Sympathy for the underdog is one of the most agreeable Anglosphere traits. I am prone to it myself; instinctively cheering on West Bromwich Albion or Stoke City against the likes of Manchester United. Fans of the Red Devils will bitterly tell you of the phenomenon known as "ABU" - Anyone But United, which is the same trait viewed from their perspective. It's logical then that we Brits should empathise with the downtrodden and – depending on our analysis of how they came to be underfoot – seek to right their perceived wrongs. 

Humans have always been too quick to analyse their problems in terms of perceived malice from "the other". For example, I grew up in t'North in a heady atmosphere of victimhood. There were plenty of logical reasons for the relative poverty of our post-industrial towns and cities. Many of them would simply never be built in modern circumstances. They are there for long-gone reasons but their communities, bound together by tribal loyalties, cling to them with ferocious sentimentality. It would amuse their ancestors who left rural poverty all over our islands during the Industrial Revolution to flock to opportunities in dark, Satanic mills. To seek betterment elsewhere, as their ancestors did and as I could not wait to do, is perceived as defecting to the enemy. Better to live on, more or less supported (as their plucky ancestors never were) by a Welfare State that subsidises such wilful victimhood.

Even after I had left, it took me years to shake off those ideas. At University my law tutors urged me to apply to the major London firms but I declined, having grown up with the ridiculous but unchallenged view that our capital city was a nest of predators living idly on the sweat of honest working folk. The flip-side ABU-equivalent is the way that London football fans sneer-chant at provincial supporters "We pay your benefits". Now that I live in "that London" I have also heard Londoners claim victim-status themselves, bemoaning the high cost of living (particularly housing) and claiming that the capital is the only city on these islands to make a positive net contribution to HM Treasury. 

Humans are tribal. If a language is really old, like Chinese or the tongues of the Native American tribes, the word for ones own people is "human" and the words for other peoples are derogatory – "foreign devil" or the like. The names we use for the Plains Indian tribes are given by their enemies because their own names would all translate to the same word. More recently, even "Wales" and "Welsh", the English names for the place I was born and the people among whom I was raised, are from the Anglo-Saxon for "foreigner". I would argue that where things have begun to go wrong in the West is that tribalism and victimhood have converged and an identity arms race encouraged by the anti-discrimination lobby has set all the "tribes" against  each other.

This, I would suggest, is what the present furore about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, the scandal about statutory rapes in Telford, the murder of an elderly Jewish lady in Paris, the emergence of the Alt-Right, Black Lives Matter and AntiFa have in common. In their game of "victimhood trumps" various would-be underdogs have both strengthened their own tribal bonds and awoken the tribalism of others.

It's dangerous to enjoy the sight of the Labour Party – home of cynical grievance-mongers for decades – hoist by its own petard over anti-Semitism. It's perilous to succumb to anger over the way that Leftist political correctness has thrown thousands of white girls in Telford or Rotherham to the wolves for fear of the juju word "Racist".  Lives are being lost (and many more lives degraded) in the United States as the uncontroversial assertions that "Black Lives Matter" and "All lives matter" are used as tribal battle cries. The Alt-Right's so-called "fascism" would evoke snorts of derision from history's real Fascists, as it amounts to White people lamely joining the destructive game of identity politics.

When growing up in Wales I once told a fanatical Welsh Nationalist that if he really had nothing better to be proud of than his ethnic roots, he should  take up macramé so as to have an actual skill to take pride in. I felt free to mock his parochial obsessions because I could never imagine him presenting a threat but that kind of thing is more dangerous now. At one of my first partners meetings at a law firm in London where most of my partners were Jewish, I was surprised when one said we had no chance of winning a bid for some work because of anti-semitism. I told him, truthfully, that I had never heard an anti-semitic remark in my life and doubted the thought would even cross the potential client's mind.

That anti-semitism is back in Britain, as it clearly now is, is due to the Labour Party's attempts to use identity politics to build its own base. Rejecting (or rather rejected by) its traditional base, Labour has sought to put together a coalition of victims, including – though socially and economically there is no more "conservative" group around – British Muslims. To do so it has become uniformly pro-"Palestinian" and anti-Israel and thus attracted into its midst many members reared with a hatred of Jews as unchallenged as my early hatred of "the South".

I reject the Alt-Right because fighting fire with fire just doesn't work. The answer to the poisonous ideas of identity politics is not to join in. It's to reject them for what they are– inimical to the best values of Western Civilisation. Our highest value is the Rule of Law – a much misunderstood phrase, particularly on the Continent where it's often used to mean "shut up and do as you are told or we'll set the police on you". The best way to explain it is in the resonant phrase – "Be you never so high, the Law is above you".  Your social status, your ethnicity, your family background, your education, your political power and your wealth are all irrelevant to the Law, in the august presence of which we are all (as we are not in any other context) equal. When you say your favourite class of "victim" deserves special protection from the Law, you are shattering the only important equality – the one on which our civilisation is built. We in the West have done that repeatedly and with the terrible consequences that are now emerging as we have sought to signal our virtue by "protecting" various underdogs. 

The Labour Party will not extricate itself from its present mess by re-ordering the hierarchy of victim-groups. I hope and believe that was not what the British Jews protesting yesterday were asking for. Nor by classifying her murder as an anti-Semitic hate crime will we bring back to life the murdered Parisienne or protect future such victims. We can all only emerge from this destructive and hateful shambles by restoring equality before the law and abandoning the damaging notions of identity politics in general and "hate crime" in particular.

Human progress is driven by free competition of ideas. It is hindered by the sort of tribalism that means you must know someones race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender before you can evaluate the credibility of their ideas, their rights to express them or the correct punishment for someone who hurts them.

 Today, I let another part of my old life go. In a pleasant conversation with a lady from the International Bar Association, I explained that I did not plan to renew my subscription  of more than 20 years. I had only been maintaining it out of nostalgia for the days when I used to attend its conferences in locations chosen to give its mainly American membership tax deductible vacations for themselves and their families. HMRC was never so flexible or gullible as the IRS but for me it meant networking with colleagues in agreeable cities with great shopping for cash rich / time poor professionals bribing their spouses to accept neglect. And of course intelligent discussion on subjects relevant to my international practice of law. 

Reading my last copy of the IBA's journal I realised another reason why I was content to let go. The tone of the articles has changed.  Lawyers are always in danger of going to the dark side because, good or bad, new laws tend to make them richer. Arguably the worse the laws the more work they generate. Only noble traditions passed on at an individual's age of peak naivety in Law School helped most of us understand that law is at its very best only a (sometimes) necessary evil and that every problem solved even by the best law introduces several new ones. 

The capture of academia by Cultural Marxists / post modernism has killed that protection. Every article introducing a new law now seems to bemoan that it did not go further. For example a new law in France requires companies to monitor their suppliers for human rights and environmental concerns. French companies are required to increase their costs, making their goods and services more expensive to consumers, to "police" suppliers beyond the reach of rich world legislative activists. It repeats an unjust pattern of punishing the decent and near at hand for the crimes of out of reach bad people. It makes life more expensive. It may make companies avoid dealing with countries that fall short of Western ideals, perpetuating poverty there and increasing dependency on aid. The commentator makes no such "law of unintended consequences" points. Rather she bemoans the exemption for small companies!

The same journal contains a piece discussing President Trump's nominee to replace Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court bench.  It expresses surprise that the nominee is a critic of the "Chevron doctrine" under which the Presidency has taken powers from Congress. 

 Michael Dorf of Cornell Law School puts the problem succinctly: "it's weird that a Republican Congress would be trying to get rid of deference to the executive branch while there is a Republican president"

If it's "weird" that a politician should ever act on principle against party interest then we are not in a post-truth but a post-ethics world. Sure, I cynically assume most will often do the wrong thing if torn between the right thing and self-serving but surely it's going too far to assume the right thing is beyond reach all the time for everyone!

The correct, ethical role for lawyers is surely to support only good and necessary new laws, to critique proposed new laws to that end and then to ensure that their clients suffer from them only to the minimum extent necessary to do justice. It's neither to assume that the more laws the better nor to challenge the sanity of legislators who seek to roll back executive power. 

The only  sensible article in my last copy of the journal is on the subject of "fake news".  As the authoritarian Valkyries in Britain and Germany gear up to  introduce censorship, the article discussed in a mostly balanced way the risks to free speech of giving government power to "regulate" so called "fake news". It's a good piece on the side of the angels but stands out from the others in a telling way.

I couldn't practise law in Britain now because I couldn't morally comply with laws requiring me to shop my clients to the authorities. I was relieved to retire without ever having encountered that dilemma and horrified to discover, when serving on my firm's management committee in the last years of my career just how often my colleagues were dropping a dime on the people they exist to serve. But I'm not sure I'd want anyway to be the kind of modern lawyer who relishes regulations and argues for ever more. I still stand with Montesquieu who said "If it is not necessary to make a law it is necessary NOT to make a law".

Thank goodness I have the financial freedom to avoid the pressures on my successors in the profession. I hope they escape their careers with their souls intact. 

The Orlando massacre tells us nothing about the killer save that he was insane, but it's telling us a lot about ourselves.

Just look at the politicians warning of islamophobia. The people virtue-signalling on Facebook. The triggered leftist storming off British TV because he thought the discussion was focussing on the terrorism angle rather than the hatred of gays. Donald Trump turning the horror to predictable political advantage. Give it a day and the gun control advocates will be complaining about the ease of buying weapons in America and the NRA will be calling for more heavily-armed homosexuals. Plus ça change...

We need to learn lessons but for that we need to open our minds. Every comment I have read so far is someone seizing on a new event as proof of the correctness of old ideas and the continuing wickedness of old adversaries.

If facts don't change our minds what is the point of having them? We might as well all curl up in a corner and live in our deranged imaginations whatever life we fancy. Or to take my ambiguous question the other way, why have minds if facts don't change them?

Is this what our law has come to?

A Muslim extremist linked to Woolwich killer Michael Adebowale was jailed for five years and four months today (Weds) for glorifying the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in a series of YouTube videos. Royal Barnes, 23, was filmed by his veiled wife Rebekah Dawson, 22, laughing hysterically as he drove past the scene of the attack. Dawson, who has caused nationwide controversy by refusing to remove her niqab in court, was jailed for one year and eight months. The couple ridiculed the memorial flowers left by friends, family and members of the public for Drummer Rigby and Barnes described the murder as 'absolutely brilliant'. Dawson also boasted in a text to a friend: 'Did you watch it? It was really inciting and almost glorifying lol.'

Two young idiots upload stupid films to YouTube. They express primitive, ignorant, violent opinions. Opinions rather like those expressed by revolutionary socialists every single day (but with far less chance of influencing anyone).

Did their childish, ignorant words represent a threat? If so, then we are a feeble society too decadent to deserve survival. This is using the sledgehammer of the criminal law to crack something that merited the toffee hammer of an Anglo-Saxon imprecation at best.

These idiots are pathetic, yes. But so are we for having nothing better to do with the hard-earned money taken by force from decent people than to pay policemen, lawyers, judges and prison officers to deal with them. And for not understanding that it's better to hear dangerous opinions and know where threats may come from than to drive them underground.

We don't call them police forces any more. That's too explicit an acknowledgement of their role as the enforcers of our all-powerful state. Policing, God help us, is now a 'service'.

The question is; whom do our policemen serve? Is it us, the public, or the political class that guarantees their unfunded pensions from the incomes of taxpayers yet unborn? If, as they claim, it's the public, why does it sometimes feel they are serving us in the agricultural sense; as a bull serves a heifer?

Ordinary people don't believe the official crime figures because they don't accord with our experience. For years the Establishment line has been that the figures are accurate but that our fear of crime is the problem. We are neurotic and should be more trusting of our benevolent masters. Yeah right.

PC James Patrick, an analyst with the Metropolitan Police 'service' recently gave evidence to a House of Commons committee that the figures are improperly manipulated by senior officers to make police performance look better. He said

Things were clearly being reported as burglaries and then you would rerun the same report after there had been a human intervention, a management intervention, and these burglaries effectively disappeared in a puff of smoke.

How embarrassing for the political class that has used the rigged numbers to assure us it's doing its job of public protection! It seems our 'neurotic' belief that they were feathering their own nests while not giving a flying expletive about us except as sources of feathers was well-founded.

I have been waiting with interest for the state's response to this revelation. And, the Alistair Campbell approved interval for the story to die down having elapsed, here it comes. The Times reports this morning that PC Patrick has been placed on 'restricted duties' and forbidden to speak to public or media. The whistleblower has received his usual reward.

So that's clear then. Lying to make the state look good is fine. The public has no right to know the truth about the performance of the police service it is forced to fund. The career of any public-spirited person with a sense of duty and honour is unlikely to advance in the Met. In marked contrast to that of an officer who heads a botched operation that blows the head off an innocent man, for example.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along now please or you might just find yourself being served.

I learned during my long-ago university days of the key historical change from 'status' to 'contract'. In a sense, modern civilisation began when, not only were rulers subject to the law, but your legal obligations depended not on who you were but what you had agreed.

No more jus primae noctis or knight service. Your obligations depended upon the contracts you entered into. Moderns might think themselves 'wage slaves' because of a real or perceived lack of job opportunities, but their employer had no claims over them qua employer, only by reference to their contract of employment. Their serfdom was therefore metaphorical at most.

As recently as the 1970s then, this was seen as progress in itself and as a key enabler of progress. It was a thoroughly civilised way of organising human relations. Modern society was not possible without it. Indeed my legal history lecturer (leftist though he was) presented it as a key enabling factor of the industrial revolution and therefore of all modern prosperity.

Yet the drift back to status was already well underway. English law, for example, limited an employer's response to the breach of contract involved in refusing to work if it was in the context of a protected strike lawfully organised by a trade union. The status of being under the protection of a trade union (a modern descendant of a medieval guild) alters your employer's legal rights and - in a certain sense - justifies your breach of contract.

For a long time the police operated with the same power of arrest as any other citizen. If someone commited a felony (now an 'arrestable offence') you or I could arrest them and so could a copper. The only difference was that he was paid, trained and expected to do it. I always thought that was a wonderful check and balance on police power. It's a dangerous thing to have a professional police force because, among the honest decent people attracted to such work, there is bound to be a higher-than-average proportion of thugs and bullies. Bossing people around attracts bossy people.

Now the status of being a police officer or enjoying one of a large number of other state-granted statuses, confers special powers of arrest, search, seizure and forced entry. Even, as we have seen in recent days, forced entry to a mother's womb.

Landlord and tenant law tends to assume (ridiculously in the modern era when he might be Google or Microsoft and his landlord might be your mother's pension fund) that a tenant is a weaker party entitled to special protection by virtue of his status.

Similarly consumer legislation operates on the basis of a cartoon caricature of a buyer like Wile E Coyote; endlessly supplied with disappointingly non-lethal-to-road-runners goods by ACME.

The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 specifically prevents people from entering into, or at least from being bound by, contractual obligations, based on their status as 'a person dealing as a consumer.'

The notion of 'positive discrimination' confers for the first time in law an actual right to be racist (if you ignore, as I do with utter contempt, the socialist claptrap about racism being by definition a problem exclusive to white people).

The concept of 'hate crime' makes it more serious to insult, hurt or kill people enjoying a specially protected status. Current law thinks some deaths diminish me more than others. I disrespectfully disagree.

Your status as a citizen imposes all kinds of obligations on you. For example you must surrender a percentage of your earnings to the state, pay your local council for the privilege of living in your own home and hand over 45% of your parents' wealth above a certain value on inheritance. 

It would be amusing if it were not so sad that modern 'progressives' have for decades been busily restoring a key concept of feudalism and systematically undermining a key legal foundation of post-feudal prosperity. Their labels may not openly be 'lord' and 'vassal' but their world view is founded just as much on different rights and duties for different classes of human.

I often wonder how different my view of today's Britain would be if I had not lived abroad for 20 years. Expats often find it hard to resettle in their home country. Sometimes they are not "comparing apples with apples" when reviewing their life in a low-wage country against that in the capital-intensive UK. I went to a retirement party this week at a law firm where I was a partner until 1997. I had not seen some of the people there since before I left the UK in 1992, and almost none of them since I changed firms while abroad. So they were an interesting 'control group' for this question.

Most were initially surprised by my comments about changes in the UK during my absence. The changes had crept up on them over time and had not struck them so forcefully. When they thought about them however, they agreed they didn't like them much. They did not like 'political correctness' and felt particularly uncomfortable with its translation into law.

Someone recalled that twenty or so years ago, the firm's first-ever Muslim partner had asked an Orthodox Jewish job applicant how he would handle closing an urgent deal on a Friday with sunset approaching. The applicant did not get the job and complained - ludicrously - that this then predominantly Jewish firm was anti-semitic. The management had responded by issuing a grovelling apology and taking the Muslim partner off the recruitment panel.

No law was broken at the time. Indeed many of the Jewish partners asked similar questions when recruiting and were both surprised and disappointed by the firm's response. Today HR would have a fit if a partner asked such a question, just as they would if one asked a female applicant of child-bearing age how she intended to fit her career around any plans for a family. There would almost certainly be a claim under equality legislation.

The high proportion of Jewish and female partners in those long-ago days rather suggested there were acceptable answers to be given to these now-taboo questions. An Orthodox Jew might propose to involve a Gentile or less Orthodox colleague in his deal in order to cover for holy days. A female lawyer might say she had a house-husband or other family support, planned to hire a nanny or intended to give priority to child-rearing over competing for partnership. Or she might say she wasn't interested in having children so the issue didn't arise.

Now that the question cannot be asked, the temptation (though no-one would ever admit it) is to assume the worst-possible reply. This cannot be to the candidate's advantage. No-one believes a Jewish, Muslim or female lawyer is intrinsically inferior, so the only question is how to respect their different needs without compromising client service. That requires an honest and open discussion on both sides; now no longer permitted. It's a similar unintended outcome to that created by the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. As offenders are legally-entitled to lie about their convictions (and employers are not allowed to check) HR departments everywhere bin any CV that has gaps that might represent time spent in prison.

Honesty really is the best policy. The best way to deal with concerns about race or sex prejudice is to give its 'victims' every chance to show - as I am absolutely certain is true - that it is not a useful guide to performance. I worked in jurisdictions with no such legal restrictions and honestly never asked myself any question about a candidate that did not go directly to the issue of better service to clients. Because that's what I cared about - and what was in the best interests of my business.

There was one person present at the party who strongly disagreed with my views. He denied there had been any chilling of free speech. He was entirely happy with the Equalities Act and with all changes in employment law. Nor had he any problem with the discriminatory concept of 'hate crime.' He felt just as free as ever he had and said I was making 'a ridiculous fuss'. It was a happy occasion so (I am gradually learning to fit in) I passed it off lightly.

When he had moved on, someone commented wryly that this scion of an illustrious legal dynasty (a leading City firm bears his family name) must mainly read his Guardian on the deck of his yacht. Apparently he now spends much of his time cruising the Aegean. It's odd that the Toynbee-ite rich have the most left-wing views, isn't it? But then in this paradoxical country of ours, nothing is as one would expect. The main health problem of our poor is obesity and the main problem of our rich is befuddled Marxism.

Engels and Marx - longtime expatriates in England - never predicted that.

Here is a short quote from someone you have never heard of; Elise Groulx Diggs, co-chairman of the International Criminal Bar. The source for the quote is here, though I read it in the International Bar Association's dead tree magazine.

Law is an amazingly transformational tool and it doesn't take that many people to bring about change.

Whether or not you agree with the particular changes she's talking about doesn't really matter that much. Law is there to set limits to human vices, not to promote human virtues. This not least because humans are in closer agreement as to the former than the latter. Every law diminishes liberty and even a good one is a necessary evil. A bad one (and most are now bad ones) is just evil.

To put it another way, Law itself is a prison and the fewer people who ever see its bars, the better. That 'not that many' people can transform the lives of the rest of us by force of law is undoubtedly true. It happens all the time, but does not strike me as a thing to be happy about.

The lady has had a distinguished career and, from my brief research, has done a lot of good in this world. I am sure she is very admirable and I don't single her out because I think she is in any way to blame for our situation. It's just that her words sum up crisply, for me, the great mistake about the nature of Law that is making the Free World less so by the day.

Anthony Peto QC: A very un-British Bill – my response to Robert Buckland MP.

Conservatives are supposed to defend ancient rights. In their hands the great principles of English Law such as "innocent until proven guilty" and the rules of Natural Justice should be much safer than with progressives who openly seek to sweep away ancient rights to build a new order.

...was successfully suppressed by the government on the grounds that it would damage national security...

Mr Clarke’s comments look like a smokescreen for plans which are aimed not at keeping the British people safe, but at sparing the embarrassment of the security services when they get mixed up in wrongdoing. Instead of promoting this thoroughly un-British legislation, which is designed to make our courts secret as though we were living in Europe in the 1930s, Mr Clarke and his colleagues in government should concentrate on holding the security agencies to account when they break the law.

The justice and security bill has one principal aim and that is to cover up UK complicity in rendition and torture. The bill is an affront to the open justice on which this country rightly prides itself and, above all, it is an affront to human dignity.

 
The fact that some of those individuals who are complicit in rendition and torture can not only assist in the drafting of the bill but also vote to cover their tracks is a constitutional scandal.

These rights are so fundamental that for centuries they have been called the rules of “natural justice”.  This brand of justice has “Made in England” stamped all over it. It is our proudest and most enduring national product. This Bill would tarnish the brand for ever.