Returning to RIPA

I see from the Daily Telegraph (22 May 2008) that Northampton Borough Council has “admitted using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act five times to catch dog owners who let their pets foul on grass.” The powers were also used in two cases of noise nuisance and two of anti-social behaviour (as well, admittedly, as ten fraud cases).

I looked at RIPA in some detail a little while ago. What puzzles me a little here is (if the report is accurate) into which of the Section 29(3) grounds anti-social behaviour could fall. Anti-social behaviour is not as such a crime to my knowledge in England and Wales. Unless public safety or public health can be invoked, one has to wonder whether the council was acting within its powers.

Whit Sunday

Acts 2:1
“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.”

When the Church’s history begins, we find the people of God gathered in a single location. This fact gives little encouragement to those who think that belief is an essentially private matter: Christianity is a corporate matter and has been from its first day. Not only were they gathered in one place: they were of one mind. It is perhaps not a very adventurous interpretation of this verse to suggest that the unity of purpose among God’s people was a precondition for the coming of the Holy Spirit. If part of the message of Pentecost is that worship is a corporate public matter, the third of the Church’s major festivals is a holiday worthy of public celebration.

Family seats

So Ms Tamsin Dunwoody, a member of the Welsh Assembly from 2003 to 2007, is to contest the Crewe and Nantwich constituency formerly represented by her mother. One may well think that the writ for this by-election was moved with unseemly haste: Mr Hoon the Labour chief whip (both he and his opposite number Mr McLoughlin have Derbyshire connections) might have waited for Ms Dunwoody to be buried.

I am reminded of a by-election in 1944 in Mr McLoughlin’s constituency of West Derbyshire. The seat had been held almost without interruption by a member of the Cavendish family since 1885. When the marriage of Major Henry Hunloke and Lady Cavendish-Bentinck ran into difficulties, he was obliged to resign the seat, although with the excuse of Army service in the Middle East. Lord Hartington was adopted as the Conservative candidate at a selection meeting chaired by his father, the Duke of Devonshire, while Lord Hartington, on leave from the army, was waiting outside the room.

He was to lose the by-election, in spite of the wartime electoral truce between the major parties, to an independent Labour candidate, Charles Frederick White, whose father of the same name had also previously been elected to the same seat.

The Crewe and Nantwich by-election will be closely watched as by-elections usually are: I suspect for what it’s worth that the family connection may not be very helpful to Ms Dunwoody on this occasion.