Press Release - Chittagong Hill Tracts

International Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission concerned about the
discriminatory and unconstitutional directives towards indigenous peoples: urges for
immediate cancellation

15 February, 2015, Dhaka: The International Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission (CHTC) is deeply concerned about a Home Ministry memorandum of January 22, 2015 (44. 00. 0000. 09. 11. 001.13-15 dated:22/01/2015) imposing restrictions on foreigners’ visit to the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), requiring all national-international individuals and organizations’ interaction with the indigenous peoples to be supervised by members of local administration and Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) or the military, ordering the CHTC to remove the "Commission" part of their name, making check-posts at the entrances to CHT more active, transferring former indigenous Shanti Bahini members in Police and Ansar outside the CHT among other matters. The Commission considers them unconstitutional, discriminatory and in conflict with the CHT Peace Accord and calls for the immediate cancellation of the orders.

Based on the decisions taken at a Home Ministry meeting on January 7, this year, the 4th and 5th directives of the order consecutively that states if a foreigner wishes to visit the CHT districts they will have to submit an application to the Home Ministry at least a month before the intended visit. And the Home Ministry will give permission based on positive reports of the intelligence agencies of the ministry. Provided that foreign individual or agencies obtain the ministry permission to visit the CHT they would have to submit a specific schedule of the visit to the local administration and police. Also all national-foreign individuals and organizations’ interaction with the indigenous people will be supervised by members of local administration and BGB or army. The decisions not only infringe the basic rights of national or foreign citizens, they are very racist and will seriously impact the implementation of the Peace Accord. Requiring ministry approval and BGB-Army supervision for any meeting with the CHT adivasis while the same rule doesn’t apply in the rest of the country is undoubtedly racist, discriminatory, unconstitutional and tantamount to stripping individual freedom. Besides, the indigenous families with non-indigenous and foreign members would be deprived of their rights to family. CHTC strongly condemns these discriminatory decisions.

The 9th directive states that BGB sector/battalion/Border Out Posts (BOP) will function on the acquired land maintaining a friendly relations with the locals. But the conditions set in the amended CHT District Council Act 1998 according to the Accord state that no land can be acquired in the CHT without permission from the Hill District Council (HDC). But the Reserved Forests in the region are not within the purview of this rule. But it is notable that the lands for establishing BGB sector/battalion/BOP were acquired only with the approval of district administration bypassing the HDC. The process of acquiring more land for BGB is already underway. Apart from the Reserved Forests, the hills and lands in CHT are common property of indigenous people according to the traditional indigenous laws. Although the land acquired for BGB establishments are claimed to be on Reserved Forests, in reality the lands being acquired are those being used by the indigenous people as common lands. As a result many indigenous people have been evicted from their homes already while others are living in fear of eviction. The ministry order stipulating that BGB sector/battalion/border outposts (BOP) will be established on the acquired land maintaining a friendly relationship with the locals is a clear violation of the amended CHT Hill District Council Act 1998. The Commission is deeply worried at such a directive of the ministry.

In directive no. 10, check-posts at the entrances to CHT are asked to be made more active. The Commission observes with grave concern that there are numerous check-posts at different places in the CHT in the name of security. But the incidents of violence against indigenous women as well as the communal attacks have taken place within the visual limits of those check-posts.

However, a majority of the communal attacks or incidents of violence against women in the CHT have taken place in the vicinity of the check-posts. For instance, recently in Bogachhari Naniachar Upazila, the arson attacks and looting of indigenous villages occurred despite the presence of nearby check posts and military camps. Past experiences suggest that the check-posts that are there in the name of security, in many cases, instead of ensuring security cause harm to the people of the CHT. Besides, when there is no provision for establishment of check-posts at the entrance of any other districts in the country, why there is a need for there to be such check-posts in various places in the case of CHT remains a question.

Directive no. 11 states that measures will be taken to carry out a phased transfer of former members of Shanti Bahini employed in Police and Ansar outside the CHT. Given that the importance of mixed policing has been repeatedly emphasised in order to implement the Peace Accord and maintain law and order in the region, this decision, which clearly contradicts the Peace Accord, has undoubtedly increased the insecurity of the people of CHT.

Another decision undertaken at the meeting of the Home Ministry was that UNDP will be requested to send a report about the implementation progress and results of the 160 million USD development projects undertaken by them in the last 10 years. It must be noted that UNDP has been carrying out projects worth millions of dollars not just in the CHT but all over the country. So the question remains why the projects of CHT need to be singled out and evaluated/monitored separately.

Directive no. 3 has asked the CHT Commission to remove the word ‘Commission’ from its name. But it has not been explained which provision dictates that there can be no non-governmental initiative with 'Commission' attached to its name. Notably, although there have been other ‘commissions’ in the country such as the Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee’s Gono Todonto Commission or Bangladesh Human Rights Commission, the Ministry has not asked any other institution to change their names. As such, the CHTC is astonished at the directive to rename the Commission.

It may be mentioned here that the meeting was called on the basis of a BGB report and on the issue of ‘law and order development and sovereignty’. According to the Peace Accord, any significant decisions regarding the CHT must be made after consultation with the Regional Council. However, the Regional Council was not consulted prior to the meeting. We all want the country’s sovereignty to be protected and stability maintained in the CHT. But the imposition of such discriminatory, racist and ethno-centric decisions on the indigenous people of CHT in the name of law and order will likely make an already tense situation even more complicated. This order is also an attack on the freedom of expression of not just indigenous people but every citizen of Bangladesh.

As such, the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission calls for immediate withdrawal of these discriminatory and racist decisions and gives the following recommendations:

·         The extremely racist and discriminatory decisions undertaken at the Home Ministry meeting and the directives issued based on those decisions must be immediately retracted.

·         Take immediate steps to amend the contradictory clauses of the CHT Land Dispute Resolution Commission Act and ensure that the newly-appointed chairman takes impartial and effective steps to resolve the land disputes in order to create and enabling environment to establish the just rights of the indigenous people.

·         Declare a clear timeline for the full implementation of the CHT Accord.

On behalf of the CHT Commission,

             

Eric Avebury                           Sultana Kamal                                     Elsa Stamatopoulou

Co-chair of the                                    Co-chair of the                                    Co-chair of the

CHT Commission                    CHT Commission                    CHT Commission

Members: Shapan Adnan, Lars Anders Baer, Tone Bleie, Hurst Hannum, Yasmeen Haque, Sara Hossain, Zafar Iqbal, Myrna Cunningham Kain, Khushi Kabir, Michael van Walt van Praag, Iftekharuzzaman.

Adviser: Jenneke Arens, Tom Eskildsen, Meghna Guhathakurta.

cataract

Up at 06.15 this morning. and after a quick cup of tea and a piece of toast, Lindsay drove me to St. Thomas's for an 07.30 appointment to have a cataract removed from my right eye. After some delay while the administrator searched for the list, I waa first up.   The operation isn't painful, just a bit uncomfortable. You have to stay completely still. looking into a very bright light for about half an hour, while the surgeon removes the cloudy lens and replaces it with a plastic one, under a local anaesthetic. We were on the way home by about 10, and I went back to bed till 13.30.

So far, (19.30) the eyesight is fairly blurred, and the notes do warn that it can take several weeks to settle down. The eye is a bit sore, but that's only to be expected. Nothing that Paracetamol can't relieve.

Introduction by Lord Avebury, Vice Chair, Parliamentary Human Rights Group, at a press conference on Bahrain, Fielden House, 11.00 February 10, 2014

The price we pay for being given facilities for our aircraft carriers in Bahrain became clear when the Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in response to a question by Jeremy Corbyn in the Commons a few weeks ago that Bahrain is

“….travelling in the right direction. It is making significant reform. The crown prince who is charged with this agenda is directly engaged and has made significant progress over the last few months”.( House of Commons Official Report 20 Jan 2015 : Column 66)

This extraordinary statement was made on the same day that the world famous human rights activist Nabeel Rajab was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for saying in a tweet that security institutions in Bahrain  served as an ‘ideological incubator’ for jihadists’. Mr Rajab told the BBC that the laws and the judiciary were being used as tools of repression.

The day before the Foreign Secretary’s statement, the head of the country’s legal opposition al-Wefaq, Sheikh Ali Salman, was charged with promoting violent regime change, though as everybody including the Foreign Office knows,, Sheikh Ali and his party have been undeviating in their advocacy of peaceful change in the face of nation wide repression . 

The UK, unlike other countries and the whole of the international human rights community, have never called for the release of political prisoners.  We appeal for ‘due process’ in trials, when judges are appointed by the king and many of them are members of the al-Khalifa family, as was the case in the recent trial of Maryam al-Khawaja, co-Director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights, sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in absentia in December. We didn’t call for the release of Nabeel Rajab, or of the ‘Bahrain 13’, whose trials by a military court were condemned by the Bassiouni Commission; and we said not a word when the defendants were retried and convicted by a civil court using the same evidence, including confessions extracted by torture.  

A week after the Foreign Secretary told the Commons about ‘significant reform’, the Bahraini Interior Ministry announced that under a law passed in July, 72 people were stripped of their citizenship by decree, with no nonsense about due process. Ten of them were alleged supporters of the Daesh, but al-Wefaq said most were opposition activists who supported ‘a democratic transition in Bahrain’. They included   blogger Ali Abdulemam, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in absentia for running an online news forum; Dr. Ali Al-Dairi, founder of the online news site Bahrain Mirror; journalist Abbas Busafwan; university professor Masoud Jahromi; and former opposition MP Shaikh Hasan Sultan.

The cases of Mr Sultan and of Jalal and Jawad Fairooz, also former opposition MPs, are being referred to the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. This Committee will at least demand a full explanation of the reasons for these breaches of Parliamentary immunity which it will publish. The cases of other former MPs which I am not sure have yet been reported to the IPU are those of Khalil Al-Marzooq, former chairman of al Wefaq in Parliament; Osama Al-Tamimi,whose Parliamentary membership was arbitrarily revoked and access to his pension rights cancelled, and Matar Matar , who was arrested and tortured in 2011.

Foreign Office Ministers have repeatedly said that ‘inclusive and constructive political dialogue is the only way to promote peace and stability in Bahrain, a quote from their ‘Country case study’ on Bahrain published last April. We have just as consistently said the the so-called dialogue was bound to fail, because it didn’t include the street opposition, who call for replacement of the absolute monarchy by free elections leading to a people’s government. There can be no true political reform when advocacy of democracy and human rights is a crime.         

So what can Mr Hammond say now? His policy of reform through dialogue in which a whole range of subjects is criminally out of order lies in ruins. There is nobody left for the al-Khalifas to dialogue with, and the £1.5 million  the Foreign    Office has spent on cosmetic reform is money down the drain. There is no sign that the regime’s widespread use of arbitrary detention and torture of opposition activists has been mitigated, and the visit by the UN Rapporteur on Torture is on indefinite hold. Human Rights Watch reports that:

“Analysis of court verdicts in the trials of the more than 200 people on terrorism or national security charges revealed the key role of Bahrain’s courts in maintaining the country’s highly repressive political order. Courts routinely sentence peaceful protesters to long prison terms, but members of the security forces are rarely prosecuted for unlawful killings, including in detention”.

The FCO has just released its much delayed response to the critical report by the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, rejecting the Committee’s recommendation that Bahrain should be listed as a ‘Country of Concern’ because it is on a path to reform. They say it is ‘making progress’ and is ‘on a trajectory of generally positive change’. The Government ‘are confident that real efforts are being made to address [human rights] issues’, and they ‘are providing a comprehensive package of technical and diplomatic assistance to support Bahrain’s reform programme’.

All there is to show for this package is the creation of a non-independent ombudsman and national rights institute, and human rights on the ground continue to deteriorate. As for political reform, the total grip of the al-Khalifas on power remains unrestricted; all platforms for free thinking and expression have been destroyed, and al-Wefaq, the only institution that had a mere right to exist as a nominal opposition has been decapitated and emasculated.

The people of  Bahrain oppose the UK naval base and see it as a public declaration of the UK's "green light" for Bahrain to continue its tyranny and repression with impunity.  Sooner or later there has to be regime change, and when that happens a new democratic government may not look on us with great affection.

My introduction to a seminar on Traveller sites on February 3 in Committee Room G

Welcome  to this seminar, which forms part of a series organised by the Traveller Movement to address racial justice issues faced by Gypsies, Travellers and Roma

 In May last year we discussed Gypsies and Travellers in the media, and a key finding of that seminar was the impact of accommodation and planning issues on media coverage of Gypsies and Travellers at the local and national level.

Four out of the five speakers referred to accommodation issues in the context of negative and damaging media coverage.

So today we’re addressing a root cause of media hostility, and hence of hostility by the public: the inequality and discrimination these communities experience in accessing suitable accommodation.

Where then do we stand at the end of a five year Parliament? What has been done as regards Traveller sites over that period, and what  we might like to see happen under a new Government after the election.

The total number of Traveller caravans has crept up in the five years to July 2014 by just under 4%, probably not enough to keep pace with growth in the population. The number of rented and Traveller-owned caravans both increased, but so did the number on unauthorised sites, the main cause of friction with the settled population. The number of caravans on socially rented sites actually declined by 4.6%, making it all the more essential that Travellers should be facilitated in providing accommodation for themselves.

They did make every effort to acquire land and develop sites, but came up against a brick wall of opposition locally, reinforced by Eric Pickles’  strategy of wholesale recovery of planning appeals and then sitting on them indefinitely, This has now been declared unlawful and discriminatory as a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights by the High Court.  But the damage has been done; only 100 more pitches got permanent planning permission over the whole period of this Parliament.

So the current declared policy of requiring local authorities to grant planning permission for enough sites to accommodate their Traveller population for the next five years, measured  by assessment of local needs, has failed.

In the few cases where a local authority does get to the next stage of the policy, which is to identify areas of land on which the planning permissions would be granted, again it doesn’t work, because there is always a hurricane of opposition from local residents which panics the council into backing off and dropping the proposal.

We shall also discuss Pickles’ other unlawful policy of defining Travellers out of existence, which fortunately needs primary legislation and therefore cant’t happen in this Parliament. Travellers are an internationally recognised ethnic group and if Pickles’ successor does continue down that route after the election, the UK would be violating several conventions to which it is a party.

The Government dud establish a ministerial working group on tackling inequalities experienced by Gypsies and Traveller, and in the foreword to their ‘progress report’ in 2008 Andrew Stunell MP said that Ministers were ‘very concerned that  Gypsies and Travellers are being held back by some of the worst outcomes of any group across a wide range of social indicators’. Fundamental to the disadvantage  experienced by caravan-dwelling Travellers in education and in health outcomes is the insecurity of tenure that so many of them have to endure. The working group allocated money to provide 750 new and improved pitches, but the number of socially rented pitches has fallen over the lifetime of the Coalition. The Working Group quietly abandoned the job in April 2012, without mentioning they were going to make it easier for local authorities to harry Travellers across the landscape when there was no place they could lawfully settle.

The real problem with the Government strategy is that where a local authority ignores it, there is no means of enforcement, In the 1968 Act, the Government was given the power to direct a local authority to provide sites for such numbers of caravans as he should specify, and the Bill I introduced in 2012 gave the Secretary of State  an equivalent power to direct a local authority to grant planning permissions for a given number of caravans.  With the 1968 Act it wasn’t necessary to use the power, but its presence in the law was enough to galvanise backsliders into compliance.

Finally we need to consider how a different coalition after May could get round the obstacle. At a  Traveller Movement  meeting last November I drew attention to the   Government approval of plans for a 15,000 home new town at Ebbsfleet as the first of a new generation of ‘garden cities’ to solve the housing crisis, particularly in London and the Southeast. Now there are plans for 13,000 new homes at Bicester; Ashford and Oxford have expressed interest in the concept, and particularly interesting, the Homes and Communities Agency will develop and act as planning authority for 10,000 homes at Northstowe.  The HCA is aware of the needs of homeless Travellers and is sympathetic to them. But more generally, we could build into the statutes of the development corporations of these new towns an obligation to provide say 1% of the homes in the form of caravan sites for Travellers, producing 80 new pitches.

I broached this with the chairman designate of the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, Michael Cassidy and he said he would consider it. Ebbsfleet will have planning powers, and could incorporate Traveller sites into the social housing it will be providing in its business plan, helping to meet the unmet need in neighbouring authorities.

I also spoke to Paul Kitson, Project Manager for the new town of Northstowe in South Cambridgeshire at the Homes and Communities Agency, who was sympathetic about including Gypsy sites in their planning.

So lets ask the Government what contribution they expect the development of new towns to make towards meeting the needs of Travellers in their areas, and how they will ensure that each of them fit a proportionate number of pitches into their business plans.

David Rudlin the urban designer who won the £250,00 Wolfson Economics prize last September argues that we must

“take a confident bite out of the green belt”

 and build new garden city extensions to around 40 existing provincial cities and towns, including Oxford, Taunton, Ipswich and Carlisle. The Government have picked up the idea but have only listed five of the 40 candidates,  perhaps because of fear that the Council for Preservation of Rural England against them on the eve of the election. But this is the only new idea on the table for dealing with the acute housing crisis we face with cross-party support, and we must start a campaign to ensure that Travellers accommodation is an integral part of the national policy.

On August 15 I tweeted:

Eric Avebury @EricAvebury ·  

On August 15 I tweeted:

There's no time to lose! We need a coalition of the willing to eradicate the #IS and their terrorist ideology http://ln.is/bloom.bg/0Zj3U 

The victory of the YPG in Kobane is a huge triumph, but if the job is to be done there has to be coordination with the Syrian Armed Forces. For the time being they are the only other well trained forces with modern weapons fighting the Daesh on the ground.

Assisted Dying

Yesterday evening, Lindsay and I went the the book launch of I'll See Myself Out, Thank You, an anthology of short pieces about assisted dying by a range of candidates, carers, relatives and professionals in favour of changes in the law, some wanting to go further than the current Assisted Dying Bill. There was also a showing of the video Glenn's Last Tape, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RXQLF9uTL0)  about the last months of Glenn Scott, who died by his own hand of Motor Neurone Disease after a year of progressive deterioration.the inevitable course of the disease. He had the resources, the intelligence and the determination to plan and organise his death in his beloved Rome, but he recognised that most people 'don't know where to turn', faced with the approach of the gradual loss of all physical ability. That's why there is a desperate need for a lawful way of terminally ill people giving up life with medical help. Nobody with an ounce of compassion would be able to see Glenn's agonising last months without enormous sympathy, and a strong desire to see that Parliament makes it possible for others with MND or similar terminal illnesses to see themselves out.

Santosh Dass, President of the Federation of Ambedkarite amd Buddhist Organisations UK, with Vinod Tawade, Minister for School Education, Sports and Youth Welfare, Higher and Technical Education, Government of Maharashtra, at the future Ambedkar Centre

Warmest congratulations to FABOUK and its President Santosh Dass.

Warmest congratulations to FABOUK and its President Santosh Dass. The Ambedkar centre will remind  us that we still need to work for the elimination of disadvantage and discrimination, in the UK and in India

Hindustan Times

Maharashtra govt set to buy Ambedkar's house in London

Prasun Sonwalkar and Sayli Udas Mankikar, Hindustantimes.com , London/Mumbai

  |  

Updated: Jan 24, 2015 10:54 IST

After months of uncertainty, India has moved to intervene in the sale of a house in London where B R Ambedkar lived in 1921 as a student, with the Maharashtra government set to buy the property. The government plans to acquire and convert the house into a museum by April 14, Ambedkar Jayanti.

The two-storey apartment in north-west London covers 2,050 square feet. At the entrance is a blue plaque which says Ambedkar stayed there while studying at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1921-22.

Maharashtra government’s intervention came when the state’s education minister Vinod Tawde, who was on an official trip to London, visited the house and met representatives of the Indian high commission. He was accompanied by Santosh Dass, president of Federation of Ambedkarite and Buddhist Organisations, UK (FABOUK), who led efforts to acquire the house after it came on the market last year. Tawde spoke to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis who have him the go-ahead to purchase the property.

"The residence which will be converted into a museum will be open to public from April 14, which is Dr Ambedkar's birth anniversary," Tawde said. A statement issued by him in Marathi said the house will be bought for Rs 35 crore.

Dass said she was delighted with the Maharashtra government’s decision. Indian representatives would soon begin negotiations with the estate agent and house owner to complete the sale.

The house was put on the market for a minimum price of 3.1 million pounds last year. A private developer had placed a bid and completed initial formalities, but Dass alerted Maharashtra officials before the sale could be completed.

“India intervened at the right time. We are delighted that we will soon have a fitting memorial for Ambedkar and an international mission base. It was in London that Ambedkar formulated his views on eradication of caste-based discrimination, and the rights of women,” Dass told HT. Ambedkar’s grandson Prakash, who leads the Bharip Bahujan Mahasangh, thanked the Fadnavis government.

Hammond - friend of hereditary al-Khalifa hereditary human rights abusers

As a friend of Nabeel Rajab, Sheikh Ali Salman and most of the 'Bahraini 13' who are serving long sentences including life for freedom of expression offences, Philip Hammond doesn't speak for me. [http://bit.ly/1E6iN2a] People should be allowed to criticise their government and to call for it to be changed, and its outrageous for Hammond to praise a hereditary absolute monarchy that locks peaceful opponents up and takes away their citizenship for these 'offences'.

Haematology January 21

	Jan 21, 2015	Dec 24, 2014	Nov 26, 2014	Oct 29, 2014	Normal
Hb	101	104	109	100	130 - 180
WBC	3.52	4.00	3.02	3.10	4.5 - 10.0
Neutrophils	1.6	1.80	1.16	1.43	2.0 - 7.5
Plt	494	551	391	427	150 - 450

None of the values are within normal range, but Hb is just above the level at which DIPSS+ indicates a worse prognosis. The consultant agreed that an abrupt change doesn't really occur, and she also acknowledges that a single point for age over 65 doesn't accurately reflect the actual position. I think my own arbitrary adjustment for these two factors will turn out to be closer to reality, giving a departure date of July 2016.

PS Jan 22 Saw GP Dr F this evening who prescribed 1.25 mg Ramipril as well as the 10 mg Amlodipine I'm already taking since the visit to the New Cross 24-hour walk-in centre the Sunday before last. When I was discharged from King's in June all the blood pressure medication was knocked off, for review by the GP, but the message wasn't received. So I'm back to the list I was on before the pneumonia.

Chancel Repairs Liability

Chancel Repairs

Question for Short Debate

4 pm

Asked by Lord Avebury

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to abolish the liability of private householders and others for chancel repairs.

Lord Avebury (LD): My Lords, a consensus that reform of the law on chancel repairs is long overdue has emerged from discussions with the church, the Law Commission, the Law Society, the Country Landowners’ Association and the National Secular Society. Since the Chancel Repairs Bill will not make further progress until after the general election, a preliminary debate on the issues is useful now.

By the 12th century, the liability to pay for chancel repairs, the CRL, was already linked to the tithes being received by the rectors of certain parishes. At the Reformation, Henry VIII sold the right to the tithes to lay people who became liable for chancel repairs as “lay rectors”. Under the current law, the Tithe Act 1936, some lay rectors are still responsible for those repairs, but the tithes which originally enabled them to make a profit from the transaction were abolished. The unfortunate remnants were those who owned land that was not relieved of the burden in 1936, or their successors in title, who have been living under a sword of Damocles for the past 78 years. It is for discussion whether major institutions such as the schools of Eton and Winchester or the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge should continue to be required to pay long-standing non land-based CRL, but it is unreasonable for the owners of generally small plots of land in some 2,500 Anglican parishes in England—around half of them—to be potentially liable for the charge, which is without limit.

The Chancel Repairs Act 1932 reasserted the little-used right to enforce CRL, but transferred enforcement from the ecclesiastical courts to the county courts

15 Jan 2015 : Column GC274

after a lay rector was sentenced to prison by the High Court for contempt of the ecclesiastical court for non-payment of CRL. It was seldom recovered during the succeeding half-century, and in 1981 the General Synod accepted the recommendation of its standing committee, headed by the late Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Runcie, to phase it out. In moving to receive the committee’s report, Mr Clark of Southwark said:

“So I hope we shall support the suggestion that we phase out these liabilities, just as the Church of the 1830s agreed reluctantly to tithes being phased out”.

The synod approved the recommendation, but declined to use its legislative powers to implement it. Soon after, and with Church of England involvement, the Law Commission recommended the abolition of CRL by statute after a 10-year notice period, which would by now have long expired. That recommendation, made in a well argued paper, was not implemented, but if the synod itself agreed to ending CRL, thinking it unlikely that compensation would be forthcoming from the Government in 1982, it would be even less realistic in this age of austerity to expect the taxpayer to reimburse parishes for the loss of a doubtful future income. Given the furore over even the registration of CRL of properties in the roughly one in 20 parishes thought eligible to do so, parochial church councils have wisely refrained from enforcing their legal rights since 2003, so are they worth anything?

The state already contributes hugely to the upkeep of churches through gift aid worth some £84 million; the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme worth £42 million; the National Heritage Memorial Fund, currently funding repairs to Winchester Cathedral costing £14 million and of York Minster at £18.3 million; further grants to cathedrals recently announced worth £8 million; Heritage Lottery Fund grants to churches of £300 million in the 10 years to 2004, the lion’s share to the Church of England; and finally, £15 million recently announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer for repairs to church roofs and rainwater pipes under the Listed Places of Worship Roof Repair Fund.

In 2003, following a refusal by English Heritage to fund repairs to the church in Aston Cantlow in Warwickshire, the local PCC refused an offer of £25,000 from the lay rectors, Mr and Mrs Wallbank, and the parish took the case all the way to the House of Lords, with the active support of the Archbishops’ Council. There, the Wallbanks lost, and had to sell their farm to pay the CRL and costs approaching £500,000.

Parliament reacted with an order providing for registration of CRL at the Land Registry, to alert buyers to land being subject to the liability, since it was rarely shown on deeds, but lawyers doubt whether buyers of unregistered land are protected as envisaged when the order was enacted. The church warned PCCs that failure to register under the order might render trustees personally liable, so it is little wonder that an estimated 17,000 titles in a few hundred parishes have been registered. The vast majority are owned by ordinary householders, not major landowners.

Attempts were made to mitigate the harm to the mission of the church that registration caused. Titles were singled out where the return seemed most lucrative or there was likely to be opposition. PCCs often

15 Jan 2015 : Column GC275

announced that there was no intention of enforcing the liability. However, assurances are not legally binding and can be rescinded at the stroke of a pen. Even cancellation of the registration does not extinguish the right to enforcement.

PCCs were ill equipped for the laborious and exacting work of registration, often involving missing, archaic or inaccurate documents. Unsurprisingly, thousands of registrations have been made in error, compounding the distress caused to householders. This happened, for example, in Gorleston in Norfolk, where all of the nearly 1,000 registrations had to be withdrawn.

Given the hostility to registration reported by the media, churches would find it extraordinarily difficult and counterproductive in terms of their relationships with their parishes to sue for recovery of CRL. It appears not to have been attempted since Aston Cantlow. Registration is literally a medieval anomaly that undermines the value and saleability of land, creating lasting animosity towards the church, without achieving the objective of improving the funding of chancel repairs. It aims at taxing citizens who may not even be Christian or belong to any religion, for the purposes of one faith out of dozens in our multicultural society.

Even more harmful for many landowners than the exposure to unquantifiable and theoretically limitless CRL is the blight of registration, significantly reducing the sale price and even making the property unsaleable, particularly to buyers requiring mortgages. Since Aston Cantlow, purchasers of land have routinely taken out insurance against having to pay CRL, and this has proved very lucrative to the insurance industry, given that payouts have been minimal. But for property blighted by registration, premiums are astronomical or insurance is totally unavailable.

The only fair solution is abolition, modelled on the Law Commission’s recommendation, but until that can be effected, a much greater availability is needed of compounding—the ability to buy out the liability to CRL, at low cost and minimal professional fees. At Edingale in the diocese of Lichfield, the diocese agreed after long and stressful negotiations to accept just £45 from a householder to extinguish her liability to pay CRL of thousands of times that amount if it had been recoverable. Without compounding, any would-be purchaser would have had to take into account the probability that, ultimately, the church would be able to enforce the claim, as it did in Aston Cantlow.

Some dioceses already recommend compounding, but a uniform countrywide scheme would be the ideal, possibly by way of amendments to the Ecclesiastical Dilapidations Measure 1923. The initiatives of the Reverend Greg Yerbury, team rector of Penkridge, Staffs, might provide a useful model. In any case, based on the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread, it might be sensible for the church to devise a workable national scheme for compounding before we return to the Chancel Repairs Bill, abolishing CRL altogether after the general election.

Another Coalition after the General Election?

AYouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph shows 36% want a Coalition Government with LibDems in it, as compared with 27% wanting a Tory Government and 19% a Labour Government. (http://bit.ly/1KN4otv)

All the polls indicate the probability that no Party will have a majority in the Commons, So a strong LibDem vote will give a result that people would prefer to any otherm

Oxford University boxing team, 1946, with thanks to Chris Mack.

'Hit hard and often', Alf used to say

With Chris Mack, January 9. I was the first Oxford boxer to be trained by Alf Gallie in 1946, and he was the last 39 years later, in 1977.

"I'm not 'terminally ill' yet; this is defined as having less than 6 months to live, and I've still got an estimated 17!"

From the Observer:

Peers seek to limit law on assisted dying

Only those with three months or less to live could choose when to die

MARK LEFTLY 

Sunday 11 January 2015

A coalition of cross-party peers has moved to water down proposed legislation that would let the terminally ill request and receive help to end their lives.

The Assisted Dying Bill, proposed by former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, has divided the House of Lords and is scheduled for its latest debate on Friday. The Bill has made it further through Parliament than many politicians expected. The Private Member's Bill, not yet backed by any political parties, would let people request assistance in killing themselves if their terminal illness means they are likely to have no more than six months left to live. But critics are worried that this could be abused or have unintended consequences, such as sick people, fearing they are a burden on their families, requesting death even though they want to live.

Liberal Democrat Lord Carlile, Labour's Lord Darzi and crossbencher Lord Harries, have submitted an amendment which would see the six-month life expectancy limit reduced to three months. Lord Carlile opposes assisted dying "philosophically", as he does not believe anyone should be given the right to kill another person, but wanted to alter this aspect of the Bill in case assisted dying ever becomes law.

"The amendment is intended to tighten [issues surrounding] terminal illness," said Lord Carlile. "The nearer to death you are the less likely it [the prognosis] will be wrong."

Lord Avebury is terminally ill with a rare bone-marrow condition, myelofibrosis (Teri Pengilley)

Lord Falconer said this weekend that only granting people the right to assisted dying with three months or less to live would mean that in many cases it could be too late for them. They might already be in such pain that there would no longer be many benefits to choosing the timing of their own death.

"It's a big issue, whether six months is too short or too long," said Lord Falconer. "You've got to give people long enough to make their choices. I will be saying let's start with six months: opponents are trying to ambush the Bill. The time has come for change."

Even if the Bill gets through the Lords this week, there is insufficient time before the election to get it debated and passed in the House of Commons. Lord Falconer is hoping to "carry over" the Bill to the next Parliament, no matter which party or parties are in government, so that it does not have to be re-introduced from scratch.

As it is a Private Member's rather than a government Bill, this would be an unusual move, but Lord Falconer is contacting senior Whips in major parties to see if they will consent to the idea.

One peer who is pushing hard for the Bill to become law early in the next Parliament is Lord Avebury, the LibDem who is widely considered to have achieved the most stunning by-election victory of the 20th century when he took Orpington in 1962. Overturning a huge Conservative majority, the win signalled a revival of a Liberal Party that had been in the doldrums for decades.

The 86-year-old is terminally ill with a rare bone-marrow condition, myelofibrosis, and has calculated that he has about 19 months left to live.

"I honestly can't understand why anybody would oppose this Bill," said Lord Avebury. "It seems to me obvious that a person should have control over his own life and that people who are trying to stop it are being very selfish about it.

"It's not obviously something that affects them as they don't need it, so to make it impossible for anybody else to take advantage of a law of this kind seems peculiarly perverse."

Lord Avebury says the Bill's opponents should look at evidence from the US state of Oregon, where assisted dying has been legal since 1997. "No one has alleged that greedy relatives have tried to persuade someone to take advantage of the law so as to collect the money," he argued.

Supportive peers would like to see their parties make manifesto commitments to giving the Bill plenty of Parliamentary time for debate after the election. The Earl of Arran, a Conservative, said he would "love it" if this appeared in any party manifesto, while fellow Tory Baroness Wheatcroft argues that "the body of [public] opinion is moving more and more in favour" of assisted suicide.

The party leaders, who have left assisted suicide as a free vote and therefore a matter of conscience for their Parliamentarians, are also under pressure from their MPs to consider whether the Bill should become law. Norman Lamb, the Health minister who has been tipped as a future leader of the LibDems, said: "I hope that our party, if it is in government, helps to facilitate the debate going forward to the next Parliament."

Tory MP Sir Richard Ottaway said that "a serious assault" on getting assisted dying on to the statute books was needed.

My Dad's 1937 Bugatti

I well remember urging him to keep his foot hard down on the accelerator as we hurtled down the empty A2 on the way to Sandwich just after he got the car in 1937.. He got it up to 125 mph.