The Wrong Answer

I see the Chief Constable of Cheshire Police is calling for the legal age for buying alcohol to be raised to 21. Apparently he believes that this will reduce the problem of teenage drunkenness. Which suggests that it must be a long time since he last walked a beat.
The problem is not the minimum age at which people are allowed to BUY alcohol. It's the minimum age at which too many retailers are prepared to SELL alcohol, which is already way below the present legal age of 18. Whenever local trading standards departments decide to take out underage volunteers to make test purchases, a crop of prosecutions follows. The trouble is they don't do it very frequently, so most of the time these sales can be made with impunity.
If we are serious about restricting the availability of alcohol for young people, we need much heavier sanctions against those who sell it. That used to be achieved by the threat of losing your licence and hence your livelihood, which doesn't seem to be the case these days where off-sales are concerned.

Where we're coming from

I regularly drop in on "The Magistrate's Blog" (see link below; the lawwestofealingbroadway), because I find what Bystander has to say is usually thought-provoking. Comment-provoking, too. Some of the comments he attracts either seem to expect the judiciary to have a society-focused agenda or complain that we are an arm of the nanny state, interfering unjustifiably in peoples' private lives.

It might help to see what we commit to on appointment. Every magistrate has to swear the Judicial Oath - so does very judge, but with appropriately amended wording. The oath is as follows:

I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth the Second in the office of Justice of the Peace and I will do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of the Realm without fear or favour, affection or ill-will.

In other words:

We serve the Crown, not the government of the day.
We apply the law as it is enacted, not as we wish it were.
We will do so impartially, striving always to recognise and set aside our prejudices and preconceptions.

This is an absolute obligation. If we encounter a piece of legislation which we strongly oppose, we have only one remedy; resign from the bench. Many people did resign at the introduction of the poll tax; a small number have left as a result of the recently introduced victim surcharge.

All too familiar

I'm reading a report about Emma (not her real name) and it makes depressing reading. It details a chaotic lifestyle, characterised by misuse of alcohol, heroin and cocaine. It isn't a probation report as you might imagine, and Emma isn't an offender. She's 11 months old and she's a victim. Her mother 'Dawn' is the addict and the report has been prepared by the local Social Services Dept. Next week, we will have to decide whether to grant the local authority a care order in respect of Emma, so that they can assume parental responsibility, something which neither mother nor her violent, drug-dependent partner want, but which their own lack of care of Emma does nothing to ward off. The report talks of Dawn's failure to prioritise Emma's needs over her own, or to engage effectively with social services to address her drug and alcohol problems and her parenting skills. In just the same way that she failed to engage with the maternity services during her pregnancy, whilst assuring them that she was not using. Even so, very shortly after her birth Emma began to show clear symptoms of withdrawal and had to be cared for on the special baby unit whilst being detoxed.

Dawn's two older children by a former partner have also been through the Family Court and are now in the longterm foster care of their maternal grandmother. The question remains unanswered at this stage as to whether grandma will be prepared and able to take Emma into her care as well. And then there will be the question of the next child; Dawn is already pregnant again.

When people think of drugs and the courts, they think in terms of the criminal courts, and indeed a high proportion of the cases we see involve abuse of drugs and the criminality needed to fund the habit. But, to protect the identity of the children concerned, the public are not admitted to the Family Court, and so this whole other area of drug impact goes largely unnoticed and unreported. The cost to the community in terms of the resources that have to be provided to rescue and protect children like Emma may not be on the same scale as the cost of drug-related crime, but it still involves enormous sums of money which is not then available for care of the elderly, the mentally ill and those with disability needs.