The Queen is quite rightly embark­ing on a year of cel­e­bra­tions to mark her 60 years on the throne.

The Firm : Queen Eliz­a­beth with her hus­band, The Duke of Edin­burgh, and her heirs, Charles and William

She has seen off eleven british prime min­is­ters, attended thou­sand of sport­ing events, and prob­a­bly cov­ered every inch of the UK dur­ing her reign. Her con­sis­tency has been remark­able. Essen­tially at the beck and call of the gov­ern­ment, she hasn’t put a foot wrong whilst those around her — politi­cians, fam­ily mem­bers and flunkies have burned in the heat of pub­lic admon­ish­ment. It would be fair to say that the monar­chy in gen­eral and Queen Eliz­a­beth in par­tic­u­lar has been a steady­ing hand on the tiller of British pol­i­tics and pol­i­tics in the Com­mon­wealth. She has been a con­stant in a world of rev­o­lu­tion and disharmony.

Hardly pro­gres­sive — The House of Lords, the epit­ome of the class system.

Of course she shouldn’t really be there should she? The monar­chy is the cor­ner­stone of  aris­toc­racy — the sys­tem whereby hold­ing power is hered­i­tary and the elite main­tain them­selves through con­trol of Law, Church and State. The royal fam­ily is at the apex of this class sys­tem. When Hitler talked of the thou­sand year reich, he could well have been look­ing across the chan­nel to Eng­land, where many of the most pow­er­ful fam­i­lies can trace their for­tunes back to William the Con­queror. Whilst many of the trap­pings of aris­toc­racy have been swept away, the fun­da­men­tals of the sys­tem remain, and the Wind­sors are the epit­ome of hered­i­tary power. For whilst the Queen seems to be impo­tent, her influ­ence goes through the heart of soci­ety like ‘Black­pool’ through a stick of rock. Her con­sti­tu­tional pow­ers may be lim­ited, but she does have the right to dis­solve par­lia­ment and dis­miss the Prime Min­is­ter. Indeed, her offi­cial role now could be seen as to pro­tect the peo­ple from any excesses of gov­ern­ment. She is the defender of the peo­ple. Don’t think it couldn’t hap­pen. Gough Whit­lam was removed from office in Aus­tralia in 1975 by the Governor-General, the Queen’s man in Canberra.

So a hered­i­tary monarch with such sweep­ing power should be the very antithe­sis of a mod­ern democ­racy. Surely any right-thinking cit­i­zen should call for her removal and the destruc­tion of all she rep­re­sents. But that would only work if the sys­tem could be replaced by some­thing bet­ter. Granted, if we were start­ing afresh with a clean sheet of paper, we wouldn’t con­tem­plate such a sys­tem. An elected head of state would be an obvi­ous choice, in a mer­i­toc­racy with an informed and unselfish elec­torate. How­ever, in a state where pub­lic opin­ion is formed by head­lines and sound bites and the money in our pock­ets today trumps any thought of tomor­row, hav­ing a con­stant at the heart of gov­ern­ment who can influ­ence and restrain the fickle, attention-loving politi­cians is invaluable.

As a repub­li­can with a huge respect for the queen, I want to have my cake and eat it. We should abol­ish the Monar­chy for an elected head of state. I think we should all vote for Mrs Eliz­a­beth Windsor.

The Juror impris­oned for check­ing Google should be applauded

There is no sur­prise that the full weight of the law has crashed down on Theodora Dal­las. A court of law is one of the few places where knowl­edge is still power. The ridicu­lous idea that the legal pro­fes­sion knows what is best and should be allowed to con­tinue unques­tioned and unchal­lenged must be main­tained, oth­er­wise where would it all end?

Boy, would he have been in trouble.…Henry Fonda in the film ‘Twelve Angry Men’

I have been on two juries and I have been amazed at what the advo­cats are allowed the get away with. Essen­tially they are allowed to lie by omis­sion. In the cases I heard, both pros­e­cu­tion and defence did their best to put their own points of view as unques­tion­able facts and reduce the oppos­ing views by under­min­ing and smear­ing. Nei­ther seemed remotely inter­ested in the truth or, for that mat­ter, in their clients. Win­ning the case was the point. The only point.

So what is a juror to do? I sat there, bewil­dered, know­ing less at the end of the cases than I knew at the begin­ning. Were they guilty? I don’t know. For­tu­nately both cases fell through, but I think I would prob­a­bly just have gone with the flow…

This is a tragedy. Not least because in my expe­ri­ence jurors are des­per­ate to take their respon­si­bil­i­ties seri­ously. They may have resented the call and have done what­ever to get out of it, but once selected, they see this as a very impor­tant civil duty and are deter­mined to com­plete it to their best abil­ity. Sadly, after only a few hours of advo­cacy, they start to realise what they are up against. These lawyers are not here to fathom the truth of the case, they are here to bam­boo­zle and obfus­cate. Dis­in­for­ma­tion rules. They call irrel­e­vant wit­nesses, yet avoid ones who could estab­lish facts that they do not want heard. They focus on ele­ments which could not pos­si­bly have any bear­ing and skip over real issues. They con­trol the dis­tri­b­u­tion of knowl­edge as if it were gold in a miser’s purse.  That is their job.

The idea that jus­tice would be tainted if jurors knew the full facts is both patro­n­is­ing and laugh­able. Jus­tice is tainted by jurors being spoon­fed half-truths by the lawyers. The idea that jurors should only be allowed to know what they lawyers tell them about a case gives the lawyers a power they should never have had. When the jury sys­tem began, there was no hint that the jury should oper­ate in this kind of vac­uum, because it would have been impos­si­ble. This was a time when a town might have 10,000 inhab­i­tants, travel was lim­ited and every­one knew each other. When the judge came to town and the court was estab­lished, the case would be well known, the vic­tim would be known, the accused would prob­a­bly be known and the jury would have good idea if he ( or she ) had done it. The main idea behind the British jury sys­tem was that peo­ple were being judged by their peers — that soci­ety as a whole was decid­ing their fate — not some whim­si­cal monarch, or mag­is­trate. Lawyers with­hold­ing facts from the deci­sion mak­ers was never the intention.

So three cheers for Theodore Dal­las. An aca­d­e­mic trained to ques­tion and probe, there is no sur­prise that she found being spoon-fed by these offi­cers of jus­tice intol­er­a­ble. Let’s bring back the idea that the legal sys­tem should first estab­lish the truth before mov­ing on to jus­tice. Allow jurors to do their own research, indeed encour­age it. Then allow them to have ques­tions asked on their behalf so that they can get to the bot­tom of a case. Juries are the sole rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the peo­ple in a court room. They should hold the most power.

Times are going to be tough, but we can re-invent our­selves for the future

Let’s change the system

As we come to terms with the idea that we shall work longer for less, and not reap the same pen­sion ben­e­fits as our par­ents, we should be ask­ing our­selves how we can draw some com­fort from the dif­fi­cult few years ahead of us. When Vince Cable likened our eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion with the war, I am sure those who actu­ally lived through it must have viewed the state­ment with a mix­ture of dis­be­lief and fear. Of course, the next few years will be less destruc­tive of life and prop­erty but, when our flatlin­ing economies start to recover, we will find, like in 1919 and 1945,  that we have effec­tively lost a decade of growth, opti­mism and well­be­ing. Even after the two world wars, when the pur­poses had been so well defined, there was a period of des­o­la­tion between the ine­bri­a­tion of vic­tory and the resump­tion of eco­nomic growth.

More pos­i­tively, the wars drove social change for the bet­ter. In Britain Women finally achieved suf­frage in 1918 ( lim­ited until 1928 ) and the edu­ca­tion sys­tem was reformed under the Fisher act, giv­ing the state respon­si­bil­ity for sec­ondary edu­ca­tion. The end of the sec­ond world war  saw the intro­duc­tion of the National Health Ser­vice, nation­alised rail­ways, coal mines and steel production.

So, if this period can be likened to war, should we not be look­ing to see what we can change to improve our futures like the post war years? What should we be look­ing at? What New Year’s Rev­o­lu­tions should we be look­ing to enact to build a bet­ter future for us and our offspring?

1)  National Service.

Yes that old chest­nut, but with youth unem­ploy­ment in the UK at a high, and the ever­grow­ing prob­lem of elderly care, it seems bonkers not to join the two together and have the young look after the old. See this for more details.

2) Pen­sions.

The pen­sions sys­tem in the UK is crazy. Why should employ­ers have to pro­vide pen­sions? Why should they be invested in the mar­kets, who then bet against us? How can a soci­ety allow its old to sink into poverty through poor pen­sion pro­vi­sion?  The solu­tion is already in place. Take 10% of every salary and place it into a per­sonal pen­sion plan backed by the gov­ern­ment and run by an inde­pen­dent body. the money accrued could be loaned to gov­ern­ments ( our own, for exam­ple ) at a com­pet­i­tive rate, negat­ing the need for them to go to the mar­kets. The mar­kets would grad­u­ally loose the vast wealth of the pen­sion funds and find their orig­i­nal level ( when they were just a rich man’s bet­ting shop ). Every indi­vid­ual would receive a state­ment once a year inform­ing them of how much was in their par­tic­u­lar pot and how much this would gen­er­ate at retire­ment. Remem­ber it is in everyone’s inter­est that we all get good pen­sion pro­vi­sion. Pen­sion­ers who live on the bread­line are eco­nom­i­cally dead. Just think how our econ­omy would ben­e­fit if our pen­sion­ers had money to spend.

Make tax pay­ment public.

The recent par­lia­men­tary report on the Inland Revenue’s writ­ing off  bil­lions of pounds worth of taxes for Voda­fone left a nasty taste in the mouths of Joe Pub­lic. But, in fact it is just the tip of the ice­berg. Because of this ridicu­lous notion that tax is a pri­vate issue, non-taxpayers have been get­ting away with it for years. Surely, in these times of hard­ship, we should be sup­port­ing those com­pa­nies who pay their taxes in the UK? Take Boots the Chemist, for exam­ple, until it was bought by a pri­vate equity com­pany in 2008, it was con­tribut­ing abut £140 mil­lion to the exche­quer every year in taxes. Its new own­ers quickly moved the com­pany HQ to Switzer­land and now we receive noth­ing. But that is not all is it? Boots is now com­pet­ing with legit­i­mate tax pay­ing British com­pa­nies whilst not pay­ing tax itself. Hardly a level play­ing field is it? Accord­ing to this research, it is esti­mated that the gov­ern­ment cur­rently loses £12 bil­lion a year in taxes unpaid. Yet surely it should be a sim­ple process for the Inland Rev­enue to issue a ‘tax paid ’ state­ment to each com­pany — or indi­vid­ual — who would surely then be pleased to present it pub­licly. A ‘pays British tax’ logo above your shop would boost sales, wouldn’t it? Of course the main prob­lem is that they are all at it. Even if they have their HQ in the UK, their incomes are sifted through hun­dreds off-shore accounts. So don’t expect a pub­lic cam­paign for this. The media groups are play­ing the sys­tem just like every­one else.

Limit polit­i­cal careers.

That ugly phrase, ‘the polit­i­cal classes’ sug­gests some sort of Pla­tonic pre­de­ter­min­ism which strikes at the heart of demo­c­ra­tic processes. Politi­cians should be lim­ited to 4 par­lia­men­tary terms and the two cham­bers ( Com­mons and Lords) should be mutu­ally exclusive.