UK bans Japanese swords.

[A. G. Maisey]

Spiral, there is no doubt that as long as laws exist they will be thoughtlessly enforced, carelessly enforced, and enforced in a discriminatory manner. This has ever been so, and I do not believe that things will change in the future.

The police have a job to do, and mostly they do it in accordance with their instructions. If there is any doubt, any possibility of an infringement, they enforce.

However, when the matter comes before the court it is an entirely different ballgame. At that point the person who has been charged has the opportunity to escape conviction, and to establish a precedent that can influence all further cases of a similar nature.

There is a problem, and that is the cost of mounting an effective defense, but that is an entirely different matter to having the opportunity to actually mount the defense.

The UK is not unique in this matter of thoughtless law enforcement. It exists in Australia, and I am sure it exists in all other countries. The important thing is this:- in the system under which you I and I live, we have the opportunity to change the way in which a law is interpreted. We can do this by employing a "champion", ie, a damned good barrister and his "squire", a damned good solicitor. We send these people in to fight our fight for us, and if we have chosen well, and there are chinks in the armour of the law, our champion will drive the lance of his argument right through those chinks.

In effect, our legal system is like a tournament where two knights go to battle, and a judge and jury decides who wins.

Select the right barrister for the fight, and you have a very, very good chance of winning.

Because we have the opportunity to use this system, if some matter of importance becomes subject to a law that can adversely affect us, we are probably well advised to test that law under circumstances that are favourable to us, at the earliest possible opportunity.

If we wait until our antagonists, the people who have fostered this law and nursed it into being, test the law, you can bet on it that the first case, or couple of cases will result in wins for our antagonists, the precedent will be established, and it will become much more difficult in the future to do anything about getting reasonable interpretations of the law.