Do you support the Caliphate?

A FEW days ago I wrote that dwarf James Lusted was a familiar site in Cardiff, which suggests someone may be planning to build on him. He is, of course, a familiar sight.

LUSTED was in the news when a waitress, assuming he was a child, offered him a colouring book. Some might have sued for trauma but Lusted thought it was hilarious. Contrast his robust view of life with that of an American man in Delaware who awoke from surgery in a hospital recently to find he was wearing an unknown woman's pink knickers. He has filed a lawsuit for "severe emotional distress and mental anguish." Oh, give him a colouring book, someone.

I AM about to plunge entirely out of my depth with a story concerning the F-word. Football. The Lusted story reminds a reader of the Wolverhampton Wanderers legend, Johnny Hancocks (1919-94) who stood only 5ft 4ins and wore tiny size-three boots. The story goes that Hancocks ordered a new pair of boots by mail-order. The supplier, assuming they were for a child, enclosed a jigsaw puzzle. Did it ever happen? It has the ring of an urban myth and I can't find any evidence, but who knows?

FOREIGN Secretary Philip Hammond says British jihadis fighting for the Islamic State could be charged with high treason on their return. High treason has been a crime since 1351, a time when the English subject was regarded pretty much as the property of the monarch. If the subject did not render the monarch absolute loyalty, he could expect to be hung, drawn and quartered. But this concept of loyalty to the state has not been tested in court for a long time. How would it stand up in an age of human rights and individual freedom?

THE jihadi's legal-aid lawyer might well point out that over the past 50 years successive British governments have preached multiculturalism, recognising and respecting the customs, languages, traditions and even the legal systems of immigrant communities. This process has reached the point where some British inner-city neighbourhoods are, in effect, outposts of Pakistan, Kashmir, Somalia or Iraq. How can the State reasonably expect the same degree of loyalty from the citizens of such neighbourhoods as it expected from a 14th century peasant? Indeed, m'lud, is the Treason Act itself not an affront to human rights? Should a citizen of today's multicultural United Kingdom not be free to choose which state deserves his loyalty?

INEVITABLY, a treason trial would open the debate that politicians have been desperate to stifle. How many young male British Muslims agree with the statement: "I support the creation of the Islamic Caliphate?" More than we would like to think, I bet.

HOW democracy works. Without a landmark court case, without even a new debate in the Commons, it is simply announced by the Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders that the guidelines on assisted suicide are being amended. She calls it "clarification" but one euthanasia campaigner hails "a great step forward." Inch by inch the goalposts are being shifted. Today the law takes account of cases where "the victim had reached a voluntary, clear, settled and informed decision to commit suicide." How long before that stern criterion is amended to "Well, she was looking a bit peaky"?

MY campaign to rename the grey wagtail goes on (I'm still waiting for a tweet from the RSPB) and a reader writes suggesting another bird needs a more accurate moniker. He complains that the black-bellied whistling duck he saw in Costa Rica did not have a black belly and couldn't whistle for toffee.