Matthew
13.2K posts
🚨 NEW: The proposed names the Government is considering calling its new towns - Elizabethtown (after the Queen) - Pankhurst (after suffragette Emmeline) - Attleeton (after ex-PM) - Athelstan (first King of England) - Seacole (after nurse Mary) [@thetimes]
Strategic lawsuits against public participation—SLAPPs—are used by those with deep pockets to silence their critics. That includes journalists, whistleblowers, and victims. These cases are not about justice. They are about intimidation. They are designed to drain resources, to exhaust journalists, and to suppress the truth. The Government should introduce legislation to curb these abuses of our legal system 👇🏻
This is all very well, but it’s very difficult to identify an actual solution. The US has a problem with SLAPPs even though its substantive law of defamation is very heavily pro-defendant.
Strategic lawsuits against public participation—SLAPPs—are used by those with deep pockets to silence their critics. That includes journalists, whistleblowers, and victims. These cases are not about justice. They are about intimidation. They are designed to drain resources, to exhaust journalists, and to suppress the truth. The Government should introduce legislation to curb these abuses of our legal system 👇🏻
You can say “I think women who are denied an abortion and attempt one on their own as a desperate last resort should be charged with a crime and sent to jail”. You don’t need to lie and say “abortion up to birth had been legalised”. It hasn’t. Own what you believe.
Before, it was illegal to abort a stillborn baby after 24 weeks. A grieving mother would have to carry their dead child to term with all the risks that come with it. The bill that the Lords just passed decriminalised it.
Under the government's proposals, not one of the 900 wrongly convicted subpostmasters would have had a right to trial by jury. The Prime Minister himself concluded in a report that the scrapping of jury trials led to miscarriages of justice in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. The right to trial by jury must be protected. #JusticeNeedsJuries
We have spent £180m on plans for a tunnel under Stonehenge. The project is now scrapped. You can be for a tunnel & think spending is a good idea (even if you think the cost of planning is silly). You can be against a tunnel & think spending is a bad idea. But *nobody* can be for spending on this scale with zero result. And yet that is a peculiarly British outcome. Nobody will be reprimanded. Nobody will see their career affected. But that’s £180m of taxpayer money just wazzed up the wall. Totally without repercussions. Multiply this by airport expansions & train route plans and Thames crossings and power stations and other examples you can think of yourself, and… soon you’re talking serious money.
7/ I and many Commons colleagues are prepared to reintroduce this legislation should we be successful in the private members ballot in the next session, which starts in the coming weeks. We are not going away.