Tessa Mayes

Monday

1 Jun 2015
Tessa Mayes

One human right should not be able to extinguish another human right

The Human Rights Act (1998) has a big fan base. In legal, political and celebrity circles there is much enthusiasm for it. Yet the law is not giving us the rights and freedoms we need, because each right can be played off against another. We’ve been losing our human rights in the name of human rights. In the mid-nineties I began chronicling and campaigning for a right to free speech while challenging the Human Rights Act. I couldn’t understand why Britain, a country renowned for its tolerance, was clamping down on the right to free speech (Article 10) including what newspapers published, in the name of a right to privacy (Article 8).  The reason was said to be the rise of stories concerning the private lives of public figures.

One human right should not be able to extinguish another human right

Saturday

3 Nov 2007
Tessa Mayes

Has the smoking ban reduced heart attacks?

It’s four months since the smoking ban was imposed in England, and most smokers I’ve met in that time seem to be quietly adapting. A friend wants to buy Suck UK’s unisex Smoking Mittens. If you have not come across them before, they are gloves that have a metal hole in them for your cigarette so you can keep warm when smoking outside in the winter. They cost £15 and, as my friend says cheerfully, ‘You never know, if it gets really cold, Silk Cut may sponsor white and purple balaclavas with silver puff holes.’But if many smokers seem to be adapting to the ban, there is still plenty of strong opposition. Groups like Forest continue to campaign for the right to smoke. In August a crowd of people including pub entertainers marched through Glastonbury in protest against the ban.

Has the smoking ban reduced heart attacks?

Saturday

23 Jun 2007

Saturday

3 Mar 2007
Tessa Mayes

Big Brother is coming

Two weeks ago, Tony Blair told the road-toll petitioners by email that his government was not trying to impose ‘Big Brother surveillance’. That was accurate, if disingenuous. The real Big Brother doesn’t announce himself. He comes creeping up on you, by stages, until you realise that you are being snooped on, scrutinised and spied upon in all sorts of ways that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago.Take the powers of the taxman. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) — the new authority established by the merger of HM Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue in 2005 — is becoming astonishingly intrusive in its investigation of so-called ‘dual purpose’ expenses to discourage taxpayers from claiming for items that could, conceivably, be put to private use (that is, almost everything).

Saturday

3 Feb 2007
Tessa Mayes

Sex offenders in schools: old news

Scandals have anniversaries, too, and another has just passed. In January 2006, it emerged that the Education Department (DfES) had authorised Paul Reeve — a man who had a police caution for viewing child pornography and was on the Sex Offenders Register — to be employed as a PE teacher in a school in Norwich. In May 2005, civil servants advised Kim Howells, an education minister at the time, that the man should be given only a warning, was not a risk to children, had not been convicted of an offence and that no child had been harmed. Reeve had not been put on what is still called ‘List 99’, the department’s blacklist, even though he was on the Sex Offenders Register. More cases were quickly uncovered. At the heart of the scandal was the government’s astonishing failure to act quickly and with political will upon the recommendations of Sir Michael Bichard.

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