Unfortunately it is not just in the Judicial system that slackness and a lack of drive have overwhelmed the service on offer. I remember being told 50 years ago about the appalling delays in the Courts of places like Greece and Egypt compared to the comparative despatch and efficiency that matters were concluded in England. Despite all the advantages conferred by IT we have slipped into approaching things in a third world dilatory manner.
Much of it arises from an abdication of authority. The fierce Judge and ferocious matron dare not exercise authority for fear of charges of bullying. To have someone “quake in their shoes” has becomes an offence not a symbol that standards are to be maintained.
It has nothing to do with money – everything to do with slackness and loss of standards. Everything is infected with bureaucratic sloth. No one is properly in charge. Yesterday the anonymous junior doctor wrote about taking 30 minutes to find the patients notes scattered around the ward as if this was a normal and acceptable way of proceeding. It is the new mindset. Don’t criticise failings someone’s feelings might be hurt.
Comparing the two countries is a fascinating study. It’s not clear who taught who, but in.200 years of being intertwined , they have clearly adopted each others best practices in terms of bureaucratic paralysis and inefficiency.
This could very easily be applied to teaching too. In the last school I taught at the headmaster was extremely cross with me for bringing up the lack of institutionalized discipline at one of our meetings. I was told that discipline is an outdated concept and that we should seek to persuade rather than to punish. The problem is that no-one wants to appear to be the bad guy in education. Our current school system operates under the grave misassumption that children would naturally be incredibly brilliant learners if only the right teacher was in front of them. And this is a major problem for teachers. They inhabit the worst of all worlds. They are held entirely accountable for everything that goes on in the school: the behavior of the children, the quality of teaching, and ensuring that everyone passes exams. Yet perversely, they are given very little institutional authority to actually do anything.
As a result almost every sane human being is leaving the school system only to be replaced by newly-qualified (and cheaper) teachers who have been drip-fed woke pedagogies at college. If I wasn’t such an optimist I could almost believe that this is all happening according to some grand design. School these days seem more about teaching the right attitudes toward pet causes (LGBQT, DEI, and climate justice) rather than the effective transmission of subject-matter. And the sad thing is, that the children deep down know that the adults around them are lying, that they are false, weak, and ineffectual, which is why they start acting up. They actually crave borders and limits, but are obviously too young to know that. I would say that the whole point of a civilized society is to adequately convey these limits so that children grow up to be mature and responsible adults.
I left that school last year and the headmaster, to his credit, came and told me that the children were really sad to see me leave, that despite my disciplinarian teaching methods they had really appreciated my classes. It kind of cheered me up, even if he was perhaps just being nice. I’d personally felt that I’d done a dreadful job. I guess the rewards that come with teaching are not immediately evident, but in any case, I doubt very much I will be returning to teaching. It burns you out after a while.
As a former secondary school teacher and latterly university lecturer myself, I totally recognise your portrayal of the education system as you experienced it. Schools and universities are now places where students are taught WHAT to think, not HOW to think. Incorrect thinking or failure to regurgitate correct thinking are punished with cancellation in degrees of vindictiveness.
Death of God and all that. Moral authority and the centre that holds long gone and the law now has to be mindful of law and not grounded in moral authority. Welcome to legal positivism
Richard Hopkins
3 months ago
Dickens wrote scathingly about the practice of the Law in Victoria times in Bleak House. The slower the case, the fatter the fees. The scale and reach of the Law has increased hugely since then. The FT story, quoted in this piece, said that the British legal industry was worth £52.7 billion in 2022 – the second largest in the world, after the USA. Odd, for such a small country.
Ironically, as the shameful PO scandal has shown, even the “most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history” just results in further fees – with no accountability visible yet. It’s hard not to conclude that the dysfunction of the justice system appears to still function rather well for those working within it.
Even two thousand years ago Juvenal felt compelled to ask:- “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”* of the finest legal system the world has ever seen.
No need to tell you whose.
(*Loosely “who judges the Judges?”. Satire VI .347-348.)
‘The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.’ – Tacitus.
N Satori
3 months ago
Judges no longer scary and no longer able to press barristers into doing their job properly? Sounds like another example of the crisis of authority afflicting the institutions.
Q. Are judges appointed on merit? Or have progressive quotas on gender etc been operating for the last two decades? The Age of Deference is long gone. But if social engineering and progressive ideology determines who sits on that bench do not be surprised if its vital authority has been washed away on the tide.
I’m more inclined to think that there has been a steady cultural shift toward Left-liberal values at all levels of society. In earlier times the Woke absurdities which plague us would have been laughed out of town. Now, if you dare to laugh, you could be in deep trouble.
Are there any traditional conservatives eager and ready to take charge and re-invigorate our flaccid institutions? I don’t see them.
The UK, like Israel, suffers from a judiciary that is out of control. Our judges make laws that affect us all – especially in relation to the application and interpretation of ‘human rights’ – rather than confining themselves to applying the laws made in Parliament via the machinery of democratic governance. This fundamentally undermines democracy in which elected representative (i.e. MPs) make the laws in Parliament and are held accountable and subject to removal. Not so with appointed judges who appear to be accountable to none but themselves. It is largely they who have inverted the law so that its principal focus is now minority rights, not the rights of the majority as was historically the case. It is through this misdirection of the law that the Woking Class elites which emerged in the 21st Century, building on the ‘progressive’ foundations of the late 20th Century, have captured and consolidated such an iron grip on power and control at every level in society, horizontally and vertically. The rooted tyranny, and its curtailment of free speech, from which we suffer today is primarily a consequence of this perversion of the law – i.e. to give unprecedented priority to minority interests, as driven relentlessly by ruthless legal practitioners and their Establishment fellow travellers whose position is now unassailable. Manipulation of the Law and legal systems has cowed the entire population of the Western ‘democracies’ far more effectively (and more permanently) than bullets and bombs could ever have achieved.
Walter Marvell
3 months ago
Of all the national institutions to have become utterly corrupted by the Progressive Revolution, now tawdry scummy British Justice has fallen the furthest. The precious thread of common law twisted and broken as we embraced the suffocating codification of Europe. The scales of justice wilfully tipped to accord with the devastating new Equality laws and their super privileged Nine Victim groups. Result? Unelected judges dictating gleefully to Parliament. Leftist mmigration lawyers allowing near every illegal migrant – sex crime no prob – to stay (compare to the French). Human rights lawyers set to destroy the finances of your local councils with demented (not like for like) gender pay rulings. The whole EHRC fiasco and the mocking by this privileged London class of fox bashers of democratic mandates. The list of woe is just too long. Brirish justice has gone the same way as the Civil Service, BBC, NHS. Captured. Changed. Corrupted. Unworthy of trust and respect.
If you want some bedtime reading try the 5,000 page Saville Report.
Charles Stanhope
3 months ago
Sadly like everything else even the standard of British Judges is sadly declining.
Gone are happy days of Horace Avery, Christmas (Toby) Humphreys and Aubrey Melford Stevenson, to replaced by the likes of Tom Denning, Archie Marshal and Leonard Hoffman.
As a KC and later QC be prosecuted at the Japanese War Trials, the Craig-Bentley case, the Ruth Ellis case, the Timothy Evans case and the Klaus Fuchs case.
As a Judge he certainly ‘went of the boil’, perhaps because of his role I. three of those high profile prosecutions?
William Amos
3 months ago
I wonder if anyone could comment as to whether this a legacy of the Woolf Reforms of 1997 or in spite of them?
Rob N
3 months ago
The problem is not only the delays and lose of determination for justice to be speedy but also the frequent lack of an appropriate punishment and the clear 2 level justice system: trans people not going to jail because it wouid be hard for them, illegals getting reduced or no sentences because they had already suffered in their own country or did not know the law.
It all seems to be part of a Government/WEF wide policy of destroying the country in every possible way. Presumably so that we will agree to them ‘taking charge’ to save us from their actions.
Gordon Arta
3 months ago
The UK’s legal system, like many of its other institutions, is obsolescent, tired, and increasingly out of touch with reality and reason. Its adversarial model, complex and often contradictory precedent, procedural complexity, ill thought out technicalities, and lawyers rewarded by how long they can string cases out, mean that ‘the law’ bears little relationship to ‘justice’.
Jerry Carroll
3 months ago
Standards began dropping in the ’60s and you see the result everywhere you look. A new Decline and Fall will be written by some brave soul a hundred years from now. Or more likely it will be a rogue AI gone off the reservation. It will be read by a narrow slice of society that has taken the trouble to educate themselves despite the risk of punishment by the state and culture. You wouldn’t want to be alive.
Katalin Kish
3 months ago
Contempt of court is an indictable offense.
As a devastated victim of ongoing, not just unpunished by unreportable crimes* since 2009 in a leafy suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where we are told not to resist mugging attempts, and our children to walk to/from school in groups to discourage assaults/muggings/abductions, I can only feel contempt for judges weeping for the hardships suffered by perpetrators of crimes, while ignoring the trauma crime victims carry for life.
While the victims’ taxes are paying for the judges’ salaries & the welfare benefits of the perpetrators, as well as the upkeep of the bureaucracy that enforces the secrecy of Australia’s absurd crime reality.
* Victoria Police routinely block reporting attempts even from public servant witnesses of crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/worse.
.
Is that a “Words fail me” comment ?
‘Just his’ way of doing it justice.
It’s Unherd’s new moderation policy. Any objectionable comment is crushed to a singularity.
He’ll be making his views clear in May 2024
I quite see your point.
Unfortunately it is not just in the Judicial system that slackness and a lack of drive have overwhelmed the service on offer. I remember being told 50 years ago about the appalling delays in the Courts of places like Greece and Egypt compared to the comparative despatch and efficiency that matters were concluded in England. Despite all the advantages conferred by IT we have slipped into approaching things in a third world dilatory manner.
Much of it arises from an abdication of authority. The fierce Judge and ferocious matron dare not exercise authority for fear of charges of bullying. To have someone “quake in their shoes” has becomes an offence not a symbol that standards are to be maintained.
It has nothing to do with money – everything to do with slackness and loss of standards. Everything is infected with bureaucratic sloth. No one is properly in charge. Yesterday the anonymous junior doctor wrote about taking 30 minutes to find the patients notes scattered around the ward as if this was a normal and acceptable way of proceeding. It is the new mindset. Don’t criticise failings someone’s feelings might be hurt.
Non accountability- I think a similar problem in countries like India
Comparing the two countries is a fascinating study. It’s not clear who taught who, but in.200 years of being intertwined , they have clearly adopted each others best practices in terms of bureaucratic paralysis and inefficiency.
This could very easily be applied to teaching too. In the last school I taught at the headmaster was extremely cross with me for bringing up the lack of institutionalized discipline at one of our meetings. I was told that discipline is an outdated concept and that we should seek to persuade rather than to punish. The problem is that no-one wants to appear to be the bad guy in education. Our current school system operates under the grave misassumption that children would naturally be incredibly brilliant learners if only the right teacher was in front of them. And this is a major problem for teachers. They inhabit the worst of all worlds. They are held entirely accountable for everything that goes on in the school: the behavior of the children, the quality of teaching, and ensuring that everyone passes exams. Yet perversely, they are given very little institutional authority to actually do anything.
As a result almost every sane human being is leaving the school system only to be replaced by newly-qualified (and cheaper) teachers who have been drip-fed woke pedagogies at college. If I wasn’t such an optimist I could almost believe that this is all happening according to some grand design. School these days seem more about teaching the right attitudes toward pet causes (LGBQT, DEI, and climate justice) rather than the effective transmission of subject-matter. And the sad thing is, that the children deep down know that the adults around them are lying, that they are false, weak, and ineffectual, which is why they start acting up. They actually crave borders and limits, but are obviously too young to know that. I would say that the whole point of a civilized society is to adequately convey these limits so that children grow up to be mature and responsible adults.
I left that school last year and the headmaster, to his credit, came and told me that the children were really sad to see me leave, that despite my disciplinarian teaching methods they had really appreciated my classes. It kind of cheered me up, even if he was perhaps just being nice. I’d personally felt that I’d done a dreadful job. I guess the rewards that come with teaching are not immediately evident, but in any case, I doubt very much I will be returning to teaching. It burns you out after a while.
As a former secondary school teacher and latterly university lecturer myself, I totally recognise your portrayal of the education system as you experienced it. Schools and universities are now places where students are taught WHAT to think, not HOW to think. Incorrect thinking or failure to regurgitate correct thinking are punished with cancellation in degrees of vindictiveness.
Death of God and all that. Moral authority and the centre that holds long gone and the law now has to be mindful of law and not grounded in moral authority. Welcome to legal positivism
Dickens wrote scathingly about the practice of the Law in Victoria times in Bleak House. The slower the case, the fatter the fees. The scale and reach of the Law has increased hugely since then. The FT story, quoted in this piece, said that the British legal industry was worth £52.7 billion in 2022 – the second largest in the world, after the USA. Odd, for such a small country.
Ironically, as the shameful PO scandal has shown, even the “most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history” just results in further fees – with no accountability visible yet. It’s hard not to conclude that the dysfunction of the justice system appears to still function rather well for those working within it.
Even two thousand years ago Juvenal felt compelled to ask:- “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”* of the finest legal system the world has ever seen.
No need to tell you whose.
(*Loosely “who judges the Judges?”. Satire VI .347-348.)
Indeed.
‘The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.’ – Tacitus.
Judges no longer scary and no longer able to press barristers into doing their job properly? Sounds like another example of the crisis of authority afflicting the institutions.
Q. Are judges appointed on merit? Or have progressive quotas on gender etc been operating for the last two decades? The Age of Deference is long gone. But if social engineering and progressive ideology determines who sits on that bench do not be surprised if its vital authority has been washed away on the tide.
Quotas are now the order of the day. Just look around you!
However, what self respecting top notch ‘Silk’* would want to be a Judge these days?
(*KC.)
I’m more inclined to think that there has been a steady cultural shift toward Left-liberal values at all levels of society. In earlier times the Woke absurdities which plague us would have been laughed out of town. Now, if you dare to laugh, you could be in deep trouble.
Are there any traditional conservatives eager and ready to take charge and re-invigorate our flaccid institutions? I don’t see them.
The UK, like Israel, suffers from a judiciary that is out of control. Our judges make laws that affect us all – especially in relation to the application and interpretation of ‘human rights’ – rather than confining themselves to applying the laws made in Parliament via the machinery of democratic governance. This fundamentally undermines democracy in which elected representative (i.e. MPs) make the laws in Parliament and are held accountable and subject to removal. Not so with appointed judges who appear to be accountable to none but themselves. It is largely they who have inverted the law so that its principal focus is now minority rights, not the rights of the majority as was historically the case. It is through this misdirection of the law that the Woking Class elites which emerged in the 21st Century, building on the ‘progressive’ foundations of the late 20th Century, have captured and consolidated such an iron grip on power and control at every level in society, horizontally and vertically. The rooted tyranny, and its curtailment of free speech, from which we suffer today is primarily a consequence of this perversion of the law – i.e. to give unprecedented priority to minority interests, as driven relentlessly by ruthless legal practitioners and their Establishment fellow travellers whose position is now unassailable. Manipulation of the Law and legal systems has cowed the entire population of the Western ‘democracies’ far more effectively (and more permanently) than bullets and bombs could ever have achieved.
Of all the national institutions to have become utterly corrupted by the Progressive Revolution, now tawdry scummy British Justice has fallen the furthest. The precious thread of common law twisted and broken as we embraced the suffocating codification of Europe. The scales of justice wilfully tipped to accord with the devastating new Equality laws and their super privileged Nine Victim groups. Result? Unelected judges dictating gleefully to Parliament. Leftist mmigration lawyers allowing near every illegal migrant – sex crime no prob – to stay (compare to the French). Human rights lawyers set to destroy the finances of your local councils with demented (not like for like) gender pay rulings. The whole EHRC fiasco and the mocking by this privileged London class of fox bashers of democratic mandates. The list of woe is just too long. Brirish justice has gone the same way as the Civil Service, BBC, NHS. Captured. Changed. Corrupted. Unworthy of trust and respect.
If you want some bedtime reading try the 5,000 page Saville Report.
Sadly like everything else even the standard of British Judges is sadly declining.
Gone are happy days of Horace Avery, Christmas (Toby) Humphreys and Aubrey Melford Stevenson, to replaced by the likes of Tom Denning, Archie Marshal and Leonard Hoffman.
Not so sure about Christmas Humphreys, a keen Buddhist and a bit of a wet.
As a KC and later QC be prosecuted at the Japanese War Trials, the Craig-Bentley case, the Ruth Ellis case, the Timothy Evans case and the Klaus Fuchs case.
As a Judge he certainly ‘went of the boil’, perhaps because of his role I. three of those high profile prosecutions?
I wonder if anyone could comment as to whether this a legacy of the Woolf Reforms of 1997 or in spite of them?
The problem is not only the delays and lose of determination for justice to be speedy but also the frequent lack of an appropriate punishment and the clear 2 level justice system: trans people not going to jail because it wouid be hard for them, illegals getting reduced or no sentences because they had already suffered in their own country or did not know the law.
It all seems to be part of a Government/WEF wide policy of destroying the country in every possible way. Presumably so that we will agree to them ‘taking charge’ to save us from their actions.
The UK’s legal system, like many of its other institutions, is obsolescent, tired, and increasingly out of touch with reality and reason. Its adversarial model, complex and often contradictory precedent, procedural complexity, ill thought out technicalities, and lawyers rewarded by how long they can string cases out, mean that ‘the law’ bears little relationship to ‘justice’.
Standards began dropping in the ’60s and you see the result everywhere you look. A new Decline and Fall will be written by some brave soul a hundred years from now. Or more likely it will be a rogue AI gone off the reservation. It will be read by a narrow slice of society that has taken the trouble to educate themselves despite the risk of punishment by the state and culture. You wouldn’t want to be alive.
Contempt of court is an indictable offense.
As a devastated victim of ongoing, not just unpunished by unreportable crimes* since 2009 in a leafy suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where we are told not to resist mugging attempts, and our children to walk to/from school in groups to discourage assaults/muggings/abductions, I can only feel contempt for judges weeping for the hardships suffered by perpetrators of crimes, while ignoring the trauma crime victims carry for life.
While the victims’ taxes are paying for the judges’ salaries & the welfare benefits of the perpetrators, as well as the upkeep of the bureaucracy that enforces the secrecy of Australia’s absurd crime reality.
* Victoria Police routinely block reporting attempts even from public servant witnesses of crimes punishable by 10 years in jail/worse.
Typo:
not just unpunished by unreportable crimes
– should read –
not just unpunished but unreportable crimes
“Shrank”, not “shrunk”. Does anybody proof these articles?