Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman on David Lammy’s cynical invocation of rape victims to push through his scheme for cutting back on jury trials:

Rape is notoriously hard to prosecute, but it’s decidedly dubious to tie that 60 per cent to the backlogs in the courts. “Delays pre-charge or a change of mind pre-charge can’t be blamed on the backlog. So much of what Lammy says to defend those proposals is inaccurate. He must know,” one KC told The Times. Must he? I don’t know, this is about the level of understanding I’d expect of a man who once went on Celebrity Mastermind and said the king who succeeded Henry VIII was Henry VII, and that Marie Antoinette won a Nobel prize for physics.

Grasp of detail or otherwise aside, Lammy has exploited the deeply emotive feelings that rape victims inspire to ram through his bill, arguing that if MPs don’t vote for it then they are extending victims’ suffering, even though that is far from proven. Instead of having a rational debate, he has misused statistics and played on emotions.

Well, here’s some more emotion for him: I feel deeply scepticism about his concern for women who have been raped. Only five years ago he said that women who object to men who identify as women entering women-only spaces — including prisons, where many of the female prisoners have been raped and abused — are “dinosaurs” who want to “hoard rights”. He later defended this by saying, “I will always stand with those from a minority community.”

He also suggested that trans women – men – can grow a cervix.

Well, Mr Lammy, have I got a reading recommendation for you. It’s a 2017 review of minorities and the criminal justice system, which conclusively found that minorities prefer jury trials, seeing them as a safeguard against prejudice because they — unlike judges and magistrates — represent the local population. It was written by our old friend, David Lammy.