and subject to change, for public opinion over the rules.I can only hope that the people of Plymouth and the readers of this newspaper will remember Marcel Berlins' words from page 11 if it turns out that the Nigerians should be sent home...

The furore over the knighthood awarded to Salman Rushdie has not passed me by, I am just shocked by it all and for once I don't think I can agree with either side.

No really, I am serious, I have no firm opinion on this matter.

As far as I see it Salman Rushdie was given shelter in this country from an essentially oppressive regime which wished/wishes to restrict freedom of speech and thought. It manifested this desire by issuing a fatwa {sometimes spelt fatwah} which called for Rushdie's death and even offered a bounty. This was in response to a novel he wrote in 1988.
Clearly this is an action which is against all natural concepts of civil liberty and the oft-cited human rights.

Of course the problem is that the people who called for his death weren't Nazis or Communists or any of the other groups whom it is acceptable to loathe. No, this particular ridiculous overreaction to a work of fiction eminated from the Islamic leader of Iran, who clearly has nothing to do with a British-Indian novelist. Still, Rushdie had to hide in Britain, at I imagine some cost to the taxpayer, for ten years.

Rushdie's contribution to literature and the issues surrounding free speech are well known and respected, but here's the problem - he's been doing it for years, why choose to knight him now?!

Instincts tell me to support the knighthood and condemn the frankly comic overreaction of the Muslim world. Burning effigies of Rushdie are a gift to people who do not believe the words of the senior clerics of that religion who constantly {but without much success it seems} tell the British media that Islam is a religion of peace. Burning effigies of the Queen are even more hilarious as it shows the total lack of comprehension of how the honours system works in this nation and is just mindlessly offensive in a way that cannot even claim some semblance of art as The Satanic Verses did.

However, here my dilemma begins - Why has Rushdie's name been put forward? Who made the choice and why was it allowed to stand at a time when relations with the Islamic world are so very tense?

Perhaps it was the action of a Civil Service who felt weakened by the Government's lacklustre performance with the kidnapped servicemen and woman in the waters off Iraq. I don't know, all I do know is that it has played straight into the hands of fundamentalists. They now have further material to pump into the heads of the young men they are undoubtedly training somewhere to blow themselves up for the glorification of a religion. A religion with a worldly incarnation which is increasingly regarded as unstable across a wide portion of the globe.

Knowing this, as I'm sure the administration does, if one death occurs as a result of this knighthood I will find it difficult to exculpate our own people. The timing is terrible and something which should have been a positive strike for freedom of expression on all sides looks like becoming an excuse for barbarism and opression.

I think I may have come across a way to get revenge on chambers who have snubbed me... Send in the parents.

There is currently only one comment on the following article, which is good in its own right: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/student/article1740369.ece

The comment mentions that terrible situation - the proud parent. It does seem to be mothers who are particularly to blame for this, rushing around telling all your old mates' mums that you're "going to be a barrister". Then come the "hilarious" legal themed comments, cards, presents etc. usually from well-meaning distant relatives who have been hoodwinked by the old mater into thinking you are in fact next in line for the Lord Chancellor's office...

Well, perhaps there should be a "feedback" session, where a proud parent can be told that chambers rejected their progeny, who is clearly QC material already, out of hand because they went to the wrong university or didn't do an assessed mini-pupillage culminating in single-handedly helping a horde of refugees win their impossible appeal etc.

At this point, the full wrath of the doting parent can be released on the selection committee - just cast your mind back to Primary School sports days when that kid from the class below you knocked your elbow dislodging the carefully balanced egg from your spoon, or the 3rd XV match where a bigger boy made your nose go crack. I clearly remember seeing fully grown adults with respectable careers turning purple with abject and incoherent rage.

Seeing this visited on three over-worked barristers would be cruel, but strangely rewarding I feel!

I am now 50% through my OLPAS ordeal, with only 5 chambers still to decide on me.

Looks like the nature of this blog may well change since I'll be staying in London for the foreseeable future and undoubtedly reporting on all the niggling little irritations which have been the bane of many a Londoner's daily life for years. However, thanks to immense egotism and the solitary online life of a blogger I will be able to post them as if they are some sort of special new revelation - stand by!

The lack of a pervading air of yesterday's takeaways and Ouzo in my kitchen this morning can mean only one thing, yes, I'm at home in the Shire... No longer surrounded by the Greek shipping MA students in my hovel in London.
Taking a little time to readjust to a morning world which includes my parents, sister and small dog I took the proffered cuppa and sat down at the table.

The bliss of being home has slowly started to ebb into the pleasant home routine which allows an old familiar thought to nag at the back of my mind. It whispers evil suggestions like not bothering with a job for one last summer of freedom before I am inevitably chained to the wheels of mammon for all eternity. Or at least until infirmity or some sort of massive windfall releases me.

Anyway, a quick reality check with the mobile phone {cunningly placed near a window to get signal} and the various email accounts {oh how we cavorted in my village when BT switched on our Broadband - I think they nearly sacrificed someone in celebration} shows that I am now linked to from another legally inclined blog. This inspired feelings of flattered pride until I started reading the thing.

I have come to the unhappy conclusion that I have blog-envy. I am one of nature's cynics, since the age of about 10 I think I've been boring in my lack of naivety, I certainly did not believe for a second that I was the only person blogging about the BVC year. I didn't even believe I was the only person with blog-envy. However, ten minutes spent perusing the musings of others was enough to inspire me to post something further to my own outpourings. {Even if it is partly only to boost the post count}
Having said I'd go and blog the BVC so that my experiences would be recorded for the benefit/amusement/warning of others I have singularly failed to do so except in the most rudimentary of senses.

The journey through one of the more obscure professional vocational courses of "education" has been an interesting one, which a cursory glance at Google will be shown to be quite well covered by others. I wish I had done a better job. Sorry.

Here's hoping I get a pupillage, then I'll try to blog that.

Oh, and I passed my Criminal Litigation MCT, at least in the provisional marking. This is "a good thing".

Is it just me, or is anyone else who is currently being put through the mill of OLPAS a bit hacked off that there is no duty to give feedback of any kind before a chambers rejects us?

2 Pump Court binned my application yesterday and it would be nice if they could have just posted a one liner saying "Your degree's crap mate" or whatever.

I know that some chambers get millions of applications, but if the same person who has to read them spends another say 20 seconds just typing out a sentence explaining the decision it would be so much better. For starters it would help me understand what chambers are really looking for, which I find is not the same as what we are told they're looking for... secondly it would help me tighten up my application for the next round and thus help other chambers who will start receiving better apps.

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On a totally unrelated point, I want to know who's responsible for the vast numbers of trees around the Gray's Inn Road/Holborn area which drop copious amounts of feathery pollen things which get in my eyes {no joke with contact lenses} and generally make everyone feel like they have hayfever. If they're still alive I hope they're in pain for several months of the year - what a stupid thing to plant in an enclosed street, I mean really!

Oh dear.

I've just spent ten minutes researching a pseudonym for my Employment opinion. That's getting close to a whole number percentage of the research time for the actual law... this is bad - I have never before wanted a piece of work to go away this much!