Although the Crown Court backlog may not be down by very much, it is down, but that is beside the point where the Government is concerned. Its desire to restrict trial by jury is ideological, and would therefore apply even if there were no backlog. Even with the prisons at and indeed beyond breaking point, it is cheerfully seeking to create whole new categories of serious criminal offence.
For example, what, exactly, is the “conversion therapy” that would carry a sentence of five years? The Government would no longer be unveiling anything of this magnitude unless it had been signed off by Andy Burnham, so we need not bother looking to him. It has been under Burnham that Manchester has come to present Canal Street as its social and cultural heart and soul.
But most lesbians and gay men had heterosexual experiences in adolescence, and sometimes well after that, before deciding that it was not for them. Why should there be either a cultural taboo around articulating the reverse experience, or a legal sanction for cooperating in someone else’s? Ignore hysteria about things like electroconvulsion, which went out with the Ark.
If conversion therapy is abhorrent, then what about the drastic and irreversible psychological, chemical and surgical aspects of so-called sex changes, which are a vast array of medical treatment for something that is supposedly not an illness at all?
And just as a ban on halal slaughter would also ban kosher slaughter, or a ban on the medically unnecessary circumcision of children would ban the bris, would not this measure ban the pastoral practice of Orthodox Judaism? We could not be having that. Could we?
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