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One Week with John Gulliver
 
Lord Woolf
The finest legal minds agree about our 'elected dictator'

THE word ‘dictatorship’ was in the air as some of the country’s most eminent jurists assembled at the London School of Economics on Tuesday.
Their target was the government but the lawyers were too polite to speak so bluntly.
They used the word ‘executive’ – and the audience, which included lots of law students – knew what the word meant.
Lecturing the assembly was Lord Woolf (pictured), the former Lord Chief Justice, who, it is believed, retired two years ago – four years early – after becoming enmeshed with government ministers critical of his pronounced liberal views.
One of his ‘crimes’ was to advise fellow judges not to jail first-time offenders.
At one point, the in-and-out home secretary David Blunkett, never one to use pretty words when a sledge hammer approach will do, called Lord Wolf ‘a confused old codger.’
Blunkett could have surprised me!
Lord Woolf, a benign elderly figure, spoke pithily and cautiously, as you would expect from a man whose legal brain is so widely admired among lawyers.
His weighty topic was Democracy and the Rule of Law, and he made it clear you can only have real democracy where the ‘executive’ and the judiciary are independent of each other.
He didn’t make a frontal attack on Blair’s government but in his coded way he was emphasising that the government often tried to cross the line.
Less shy was Nicola Lacey, a professor of law at the LSE, who used the phrase ‘elective dictatorship’ first coined in the 1960s by Lord Hailsham. Lacey then pointedly said such ‘dictatorships’ were likely to occur when a government had too big a majority – a reference to Blunkett’s megaphone politics at a time when Blair had a majority of 150 seats.
Answering questions, Lord Woolf decried the way legal aid had been run down under New Labour. Another speaker, Michael Smyth, a partner in Clifford Chance, a global firm of solicitors, described the legal aid system as one of the great achievements of the post-war Labour government – as great as the NHS – and bemoaned the way it had been treated by Labour 60 years later.


The princes of darkness

HOW many workmen does it take to dig a hole?
That was a question my colleagues and I had plenty of time to ponder by candlelight on Friday afternoon, when a crew re-laying pavement outside our Camden Road, Camden Town, offices put a pneumatic drill through an electricity cable, plunging us and neighbouring shops into darkness until nearly the evening.
A sign posted by the Transport for London – run by the Mayor – helpfully informed me that it was responsible for the work, which it had contracted to a firm called Ringway and was being overseen by Camden Consulatancy Services, a branch of the Town Hall.
But the man who struck the deadly blow to the cable, it turned out, worked for a firm called Orbital Equipment – a sub-contractor of Ringway.
Sadly, despite the involvement of two agencies of the state (TfL and the Town Hall) and two teams of private workmen (Ringway and Orbital) nobody could do anything about our power supply until EDF Energy, the electricity company, arrived two-and-a-half hours later.
Afraid of being outnumbered, the EDF man had brought along his own sub-contractor, a chap from a firm called McNicholas.
Mr EDF told me: “I do this all day, every day, all over London – there’s about 200 more vans doing more or less the same thing.
“There’s always an idiot going through the cable somewhere.”
A Ringway spokesman said: “The cable was in the wrong place.”
A Town Hall press official said: “You’re not going to try to pin this on us, are you? The contractor is responsible.”
I was going to call TfL, McNicholas and Orbital as well, but I could see where this was going.
Ever since all public contracts were put out to tender under Mrs Thatcher, it’s been easier to find eight workmen from six different firms standing in a circle scratching their heads than a contractor who takes responsibilty.



Back row from left: Calligrapher Qu Lei Lei, poet Judith Cherniak, singer Richard Edgar-Wilson, poet Cicely Herbert, Piers Plowright. Front row: David Cherniak and Yang Xuefei
Rhyme and reason in cultural exchange

THE consulvsions in the streets of Europe this week over the publication of a cartoon in a Danish newspaper reminds me of China 40 years ago when the Cultural Revolution was said to have been triggered by a critical review of a classical play. The criticism of the main character was seen as a coded attack on Mao Tse Tung!
It just shows how careful you have to be with the printed word. Or a cartoon, for that matter. I don’t want to encourage anyone to lay siege to No 10 Downing Street but I thought of Blair and the Iraq war when I heard a poem of the 1930s by the great Chinese writer Lu Xun at the British Library on Monday.
“The general sits safe on his cloud-wrapped peak,” recited Piers Plowright “While thunderbolts slaughter the humble in their hovels.”
That’s Blair for you, I thought. Always keen to send the boys off to war while he sits comfortably in No 10.
Piers Plowright, a former distinguished BBC documentary maker, who lives in Hampstead, was taking part in a ‘cultural exchange’ between London and Shanghai – Chinese poems went up this week in the London underground while English poems were placed on the Shanghai Metro.
Apparently, the Chinese chose poems by the great radical poets Shelley and Byron both of whom are known for stirring stanzas calling on the poor and the oppressed to rise up from “their slumbers”.
However, the Chinese government played safe – and chose two romantic poems by the masters instead.

David Carhart and Mr Lourie’s widow Wiera, daughter Alina and nine-year-old grandson Alfie Habershon
Lovingly remembering Lennie

RETIRE? He didn’t know the meaning of the word. After stepping down from his post as a director in the packaging industry, Lennie Lourie took up another post. This time as a teacher of French at the University of the 3rd Age (U3A) in Camden Town.
His adult education work only ended two years ago when in his late 80s he was paralysed in an accident.
Naturally, relatives, friends and ex-colleagues were keen to honour Lennie who had made such an impact on their lives as both teacher and chairman of U3A.
On Sunday they assembled at the Rosslyn Hill Chapel in Hampstead in memory of Lennie who died last November.
Highlight of the afternoon was a performance by the Double Image classical ensemble who played Glinka, Chopin and Brahms.
His wife, Friends of the Royal Free Hospital president Wiera Lourie, told me he never lost interest in the U3A.
“He was very involved right up until the day he died,” she said. “A lot of his visitors were members and his conversations with them were around it – he very much believed in it.”
Mrs Lourie said he would also have to see so many of his old friends and colleagues at the event. She said: “He would have loved it.”
Pictured: David Carhart and Mr Lourie’s widow Wiera, daughter Alina and nine-year-old grandson Alfie Habershon.

John Gulliver
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