Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
The decision to scrap one or two-word Ofsted inspection grades for England’s schools is good news for teachers – but bad news for just about everyone else, not least parents and pupils. Many school staff have never liked the labelling of schools as ‘Outstanding’, ‘Good’, ‘Requires Improvement’ and ‘Inadequate’. They say that it doesn’t give
It’s a curious political world. Few who voted Labour last month actually wanted Labour policies, or for that matter had more than the haziest idea what they were. Now the Labour leadership is returning the compliment. It is increasingly obvious that it has neither much idea what electors want, nor any great desire to provide
The longer it continues in office, the more reactionary and beholden to vested interests this government turns out to be. So far it has surrendered to the establishment on immigration, on the EU, and on higher education (blocking any awkward notions of making administrators respect free speech). Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, now appears to
The Labour party is in a bind over cars. Its instincts – collectivist, green, managerialist – strongly favour anti-car measures like low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) with roads strategically blocked off, and 20 mph speed limits. Unfortunately motorists overwhelmingly disagree. In Wales, the new government under Eluned Morgan has learnt this to its cost. Faced with
University hopefuls trepidatiously opening their official A-level emails this morning will on the whole be happier than last year. All the indications are that they are more likely to get a college place, and indeed have a better chance of making their first choice. The reasons for this are complex, but largely boil down to
The riots of 2024 will be remembered for many things. One of them is the way the establishment spectacularly closed ranks on online speech. Metropolitan Police commissioner Mark Rowley said on Saturday that he intended to throw the book not only at rioters themselves, but at ‘keyboard warriors’ who might support them. The CPS, through the Director
The previous Tory government may not have been very successful in containing the global ambitions of China, but at least it tried. Whether David Lammy’s Foreign Office has the same ambition to stand up to Beijing’s bullying is unfortunately becoming more doubtful. A straw in the wind is the announcement by China this week that
Authorities encountering the kind of civil disorder that has marked the last few days in Britain are best advised to keep a cool head and quietly deploy the powers of the ordinary law to face it down. Unfortunately there are worrying signs that this is not happening. The announcement from the Director of Public Prosecutions
Yesterday evening, the government instituted a little-known procedure called the Additional Courts Protocol. Set up following the 2011 London riots, this involves emergency ad hoc magistrates’ courts sitting 24 hours a day to deal swiftly with the troublemakers. This was the right decision. But it still may come back to bite the people who made
Universities fought tooth and nail against plans to impose fines if they failed to uphold freedom of speech. That proposal – contained in last year’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act – was one of the few things the Tory government could point to as a success. But under Labour the plan has been shelved.
Nobody said much about it before the election, but the new government inherits a ghastly financial problem with the higher education system. Rising costs, stagnant tuition fees, and a big drop in foreign student enrolments have left several universities tottering like ivory Jenga towers. We probably have too many universities This week we got an inkling of
The prison sentences passed on the Just Stop Oil protesters who immobilised the M25 – five years for Roger Hallam and four for the others – were certainly stiff. With prisons overflowing and some violent offenders receiving less harsh sentences, a small reduction in the jail terms might have been justified. But despite the backlash
The botched assassination attempt on Donald Trump could well generate a wave of sympathy that helps waft him into the White House in November. Another indirect result of those same events may contribute further to this effect. Until the Republican National Convention opened in Milwaukee this week, the GOP had a potentially awkward problem over
Life in the Berlaymont building, the Brussels headquarters of the European Union, just got a bit more surreal. A striking feature of the EU is its rotating presidency, under which the 27 member states take it in turns to do a six-month stint running its technically supreme political body, the European Council. This week, Hungary,
If you gaze south from the sarsens of Stonehenge, your view at present is of a constant crocodile of cars and caravans grinding along the nearby A303 en route to the West Country. Unfortunately the government’s plans to improve matters by burying the road in a neat two-mile tunnel, already badly delayed by activist lawfare,
James Cleverly may now be a care-and-maintenance Home Secretary, but even so he will be heaving a sigh of relief as he finally tapes up the file on Julian Assange. The Australian journalist and WikiLeaks founder was on the point of being extradited to the US for revealing state secrets obtained from agents in that
‘Britain is evolving from a democracy towards a kritarchy – the rule of lawyers,’ wrote Ross Clark in today’s Spectator magazine. His gloomy prediction has been proved correct almost immediately. A 3-2 majority in the Supreme Court today put the emergency brakes on long-standing plans to extract oil at Horse Hill in Surrey when it struck down
In this election, neither Labour nor the Tories are particularly interested in serious constitutional reform. By contrast, there’s one smaller opposition party that makes it quite clear in its manifesto that it does believe in serious democratic change to make government radically responsive to what voters want. That party is Reform. True, there’s a lot in
If anyone thought our relations with the EU since the Brexit referendum would be a respectful dialogue of equals, they were quickly disabused. Relations remain, to use an understatement, strained. Three national opposition parties have all chosen to weaponise this unpleasantness, and call for re-engagement with at least some EU institutions. Before you follow them
We are set for another high-profile tussle between Budapest and Brussels. Yesterday the EU Court of Justice chose to impose a whopping €200 million fine on the Hungarian government for failing to apply EU asylum laws, a fine that increases by €1 million for every day the infringement continues. Politics is never very far from the surface
