Off on a technicality, actually.

Technical details. When it comes to the law, technicalities are food for lawyers. Technicalities are the stuff precedents are made of. So when the Attorney-General, the highest lawyer in the land, is found to have broken the law (one of her own) on a technicality, we must all understand that it was a genuine mistake, and that these things happen and that intent, mens rea must guide those who judge.

Well, that is how it is supposed to go. Some years ago I had an auto accident (no other vehicle was involved) and was required by the police to produce my documents, which I duly did. Not a problem, for I am by intent, a law abiding citizen. Except that, somewhere, in the chain of bureaucracy leading from the desk clerk at my local police station, to the DVLC in Swansea, someone had not spelled my name correctly. I learned, by way of a summons, that I was to attend court, some hundred miles away, to explain why I did not possess a Driver's Licence.

This is where I found that the burden of proof fell to me to convince several petty clerks - faceless, emotionless, morally neutral and possibly brain-dead clerks, that I did indeed possess a Full driving licence and had done for many years. This is the point at which the law falls into assdom. It is the point at which normal ordinary and particularly middle class white people become an easy target for box tickers and quota fillers.

A good point, along with anecdotal evidence appears in The Times, where Melanie Reid says,

Overregulation has transferred to us the onus to behave like office clerks in every facet of our own lives, or suffer the consequences. It has trapped ordinary, responsible people and businesses in a web of pseudo-offending. From the authorities, there is no leeway, no slack to cut, no discretion, no room for commonsense, no amnesty; because Lady Scotland and her like have deliberately managed such things out of the system. Honestly, is it any wonder we are gleeful?

Quite. Baroness Scotland is a victim of her own willingness to criminalise the middle classes. Serves the stupid woman right. The only sad thing is, £5,000 to someone who is already overpaid and who has fiddled her expenses to the limit, the sting is nothing like as bad as it should be. My only long-term joy in this is that she wont be in government in a year's time; gone with all the other shysters and fiddlers and unelected megalomaniacs.