Bank Holiday

Not a lot of startling news since the last post. I attended the House twice this week, and asked a supplementary question on Wednesday about reconstruction following the Kashmir earthquake. JW arrived from Nottingham with his two friends Nic and Rusty on Friday, and Tordie went off to Rome that morning.

No Bank Holiday weekend would be complete without the traditional emergency removal case, and sure enough, Puck called me at breakfast time about a Ugandan who has removal directions for thie evening. So when she lets me have the material, I'm afraid that means spending many a happy hour trying to raise someone at MODCU ( management of detained cases unit) and persuading them to defer removal pending the submission of important new evidence which Puck says she can produce. Why hadn't the solicitors been doing this work? Because many of them are useless, except at the box-ticking which keeps them on the approved list. The supervisory authority pays no attention tothe quality of reprsentation, and many good practitioners have withdrawn because of the cuts in the amount of legal aid allowed.

Paul Vallely wrote in The Independent yesterday on Bank Holidays: The break with tradition, saying that my grandfather Sir John Lubbock felt that friends and families should be able to enjoy an outing together. But the name 'Bank Holiday' didn't mean that only bank employees were allowed to take the day off. The name arose from the fact that bank bills which fell due for payment on the Bank Holiday were to become payable the following day. It had nothing to do with particular firms enjoying a commercial advantage, as Vallely supposed. Sir John thought one reason why the 1871 Act encountered no Parliamentary opposition was that at the time many people didn't realise that it gave everybody a holiday.