The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

Excellent. An informative, interesting, entertaining, page-turner of a book by a barrister working in the field of criminal law in England & Wales. I am a solicitor, currently without a practising certificate, a notary public with a practising certificate, and a Spanish lawyer. Excluding the few years when I worked as a university lecturer, I have always had some Spanish ciminal cases. Sometimes more, sometimes fewer, but there has always been some crime. Usually it is youngish British men who go out to Spain on holiday and get into trouble with the police. When they are back in the UK they get some paperwork from Spain and they need a Spanish lawyer. The vast majority are GBH, some drugs, and some sex offences, but I have, so far, never had a homicide. That is an important point, because Spain has jury trials for homicides, and, interestingly, the country seems to me to be happy with the outcome of the experiment with what is actually an English-speaking world import. The core of Spain, Castille, loathes England and the United States of America, but it does appear to have accepted jury trials for homicide ... along with music by people like Taylor Swift and Chris Martin / Coldplay, not to mention earlier pop stars / groups like the Beatles and Stones. As The Secret Barrister points out, on the Continent criminal investigations are judge-led. I don't have a strong opinion on whether the Spanish system is better than the English system or vice-versa. What I do know is that a lawyer is never, ever, put in the same space as their client. I know, because I have been there. Not often, but often enough to know that there are always either a set of bars between the client and the lawyer when a private conversation needs to take place, or there is armed police present otherwise. There are no panic buttons. You are never, ever, allowed to be alone in the same room as the client with only a table separating you from your client. I have been in English prisons to see clients, and England could learn a thing or two from Spain in that regard. English clients who have been behind bars in both Spain and in England agree that the Spanish system is better. People are only really remanded in custody in Spain if the offence is a serious one and the defendant is a flight risk. It'll be interesting to see how Brexit pans out, because a stock phrase trotted out by defence lawyers is that the defendant should be allowed to go home to England because the European Arrest Warrant makes it easy to get them back if they don't turn up voluntarily for their trial. Interestingly, the vast majority of my clients do turn up voluntarily for their trial, sometimes even when advised not to, (because they want to get it over with). As I have written above, homicides get a jury trial. The other really serious offences that carry at least five years imprisonment are tried in front of a panel of three professional judges. I'm with The Secret Barrister on that one. Given a choice of being tried in Spain by a panel of three professional judges and having a jury trial in England, I'll take the jury trial in England any day. The less serious stuff, ie the less than five years imprisonment cases, are tried by a single professional judge, much as might happen in England & Wales when facing a District Judge (Magistrates' Court). Between being tried in the ordinary Magistrates' Court by a panel of three lay people or by the professional judge in Spain, I would vastly prefer being tried in Spain. Although I haven't got a practising certificate as a solicitor and I never go on the court record as acting for anyone in England, somehow I seem to have seen enough of what happens in the Magistrates Courts over the years to vastly prefer the Spanish system in every respect. Resources in Spain are extremely tight. Legal Aid is available in Spain, but it is a pittance. How does €210.00 grab you? It doesn't, but it is €210.00 only if your office is some distance from the court, otherwise the Spanish legal aid lawyer only gets paid €170.00 per case, pretty well from start to finish. The other €40.00 is for "travelling", like I say, if your office is some distance from the court. Judges are paid very little, Prosecutors are paid very little. Defence lawyers are paid very little. Cases can take years to get to trial simply because the courts are hopelessly underfunded. At the same time, the vast, vast, majority of cases end with a result as to conviction and acquittal, and as to sentencing, if convicted, that more or less square up with what I expect to see happen. I, personally, have seen very few real miscarriages of justice. Interestingly, the two times I have seen real miscarriages of justice were in sex offence cases. One where my client got sent down for six years for a rape we all knew he hadn't committed, and the other where the clients (plural) were definitely guilty, but somehow, inexplicably, get let off ... by a court that has a conviction rate of over 90%! Both cases bug me. The first one because it was "our mistakes", if that is the right term, that got him convicted. I always work with the Spanish lawyer in Spain. I don't even try to run the case on my own from England. In England and in Spain I had put together a mountain of expert evidence that should have been enough to get the lad acquitted. The Spanish lawyer in Spain suggested that the court be asked to appoint an expert to examine the client. I agreed. I wish I hadn't agreed to the suggestion, but I did. In both civil and criminal proceedings it is possible to ask the court to appoint an expert. In a civil case in the Ebro Valley of Northern Spain we had asked the court to find a valuer to value a campsite. The Spanish civil court had found a valuer, had given the instructions to the valuer, and had paid the valuer, (albeit from money extracted from us prior to instructing the valuer). The valuer did a report, which everybody accepted. England could learn from Spain in that respect. The single joint expert of the Civil Procedure Rules is, I think, a total travesty of justice that inevitably leaves one side short of an expert. In my limited experience of civil litigation in England what happens is that a costly fight breaks out over who is to be the single joint expert and on what the instructions are to be. Spain is right. If there is to be a single joint expert, it has to be an expert found by the court, instructed by the court, and paid for by the court. The parties can find the money to pay the expert, but other than that they have no input in who is the expert, what the precise instructions are, or what the pay is going to be. The parties can cross-examine the expert at the trial, but that is all they can do. The problem, as I found out, is that you have no control over who the expert is, what the expert's qualifications / areas of expertise really are, and you don't know until too late what the expert thinks. In this rape case, all the really highly qualified and experienced experts we had found, instructed, and paid came to the unanimous conclusion that the sexual activity had been consensual and that the complainant was lysing. The very young expert the court had found, instructed, and paid thought otherwise. It had been an unforced error on our part to have asked the court to appoint its own expert in this case. Fine in the Ebro Valley case, but not in this one. The good news for me, (though not at all for the lad who really did end up serving nearly the full six years in prison), is that just about every Spanish lawyer doing this kind of work has a similar horror story to tell about court appointed experts. Some, like the médico forense, (the forensic doctor), you'll have to put up with and hope they have the relevant technical expertise, because, believe me, the court will hang on their every word. In a major civil case I had in Spain, the forensic doctor, assured the court that our client was highly likely to have fully recovered from the road traffic accident. The forensic doctor admitted that he had not examined the victim, but it was his opinion that she was highly likely, (his words), that she had fully recovered. We brought a whole raft of experts, both English and Spanish, to prove otherwise, but between believing the forensic doctor appointed by the investigating judge, and our experts, found, instructed, and paid by us, the trial judge and the judges at the next level up in the appeal process, simply preferred to believe the forensic doctor. I agree that the forensic doctor was going to be more impartial, would have had no particular axe to grind either way, and was undoubtedly giving his honest opinion, but, for crying out loud, he hadn't actually ever examined the victim. The other rape case was strange. My clients all protested their innocence, but the evidence was, I thought, pretty overwhelming that something really bad had happened. The victim said that she had gone with one lad to have consensual sex with him. His friends later arrived at the apartment, and, upon seeing her naked on the bed, decided to have their turn, or at least that is how I saw it from what the complainant said and from what my own clients maybe inadvertently told me. She, quite understandably, tried to get away. A struggle ensued that left her blood on the doorpost of the exit door, all over the walls of the apartment, and, of course, on the beds. As far as I could see, there was only one strategy that made any sense. They could either do their best to stay here in England where just 1.5% of allegations get as far as a summons or charge, or they could go to Spain to stand trial in a court that has a conviction rate of over 90%. The girlfriend of one of the men decided to seek a second opinion. The Secret Barrister bemoans the fact that there are parasite solicitors in England & Wales. Well, they exist in Spain also. The new firm had a lawyer who managed to persuade the men to voluntarily stand trial in Spain, and she would be cheaper than I was. The men were acquitted, but only just I noticed, and then came the next bit. The new lawyer then put in a complaint about me to my regulatory body in Madrid, who told her to get lost, so she complained to her regulatory body in Alicante, who did investigate me, but decided to close the file, so she complained to the Solicitors Regulation Authority in England, who also investigated me, and closed the file. There is a massive problem that afflicts lawyers in both Spain and in England. If you provide clients with a cost free route for complaints, some are going make misuse of it. Client complaints to the Law Society / Solicitors Regulatory Authority and the Legal Services Ombudsman are a one-way bet. It costs nothing to make a complaint, and it might result in a refund of money paid, plus, maybe, even some money in compensation. Spain is slightly different. The complaint to the College of Lawyers might be for a disciplinary matter, but if a lawyer is going to be sued, it is normally about the obligatory attempt at mediation prior to commencing legal proceedings. The problem in Spain is that there is no court fee payable to commence legal proceedings. I have little doubt that the new lawyer who somehow got the acquittal in the teeth of all the evidence indicating guilt reached the agreement with the men that she would take a percentage of whatever money she could extract from me. There is the little matter of costs should I win the case in court, but someone who can persuade men to go voluntarily from a country where just 1.5% of men accused of rape actually get charged or summonsed to stand trial in a court with a conviction rate of over 90% will have had an answer for any concerns the men might have raised about costs in the event of losing against me in court. The Secret Barrister talks about the problem of getting good interpreters in the English criminal courts. Spain is no different. The quality of the interpreters in Spain is extremely variable. Some are good, but recently I had a case where the interpreter was a Moroccan. It could have been a Spanish speaking Moroccan. Spain has enclaves on the North African coast. All kinds of explanations are given by Spanish nationalists as to why the Spanish enclaves are completely different to Gibraltar, but there are plenty of people in Spain who understand that if Gibraltar is Spanish, then their enclaves in North Africa are Moroccan. Anyway, the French accent of this particular Moroccan said it all. He was a guy who will have spoken fluent French and Arabic, but in this case was going to have to translate between Spanish and English. It was truly pitiful to hear. Given that English is a compulsory foreign language in school I thought that just about any Spaniard would have been able to do a better job. We could exclude the binmen, but the university students on the way to their classes will have had Spanish as their first language, and will have had several years of studies of English as a foreign language when they were at school. Anyone, really, except him. In fact, given that the judge and the prosecutor were youngish we could have run the proceedings in English and skipped the pantomine of the questions being put in Spanish and have the French Moroccan translate it all into English, and then translate the Englishman's answers back into Spanish. In conclusion, for all its faults I vastly prefer the Spanish system. I am something of a generalist. People in England will be horrified to learn that one day I might be immersed in a probate and the next day taking a flight to Spain for a criminal trial, but the spread of work that I do is narrower than tends to be done by most Spanish lawyers on the Costas. It gets worse, because I know that some of my Spanish colleagues think it heroic to be doing stuff outside their normal line of work. As it used to be with solicitors in the days of my parents, people often tend to have their lawyer, who does it all. This brings me to a point not raised by The Secret Barrister, but which is absolutely crucial. Spain is very cheap compared to England when it comes to the provision of legal services. Notaries do the Wills, Probate & Conveyancing. Their fees are centrally set. There is much to be said for fixed fees set centrally. England used to have fixed fees set centrally for conveyancing. Maybe those scale fees were a tad generous, but Spain manages to set its fixed fees at a level that has notaries living OK, but not at all lavish by English City firm standards. Abogados / Spanish lawyers are in effect direct access barristers. They take the case from start to finish, doing the work of solicitor and barrister all-in-one, and it seems to me to work just fine. In fact, England has a problem that I simply haven't come across in Spain. In Spain just one lawyer tends to be taken on. In England a firm is taken on. My experience is that in Spain I am dealing with just one lawyer from start to finish, whilst in England I might have many people to deal with. Sometimes, in England, I have no idea who really is in charge of the file. I get emails and telephone calls from a number of solicitors, barristers, paralegals, trainees. Somewhere along the line that is expensive. Each person has to get a grip on the facts, and what is on the file changes all the time. Yes, two brains are better than one, and, yes, maybe the advocacy skills of a barrister often might be better than those of a solicitor, but in an age where solicitors are no longer sitting in distant offices doing Wills, Probate & Conveyancing with only the occasional foray into civil and criminal litigation, but now doing only crime, or only personal injury, or only divorce, or only whatever very narrow field, I think that it is time to consider whether having, firstly, so many people at a solicitors' firm able to charge for working on a single file should be stopped, and, secondly, if both solicitors and barristers shouldn't really be taking cases from start to finish instead of having this double manning in the civil courts generally and in the Crown Court in particular that must be increasing the cost for someone somewhere somehow when Spain and many another country seems to manage just fine with the one person representing the client. Still, like I said at the beginning, The Secret Barrister is excellent. Well worth buying and reading.

The book is a rare gem emanating from a unique set of qualities that characterize its young author: endowed with a first class intellect combined with an impressive charisma in writing. The book is admirably researched and documented, witty and caustic in its comments, serving both as a primer to criminal justice, describing its structure and historical evolution, but also and importantly, detailing candidly its failings, describing a system on the verge of collapse, primarily due to desperately inadequate funding by the state. The basics of criminal justice as practiced in England and Wales is an adversarial battle - adversarial ism being a loose term for a model pitting the state against the accused in a lawyer-driven skirmish for victory played out before an impartial body of assessors - comprising a courtroom, judge, jury, accused, complainant, witnesses, questions and speeches in some sort of configuration. Despite the noble principles underpinning the system, despite its international prestige, its intellectual craftsmanship and the very real blood, sweat and tears spilt in its ponderous cultivation, the young author exposed to its grim reality, witnessed first hand that the criminal justice system is close to the breaking point. Serious criminal cases collapse on a daily basis because of eminently avoidable failings by underfunded and understaffed police and prosecution services. The accused and the alleged victim can wait years for trial, told their cases are 'adjourned for lack of court time' for a second, third or fourth time. The wrongly accused wait until the day of trial, or perhaps for eternity, for the state to disclose material that fatally undermines the prosecution case. Defendants can find themselves represented by exhausted lawyers able to devote a fraction of the required time to their case, due to the need to stack cheap cases high to absorb government cuts. Some defendants are excluded from publicly funded representation altogether, faced to secure together savings or loans to meet legal aid 'contributions' or private legal fees, failing which they represent themselves in proceedings in which the endgame is a prison sentence. The bottom line is that victims of crime are denied justice, and people who are not guilty find themselves in prison. Identifying a major cause is not difficult. Between 2010 and 2016, spending on the criminal justice system as a whole fell by 26 per cent, with a further 15 per cent to take effect by 2020. The courts, Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunal Service, have borne a 35 per cent in real terms, and more is to come. By 2020, there will have been a further 40 per cent in the court staffing budget. The author sadly concludes that a working criminal justice system, properly resourced by dedicated professionals each performing their invaluable civic function, for the prosecution and the defence, serves to protect the innocent, convict the guilty, protect the public and protect the integrity and humanity of our society. This should be a societal baseline. Not a luxury.

Fascinating. The law is an ass. This book proves how the law is bent, twisted and corrupt. Those with deep pockets will win against that which is right. Emotions are ignored, facts and logic are supreme. This book shows what is fact and what can be twisted to show lies can be misconstrued as convenient to win a case overriding justice leaving the innocent bereft of the real truth.

I gave this 5 stars for the quality of the book, the writing, the research and the obvious passion the author has for a working system. The content of the book - the exposure of the underfunded and broken system is downright terrifying. I am not remotely surprised the author has decided to hide his / her identity. Most of us happily go through life assuming the Police only arrest those who did it. Or at least only charge those who did it. We have little sympathy for those arrested and even less for those charged. We read the newspapers, particularly the higher selling ones, and become enraged that someone-or-other has been given Legal Aid money. We happily forget the vital mantra "Innocent until proven guilty" and also forget that at the point where legal aid was given the person had not been proven guilty, indeed may not have even had their first day in court. We simply move on with a "will never happen to me" attitude. What I didn't know was how wrong my misconceptions were. All of these assumptions fall apart when even a tiny bit of research is done. When an enormous amount of research has been completed, such as this book, and that research is them combined with the author's personal expertise those assumptions are shown to go beyond merely falling apart: the fallen apart pieces are crushed, steamrollered, diced, and then burnt to a crisp. When a person is convicted I want that person to have been convicted for the right reasons. I want the evidence to have been fully tested. I want to be able to sleep at night because as a citizen of this country every person locked up by the Courts has been locked up in my name, and in yours. I certainly do not want any hint that a person has been sent to prison for life due to a cut down and badly managed process being followed "on a budget." If a stone has been left unturned then how can I have confidence in either the conviction or the acquittal? That seems to be part of the narrative that is often missed - if you, me, anyone, could think they would not be confident in a decision of the court because of a lack of money or some other failure in running the system, then that damages the confidence in BOTH guilty and not guilty verdicts. Not just 1 side. Any of us could be falsely accused of a crime and any one of us could suffer the loss of our liberty due to budget cuts! - Not because of lying witnesses, or a personal grudge, or even bent coppers and all the other usual things we might fear - but actually because the system isn't funded or run well enough to make sure the innocent are properly identified as well as the guilty. I find this appalling. Justice cannot be done half-hearted way! To add insult to injury I discovered that if an accused person cannot get legal aid and has to spend their own money to defend themselves then even if they are cleared of all charges and found Not Guilty, the government does NOT have to pay back all the legal fees they spent. Even if they had to sell their house! They win and can still end up homeless and bankrupt! I have often thought that the national curriculum should have Civics and basic Law as compulsory subjects along side maths and English and the usual common subjects. This book confirms my view - how on earth can the system be fixed if the vast majority of us have no idea how it is supposed to work, let alone that the biggest failing seems to be from government itself. All we see is in the newspapers are stories of failed or abandoned prosecutions (maybe they didn't fail - maybe they just didn't do it), and stories of not guilty verdicts (maybe they did do it?) moaning about the "waste" of our public money. Identifying the right people to send to prison by it's very nature means excluding the wrong people, the ones who didn't do it. Can't spend money on only half the process because there is no "half the process" - it is all 1 process to make sure the final decision was right. Seemingly for decades the various governments have failed to provide proper funding and failed to have a system that works properly. There is no education as to what a working system *should* be - presumably because we would all see that the current system is so poor. Why? I suppose there's just no votes in it.

First thing you will notice about this book - or rather the author - is that she very much falls into the the 'soft left' of the political spectrum. That's not a good or a bad thing because of course the UK is a democracy and all sides of the argument should be represented regardless of personal feelings or leanings. The problem with it in this kind of book, is that it colours the 'evidence' all the way through the book. And after a while you get kind of tired of getting the same old argument that they don't have enough money. No one does because there isn't a bottomless pit. We all know that. The other thing is that irritates me about this view is that clearly this author has a real issue with the likes of magistrates and the public being involved in general with the law. She very much comes across as one who thinks that the law should be reserved for 'professionals,' not the oiks such as ourselves. This is very much a view that I disagree with because the law affects us all and we should all have a say in it. Even if it does not necessarily coincide with the politically correct one that is now in vogue. The author makes the point that magistrates for instance are far more likely to make a guilty verdict than a 'real' court and thus this clearly demonstrates that magistrates are all horrible middle England monsters. My interpretation, the last bit. She does not of course consider that the low level crime or cases presented to a magistrate because of their type, may well mean more of the people in front of them are actually ner'do'wells. No. The simply consideration is that crown courts are correct because less people get banged up whilst magistrates courts are wrong because more people are found guilty. Its that kind of sweeping presumption that eventually starts to get on one's nerves. The other one being lack of money. And frankly not many people are going to shed a tear at our lawyers getting less wedge - which is partially down to cuts which one cannot argue is not a good thing, but also because so many people have taken up law because it was seen as a great job that the supply and demand reality has hit. Not that that point is conceded. Gripes about gripes aside there is some interesting stuff in this and on balance I enjoyed it for the little nuggets that are presented. Did you know for instance that English judges do not use the wooden gavel? We all think we do, but that's because we've all seen so many American court room drama's and films. So, a book that its slightly irritating but interesting nevertheless.

I noted before opening the first page of this book that a crowdfunding effort has been successful in raising enough funds to ensure that every MP in the country is provided with a copy, along with a letter exhorting them to read it. That it itself spoke volumes. In preparation, I read a few reviews and words like 'hilarious', 'social satire' and 'terrifyingly funny' were bandied about, which added a little wariness to my anticipation. However - once I turned the first page, I found it hard to put it down. The book is written with a kind of humour that leads the reader to turn page after page, along with a searing honesty that does likewise. The case histories he has chosen are heartrending in their detail, but he is utterly ruthless in the way he shoots down in flames the idea that the system is designed to do anything but achieve 'results' and cost the taxpayer as little as possible in financial terms. That said, his masterly dissection and analysis of our system and any alternatives, leads to the sobering conclusion that we must make the best of a bad job and reform what we have rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater in a futile attempt to start afresh. His attention to detail in describing the system by which we are all affected - for the criminal law affects us all in some way - is exemplary. He is up-to-date enough to have included a comment on Liam Allen's case and others like it. His fury at how the system has evolved and the extent to which short-sighted government has 'screwed over' (my phrase, not his), victims on all sides of the legal procedure is almost palpable, as is his concern and feeling for the poor souls caught up, often unwittingly in its grip. It had me laughing out loud on occasions, pointing out to my husband some witty turn of phrase or description. It was worth reading for those alone. On other occasions I sat silently with tears flowing, such was the Secret Barrister's ability to make the words on the page, vibrant and real, his ability to bring to life the most poignant and heartfelt moments. One reviewer claims that he has done for lawyers what James Herriott did for vets. I beg to disagree. To describe this book in that way demeans it if only because James Herriott's writings were never intended to be more than a light-hearted memoir. This topic is far too serious and the Secret Barrister knows it. We know it too. There are few books I have read that I feel warrant a second reading. Tears apart, this is one of them. Please read it - or at the very least contact your MP and ask them to read it when their copy lands on their desk. It should be required reading for them such is its powerful message.

Other than a box set of Law & Order: SVU DVDs and a neurotic habit of Googling old University friends who are richer and more successful than I am, I really didn't have much interest in the law. I mean, I knew that all barristers were super-rich and super-nasty. I knew that they took great pleasure in destroying people on the stand while the judge wore a long wig and banged a gavel. I knew that they worked in plush offices, collected massive salaries and spent most of their time quaffing champagne and having it off with their secretaries. And I knew (because I went to University with some of them) that they had no idea about how normal people live, and no compassion for those whose lives spiral out of control. Turns out I didn't know as much as I thought. This book presents as a damning indictment of the crumbling, underfunded and ridiculously complicated Criminal Justice System; and so it is. But - perhaps unintentionally - it's also a revealing portrait of somebody who actually understands people who live chaotic and dysfunctional lives, and the way they are often ground down by society and life in general. At almost every turn, the SB's sadness, anger and sometimes guilt bleed through the narrative and give the book a humanity which (let's face it) we don't tend to attribute to lawyers. That's not to say that this is some kind of misery memoir. Far from it. There are moments of genuine pathos, and whole sections which really made me wince - the chapter on rape does not make for comfortable reading at all - but this is also a hugely entertaining read, with plenty of moments which will make you laugh out loud. The SB has a very humorous, if slightly Stephen-Fry-ish, turn of phrase (a recent tweet deliciously described somebody as "a thundering halfwit"); but any pomposity is quickly punctured by those flashes of understanding and compassion. The vignette of the author in a dilapidated courtroom loo crying tears of impotent rage is one that will haunt me for a long time, and continue to challenge some of my own prejudices. The book is, of course, also a call to action. Its point is well made - that while we continue to be scandalised by failures in health or education, funding cuts and inefficiencies in the CJS largely go unreported by the media and unnoticed by the general public. Perhaps the only weakness in the book's argument is a belief that if we the public knew what was happening, it might somehow get sorted out. Sadly, the parallels with health and education (and social services, and the benefits system, etc., etc., etc.) might suggest that this is somewhat naive. But, ultimately, that naivety is the book's strength. Despite all the frustrations, despite the low pay and long hours, despite (presumably) knowing in his/her heart of hearts that the system will probably always be broken, the SB is clearly still passionate about the law, the CJS and the vulnerable people that society too often throws on the scrapheap. Ironically, it took an anonymous author with a scribbled-out face to show us that maybe some barristers are human after all.

A reasonable description of the justice system in England but a little dull and I felt the examples have a bad reflection on the victims of sexual assault

Being a practicing lawyer from India, I am hoping this book will give me good insight of the English courts and the chambers.

Excellent writing, an ability to find humor in some unhumorous contexts, and detailed exposition of the current state of the English criminal courts and how they are failing in so many ways. As an American, it was instructive to read all this, both for details of how English courts work and how they are supposed to work but don't actually work. There were plenty of points at which I would have liked to say It can't happen here, but I couldn't sincerely say it wouldn't happen here. The author makes clear what the solutions are--often involving more funding and more staffing--but necessary if the system is to work the way it should work. Kudos to Secret Barrister.

Comprei na Black Friday por um preço difícil de acreditar de tão barato!! Livro ótimo.

An excellent read. Somewhat depressing at times when you realise how inadequate and messed-up the UK legal system is. A must-read.

I am not a lawyer but saw this book discussed on twitter. Intrigued, I decided to read it and so glad I did. There are some deeply worrying matters discussed which I am sure would be of great surprise and concern if they were known to the population in England.