For the death of the King, who was very well liked, also signified the end of the second world war period, with which he and the late Queen Mother were forever to be associated.  There were still bombed out houses in our part of the world, and ration books, but the Elizabethan age was about to dawn, and we knew it.  The early fifties were marked not only by a change of monarch (and how hard it was to get used to singing God Save the Queen in place of the King!) but by a new sense of modernity and the opening up of opportunities.  The queues for food seemed to diminish, houses were patched up, clothes became more colourful, and cars and TV began to appear (though not for us, and it really didn’t matter). The legacy of the Festival of Britain, just a year earlier, was a fantastic cultural life in London. It was all free: the British Museum, the art galleries, and the wonderful local library, where it was so exciting finally to be allowed to borrow books from the adult section, having worked one’s way through the children’s section. I travelled in the underground and on the buses frequently on my own at age 10 or so, and never experienced any difficulty.  The new welfare state was at its best: our eyes, hearing and teeth were checked at school, and we were well taken care of physically as well as intellectually.  My primary school knew that the 11+ was the route out and up, and so it proved.  

A holiday at Folkestone or on the Isle of Wight was all that one could possibly want, although I was fortunate in that my parents took me to the continent of Europe, by ferry, at an early age.  This helped me educationally, especially as it made me less self conscious when it came to speaking French than some other children who had never left England.    We gathered round the big wooden radio to listen to the Home Service and the Light Programme  - children’s hour, good plays, great comedy, Educating Archie, Music and Movement at school, 20 Questions, Jennings, Top of the Form - it all opened my eyes to the world beyond home.  I had a set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia and I read The Children’s Newspaper, Girl comic, and Little Lulu comic, sent by a friend in the USA; my mother and I read Great Expectations as we sat by the coal fire. I had pen pals whom I never met, and went to Saturday morning children’s cinema and played hopscotch in the street.

We were all monarchists too: there was no reason not to be. I collected pictures of the young Princesses for my scrapbook and noted the new head on the stamps in my stamp album. The only unpleasantness I recall were the smogs caused by pollution, and having to walk to school unable to see more than a yard ahead.  Life was hard for the adults, especially the women, but to be a child in London when the Queen came to the throne was a privilege indeed. And how I have enjoyed writing this!

There have been conflicting stories in the press this week about how and whether the government intends to change the law in order to ensure that both parents see more of their children after divorce.  Some reports said that there would be introduced a legal presumption of equally shared parenting; others that it would not go this far but that there would be encouragement of equal access, or visitation rights.

In the Family Justice Review 2011 the proposal that England adopt the shared parenting law as applied in Australia was rejected, because reports from Australia indicate that judges found it difficult to apply and divorce cases there were dominated by decisions about how much time each parent would be entitled to see the child. The Review concluded that the courts here should continue to apply the principle of the paramountcy of the welfare of the child.  It is often reported that 40% of children lose all contact with their fathers after divorce.  Lobby groups for separated and divorced fathers blame this on the law; other studies indicate that even where fathers are granted legal access, they simply fail to show up when the children are expecting a visit.  As the divorced fathers make a new relationship with another woman, who may have her own children, they distance themselves from their children of the earlier relationship. Wherever the blame lies, there is no doubt that children suffer from the loss of a father after divorce, and that over 100,000 children fall into this category every year. There are probably more because this takes no account of children affected by the breakup of parents who are not married but cohabiting or were always single.

This relates to my post Against my Will, where I repeated my objections to attempts to make the law of marriage apply to cohabitants who do not want to or cannot marry.  I heard recently of the growth of a new practice by men, nicknamed the “Hugh Grant” syndrome.  That is, they take care not to marry or live with the mother of their child, or girlfriend, because they fear that once married or cohabiting, their assets are vulnerable to the law and that a split will expose half of their property and income to transfer to the woman.  (It could be the other way round where the woman is wealthier than the man.) They see maintenance law as unfair and so uncertain that its application by lawyers will in itself cost thousands of pounds.  Maintenance law has become a field where women with well-off husbands seek someone to fund the litigation in return for a cut of the proceeds. This is a really bad result for the children involved.  The solution is not to apply the existing unfair and uncertain marriage law to cohabitants, but to simplify the existing law and make it fair to men and women in a society where women can and do earn a living and where, sadly, relationship breakdown is all too common and unsurprising.

The chair of RBS and of the remuneration committee is Sir Philip Hampton. A Sir Philip Hampton was the author of the Hampton Report on Good Regulation in 2005, which recommended principles of best practice, such as accountability and proportionality.  Surely not the same man?

So the proposal would take the estate away from children and family and divert it to the surviving cohabitant.  At the moment the onus is on the cohabitant to make a claim under the 1975 Act if she has been left nothing; if  the law changed, the onus would be on the family to dispute the entitlement of the cohabitant.  They certainly would do this, in part because the definition of a cohabitant under the Bill is rather vague and leaves lots to dispute over, and also because there may well be resentment on the part of children and family if a “jilly-come-lately” moves in with the old man five years before his death and takes his property.

Of course if the deceased had made a will, he could leave the property as he wishes.  Many more married people make wills than do cohabitants, and it may be that the failure on the part of the latter to do so is precisely because they do not see themselves in that sort of relationship or because they want to preserve what they have for their children from a previous marriage. Of those who responded to the Law Commission consultation, more opposed the change than supported it.  But the Law Commission gave greater weight to the views of the organisations that supported it than the ordinary individuals who opposed it. 

I have blogged about cohabitation before – (Law in Action 23.11.09, Love and Marriage 7.1.11) – pointing out that people know very well what the difference is between marriage and cohabitation and that most people do not want to have the legal effects of marriage thrust upon them when they have chosen to cohabit in order to avoid these. I have received hundreds of letters from the public saying they do not want cohbitation to become marriage. The recent blogs from readers of the Guardian and the Telegraph make the same point.  The law should not force people into a status they do not want.  We condemn forced marriages.  We should also condemn forcing legal status onto two people who have done their best to avoid it.  The Bill would also discriminate against people who live together, but not as spouses, e.g. sisters or lifelong friends.  The surviving cohabitant would presumably get the inheritance tax deferment that spouses get at the moment, but which is denied to sisters living in the same house. 

This Intestacy Bill is a recipe for trouble.  Family disputes will become bitter; older parents will be warned off allowing someone to live in their home and take care of them; there will be no legal aid available for litigation, so the costs will eat up the very assets disputed; and the surviving cohabitant may take all the property away with her to a new relationship without benefiting the children.

Most poignant, and ringing true, were the film’s depictions of the union of Denis and Margaret and how much he did to support her, at some cost to himself and his expectations of family life.  Nevertheless I felt uneasy that a film should be made during someone’s lifetime, purporting to show their physical and mental decline.  In that sense it was rather like the film about Iris Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s, made after her death.  The difference is that The Iron Lady is made during its subject’s lifetime, and that seems to me to be wrong.  It is inappropriate, and the premature nature of the film prevents proper historical judgments from being made,  and may even affect them when they come to be made in the future. Many prime minsters and Presidents declined and became ill in their old age (Wilson, Churchill, Roosevelt), as we all do, but that decline should not  be projected backwards to make it appear that it affected them at their peak.  That is derogatory, and it is ironic that the focus of the Mrs. Thatcher film is on the weaker years. But go and see it anyway.

While no one can disagree that many of our towns’ and cities’ high streets need revitalisation, there are differences of opinion about what they are for, and how they are used.  My own perspective is of course as a working wife and, for a period, working mother, ie always in a hurry and always short of time.  So I do not share the general snobbery about supermarkets, especially out-of-town ones, and I like Tesco’s.  The Portas review, however, envisages the high street as a place where people stroll all day carrying nothing other than a handbag, and have time to chat as they go from the butcher’s to the grocer’s to the hardware shop. The Portas perspective takes me back to when my mother would have to visit the high street shops every day to buy small quantities, and chat to each shopkeeper; shopping was apparently designed then to place obstacles in the way of women going to work.  Not only that, but children,  pushchairs and wheelchairs do not feature in the Portas vision.  There is a charming colour picture in the review of a disneyfied high street, showing not a single baby or other impediment, only the unencumbered, outdoors dining tables and lots of benches.  This is not the reality for anyone who has ever tried to fit in a week’s shopping after 5pm or at the weekend, or had to make their way around with a toddler and a baby in a buggy.  While small supermarkets may have a place in the high street, there can be no sense in locating large ones there: how on earth would you carry several bags home when buses are far away from the pedestrianised streets of this paradise, and even if they were closer the large weekly shopping burden would be unmanageable?  Many towns are doing their best to keep cars out by making parking difficult, expensive and rare.  And even if you take the bus in, it is impossible to buy more than one can carry. So welcome to the out-of-town supermarkets and malls: safe, warm, dry, convenient, open at hours when working people can get there, and enabling choice and competition. And good to know that some supermarkets lay on buses to help shoppers get there from town. Why shouldn’t the supermarkets sell a range of clothes and househood goods, if that is what we want?  There is also a lot in the review about “communities” using their high streets for worthy Big Society type activities.  I am not convinced.

Perhaps my reaction to the review is coloured by my visit to the Mary Portas boutique within a London department store. When it opened, we were promised quality fashion for the over 40s.  On my first visit, there was so little lighting I couldn’t see anything.  The next time I went, there were lots of short dresses in fluorescent colours, as everywhere else. All that was left of the only skirt I liked were sizes 6 and 8. (Gentlemen readers – think of Nancy Reagan; if you are too young to remember her, think of Kate Moss.) Most lady peers don’t come in that shape . . .

Happy Xmas to everyone!

I mention him because in the midst of the concentration on our links with Europe, it is easy to overlook that much older association, the Commonwealth.  Sir Zelman embodied the links this country forged with others that shared the same legal system, the common law, respect for the rule of law and democracy, and who joined with  the Allies in declaring war on Germany at the start of the second world war.  Sir Zelman came to Oxford from his native Melbourne by way of a Rhodes Scholarship after the war.  The latest list of Rhodes Scholars has just been announced, and it is worth remembering how much good they have done by giving young people from around the world, but in particular from the US and the Commonwealth, the very best education we can offer before they return home usually to achieve great things in their own countries.  He wrote books about constitutional law, taught law here and in Australia, advised the British Colonial Service, and as Governor General successfully healed the wounds after the controversial dismissal in 1975 of the Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by an earlier Governor General, John Kerr. This raised questions about whether the Governor General, the representative of the Queen in Australia, had the power to do this.  In later life it seemed that Sir Zelman favoured Australia becoming a republic.  Yet he treasured, and embodied close links with the UK through shared legal concepts.  A very great man.

I set this out in order to illustrate just how difficult it has become to decide what is secret and what is not.  The Information Commissioner has the extremely difficult task of balancing two public interests against each other under the FOI Act.  Reasonable people could go either way. All of which reinforces the argument I made the other day that it has become hard to make sense of what is kept secret and what is disclosed under the Data Protection Act and the FOI Act.  In general we do not seem to know, or agree, when matters are confidential and when they are not, and what is the public interest that might be invoked as an excuse for revealing otherwise naturally confidential material.  So phone-hacking is generally regarded as immoral and illegal (although few complaints were raised when Prince Charles’ conversations with the now Duchess of Cornwall were published in 1989); but the sensitive and even life-threatening material revealed by wikileaks does not seem to be regarded as equally wrong. Some injunctions to guard against publication of the details of the life of a famous person are regarded as unnecessary, others acceptable.  Is it permissible to break the law in order to secure information that is subsequently judged to be in the public interest, e.g. it is said that some investigative journalists pay to get confidential material, or bug conversations?  There may be a public interest defence to illegal phone-hacking, and if so, what is the definition? Perhaps the Leveson and other inquiries will clear all of this up.  It would be good to have some sound principles of privacy/openness in private/public life, although the need for a judge or the Information Commissioner to balance competing public interests in this sphere can probably never be dispensed with.

And yet in recent times campuses have been the scenes of the worst antisemitic speeches and outbreaks I have witnessed in my lifetime.  Take the University of Exeter.  A couple of weeks ago a speaker included these phrases in his speech to students – “Hitler was right”, “the only kind of form equivalent in History to Israeli barbarism, expansionalism, racially driven philosophy is Nazi Germany”, “Israel must be de-Jewdefied”, “antisemitism doesn’t exist”. There was a lot more like this, but it sickens me to copy it and it would only bring out the madder bloggers, of whom there are plenty to be found in relation to this theme on the internet.

Students are the first to protest when there might be discrimination against black and ethnic minorities, against gays, against women, or to complain about bankers, etc.  But when it comes to antisemitism, what did the right-on Student Guild of Exeter reply to the protests on behalf of the Jewish students in the audience, who had walked out, offended? “Freedom of expression is not criminal” and that the university’s legal and moral obligation to protect its students “was not legally enforceable.” So where antisemitism is concerned, the students’ union is not interested because the laws against it can, in their view (albeit wrongly) be avoided.

I used to be the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, handling student complaints from all the unversities in England & Wales, and I know something about the law.  So I would have expected the University of Exeter authorities not only to have taken action, if not to stop it (given that the speaker was well known for this sort of language) then at least to act firmly during the speech, halting it, but also to sanction the Student Guild afterwards and commence the appropriate legal action against the speaker.  Apparently they have done absolutely nothing, in contravention not only of the laws mentioned here, but of others in the same vein, and in disregard of National Union of Students and government guidance on hate speech on campus.  Exeter could learn from Manchester and Birmingham Universities which have brought their guidelines on speakers up to date and have good policies.

No connection, I suppose, with the University of Exeter’s solicitation of funds from Gaddafi a few years ago, nor its receipt of substantial funds from various Middle Eastern states with bad human rights records. http://www.studentrights.org.uk/2011/03/disregard-morality-exeter-university/; http://www.studentrights.org.uk/2011/04/blood-stained-money-funded-exeter-university/

The University of Exeter is clearly not a welcoming place for Jews, or women, let alone Jewish women. A recent “safer sex student ball” there promoted itself with a rape joke in a “shag mag”. http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/Fury-rape-joke-student-ball-magazine/story-13977806-detail/story.html

The universities have in general shown themselves to be in denial as far as the possibility of nurturing terrorist activity on campus goes – witness their resistance to the government Prevent Strategy, which is the subject of a debate in the Lords on 30 November.  They have also ignored the warnings about antisemitism on campus contained in the All Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, and the subsequent helpful government responses to it.  Campus should be a place for dialogue, equality and truth telling, not hatred, fear and racism.

In the afternoon we took evidence from more journalists about investigative journalism and, by video link from New York, heard from Sir Harold Evans. In an impressive interview he reminded us of the great news stories of his time, the thalidomide disaster, the DC10, Kim Philby.  It seems that the US press is less inhibited (in every sense) than ours, but he was quite optimistic that investigative journalism will still flourish, despite the economic difficulties of local newspapers and the increasing move to digital news.  We shall see.