English Ethnic Dress (1)

This is English Fancy Dress rather than ethnic dress but it is based on real clothes. It is the coming thing for the age of austerity, combining craft and practicality. The male dress is interesting because it allows a display of individuality we haven't seen for many years.

Elements: boots, cord or plain trousers tied at the knee with twine. There's a terrible fear in all English male dress of attacks via the knees: adders, eels, mice, the devil, ferrets (never sure if the string is to keep them out or in) so trousers have to be bound there. Straw looks good; string if not. Not that horrible bright pink plastic twine - the green or brown hairy hemp is fine.

Shirts are of small checks, preferably smudgy ones where the colours are barely differentiated. Bright, high-contrast checks are not the thing. Neckerchief is optional but very useful so most men will have them. You cannot really beat the cotton, red and white spotted neckerchief and they are so useful that there should be spare ones in the pockets of the capacious jacket.

The jacket is not tailored in the sense of fitting. It's tailored in the sense that it might fit somebody and will come and find that person. It will be made of good wool of the tweedy variety and here the customizing comes in. Strips of fabric and maybe feathers are lightly sewn on in rows to create padded contours and crests which emphasize movement and protect the jacket if you have to shove something with your shoulder, perhaps a car or a gate. It isn't necessary to cover the entire jacket although some people like to. Pads can be replaced if they get oily.

The hat is either a tweedy trilby or some favour canvas and leather versions of stockman hats. The trilby is neat, can easily be re-dressed with new feathers and blends in. The overall look should be owlish, not like a peacock. A flat hat, if worn, should not get over-large or it looks like it escaped from Top Of The Pops in 1973.

Accessories are whatever you think best in your pockets, plus a broom. This is not so much for sweeping as beating time like the tap dancers in Stomp do.



The Lincolnshire Poacher look is practical without being reminiscent of hospital scrubs or pyjamas, and suggests one has been up since sunrise conducting delicate business which one is not at liberty to discuss.

Female ethnic dress will be discussed later.

Apple Day 2011

There are events all over the country this month for Apple Day. The festival is a modern marketing creation but it has been well-attended as there are few things more beautiful than orchards. The loveliest tree of all is the golden pear, the quince, which reigns like a queen over the other trees, decked in magnificence.

Magic quince tree, Corpus Christi, Oxford

A little quince is good for flavouring but they take a lot of processing. It is much easier to eat apples and you can make many more things with them. Plus, you get cider from apples and that's what I'm hoping to be testing on Saturday. If I'm lucky with the weather I'll be wandering around in an absurd haze of bonhomie with a pie in one hand and a beaker of hot spiced cider punch in the other, laughing at the wolf winter which is loping towards us. If I'm not lucky with the weather I shall do just the same but pull the hood of my mac over the cider punch so the rain doesn't get in it.

Toffee Apple Cake.


Heat the oven to medium-hot, about gas mark 5
Have 2 x 1lb loaf tins or your choice of bakeware handy. I use the paper liners but I understand that silicon bakeware is very popular these days.

Fruit compote:
4 smallish apples, cored and sliced and cubed
A lemon, squeezed, to stop them oxidising
About 2 good tablespoons of honey
Cinnamon - some, how much you like, if you like like it. I'm having at least two good teaspoonsful.
Cook briefly together to soften them, leave to cool. The cubes of apple should now be covered in a syrup like toffee so don't burn them or they'll taste bitter. The need to cool down or they'll coagulate the cake mixture when they go in.

Cake batter of:
8oz self-raising flour
4oz unsalted butter or margarine
2 eggs
2 oz sugar, brown if you have it but any is fine.
A little milk if the batter is too stiff, but it probably won't be when you add the fruit.

Mix up the batter using any protocol you like, including the one where you separate the eggs, whip up the whites, then fold them in to the rest of the mixture later. This is a lot of mucking about but it does give puffier results. However, I'm doing sugar and butter, then eggs, then flour. The batter is stiff, more like a scone, but it will soften as you put the apple in. It is easier to do this by pouring the cool syrup in first.

Stir the apples in to the cake mixture which will be like rich cream - not hard but not runny - and cook in a medium-hot oven, around gas mark 5. If you are using two loaf tins this will take about 50 mins, longer if you use a deep tin, less if you are wise and spread the mixture in a wider tin. At any rate, cook until a knife-blade slides out cleanly and not covered in raw cake mix. The oven needs to be hot to get the reaction going and puff up the cake, but it can burn the top. Turn the oven down and leave it longer if it is a problem getting the centres to set. This happens with cakes using fresh fruit.

Cool on wire rack. The cake should not be over-sweet. Fresh fruit cakes count as health food if the council sends a spy round to 'test' your buns. You need to eat them quicker than other cakes because they only have a limited shelf life of a few days. This should not be a problem.

Aha! Found some spare cream. Yes, this all works.

If you enjoyed the apples, save the pips from the cores and shove them in the ground somewhere. Who knows, but one day there may be tree. All the instructions are in there.

A note on honey: this cake used rapeflower honey. Be aware that rapeflower honey is bland which makes it adaptable for cooking but that - in my opinion - it lacks the depth of flavour you might like in a table honey.

Cluck cluck CL*CK

That's what the noise was about.

Sinister plot.....

....discovered in supermarket.

Harvest Home 2011

The moon nearest the Autumn equinox (around September 23) is known as the Harvest Moon, but that was back on 12 September. The coming moon on October 11 is known as the Hunter's Moon although it can be called the Harvest Moon if the moon phase falls closest to the equinox in a given year.

It didn't this year but never mind; the harvest comes in from August onwards and is still going on, so this was a good weekend for a Harvest festival. Given the burst of hot days last week it worked out well. Besides, the children have been back at school for just over a month so they've had time to do projects on Where Our Food Comes From.


The modern consumer parade of seasonal food doesn't catch what we know is the deeper psychological truth; there isn't going to be any food made for months. People want, profoundly, to store life against the depths of the winter, near the solstice, when we will need captive sunshine. Maybe there should be more tinned food in the displays, or more exhibitions of salting, drying and preserving in sugar. It is one thing to produce food, quite another to be able to shift it forward, each jar a tiny time capsule.

The bees do it best with their immortal honey and beautiful wax but they are in great danger and nobody knows quite why their numbers are dropping and colonies are crashing. The British Beekeeper's Association asks that in the meantime, please could everyone put in bee-friendly plants, especially for May and June where the bees need all the help they can get.

Plants I've found are robust and take hardly any looking-after are foxgloves, hollyhocks, lavender and thyme. They might need a trim when the bees are finished with them but otherwise they just get on with it. As the hollyhock flowers tend to drop off and lay around on the path it's best to plant them at the back of the border where you don't have to sweep them up.


The Anglo-Saxons had a charm for bees and St Benedict had a Catholic prayer for them. As we are largely dependent on the bees for pollination or there won't be a next harvest, it is urgent to discover what is causing the colonies to collapse. A prayer on the side never does any harm, though. Other practical advice from the British Bee Keepers Association.

Desserts - Michel Roux

Inland to Toppings Bookshop in Ely for the book launch of Michel Roux's latest work, Desserts.

A gust of oestrogen knocked me over as I walked in to the hall they were using for the event. You can keep your interfering hyper-active bully-boys with their pukka pasta. If you want to see a babe-magnet in operation and grown women going giggly - and I'm talking about from 18 year olds to 80 year olds - Michel is your exemplar.

He doesn't appear immediately as there is a lunch first. Substantial quiches, salads, wine or elderflower presse are balanced on knees while people pre-buy books and browse through a selection of his other titles. Roux has a regular editorial team, including his wife who does the proof reading, and they are all credited. He produces books with the same values with which he cooks - just as he wouldn't ask someone to eat food he wouldn't eat himself, so the book has to satisfy him as an object, as a work in its own right. Later he emphasizes that he knows every page number for every recipe - it's his book, his name is on the cover.

Eventually Mr Topping - who has been toting boxes for days now and is nearly melting in the lunchtime sunshine - stands up and begins to tell of his joy at hearing someone say the bookshop was 'just like the one in Notting Hill'. Ha! That means he is equivalent to Hugh Grant. However, the bookshop in Notting Hill has just closed, as have dozens of others.

Toppings in Bath and Ely has bucked that trend by adding value as a retailer. They hold a book club each month and well-organized events where the authors are expected to turn up and perform. They also offer you fresh tea or coffee - for free - and don't mind browsers, so it's rare that you get out of there without something you didn't know you wanted. The lunch is to develop a trading relationship with the customers, so for £15 you get lunch, a literary cabaret, and a signed copy of the book.

Then comes the treat. The ladies come in with trays of desserts made by Michel's very own hand. On each white plate is a slice of chocolate raspberry roulade (roule marquis, page 168) and a shot-glass sized fig and honey pannacotta (page 76). There is cat-like purr of five dozen women simultaneously licking vanilla ambrosia and forgetting there is a world outside.


The audience is now as pliable as a sheet of soaked gelatin and the star comes out of his kitchen to great applause.

Time has been kind to Michel Roux. It's been more than kind; he is a Frenchman with a big nose and he's 70 so it isn't fair that he looks better now than he did twenty four years ago when he and his older brother Albert bickered their way across the nation's TV screens to challenge the worthy approaches of the kitchen divas such as Delia Smith. Michel remains slim and obviously active, no stoop, tanned, with white teeth and blue eyes. Even his hair has swept itself back in to a chic silver bardic mane which he certainly didn't have in 1988. I have the picture here - in those days he had to make do with an ordinary mousey fuzz of a barnett.

Being French he feels there is an obligation to show Italian men how It Is Done. There has to be a quality of casual effortless grace which leaves the Italians looking over-polished and fussy. "'Ow to understand a woman?" he shrugs Gallically, and the Italians would seethe because they know he does. The Brits nod sagely, interpreting it as a shared take-my-wife joke. There, right there, you have Europe on a plate.

There are barely a handful of men at the launch, which is strange when you consider how Roux's work is either neutral or masculine, grounded in the professional kitchen and the concepts of aristocratic food, not peasant pottage. It can't only be women who manage to get away from the office or the home at lunchtime.

Michel opens with a cautionary tale. He had hoped to show the signature fruit meringues he is proud of but they turn out to be very sensitive to air humidity and the quality of the oven. He waves one, explaining how disappointed he was with the texture and uneven quality. The encouraging moral is: even Michel Roux has disasters. None the less, he urges us to give plum meringue, page 150, a whirl. "Plums are cheap, you must dry them well, meringues are cheap if you have just made something with egg yokes".

Considering his name is linked with expensive food and he's obviously not short of a bob or two being domiciled now in Switzerland, it is surprising how many times he refers to the cost of food. It is preying on his mind - but then, being born in 1941 and growing up in the austerity years after the war with an unreliable father, he must have experienced what it means to be worried about food and its price. Perhaps that's why he cares so much about every mouthful; the ghost haunting him is not bad food, but no food.

He advises not starting with the book, but to go to a market, find what's cheap, then go back and look up a way to cook it. There's nothing special about that advice but it cuts through the marketing nonsense about wandering round a supermarket with the recipe their celebrity chef has suggested which just so happens to require five of their premium pre-packed ingredients.

The advice goes on. An omelette takes between 1 minute and 90 seconds. He advises scrambled eggs with a scoop of cream, Albert says two scoops. If you use milk the eggs will be a little wet but that may be the best way for you, if you don't want to use cream. Do not mix spices in desserts - stick to only one - two if you must - to avoid confusing the flavour. Fresh fish is a live food and very good for you. Meat is already very dead and if you cook it wrong, it can be twice as dead. A Christmas pudding is a wonderful thing and he believes that his own are the best in the world. (Although it doesn't appear to have made it in to this book). Don't use more than about six ingredients in a dish, unless you have a special reason - it is too much, too confusing. A cook must have a glass of wine while working, or at least water if you are not a wine drinker. Despite this being a book about desserts and therefore not without calories, the use of fruit and a reduced quantity of sugar and fat has been recommended . The trend is for lighter desserts, he says.

There is a lively exchange of views about the storage of eggs resulting in Michel being exasperated about too-low storage temperatures and the lack of larders in the modern house due to the EU. It's not clear to me precisely how they are responsible for that but sometimes his French accent is still hard to understand, even after all these years. "I'm in favour of the common market" he said, echoing so many people over the years "but not this EU".

Neither I nor any other lady there cares tuppence about understanding every word - he can read out the phone book as far as we are concerned, and it will still sound like ginger creme brulee (page 75), but it brings an interesting thought about the book. Roux writes in French because he says it is still quicker for him. The translator, Sally Somers, then puts this in to crystal-clear English, but in doing so it is impossible to avoid rinsing out some of the warmth and poetry of his Franglais phrasing.

One day he should write a book with the French on one page and the translation opposite, perhaps a considered guide to shopping and stocking a kitchen without over-spending or wastage, but getting value for money. If that's where good cookery starts, it is time he addressed the subject directly in his own signature grammar.

Second prize....

Alistair Darling has his book out: One Thousand and One Nights, the steamy tales told by an intelligent but unlucky courtesan who found herself married to an irascible knife-throwing sultan in the days of the Scottish Raj.

It features the laugh-a-minute bawdy escapade "It Started in America" and the x-rated erotic thriller "The Thief, The Prime Minister, His Lover and Their Banker".

Despite flirting with literary agent Eddie Bell at Bell Lomax Moreton the entrancing minx with intense eye-brows over-came his reluctance to kiss'n'tell, and signed to Maggie McKernan at her own outfit, the McKernan Agency, who acted with Capel & Land to take the book to publisher Atlantic (Toby Mundy).

The book was originally going to be called "My old job and how I expect to get paid twice" but McKernan is thought to have suggested that something sexier would go better in the run-up-to-Christmas market. Possibly something with cats on the cover, such as a white Persian being stroked by a podgy male hand.

Do not miss Alistair performing live the Dance of the Seven Veils, various venues all round the country. You would not belieeeve the tattoos.

Galliano, Galliano, Galliano let me go-oh-oh-oh

John Galliano is a gifted designer of frocks who, if we had any commercial sense, would be doing business here - like he once was - and helping to make us rich, rather than having to go to Paris to get the world recognition he deserves and generating all the money for LVMH. He'd be living in a small castle in the Cotswolds, have an atelier in Kensington and a factory in East Anglia which would put Paris couture to shame.

Instead, after years of boiling his brain to meet the cut-throat promotions schedule of international fashion houses and the rip-off merchants of mass fashion, including the vampires on all the magazines who rely on him to generate their images and having not a thousandth part of his talent, Galliano hit the bottle and began to mouth-off at gawpers in bars and, allegedly, physically attacked at least one woman. (This charge does not appear to have been pressed).

Where were the friends, the entourage, hangers-on who are supposed to at least pay court to the gifted? What was he doing huddled alone in the corner of a bar, trying to make a home of it? No law against that and where better than Paris for an artist to have a drink and collect the vibe of the streets as it comes up to inform haute couture. Even so, a designer with that much potential wealth creation in his knobbly skull should have had a permanent walker if Dior had cared about its talent. Leaving it to the chauffeur to call a lawyer wasn't the close protection he needed.

Obviously the artistically driven can be difficult to love even when they are sober - and that's putting it mildly - but somebody should have been there to scoop him in to a clinic. John, love, let's go home, let's have another drink, don't talk to them, the taxi is here. It's just another blood-sucker who wants to sell a story about you, lalalala, yes, that's right, let's have a sing-song.

That Dior had to dismiss him after the fracas was inevitable for brand-protection. If you are flogging expensive perfume, cosmetics and diffusion ranges, you really cannot have people who get in to fights with the potential customers. As Simon Doonan points out:

Without the passionate and genuine support of style-obsessed Dior-loving Jewesses, Galliano might be stitching frocks for City Girl Jennifer.

What Galliano said was racially offensive and the judges will be ruling on precisely where those statements stand in French law. But in the general sense, millions of offensive things are said every day. In some mouths it matters, but in Galliano's irrelevant gob it was only significant in that it betrayed that the wicked old idea is still blowing round the French fashion industry. Like we didn't know. People like John don't sit around crafting insults; they copy them from their mates. You might as well blame a weather-cock for the wind.

He could as easily have told the unwelcome strangers to get lost but the half-Spic Gibraltarian from Sarf Lunnon (so not even a proper Cockerney, the mischling) had been in France for so long he forgot he wasn't French, just like he temporarily forgot he was gay and where the iconography of the pink triangle comes from.

What he was aiming for was offensively hip with a hint of Parisian Fuque-vous , a la Sex Pistols 1976, which he might have remembered from when he was a teenager. This is difficult to pull-off when sober, which is probably why it is usually only attempted by the bladdered. They are normally protected by incoherence. Sadly, Galliano had not quite reached that level of inebriation so it was still possible to make out what he was saying.

Note that the video provided via the Sun (who must have paid a pretty penny for it) is not of the incident which the court is ruling on, but an earlier ear-bashing he gave to an Italian pair of women. If it is his usual behaviour, he used English but in a cod French accent, following the convention set by Croft and Perry in 'Allo 'Allo. That's how drenched he got; his mouth spoke English and his brain heard French. Good Moaning.

Ask yourself: if you meet a drunk, do you insist on asking them questions and video it, or do you go away to get on with something more rewarding. I suppose it depends on if you think the poor bastard is good for a bob or two, or if you can sell the pictures.

In the bar-room squabble at issue in court, Galliano acted as if he owned the bar. The bar owner, in deference to a good customer, asked the other customer to change seats, just leave the pissed Brit alone. The customer declined - althought she also didn't own the bar - and instead engaged in a 45 minute slanging-match which ended with Geraldine Bloch being told she had "low-end thighs" (ouch) and her manfriend Philippe Virgitti offering to re-arrange Galliano's head with a bar-stool. Charming, the lot of 'em.

This week they are having another go at humiliating Galliano in court. Bloch wants want one symbolic Euro and an apology printed in the world's leading fashion titles (presumably saying that her derriere is second only to Pippa Middleton's) , while Virgitti, having been all matey earlier on, has now decided that his feelings are so terribly hurt that only money, lots of it, can assuage his flustered honour. A third person is also claiming to have been hurt, but this may be a more complex charge and possibly out of time due to limitations on delay for bringing a complaint. They've already had him sacked and made him grovel. He already apologised, weeks ago. Here, luv, have a Euro from me. Mind you don't spend it all at once, there are Greeks desperate for that much money.

A de-toxed Galliano presented himself to court to show respect rather than sending a sick-note via his lawyer, but wisely determined not to speak French (surely he must have picked up a few words by now) and used an interpreter to make sure that what ever he said this time, it wouldn't upset any one. Vogue is covering the trial, although you'd think they'd take better fashion notes than he was "dressed conservatively". The best trial coverage to date comes via the Daily Beast on Powerwall.

Obviously, there's a great deal of crow pie to be eaten. Never mind the dodgier statements; the French prosecutor has suggested that in France it is a crime amounting to assault to criticise the size of a woman's thighs and the condition of her hair. A damn serious offence, if you ask me. This could be the greater problem for Galliano because the citizens of Planet Fashion don't really care or understand about race or religion but they mind very much indeed if they are accused of having a big fat bum.

For proof of this, look at Cecil Beaton. David Noh recounts that Beaton was being a frightful lovey in 1938 and thought he was pulling off a wizard jape when he included in a sketch in microscopic writing:

"Mr. R. Andrew's ball at the El Morocco brought out all the damned kikes in town."

The editor warned him to remove it, but he threw a hissy fit and somehow it made it in to print, in to the pages of Vogue. But Beaton had enemies and they made sure that journalist Walter Winchell was tipped-off to examine the illustration with a magnifying glass. In the resulting row Beaton was forced to resign. Explanations for his behaviour don't really stack up and he doesn't appear to have made the obvious defence that this merely held up a mirror to what people, fashionistas, were saying when they got together. Despite his public school and Cambridge background, he was gifted artistically rather than intellectually and failed to see that a fashion mag can never risk portraying its customers in anything other than a pool of golden light.

Despite the lull Beaton's career went in to, he emerged triumphant later when he produced the costumes for "My Fair Lady". Beaton collected a CBE in 1956, was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1960 and was knighted in 1972. He didn't get those by calling the gentry a bunch of lardy old trout, which would definitely have seen him skinned. He survived his publishing faux pas because it was only about politics, dahlink.

Politically Galliano can recover if he stays away from subjects he doesn't comprehend and off substances which overwhelm him. He already has a CBE and is a member of the Legion of Honour, so if he stacks up 20 years more of solid job creation over here, he could end up as Sir John of Streatham. Artistically, it may be harder to find his way back to the effortless distillations which mark out his creations at their very best, but I hope he'll try. The reports of his closing collections were sympathetic - there was nothing wrong with the quality of his artistic vision. I hope he sends me a ticket for his show.



Update 28 June: Vogue have published the account of a witness who is claims to have seen the whole argument unfold. Felicitas Michel's telling of it does not involve anti-semitic opinions. The French court allowed the video in evidence which refers to separate event and is NOT the subject of the complaint.

Some commenters on the fashion blogs have pointed out that the rant tape was not saleable or perhaps even useable under French law, which currently takes a wider view of privacy than English law does (or did until recently). The complaint to the police made it possible for News International to risk publishing the video clip.

....

Update 10 September 2011

John Galliano appeared in court in Paris, which imposed a suspended sentence of a fine of £5,300 on a conviction for "casting public insults based on origin, religious affiliation or ethnicity". This establishes that the bar-room exchange was in what has now been defined as a public place for these purposes.

Galliano was also ordered to pay a symbolic 1 Euro compensation to his victims. Make of that what you will under French law. In English terms it means the judges accept the complaints and that the State has made its case, and mean him to apologise, but don't think much of the complainants. Note, however, that this was precisely what one of the complainants asked for.

The court rejected Galliano's denial that he had said any such thing , although other witnesses backed his version of events.

The Sun - on behalf of News International which paid out for the video of a previous beasting where a pissed Galliano was goaded in to forgetting that he wasn't French and wasn't an edgy intellectual - said, in its print editorial:

"So much for France's pious grandstanding as the champion of decency and human rights"

Les Rosbifs never miss a chance to rag the Frogs, but if that doesn't make you laugh you must have had your funny bone surgically removed.

Plastic pots, plastic education

Clearing out the back of a locker I came across these grotty plastic pots and had a Proustian moment. They came from the days of cookery lessons, or 'food technology' as it was more properly called because it wasn't anything as honest or useful as cooking but it wanted to get itself up as on a par with the technologists (wood work, metal work, chemistry) who in turn wanted to get themselves up with the physics and maths department.

With only one period and a class full of giddy teenagers, the food technology teacher resorted to sending letters which pleaded with the parents to send ingredients weighed out. These would be lightly combined and, if time permitted, heated in some fashion. Sometimes a raw assembly would come back. An uncooked pastry twist is not improved for sloshing about on the bus home.

The constraints made the ingredients very limited. I had no idea you could get an entire curriculum out of wheat, fat and sugar. Fruit was sometimes mentioned and if the teacher was feeling flamboyant, a request would come back for an egg or some milk in a little jar. Once they even asked for garlic, the mad impetuous fools. It meant mashing bottled garlic paste in to butter to make garlic bread. The bread came back - a shop-bought baguette - having had garlic butter surgically introduced. We still had to do the heating, though.

I should have protested when I saw the 'design sheets' for a pizza topping, solemnly planning where to stick the sausage circles on the pre-baked pizza bases. I should have demonstrated. A braver person would have said "If you can't teach something useful, let's sack you and buy some more maths hours or maybe a teacher prepared to do spelling tests and explain punctuation".

But I'm not brave. Besides I just felt so damn sorry for the teacher. It's always the fluffy ones who end up teaching this subject and they have that trembling tearful look of someone who means well but who, for their pains, has been lumbered with all the worst pastoral work. Armed with only a couple of sandwich tins they are supposed to be able to effect profound motivational change. It's not going to happen, is it? Even Jamie Oliver found that trick was harder than he imagined.

So I supervised the measuring-out of ingredients, chaffing that this too was something schools used to teach. Despite my whinging the results must have been alright. At any rate, the greedy beggars ate all the good stuff on the bus home.

Burglar Wayne Bishop and the benefits system

One of the first acts of the Conservative government was to curtail the child benefit to certain parents who could be described as middle class on the basis of their "family income", a term which should be meaningless since taxation is personal. Child benefit was intended to be a universal benefit which attached not to families or any class, but to the child themselves, usually via the mother but can be via the father or other carer.

If you are a middle-class (approximately; the term is not about money but a set of values) parent you are unlikely to be swayed by the level of benefit available to have more than two children, although some of them do where family income permits the levels of care to be maintained. Where family income is low the package of benefits including housing and free school meals creates an incentive to continue to have children since each child represents an increase in family income which is proportionately larger than it would be in the better-off household.

Thus it makes sense for Wayne Bishop, petty thief of Southchurch Drive, Clifton, Nottingham, to have as many children as he can and hand the bill to the taxpayer. His children represent a form of wealth to him in a way they do not to better-off families where there are economic penalties for increasing the number of children. Or it could be that Wayne Bishop is an irresistible stud-muffin, but in light of the photos of him, I'm betting that the benefits are a better explanation for his inability to master a condom.

Wayne Bishop is the Nottingham burglar who has just cost us the legal aid and the cost of hearing the case to have a short prison sentence overturned on the pretext that he is the sole carer for his five children. Another example of how useful children are.

Bishop's QC, Ian Wise, head of the public law team at Doughty Street Chambers assured members of the judiciary that the issue of the length of the sentence and its effect on the children mattered on the basis that Bishop was the children's sole or main carer. Was he? Did they check? One commenter says :

"there mother picks them up everyday the only time ive ever seen this bloke at school was once. its common knowledge to asll the parents and teachers in the school were these kids liv"

The court was given to understand that care was being split between Bishop's sister, who already has care of seven children, and his ex-partner who is the only one said to have a full-time relationship with paid work. If she does, let's subsidize her with a proper nanny - two if that's what it takes as her work is said to be on shifts and at night - because she's the only one setting any kind of example. It will cost the same as paying Wayne but the children will have a reliable carer.

Perhaps the police or local authority or benefits agencies will use their powers to investigate whether statements made in court were mistaken or unchecked.

However, the question is would the welfare of the children have mattered less in law if he'd had only, say, two children? Should a middle-class fraudster who normally lives with his wife be obliged to stay in chokey as he doesn't have the same childcare duties? Indeed, should the number of children be taken in to consideration before the CPS bring charges? Apparently, under this interpretation of the Human Rights Act, it does. Some commenters have pointed out that when women are sentenced, the effect on their children is automatically considered.

In case anyone thinks this is unfair to a hard-working single parent, Wayne doesn't do the single parent thing of trying to juggle a job and childcare as he already explained that he took to burglary because he couldn't manage on benefits. He can't drive a getaway van either and ended up trapping himself in a dead-end street. A metaphor for his life: the benefits trap means that he's unlikely to be able to work his way out of dependency, especially now his criminal record probably makes him unemployable.

Let's have a look at the 33 year-old's career in crime, which This Is Nottingham has helpfully indexed.

In November 2008 Wayne Bishop, then living at Stotfield Road, Bilborough, threatened the headmistress Dora Wood of the Portland School. Bishop had sent his infant child to school wearing a gold bracelet, which as any parent will know is not permitted and is always clearly stated in the school rules of which all parents are aware. There are two simple reasons for that; there is a chance the bracelet will get caught on something while playing with the result that the child is injured and everyone gets in to a world of legal trouble, and valuable items have a habit of getting lost which leads to teachers having to control distraught children who shouldn't have been bringing jewellery in the first place.

The Headmistress, Mrs Dora Wood, confiscated the bracelet and called the parent in to explain the situation and hand it back.

Most parents have nothing but sympathy for a head teacher who is only trying to get on with teaching but this is undermined by our laws on religious and cultural expression which leads the likes of Wayne Bishop to wonder why we have double standards which permit some children to wear bracelets but not others.

However, rather than making a robust political point and risk being threatened with racially-aggravated something or other, Wayne threatened to do the Headmistress over, yelling:

"I'm not sticking to the rules. My son's not sticking to the rules."

This is a howling with which I have nothing but sympathy because schools have indulged in rule-making and propaganda about things, particularly in sex education and religion, which are properly the business of the parent, not the state. However, in this case Ms Wood was right and Bishop was wrong. Comments below the original story suggest that other parents were not happy with Ms Wood's headship either, but the majority agree that Bishop was wrong to threaten her and the property of everyone else in the car park.

The police were called and after pleading guilty to using threatening words and behaviour (up to 1/3 discount on sentence) District Judge Morris Cooper gave Bishop a community sentence of one year with supervision by the probation service and 100 hours of unpaid work plus he was to pay £50 in compensation to Ms Wood. As Bishop's income is from benefits it is difficult to see how he could pay the compensation without directly depriving the children and if he's looking after five of them plus four step children - who live separately with his current wife - it is similarly difficult to see how he would complete 100 hours of labour. I wonder if either of them ever happened?

The story goes quiet until September 2010, when Bishop - by now living in Brooksby Lane - attempted to rob a local club and made a pig's ear of it, ending up in a car chase which was dangerous as it clipped a police car and ran a red light. He faced charges of burglary and dangerous driving, pleaded guilty and admitted dangerous driving, thereby going for his usual strategy of getting a discounted sentence which would, presumably have been halved in practice if he behaved himself inside. So he would have faced a sentence of between four and eight months, which sounds about right, provided, of course, you aren't the victim of the burglary. He was locked up on April 11 and leave to appeal was granted by Mrs Justice Gloster on 24 May, six weeks later. The appeal itself followed within days.

However, one report states that by then Bishop already had previous convictions for offences of theft and driving while disqualified.

To summarize, the offences which are known about are: threatening behaviour, theft, driving while disqualified, dangerous driving, burglary. Another commenter claims but does not substantiate:

"not worth it mate, his "family life" is much better with out him in it im tellin ya n plus hes bin prison more than 5 times so a waste of bein a dad to him cos he'l end up inside agen"

Tracey York, the mother of the children and Bishop's ex-partner says that he has three previous jail terms, but doesn't state what they were for. That would make four in total, not five, but the point is he is not reliably available for childcare.

Richard Posner, a partner at Nottingham law firm Bhatia Best, was on Wayne Bishop's legal team and insisted

"This is not about a criminal's human rights – the children are the primary focus"

In which case it should not have been in the Court of Appeal on a criminal challenge. It should have been in the family courts deciding if Bishop is capable of meeting the needs of the children under normal conditions, since he keeps committing crimes and getting locked up. However, Nottingham has a great many problems and Wayne Bishop is only one of them.

In June 2010 the head of social services had to ask other agencies to deal with issues relating to cleanliness or nutrition, but if there was a concern about child protection, his staff would respond. So if children are being bashed-up or sexually assaulted, the department will act but if the problem is neglect, the casual indifference to squalor, discipline, education or diet, then those old devils will be left to do their awful work until children are old enough to get pregnant and demand council flats of their own, which won't be long.

It's time to ask mature questions, to refuse to be cowed by shouts of "nasty party", to see if the benefits system is helping families or creating perverse incentives which disadvantage the very children it was supposed to help.

.....

Names

Offender: Wayne Bishop
Solicitor: Richard Posner, Bhatia Best
Barrister: Ian Wise QC, Doughty Street Chambers
Court of Appeal judges: Mr Justice Maddison and Mr Justice Sweeney

Liberation Day

Today is Liberation Day on Jersey. Thousands will attend an outdoor service in Liberation Square, commemorating the release of the Channel Islands from the Occupation in 1945.

The subject of the Occupation is still a raw one because the Channel Islands are a mirror for Britain. They are what would have happened to us. To get an idea of the scale of the invasion there is a trail which is best visited but the download gives an idea of the magnitude of the event.



The most important site is the complex known as The Jersey War Tunnels - the underground hospital Hohlgangsanlage 8. It is one of the most important war museums in Europe, although it is comparatively small. Allow a full day to walk through the long corridors which are set up to chronologically document how the war affected a small island.

The Channel Islands were also a laboratory for Goebbels who took keen personal interest in how the invasion was handled as it formed part of his PR strategy for his German audience. He arranged for photos to be taken which allowed the folks back home to imagine that this was the Isle of Wight - something even the invading soldiers were sometimes confused about - and suggested that far from resisting, the inhabitants had all but welcomed them with open arms. The sore point being, that some - a very few it should be grimly noted - did welcome them with open arms and legs. The Germans were good-looking and appeared to have cash.

Anyone stranded on the Island at that point would have thought the Reich had triumphed and there was nothing for sensible people to do but knuckle under and be enfolded in to the new empire, inch by inch. There was nothing left but a thread of hope and small acts of resistance, such as hiding"V" lapel pins made out of Victorian sixpences. Each act was met with increasing ferocity and repression. Albert Bedane decided to hide a Jewish woman and a number of other people; his thinking was that if he was to die, he might as well make it for a large risk.

The Islanders hung on despite the risks, the deaths, the deportations. On May 8 1945 the starving fag-end of the Reich finally accepted they had run out of arms, men and money. On May 9 the formal surrender locally was done on HMS Bulldog in St Peter Port, Guernsey.

Happy Liberation Day, Channel Islands.

St George's Day parade (delayed date)

"This is no thaw" muttered the dwarf "This is Spring"



"Hold your tongue" growled the witch.



"George died centuries ago. He has no power today."

Every google tells a story

Click in the box for proof

Google says I'm not the first person to wonder if Pippa is spoken for. From the automatically offered search terms it looks like Harry and six million others may have already enquired:

pippa middleton
pippa middleton dress
pippa middleton arse
pippa middleton boyfriend I'm Feeling Lucky »

Royal Wedding

A wedding hat

Nana Raft loves a wedding, especially a Royal one. She has spoken and thus it is decreed we will be hanging out the flags because, if you look round at the Family Windsor, this could be the last big Royal wedding for a long time. There is the Diamond Jubilee next year.

Baba Raft has kindly agreed to do the catering, so it's all round to her gaff for the nuptials. She puts on a magnificent spread does Baba, which is far better than leaving it to me.

With all due respect to Republicans, I do not share their reservations. The English dearly love a lord and so, as it happens, do the Poles. The Polish car wash has decked itself out in flags and, touchingly, the English flag, bless them, for it is our Saint's parade on Sunday.

If the Poles can put on a show, so can I.

Besides, it is a chance to wear a wedding hat I bought some time ago. The hat is super-light, whipped up out of netting, just the thing for watching telly in (New Look, dahlink). It is unfortunately similar to a lavender lampshade but it was a bargain. I've even got a heather-pink tweed jacket and dress which will go well with it.

Possibly I shall have to wear it with pink Crocs if there is a lot of trotting from the nibbles to the telly; it's important to get the right functional footwear for these formal occasions. I will also get out the diamante necklace, although diamonds are not really 'before lunch' jewels. But then, they aren't diamonds. Maybe I'll go with the Majorica pearls - they are much more Kate than Di.

Best Wishes to William and Catherine.

Kung Fu Fighting - subjective and objective

The Mail carries the serious case of a pub singer who now has a recorded arrest for a racially aggravated public order offence. The arrest will show up on an enhanced CRB check if he wishes to work with children; for example, becoming a music teacher or a volunteer. It could damage his chances of being employed by other holiday operators. No charges have been brought as the police have snottily accepted that "There was not enough evidence to prove a criminal offence had been committed". For Simon Ledger an arrest is not much less serious than a conviction and amounts to oppression where the process is the punishment, regardless of any finding of guilt.

Ledger, a seasoned popular entertainer, said he hadn't done anything except sing the the 37-year old pop song, Kung Fu Fighting - as he regularly does. It's older than he is. Ledger was playing the song when two tourists walked past the Driftwood beach bar in Sandown. This is the Driftwood website and Simon's is the first video on the left, "Duelling Organs".

One of the guests - a young man - objected loudly, abusively, giving him hand signals and shouting that they were wankers. The BBC implied that the tourist then claimed to have been subjected to racist abuse in return and subsequently complained to the police. However, Ledger claimed that the complaint is about the song, not anything else. As he has been an entertainer for over a decade - nearly two according to friends - it would be surprising to find him getting in to a slanging-match with a heckler who didn't care much for his choice of music.

After the 5.30 set the Hampshire police (presumably the Sandown team) traced Ledger to a local Chinese restaurant - which must have taken some doing rather than identifying him and visiting him at home in Shanklin - arresting him at 10pm. A spokesperson for Hampshire police said:

"a 32-year-old man of Chinese origin had claimed he was subjected to racial abuse.

He added: ‘If a victim believes that an alleged crime is racially aggravated, the police will treat it seriously. Investigations into this incident are continuing.’

The spokesman said a 34-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of causing harassment, alarm or distress under section 4a of the Public Order Act 1986"

It is now apparent the police arrested Ledger on the basis that a Chinese person didn't like the song a white man was playing. let's have a look at s.4A to see what it says, edited for the clauses which apply here:

4A Intentional harassment, alarm or distress.

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—

(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or

(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

(3) It is a defence for the accused to prove—

(b) that his conduct was reasonable.

(4) A constable may arrest without warrant anyone he reasonably suspects is committing an offence under this section.

6 Mental element: miscellaneous.

(3) A person is guilty of an offence under section 4 only if he intends his words or behaviour, or the writing, sign or other visible representation, to be threatening, abusive or insulting, or is aware that it may be threatening, abusive or insulting.

From the top: it was obvious that there was no intention (4A1) to cause offence because it is objectively impossible to cause offence by singing a 37 year old song which generally praises the cats for being as fast as lighting with expert timing. Whether it is about a fight or a martial arts display, it acknowledges the innate superiority of oriental technique over Yardie hack and slash thuggery. Or it might just be a damn good disco tune. Here's a live performance to a German audience, which accounts for them looking baffled:



If Simon Ledger had wanted to cause offence - which he didn't- he chose the wrong song to start with. You can't commit this offence by accident; you have to have the intention to abuse or insult or be aware of the potential to cause it. There might have been an intention to amuse, but that's not a crime. The CPS advice makes this clear in their own stumbling language:

Section 4A .... is intended for the more directed and persistent type of behaviour required to prove the elements of intent and causation.

In this case, it isn't even possible to accidentally cause offence. No reasonable onlooker could regard the words or actions as abusive or insulting in the context of a beach bar. This isn't an abusive or insulting song and it is incapable of causing harassment, alarm or distress in normal play. (1a). Perhaps if it was on a continuous loop it would become distressing.

However, the viewer claims he was caused (1b) harassment, alarm or distress. How was he caused it? There is no causative link between the song and his reaction. He may have experienced harassment alarm or distress, but that's only because he appears to have completely misunderstood the song. Any causation is in his own mind, nowhere else. This is completely subjective. That cannot be the yardstick for a criminal offence - although the police keep misunderstanding this - because people subjectively believe all sorts of things which are not objectively true.

The song is internationally famous for having topped both the US Billboard and UK Singles charts in 1974. As a result, the story of the arrest has been picked up around the world. Singing the song was reasonable. (3b). This is a complete defence. If Hampshire police are so bothered about it, perhaps they should raise an international arrest warrant and go after Carl Douglas, who now runs a publishing company in Germany. They can take in to consideration his follow-up "Dance the Kung Fu".

Given the above, the police did not have reasonable suspicion (4A4) for an arrest. All they had was the inexplicable reaction of somebody who was 'of Chinese origin'. So what? There is no shortage of upset people of every hue. Last week I met a person who was sincerely convinced that their enemy was harassing them by going down the street and switching the D-lock on their bicycle to an identical one for which they didn't have the key. This is not grounds for arresting an ex-lover. It's grounds for checking that the keys and locks are properly matched and that the medication is not over-due. There is not automatically a crime, no mattter how upset the complainant is.

The mental element of intention is so important that it is repeated at 6(3). To be guilty the accused person must have intended offence, or at a minimum been aware of the ability of a song to be insulting. This song in the context of a beach bar is not distressing to anyone except those who are allegic to disco.

This would be funny but for three things:

1) Simon Ledger now has a file which could be used against him in the future.

2) The police do not appear to understand that 'taking a complaint seriously' may not automatically mean 'arrest somebody'. They first have to establish that there was an offence at all, and the playing of Kung Fu Fighting cannot objectively be one in the context of a beach bar, no matter how subjectively the complainant - who has not been named, unlike Simon Ledger - feels it is. The CCTV footage which they could have examined before jumping in with their size 9s, shows the complainant was the one abusing and insulting Simon Ledger. I doubt the police will be arresting the complainant, though.

3) The only person here who has been a victim of harassment is Mr Ledger. The going rate for false arrest compensation is about £4k plus costs, plus a grovelling apology from the Chief Constable about "lessons learned". Ledger could argue that the arrest itself was racially aggravated since the police thought it was alright to arrest a white man in order to placate someone of a different ethnicity According to the Mail, their police sources kept insisting there was 'more to it'. No there wasn't. That was character assassination in order to try to support the police officers' outrageous behaviour.

Chief Constable of Hampshire Constabulary Alex Marshall can be thankful that somebody has stopped the stupid case running. Ledger should take advice on claiming for false arrest as the lemon-mouthed "not enough evidence to show an offence has been committed" does not amount to an apology and a public acknowledgment that playing a song cannot be grounds for arrest merely because somebody who is not a white caucasian has complained about it. It leaves the tainted idea that Ledger may have done something criminal but that they just can't prove it. He did no such thing. It also fails to acknowledge the distress which the police have caused him since Sunday night.

Let's have a Spartacus Action down on the beach. Put on an outdoor production of The Mikado and see if Hampshire Plod would like to arrest an entire amateur operatic society for dressing up Chinese-style, and don't forget to arrest Aladdin when he next does panto during the turkey'n'tinsel season. I've got a little list...

Woodstore

A woodstore several days ago.

I keep a lookout for these now and note the rising popularity of wood burners. In a stand of sensible, although superior, new-build houses a small woodstore was provided as a standard next to the dustbin.

This was a grander one cut in to a hill in woodland - presumably contributing the fuel - so it had a bluebell wood just above it.

Bronte Burghers

To Haworth in West Yorkshire, now known as Bronte Country. The village has done well out of the brilliant but unlucky Bronte babes, selling cream teas and souvenirs to hundreds of thousands of dutiful pilgrims who trudge up and down the viciously cobbled hill on which they lived.

Mobility of the old folk in Haworth is kept up by a death penalty for anybody who can't manage the incline; it's no place for hip replacements and a wheelchair released at the top would hit the bottom doing 120 mph. Most places would put in a funicular railway and be done with it, but in Howarth every inch is a potential gold mine and so it is lined with gastropubs, holiday cottages, cheesemongers, toyshops and galleries. The tourist centre coyly gives the views at the top of the hill which flattens out in to a charming space fronting the church; it doesn't mention the ski-slope just beyond the Post Office. Photos are misleading; it is steeper than it looks.

The Brontes would always have been awkward, clever girls, following the footsteps of their impoverished but cultured Oirish father, but if that was not enough trouble, Haworth brought the strangeness out in them as even they struggled to portray themselves as ordinary genteel women.

It cannot help but do that; Haworth is a place which hums with Gothick presentments, where the everyday objects are caught in slanting light and for a moment look suspicious, as if they have been caught out having secret conversations with each other just beyond the range of human hearing.

A large hat with flowers will suddenly seem to have faces nestling in the petals, a cat walking along a wall seems stripey, then when you look again, it is plain. The Fleece pub has beer garden, but that is at the top of the fire escape above the roof and is built out over a precipitous drop, or what would be a drop if it wasn't filled with lean-to sheds snuggling against a cliff-face. If you could slip through the treads - which you can't, it is perfectly safe - you would crash through umpteen layers of glass in to the hidden crevasse.



Loitering by Spooks at 22 Main Street - Specialist Bookshop for Psychic Phenomena supplies - a vortex of strangeness is there, right on the stone slab by the side window. There is nothing whatever strange about a shop selling psychic accoutrements, books on Dowsing, Clairvoyance, Healing, Reincarnation, Alternative Medicine, Astrology, Local History, Tarot Cards, Crystals, Essential Oils, Incenses, Runes, Pendulums, Celtic and Mythical Pendants. Those are everywhere

What is strange is the planning application. There is a plan to change the ground floor in to an adult entertainment shop and the basement in to booths for private lap dancing. Maybe it's nominative determinism seeping through the stone. The sign on the wall says Purvs Corner and the shop stands on the junction with Butt Lane.



This is West Yorkshire, no more than a longish bus ride outside Bradford. It is moorland. It's not the fleshpots of York or the Dales with their undulating hips and ice cream parlours. It's not even Whitby with its unique approach to diversity. It's Haworth, dammit, where a lady changes her sheepskin mittens for crochet fingerless gloves indoors. The one place where going about in a burkha is considered foolhardy exposure to the weather, unless you can get it on over a hat and coat.

Who exactly is going to patronize this place? The stag party organizers Red Seven may have a point if sloping up and down the street, visiting good pubs and having great food is your thing. No shortage of those. However, as they say:

Boat party, Bobsleigh, Bungee jumping, City break, Clay pigeon shooting, Coasteering, Day at the races, Drive a supercar, Fishing, Fly a MiG jet fighter in Moscow, Football trip, Go-karting, Golf, Horse riding , Horse racing, Indoor skydiving, Kayaking or canoeing, Off roading, Paintballing, Powerboating, Quad bikes, Rally driving, Rock climbing, Skiing or snowboarding, Skydiving, Surfing, Tank driving, White water rafting and Zorbing (or Sphering). Not all of these are available in Haworth so you may want to consider other locations

The plan seems to be that stag parties will drift about the pubs before their booking in to the club. Are there enough stag parties to warrant this optimism? Despite the international visitors and the good value which Haworth offers them, you won't find "raunchy" on a list of the ten qualities people commonly associate with the town. If you are looking for raunch it's best to start in Leeds.

Haworth does a fair line in repressed passion, though. If unattached it is a good place to look for a certain kind of woman i.e. an available one, but a stag party is unlikely to want to settle down for a night of passionate readings no matter how much significant eye contact is involved.

The planning application closed on 20th March and we shall see what happens. The vortex by the paranormal bookshop giggled and determined that the Clerk to the Council be called Gordon Bashami-Ghoulis.

Update: A controversial Radio 3 dramatisation of Wuthering Heights is being aired. It has gone all DH Lawrence and has Cathy and Heathcliff swearing at each other.

Sir David Attenborough

Polynesia,
who also worked with the other brother, Richard Attenborough CBE.

"Madagascar" is a masterpiece. I've been falling asleep in front of Sir David Attenborough masterpieces for as long as I can remember.

It's not boredom; it's that fruity-calm-hushed voice and the complex coloured pictures. No matter how fascinating the material, after about ten minutes the shutters slide down and that's it until the closing credits.

It's not just me. Over his 50 years in broadcasting, thousands of animals have conked-out in Sir David's presence. He puts the 'fluence on them, a Dr Dolittle whose main way of talking to the animals is "You are getting very sleepy. Your paws are heavy, your ears are floppy, your whiskers are drooping, you are just going to rest your eyes for a moment".

He had to stop talking for the famous gorilla sequence or else they'd have had nothing but a troupe of slumped and snoring primates, nestled like farting carpets on the forest floor. It was a close thing; you can see them yawning.

When Sir David was following a chimpanzee hunting yo, the pan troglodytes, being brighter than gorillas, were all screaming "Run for your life, guys, it's that sleepy man. Next thing you know he'll have us carrying his camera gear and nobody has ever got him to pay a performer yet. "

Luckily, in line with the rules about stage hypnosis, his voice changes its pattern in his closing words of any script. It tends to rise to a question, probably a very good one, but unfortunately at that moment I'm in no condition to understand it let alone answer it. Electricity supply controllers say they stand-by for the surge in demand as the nation staggers blearily to its feet and puts the kettle on.

I reckon Sir David is in the pay of international beverage merchants and what he really says is: "You are getting thirsty. You will remember nothing but in five seconds you will rise and make the tea. Three Two ONE".

Product placement of coffee machines now allowed? Pah, amateurs.

Sheilas' Wheels - an ECJ ruling

The European Court of Justice is the EU court in Luxembourg, the one set up to rule on the interpretation of treaties. It is the court which in the early 1960s made it crystal clear that it was the final arbiter of a new legal order, which we now know as the European Union.

Member states couldn't ignore its rulings and neither could citizens. The potential for the court to rule on all areas of life was implicit in the Treaty of Rome but anyone who pointed this out was dismissed as a swivel-eyed conspiraloon. Gradually, the effective areas of law were extended.

Today, if you want to sell your house, you have to pay to fill in a form - an Energy Performance Certificate - about light bulbs and insulation, not because the buyer gives a hoot as they are interested in location and space, but because an EU regulation says Something Must Be Done, and Britain is a member of the EU and has agreed to abide by laws generated by the European legislation, and the EPC rule is buried down in the fine print of a directive.

The process of challenging the rule itself if so Byzantine that nobody has even tried it in this instance. It would cost a fortune, drive them mad and they'd probably lose, as Mrs Thatcher found out in the Factortame case. I reckon that case helped push her over the edge; she certainly became less anchored in political reality than she had been around then.

The short version is: if it is a ruling of the ECJ, or if you'd lose at the ECJ if you went there, then we have to abide by it for as long as we remain a member state of the European Union.

Today the ECJ has confirmed the opinion of Advocate General Juliane Kokutt that being male or female cannot be used as a factor when calculating motor insurance prices, over-riding derogations (the law being temporarily disapplied) from earlier arguments. The opinion recognized that it is an actuarial fact that the sex of a driver changes the profile of the risk. The ruling says firms can't take that actuarial fact in to consideration when setting price relative to risk from the end of December 2012. Previous derogations no longer hold as a matter of social policy.

The social policy is being set by a court which isn't even our own Supreme Court. Besides, we have a legislature for setting social policy. This would once have been called 'usurping the authority of parliament'. Possibly our own court would have to give the same ruling because of the Equalities Act 2010, but we don't know because it didn't happen here. Our own judges were not given the chance to interpret our own laws, nor our electors to pass an opinion on whether we wanted this act repealed or not.

Because of how the ECJ's website works, you have to go to an index and click on the correct case:

C-236/09

Opinion

2010-09-30

Association Belge des Consommateurs Test-Achats and Others

Social policy

for the preliminary opinion which gives the fact and the legal reasoning.

The Court's confirmation of this opinion is published at:

C-236/09

Judgment

2011-03-01

Association Belge des Consommateurs Test-Achats and Others

Social policy

Many people hold that the original basis of offering prices was sexist. This is to misunderstand the statistical nature of betting, which is all insurance is; the laying-off of risk with someone prepared to aggregate those risks over big numbers for a fee.

The rates were never based on beliefs about driver competence related to gender. It was a matter of counting the claims. Over big numbers men tend to have more accidents and those accidents are more expensive. Over big numbers women tend to have fewer accidents and cheaper ones. There's no secret about it; young men are the highest risk.

As Damon Runyon put it: The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.

In Britain the publicity has focused on the insurance brand "Sheilas' Wheels.” There are other brands, but this is the best known one to pitch itself specifically to females. It isn't Australian and it isn't a company. Rather, it’s a line of insurance wrappers developed since 2005 from esure.

Men can take out policies with Sheilas' Wheels, and if they do the price will be based on a calculation of their statistical risks. It has spent five years attracting female customers and is a brand-leader. It has no problems with the ruling. As far as they are concerned, it is free publicity.

As the customer-base is overwhelmingly female they may be able to lay off some of the risks of the male customers after 2012 against the lower claims of the female customers, at least until the number of male customers rises and they can no longer offer preferential rates compared to the wider market.

From the end of 2012 the company can truthfully say it is unable to offer lower prices reflecting risk related to the sex of the person in front of them. Instead, they will then have to charge women the same price that they would to males which just happens to be more expensive.

You didn't really think any prices were going to come down, did you?

If you want prices to come down, there is a way.....

updates:
a useful index h/t City Unslicker
Gonna Get Along Without EU Now Concerned citizens plan a rally, indoors.