Supreme Court: bedroom tax and a campaigning vicar

We've been together now for forty years,

An' it don't seem a day too much:

There ain't a lady livin' in the land

As I'd swop for my dear old Dutch. 

That's from a tear-jerking music hall song. The impoverished pair are being parted - not by death, but by the workhouse. Segregation of the sexes was the rule, even for elderly married couples.

The Department for Work and Pensions now operates a reverse imposition: that a couple needs only one bedroom, despite the fact that swanky developers are increasingly building twin master bedrooms.

Today's hearing is looking at bedroom tax, including the needs of people with live-in carers and couples who sleep apart. I'm inevitably reminded of window tax (imposed from 1696 to 1851) and the well-known dodge of bricking up windows.

There are - possibly - some examples of this [left] in Strutton Ground, a cobbled street near the Supreme Court. Without a lot of poking around, I can't confirm that these were bricked up for tax avoidance, but the buildings are from the right period.

Maybe the Government could tax extravagant residential basement developments rather than count the bedrooms of people on low or no incomes.

In court I'm sitting next to the Vicar of Dibley - the real one, the Rev. Paul Nicolson, who gave permission for the TV series to be based on Turville in Buckinghamshire, his parish at the time.

Paul Nicolson at Occupy

Paul is a dedicated campaigner who founded the London-based charity Z2K: its declared purpose is to fight the causes of poverty and help vulnerable debtors to gain justice against unfair systems.

I've blogged about Paul a couple of times before, at the Occupy protest camp outside St Paul's cathedral, so let me dip into the archive:

He refused to pay the poll tax because he believed it was an injustice to the poorest people, but it was docked from his pay [as a vicar] anyway. 'I told the Church Commissioners they should be involved in civil disobedience like I was. I got a very short answer.'

Before becoming a vicar Paul worked in the family Champagne business. He recalls a two-week trip to Paris learning how to sell Champagne to nightclubs: 'I went to one club where there was a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on each table before you sat down. Mistinguett, the Folies Bergere star, was sitting at a table. Her legs had been insured for £1,000,000 because they were so beautiful. By then she was 86. A female impersonator did his impression of her while she sat holding hands with a dwarf. Then Jacques Tati walked in and sat at the bar. It was pure Toulouse Lautrec.'

I sit there drawing Paul while he fidgets, scribbles notes and (very quietly) huffs with exasperation. Paul is facing a five-figure legal bill for his latest test case, fought (and lost) on behalf of people in need.

















As always in Court 1, the portrait of the super-magistrate Sir John Fielding, blinded at the age of 19 by eighteenth century surgical techniques, looks down on proceedings.

There are a lot of people in the public seats today, all of them very attentive. The one swigging a soft drink from a can is a solicitor. A courteous guard allows her to finish then politely takes it away.

R (on the application of MA and others) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions; R (on the application of A) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions; R (on the application of Rutherford and others) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

Supreme Court: the sands of time

Wait for low tide. Put the strongest man on the best horse and send him to throw a javelin far out to sea. Where it lands will mark the extent of your holdings offshore.

It's not so simple now.

'My lords, there are many balls in the air,' begins counsel.
'And in the water,' says Lord Neuberger.

Lynn Shellfish Limited and others v Loose and another is a dispute over what the Aldeburgh poet George Crabbe called 'shelly sands'. Norfolk fishermen are in court.

Is Lynn Shellfish entitled to harvest the molluscs on certain sandbanks on the Eastern Wash? How do you measure low tide? What is the legal effect of siltation, which joins up sandbanks over time? Today's incantatory phrases are time out of mind, time immemorial, in living memory.

And what could be more English than a case which considers the position in 1189 (the date of Richard I's accession, an anchor point for proof of unbroken possession)? And a QC called Guy Fetherstonhaugh? If you're reading this aloud it's pronounced Fether - ston - haugh, not Fanshaw.

Admiralty law comes and goes with the tide. Lord Sumption beams. He is in his element, mediaeval history. 

There is mention of a duty of one farthing. And nostalgie de la boue: 'We all like the cases best we were in as counsel,' says Lord Clarke.
'Provided we won,' says Lord Neuberger.

The documentation is adrift. Bundle grumbles worsen when the bench turn to confusing colour-coded charts of the contested shore.

'My lords, the chart is the wrong way up.'
'Excellent,' says Lord Neuberger.

My pencil vanishes in a Bermuda triangle. I search for it anxiously while pretending not to.

'What is stubborn sand?' asks Lord Neuberger. Counsel says it hugs the coast.

'The cockles are all wild, are they?' asks Lord Carnwath. Counsel agrees, then admits he does not know how they reproduce. 'Never mind,' says Lord Carnwath, 'I can look it up on Wikipedia.'

In the lunch break the usher tells me about an anti-fracking demo outside. I wonder if Tina Louise Rothery is there, a dedicated campaigner who stood for the Green party against George Osborne on an anti-fracking ticket. I met her when I was doorstepping Occupy out in the cold (see this blog).

Dominating the charcoal ranks of lawyers, the national flowers on the velvet wall hangings are thorny and squirming, designed by Timorous Beasties who aren't afraid to splash their florals with blood if the brief allows. I think of Crabbe's humanoid plants on the unforgiving East Anglian coast:

Marsh flowers

Here the strong mallow strikes her slimy root, 

Here the dull night-shade hangs her deadly fruit; 

On hills of dust the henbane's faded green, 

And pencill'd flower of sickly scent is seen; 

Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom, 

Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume. 

At the wall's base the fiery nettle springs, 

With fruit globose and fierce with poison'd stings; 

In every chink delights the fern to grow, 

With glossy leaf and tawny bloom below: 

The few dull flowers that o'er the place are spread 

Partake the nature of their fenny bed. 

These, with our sea-weeds, rolling up and down, 

Form the contracted Flora of our town.

Towards dusk I go out to Parliament Square. Greenpeace are staging one of their orderly spectaculars, a fake fracking station manned by protesters in high-vis jackets.

I see her standing out in the middle, by the last yard of sun, giving yet another media interview.

I'd been painting the Tudor rose of England today as part of the Supreme Court emblem; here it is again on Tina's badge.

Views are my sitters' own. If I'm making any factual mistakes please let me know.

Bastard wean, part two: Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

The Pringles were border reivers - raiders and livestock rustlers on the Scottish border from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The authorities were so exasperated that there was talk of reinforcing Hadrian's Wall, but today the Pringles' infighting is confined to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.  

In the matter of Baronetcy of Pringle and Stichill is a skirmish between two branches of the family to see who inherits the baronetcy, following the discovery of an intruder. He inherited the title but was discovered not to be the son of his mother's husband. 

I blogged about the first hearing here. Today's hearing goes into the Scottish ramifications, so who better to be on his feet than Sir Crispin Agnew of Lochnaw Bt QC. 

Court 1 contains a portrait of the eighteenth century magistrate Sir John Fielding. He took over the magistracy from his half-brother, Henry Fielding, who wrote The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. 

Tom's promiscuity isn't the problem - it's his parentage. His childhood sweetheart Sophia is admonished: 'And is it possible you can think of disgracing your family by allying yourself to a bastard? Can the blood of the Westerns submit to such contamination?' 

Tom eventually finds out who his father is. My father wasn't so lucky. He experienced the stigma as a lonely child brought up by his grandmother in the same back street as - but not mixing with - his mother and her legitimate children. 

My quest to find out about my father's other ancestors slammed up against a granite wall of Smiths. But I did find someone living. 



 


Ted is kind and proud of his family. He isn't my blood relative, but the widower of one of my father's half-sisters. 

Here he is with my unknown grandfather - Everyman, aka Antony Gormley. Ted has 13 grandchildren. They all know who he is. 


Finally, it's Burns night so here's his poem about his first illegitimate child: 







Welcome to a Bastard Wean

Thou's welcome, wean! Mishanter fa' me
If thoughts of thee or yet thy mammie
Shall ever daunton me or awe me,
My sweet, wee lady,
Or if I blush when thou shalt call me
Tyta or daddie!

What though they call me fornicator
And tease my name in country clatter?
The more they talk, I'm known the better.
E'en let them clash!
An old wife's tongue's a feckless matter
To give one fash.

Welcome, my bonnie, sweet, wee daughter!
Though ye come here a wee unsought for
And though your coming I have fought for
Both church and choir,
Yet, by my faith, ye're not unwrought for --
That I shall swear!

Sweet fruit of many a merry dint,
My funny toil is no all tint.
Though thou came to the world asklent,
Which fools may scoff at,
In my last plack thy part's be in't
The better half of it.

Though I should be the worse bestead,
Thou's be as braw and bienly clad
And thy young years as nicely bred
With education
As any brat of wedlock's bed
In all thy station.

Wee image o' my bonnie Betty,
As fatherly I kiss and daut thee,
As dear and near my heart I set thee,
With as good will
As all the priests had seen me get thee
That's out o' Hell.

Gude grant that thou may ay inherit
Thy mother's looks and graceful merit
And thy poor, worthless daddie's spirit
Without his failins!
'Twill please me more to see thee heir it
Than stocket mailins.

And if thou be what I would have thee
An' take the counsel I shall give thee,
I'll never rue my trouble with thee --
The cost nor shame of it --
But be a loving father to thee
And brag the name of it.

Cameras in the criminal court? Symposium in Bristol

If you notice that you're being drawn, you'll probably feel self-conscious. I see a bit of it at today's symposium about cameras in courtrooms, Screening the Criminal Trial. Some people adjust their position when I lock on to them.

So how will you feel if TV cameras are pointing at you? Chances are you'll change your behaviour - which makes Dr Paul Mason of Doughty Street Chambers dubious about filming criminal trials. He isn't keen on the idea of 'barristers playing up to future employers'.

Truth and transparency are vulnerable to what someone today calls 'the commercially driven imperatives of media'. And the camera could mean 'visibility is prioritised over intelligibility'.

Dr Eleanor Rycroft quotes Sartre: 'The law is theatre.' But should we treat it as a spectacle? The viewing public can't look over the judge's shoulder to read the case documents, so the narrative would seem moth-eaten at best.

Paul Mason says that the public seeks 'gore, sex, drama, violence.' He fears that court footage could be 'voyeurism dressed up as access to justice' unless it is unedited.

There is consensus today that the only way to preserve integrity is to show continuous footage, without intervention. This is already provided by the UK Supreme Court on its website, with judgments posted on YouTube.

There are no cameras in the lower courts in England and Wales except in the Court of Appeal, where footage of judgments is available to TV news editors. They don't often use it: courtroom longueurs don't suit the showbiz pace of news broadcasts.

As it happens, there's a snatch of a Court of Appeal judgment on the news the day after the symposium. Boxed up and miniaturised on screen, the court looks like a Victorian doll's house, all wood panels and wigs.

Several speakers refer to the televised O. J. Simpson trial, that long-running forensic car crash. I remember the Dancing Itos, dressed up as the trial judge. Here they are on The Tonight Show with chief prosecutor Marcia Clark (no, not really). Their cabaret performances were broadcast while the trial was continuing. Did anyone say contempt?

The real Judge Ito played up to his image by, for example, delaying the action one morning to advise everyone to see Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III which he had enjoyed the night before, perhaps not recollecting that some people at the double murder trial were a bit preoccupied.

When Doughty Street is mentioned today, its most famous tenant comes to mind and I play a mental sequence of Amal Clooney outfits including a recent bare-midriff ladyboy number. She dresses for the cameras.

The symposium was held by GW4, a collaboration between the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter. 

In a press release, GW4 says: 'On 8 July the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osbourne [sic], announced the first Conservative Budget for 19 years, placing importance on regional collaboration. The Budget announced that “the government will invite universities to develop proposals for supporting local collaborations”. GW4 was given as an example of a successful partnership model.'

The next public event, on 29 January, is Marx in the Key Hope, 'a workshop to read Marx and Marxists’ work in the context of current controversies, challenges and alternatives'.

 

The Naked Rambler: AND SITTING

The Naked Rambler's outfit - hiking boots and socks - doesn't fit the legal system. His tailor-made ASBO says he mustn't be naked in public.

The cost to the taxpayer of his 10-year incarceration to date is the equivalent of 100 entry-level bespoke suits, if you can still find them for £4k.

Our tegument today is Winchester Crown Court, an architectural affront. Indoors, a bicycle is parked next to a bust of Lord Hailsham. The reception area is gaudy with tinsel and the guards are in possession of a turkey hat. Made of plush to simulate raw flesh, it plays tinny music while the legs judder. 'The best ten pounds I ever spent,' says a guard.
 
The Naked Rambler, aka Steve, has a compulsion to defy authority. This has led him to the highly controlled environment of solitary confinement. Does he seek this control? He expresses his compulsion by not wearing clothes. He does, however, have control over his behaviour: he wore clothes in order to travel to meet his children, undressing on arrival. He has refused a job in a nudist reserve, presumably because it doesn't give him an obvious mode of defiance.

Steve is like parchment - something blank on which other people can impose their ideas: hero, martyr, mischief-maker, loony, PTSD-sufferer, victim of the law's inflexibility who has suffered a grotesquely disproportionate punishment. His skin has something of parchment's dryness and sallow glimmer in the harsh downlights of the dock, on what is probably his fortieth court appearance.

I'm also working on an analogy with polenta - yellowish, bland, and prone to mysterious lumps as is Steve's right leg.

He reminds me a bit of the anti-protein campaigner Stanley Green, an eccentric part of the Oxford Circus scenery for 25 years who made that naff precinct more human.

But Steve's own body is his protest banner, his cause is himself. He has won the support of a loyal entourage, he is polite and co-operative when arrested, albeit inconsiderate on the hygiene front, but he lacks ironic self-awareness and soaks up the altruism of others. His conversation is solipsistic and his choices mean that he can't contribute to society by paying tax or doing voluntary work.

In court today Steve wishes to be unrepresented, but his long-suffering brief is here as amicus curiae in a gallant attempt to offer him some necessary cover - Matthew Scott is 'always known for his helpfulness to the courts in whatever he does,' says the judge.

'Do you want to say you're sorry?' asks the judge.

'I'm not sorry,' says Steve, his breath misting the glass in front of the dock.

Even so, Steve gets off with what sounds like the minimum sentence. He could be out soon - but for how long? Will he take the judge's advice to seek an alteration to the ASBO, which he has outgrown? The default expression on the face of the guard escorting him in the dock is 'We've got a right one here.'
  

And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. - Genesis 3:10. 

Traditionally, public nakedness has been seen as a punishment (here is an Air France executive after an attack by disgruntled workers). So why should society punish the already naked?

Coda: the only inappropriate erection in this story is Winchester Crown Court and Steve appears confident that he can get around without being plagued by such. This should give comfort to any citizen pusillanimous enough to feel outraged by someone who would have been seized by any self-respecting Renaissance painter as a scrawny model for John the Baptist.

I've blogged about Steve here and here.

Illustrating moral panic

Justice in a time of moral panic is a collection of essays by lawyers, academics and journalists.

Most of the illustrations in it are by me.

I gave the art director components which he assembled on the page.

I started by wanting to draw a twitter storm - a furious flock of twitter logos. Nope, said a copyright lawyer.

'I want you to imagine you're being attacked by birds,' I said to friends and life-class models who crossed my path, and drew them with tufts of sheep's wool dipped in ink. One day I forgot to bring wool and improvised with Andrex which worked just as well.

Doing proper botanical drawing would kill me. These are stylised leaves from a castor-oil plant, to illustrate a story about ricin.

The most co-operative model is yourself...

...although if I'd realised that the hands would be used so prolifically I would have grabbed some big gnarly male hands to balance my small one.

A selection of inked lines came in useful for layout purposes.

The drawings below were rejected as too esoteric for the brief. The subjects for them were reactions to Irish accents, historic child sexual abuse, rape myths and terrorism. I blog about them here.

Apollo and Daphne, Piero Del Pollaiuolo c1470-80, National Gallery

Justice in a time of moral panic is the theme of the first issue of Proof magazine, edited by Jon Robins and Brian Thornton and designed by Andrew Stocks (£15, The Justice Gap).

John Robins is a freelance journalist. He has written several books and runs The Justice Gap.

Andrew Stocks is a freelance designer and an art director at The Guardian.

Brian Thornton is a senior lecturer in Winchester University’s journalism department and commissioning editor on The Justice Gap.