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Science, People & Politics. First volume (1-3), Volume iii, issue 1, January - February 2008.

Britain's Place in the World Economy, the Comprehensive Spending Review of 2007, Criminal and Civil Law.

The Queen it is said - I mean the Queen of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and this is 2008, - refers to her family as "The Firm". I have no idea if this is true because I have never been a Royal Reporter.

I do know I may not use the Royal Coat of Arms in any circumstances that suggest their trademark endorses my products. There is a very nice scene in the nineteenth Century costume drama Candleford that makes this point, in which a travelling salesman sell dangerous goods to a credulous population that has little access to decent medicine by fraudulently claiming to have acquired a Royal stamp of approval for his personal concoction (the series can be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer).

I did not know this about the Royal Coat of Arms explicitly in the past, though instinctively I did and have never wanted to claim their Coat of Arms for myself.

The same applies to all trademarks. I may not use the trademarks of others in my business in circumstances that suggest that that firm endorses my activities or products. I may give genuine thanks to companies that have been helpful to my business but must do so openly and making clear they do not endorse my product.

In my own personal business I may not claim to be working personally for people I am not working for and have nor worked for in circumstances where, and there is the intent, of fraudulently making financial or other gain or endangering life and limb or business of myself or others.

Is there any situation in which I might claim I am working for someone I am not working for? Well I suppose if someone were to inadvertently leak to me something I had no right to know about a particular company then if a situation arose in which it might be that it was dangerous to others that I had that information and the Police would not listen to me then I might have to appoint myself as an unsalaried member of the company that I had been given knowledge of, knowledge to which I had no right, and seek a trustworthy third party. That might be a responsible corporate attitude.

I know also as a British citizen that I may read and transcribe from primary legislation published in hardback books with ER stamped on the spine and challenge the highest in the land as to their interpretation of that legislation. Case law, I am told, may never overturn Statute. I am still struggling to a personal understanding of what happened in the UK to the Bill of Rights of, I believe, 1689.

At what point is it decided that existing Statute no longer meets need and that instead of amplification of meaning new Statute is needed, and the old Statute needs to be removed from the Statute books? I would guess it is when internal conflict within a particular Act becomes so extreme that only by shining a new light on the issue, and going back to the very beginning can one clarify what the framers of the legislation were trying and struggling at that time to say. Then we must ask do we still agree with what they were trying to say. This, I think, might be relevant now to the Copyright, Design and Patent Act of 1988, and it is an Act with deep, deep roots, so there is much to excavate when exploring its current Parts.

Which relationships, for example, are the primary relationship in a jointly created work? For me only an academic question, but one of significance for those jointly creating work.

And if case law can never overturn Statute what are the limits on the independence of the judiciary, in both civil and criminal law?

Let my mind flit now butterfly-like elsewhere. I am astonished at the steadfastness that the Royal Family brings to its task appointed by accidental birth of being the head of, mouthpieces of and essential representative of the British State. Think about how the British State behaves in some situations. How could we, the constituent parts of the British State, possibly expect another human being to be our embodiment in law? And having done so what were we thinking when we made the embodiment of the British State the commander-in-chief of the armed forces? I would guess we were not thinking about the European Union of the United Nations.

But that is not what this editorial is about. And, having failed to show grace and graciousness in some aspects of my own personal struggles, I am not really in a position to pass much comment on the embodiment of the British State save that to say that it seems to me that all members of the Royal Family ought to have the right to run as MPs if they wish to do so.

Thus if HRH the Prince of Wales has a tree-growing agenda for meeting climate change objectives then he could consider allowing HRH, the Duke of York, to be heir to the throne whilst he, HRH the Prince of Wales, renounces his birthright to be the embodiment of the British State so that he can pursue his personal political agenda if he wants to. Lots of people are born into wealthy families so we cannot really blame him for that or for his surname. The problem is that I doubt that we, the constituent parts of the British State, would actually allow him to live his life in privacy if he were to renounce his birthright. That ought to be our shame.

Somehow we need to start seeing people in isolation and as themselves only, not only as who they are related to. This applies to the Copyright, Design and Patent Act of 1988 as much as to the British Royal Family, the genetic underpinnings of illnesses or to the psychology of stress reactions and individual coping mechanisms. Each Man is an Island.

Which brings me circuitously to the Comprehensive Spending Review of 2008-09, 2009-10 and 2010-11.

What the CSR of 2007 means for British citizens curious to know what disposable income they will have in the financial year of 2008-2009 will become clear on 12th March when the Chancellor of the Exchequer makes his budget speech. What the Comprehensive Spending Review means for other countries is that they ought to be able to make strategic and tactical economic, commercial and business plans with confidence that the UK has a stated business intent for three years and to be able to assess whether or not they wish to integrate with British plans.

What the Review, published in 2007, says, is that the British economy has grown for 60 consecutive quarters, and that inflation is close to target. In other words for 25 years, despite The Falkland Islands War, the two Iraq Wars and the economic crash of the early 1990s around the time of the first Iraq War the economy has managed to not spiral totally out of control, and individual creativity and resourcefulness has managed to add up to a whole greater than its constituent parts.

These Comprehensive Spending Reviews, introduced to the public when Labour first came to power in 1997, are the reality with which all in search of public money, from physicists to the BBC, need to integrate. The CSRs are an externalising of the workings of the machinery of national government as it seeks to support the Executive putting its election manifesto into effect via laws honed and argued about word by word in select and standing committees before making it to the floor of the House of Commons. It is not that long-term economic plans did not exist before the first CSR of 1997, just that they were not publicised with the same fanfare.

The theme of the 2007 CSR is, "Equipping Britain for Global Challenges", and the authors have in mind the decade 2007 to 2017. Demographics, socio-economic change, globalisation, climate and environment change, global uncertainty and technological change are the shaping influences guiding British government economists. By the way it is in this context that HRH the Prince of Wales might be tiptoeing through a political minefield.

The CSR puts numbers into the public domain for 2008-2009, 2009-2010 and 2010-2011. These are an envelope and within the envelope there is room for modest manoeuvring. Public expenditure is planned to grow from £589 billion to ?678 billion between 2008-2009 and 2010-2011, providing of course we do not kill off a large part of the population and deprive ourselves of tax payers.

We pay tax in vat, indirectly as corporation tax whenever we buy any goods or services, as income tax, and in our National Insurance contributions. We contribute to corporate and State profit through creativity and investment in property and in the goods and services we buy. People on benefits also contribute, and do so significantly, despite the ignorance of The Daily Mail.

Providing crime is not committed against us to prevent us contributing by killing us, making us ill, stealing our freedom, destroying our employability through traduction and belittlement that shatters our carefully laid plans then somehow as individuals over a life time we will have contributed financially in a positive way to our society.

Which brings me to that fact that I must tell readers that significant crime was committed by quite a lot of professional people (the medical profession and police in particular) and others and against me in 2004, most especially between the months of March and September of 2004. But that now the situation is that rather than the wrong against me having been acknowledged I am the one accused of crime, that is of harassing without violence people I have never met, when I was trying to bring to the attention of the local Police Commander information that was legitimately his.

This situation is possible because Police derided me and used the Mental Health Act to destroy my credibility, or perhaps the medics had already suggested to them that I was mentally ill, but just had not told me they had any contact with the Police. It was done by a solicitor, Judith Stansfield of Blake Lapthorn Tarlo Lyons in Oxford, then Linnells, who told me that her firm had no one dealing with National Security, criminal law or litigation and that I ought to find a firm that did and then refused to explain why and then denied her words. That traduction of my professionalism led me into an interaction with the Police and medical profession in the UK that showed me we have made a dreadful, dreadful mess in the UK of the way in which the Mental Health Act and the Criminal Justice system work together and can be abused. The way in which the Mental Health Act now interacts with the Criminal Justice System is terrifying and gives power to people not qualified to yield such power. That is to the medical and social work professions. It is a system ripe for abuse. Imagine a kangeroo Court condemns someone for something they have not done, then suborns police with misinformation to get someone arrested under the Mental Health Act, or a third party or parties intervene with, say, drugs in a way that leads to the victim being viewed as the aggressor and again the police use the Mental Health Act rather than give the arrestee a defence. The highways and byways of the system allows ones own ignorance to be used against one - as happened to me when at the last minute a doctor's action, if my then solicitor is telling me the truth, deprived me of a defence.

Be afraid. Be very afraid of this system. This is an issue that the Comprehensive Spending Review does not address. This is an issue that calls on framers of legislation to revisit the principles underlying the earliest versions of the Copyright, Design and Patent Act and to imbibe again the drivers behind Britain's Bill of Rights of 1689. It is a question that as far as I can see opens the question of what exactly are the constitutional limits of an independent judiciary. And I am quite sure that no doctor or social worker, indeed no one in medicine or social work, ought to have the right or power to judge another human being and impose restrictions of any kind on their life. People in those professions are not trained in law. They have no more right than I to judge, imprison and seek to control a human being.
Helen Gavaghan, Hebden Bridge, UK. 28th February, 2008.

Editorial above finalised 4.8.09. Note of explanation added 5.12.11. I was acquitted of crime by Bradford Crown Court on 17.9.08. Ms Stansfield's firm (which became Blake Lapthorn) have, in the form of their senior partner, Mr J. Lloyd-Jones, behaved with continuing inexcusable passive aggression, turning their back on me a client, in 2004, of 21 years, who had done them and their partners no harm, had always given them a good name, and behaving in a slanderous manner behind my back since 2004, cancelling meetings of resolution, denying my real need for such a meeting following acquittal, oblivious to the money of mine they have wasted by this behaviour, when I had spent that money in good faith, making threats not followed through, abusing my privacy and holding all the cards as practitioners of law with knowledge I do not have. Their offer to act as executors of my will, made in writing, for free, is of no use given the behaviour of Mr Lloyd-Jones. The offer is a mockery of someone who has nothing, in significant part, because of the words and behaviour of two of their partners since April 2004. I have no understanding of their behaviour as a firm of lawyers at any time since 2004. The harm two of their partners did me, and which their silence and refusal to meet me, continues to do me, is enormous, and when there was, and is, no need to harm me, and nothing unreasonable in my request to meet for clarification of their words which have had and have significant professional and personal consequences for me.

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