The ITV police drama Broadchurch last week dealt a damaging blow to British justice

The ITV police drama Broadchurch last week dealt a damaging blow to British justice. This expensively made, star-infested type of programme has a huge impact on those who watch it.

Beloved and respected actors in tense, enthralling stories influence viewers far more than any amount of news or documentary film. As the author Philip Pullman has rightly said, ‘Once upon a time’ is a far more effective way of getting into someone’s mind than ‘Thou shalt not’.

So I was appalled by a scene in the first episode of the new series – a high-impact moment just before the first commercial break.

The actors involved were David Tennant, a TV superstar since he played Doctor Who, Olivia Colman, a key character in the successful The Night Manager, and Julie Hesmondhalgh, for 15 years a mainstay of Coronation Street, as the transsexual Hayley Cropper.

People want to like these celebrities, and they want to be liked by them. Police often imitate what fictional coppers do on TV

This platoon of the glamorous, the earnest and the politically correct joined together to portray the investigation of a rape.

At least there was no attempt to pretend that the police still treat those who report rapes with dismissive callousness, something that stopped about 20 years ago.

On the contrary, Ms Hesmondhalgh’s character was caressed with endless consideration.

Mind you, this wasn’t one of those he-said she-said rapes where the complainant says there was no consent and the alleged rapist says there was consent.

This was a full-scale violent attack, with Ms Hesmondhalgh’s character covered in blood, bruises, scratches and cuts, and suffering from concussion.

So why on earth would a battered, blood-encrusted person, after being taken deadly seriously for hours, swabbed for DNA and the rest, suddenly ask the kindly, helpful, diligent police team: ‘Do you believe me?’

This platoon of the glamorous, the earnest and the politically correct joined together to portray the investigation of a rape

As far as I can see it was only so that David Tennant could say ‘Yes’. Later in the same programme, Olivia Colman’s character snapped at a colleague: ‘We always start from a position of believing the victim.’

These are words a police officer should never say. The police are servants of justice, not judges, let alone a substitute for independent juries. If they decide in advance that an allegation is true, they will not investigate the case properly because their minds are shut.

It was this misguided attitude that led to multiple police mess-ups, the worst of them being the ludicrous, inexcusable public persecution of Field Marshal Lord Bramall and the disgraceful treatment of the late Leon Brittan and his widow.

This has been the subject of a huge debate. It led to the excoriation of the police in a report by the distinguished Judge Sir Richard Henriques.

He says no judge would ever allow an alleged victim to be referred to in court as a plain ‘victim’ when there has been no conviction.

The police should do the same. But, partly because they have recently got much too big for their boots, and started to think they are judge, jury and executioner, the police don’t want to. They will have been pleased by this scene.

Olivia Colman’s character snapped at a colleague: ‘We always start from a position of believing the victim’

You may not care about this. But unless it is put right, every one of us, no matter how respected and apparently secure, is at the mercy of a false accusation and the ruin that can follow – think of the Dorset Fire Chief David Bryant, who spent three years in prison on the basis of an accusation of sexual assault. But the complainant was later found to be a fantasist with a history of mental illness.

Mr Bryant’s wife Lynn, who worked so hard to clear his name, has since died, probably thanks to the terrible strain of fighting a prejudiced justice system.

I have no doubt that the police ‘believed’ this horrible liar, and referred to him as a ‘victim’. Perhaps if they hadn’t, it might have crossed their minds to do the detecting that they are hired and paid to do, and that poor, devoted Lynn Bryant wore herself out doing.

All of us – and that includes TV scriptwriters and actors – have a duty to help put an end to this sort of injustice. Broadchurch has done a great deal of harm by endorsing police arrogance and folly.

Ms Liz Truss, now in charge of our drug-filled prisons, was once an ultra-keen campaigner for the legalisation of marijuana

They've freed the weed at last, Liz. Happy now?

Our ‘Justice Secretary’, Ms Liz Truss, now in charge of our drug-filled prisons, was once an ultra-keen campaigner for the legalisation of marijuana.

This was in the days when she was openly a Liberal Democrat, instead of the nominal Tory she is now.

One of her former comrades recalled in a BBC Radio 4 profile that Ms Truss, pictured left, wanted to cover a whole Lib Dem stall with posters saying Free The Weed! She had to be persuaded to take some down.

He said she was ‘very keen that we should be fighting the cause’. I asked her office about this and (after ignoring me for a bit, and being pestered) they eventually responded by saying: ‘The Secretary of State does not believe cannabis should be legalised.’

Well, of course she doesn’t. Why should she? Her student goal is being achieved by another route.

Britain, as a member of the UN Security Council, cannot legalise marijuana without breaking its treaty obligations. But what it can do, as pro-drug campaigners worked out long ago, is just not enforce the law.

And our elite have done just that. Several police forces now openly state that they don’t bother with cannabis possession any more.

The official maximum penalty for possessing marijuana is five years in jail. But the standard response to this crime, recommended by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, is the ‘cannabis warning’, an unrecorded nothing.

Britain, as a member of the UN Security Council, cannot legalise marijuana without breaking its treaty obligations. But what it can do, as pro-drug campaigners worked out long ago, is just not enforce the law

Even that is falling into disuse. A parliamentary answer found ‘cannabis warnings’ dropped from 95,000 in 2009 to 72,172 in 2012 to 35,343 last year. This isn’t because there’s less of it about. It’s because the ‘warning’ was just the latest stage in a long surrender.

Meanwhile, there is more evidence each day of a correlation between this drug and mental illness. Ms Truss’s anarchic prisons are full of people whose minds have been wrecked by drugs. But don’t expect a government crammed with people like her to do anything about it.

The Weed is Free in all but name.

Grammars come out top for fair education

The tiny rump of besieged grammar schools in England are incessantly accused of reinforcing privilege, though it’s not their fault.

But when two major surveys show that comprehensives, by their nature, really do reinforce privilege, silence falls over the media and politics.

I wonder why.

The Sutton Trust reported last week that more than 85 per cent of the best-performing comprehensives don’t take their fair share of poor pupils.

About half of this gap is down to schools having catchment areas that just don’t have many poor people living in them. And a typical house in the catchment area for a good comprehensive costs £45,700 above average in that local authority area.

Meanwhile, a separate report from Teach First also showed that children from the richest homes dominate the top state schools.

To be exact, 43 per cent of pupils at ‘outstanding’ secondaries are from the wealthiest 20 per cent of families.

Yet the Left complain that academic selection is ruthless. Actually, there are plenty of second chances in a school system based on merit. But when wealth is the test, immovable bars of gold separate the lucky from the unlucky, for ever.

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