Except that, I would not see it as a battle of wills between the Bar and the Home Secretary It would be trite to express it in such narrow terms. The Government is tackling crime – which in aggregate terms is now declining – at the wrong end.It is appalling social conditions and the drugs culture more than anything else that create victims in our day and age, not the court system. That is why I want to see more investment in and support for the police to enable them to focus on conducting proper research and investigations.I accept that the public are concerned by crime. However, I don't accept that the public are crying out for all previous convictions and "bad behaviour" to go in as evidence.

I don't accept that the public are crying out for restrictions on jury trials. I do accept that the Home Office has had these issues on its "wish list" for a long time.I believe the public do want more police on the streets to protect them, arrest offenders and address the reality of crime, which mars life for many people. Indeed, as things stand with the Bill, the Government is neither tough on crime nor tough on the causes of crime, to borrow an expression. It is tough on people's basic rights.Tough on the right to a jury trial in a serious case Tough on the right to a fair trial And tough on the presumption of innocence. Tampering with the scales of justice will never solve the crime problem. It will make it easier to convict the wrong person of an offence..

The facts in the independent report into the case of two-year-old Ainlee Walker, whose parents starved and tortured her and were convicted of her manslaughter, have a sickening familiarity. The roll call of children who have died in similar circumstances includes Maria Colwell, Jasmine Beckford, Tyra Henry and Kimberley Carlile We are drowning in recommendations from various inquiries. Where do we go from here? The brutal killing of seven-year-old Maria Colwell by her stepfather, and the subsequent inquiry in 1973, prompted a commentator to write that it signalled "the beginning of modern political, public and professional interest in child abuse". That interest has been sustained by a series of high-profile inquiries, including, Cleveland, Orkney, "Pindown" in Staffordshire, Leicestershire, North Wales, and Victoria Climbi?which investigated various kinds of serious child abuse.The deaths of Maria Colwell, Jasmine Beckford, Tyra Henry, and Kimberley Carlile had a substantial impact on the public and the professions.

In each case a relative or carer had caused the child's death from neglect and physical abuse. The professionals involved, whether social workers, health workers, health visitors or the police, had failed to carry out any effective interventions. Warning signs were missed or ignored, inter-professional and inter-agency co-operation was found wanting, and, crucially, no proper evaluation of the available data was carried out. No one intervened and removed the children before the brutal ending of each child's life. The echoes in the case of Ainlee Walker are obvious.Something has gone seriously wrong. It would, of course, be too ambitious to hope to eradicate all the cases that lead to children's unlawful deaths. Should we perhaps retire from the field and say that such deaths are inevitable, so nothing further can be done? This would be a profoundly wrong and defeatist view.