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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I have no doubt that the Government are to be praised and applauded for their efforts regarding this. It is a real problem of considerable magnitude. However, I very much doubt, with the greatest respect, whether the test, in so far as it is going to turn on the question of what the public in general feel is abhorrent, can be sustained. There is nothing inherently wrong in setting a benchmark in law that is based upon the attitude of an ordinary, decent person. In the definition of dishonesty, judges day in and day out will tell their juries that the test of dishonesty is the test of what ordinary, decent people regard as the line where something ceases to be honest. That is a test that works. The difficulty with abhorrence is that whereas most people would be able to agree absolutely where that line is in relation to honesty or dishonesty, people might have hundreds or thousands of different views about what exactly is abhorrent. To my mind the use of that word carries echoes of the Lady Chatterley trial, which must have been 50 years ago, and Mervyn Griffith-Jones, learned counsel for the Crown, exhorting the jury to consider whether that was the sort of disgraceful book they would allow their servants to read.