Freedom: I applaud the Metropolitan Police chief, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, for his plan to pull back from a nasty, prejudiced and unBritish point of view

This is the way we lose our freedom, through the semi-secret decisions of boot-faced bureaucrats and the slavish obedience of over-zealous policemen.

Almost nobody cares about the presumption of innocence until it affects them personally, but it is actually far more important to British liberty than the freedom to vote, let alone the miserable Human Rights Act.

As long as the State has to prove you are guilty before throwing you into prison, you are safe. As soon as you have to prove you are innocent, a nasty government or a raging mob can have you locked away for years and you can do nothing about it.

Our current national frenzy about sex crimes has caused us to forget this. Surely, the worse the crime of which you are accused, the more you need to be sure you will get a fair trial.

So there should have been the most enormous row when Sir Thomas Winsor, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, declared on November 18, 2014, referring to cases of rape: ‘The police should immediately institutionalise the presumption that the victim is to be believed.’

There wasn’t any row at all. In fact, I fear I didn’t even notice it when it happened.

But no wonder, after that, that those accused of such crimes found themselves subjected to heavy-handed punishment without trial.

From a person of such authority, this shocking rubbish was far worse than the recent crass remark by an individual police officer that an allegation was ‘credible and true’ before it had seen a courtroom, or promises to accusers that ‘you will be believed’. If this is so in sex cases, how long before it is so in cases where people are charged with breaches of political correctness? There is no shortage of accusers.

And so I applaud the Metropolitan Police chief, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, for his plan to pull back from this nasty, prejudiced and unBritish point of view. I hope he succeeds and is copied all over the country.

It is not the job of the police to believe or disbelieve. It is their job to investigate, where it seems likely that a crime may have happened. And that rarely means descending in platoons on the homes of elderly military men, subjecting them to humiliating searches in which their homes are turned over by prying fingers, and interrogation about events that supposedly happened 30 years ago. As the experienced lawyer and former prosecutor Alison Levitt QC has rightly asked: ‘What are they expecting to find in these searches?’

Long before the accused person is questioned, the police should have investigated the claim itself, searched for corroboration and witnesses, established that the alleged crime was physically possible, that the location actually existed and the accused could have been there at the time.

Isn’t that what you would have thought happened all along? But it hasn’t been happening. And it all changed while we weren’t looking.

But if you care more about football or the Lottery than you do about freedom, then you will lose that freedom.

The Economist, the bumptious and self-satisfied weekly journal of war, money and greed, far more often wrong about the world than it is right, has come out emphatically in favour of legalising marijuana.

Perhaps this will at last alert the soppy vegan Fairtrade types, who bizarrely support the slick, billionaire-backed Big Dope campaign, that they are on the wrong side. The pathetic rump of the Liberal Democrats, now pursuing this greasy, irresponsible cause, should also know better.

I have always thought it odd that people who are (rightly) worried about the ruthless conglomerates who cram us with deadly hamburgers and lethal fizzy drinks, and who (reasonably) regard Big Tobacco as Satan made flesh, ally with Big Dope.

The product which Big Dope so irresponsibly promotes is increasingly correlated with irreversible mental illness, a scourge that has already scarred many families. That’s surely worse than anything a cheeseburger can do.

And Big Dope, now backed by many politicians who hope to levy heavy taxes on human greed, grief and folly, is one of the most unscrupulous and most avaricious of all the lobbies now operating on this planet. It’s no place for gentle people.

Helen, real star of a flawed film

One day Hollywood will make a film about Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s Soviet Union. It’s time the world knew more about this insane outbreak of mass murder, in which a misplaced joke could earn you a bullet in the head or living death in a slave camp, and the parks of Moscow were full of mass graves.

But Hollywood is still far more worried about the (undoubtedly wrong) blacklisting of a few pro-communist stars and scriptwriters in Tinseltown itself, in the 1940s.

Star: The best thing in it is Helen Mirren playing the villainous, anti-Semitic gossip harpy Hedda Hopper in a succession of 150-megaton hats

Trumbo is the second movie about this subject, and makes a liberal hero out of Dalton Trumbo, a rich and talented writer, who defended the Kremlin regime in its most murderous years and (following the Stalin line during his peace pact with Hitler) campaigned to stop the US allying with Britain in 1940.

The best thing in it is Helen Mirren playing the villainous, anti-Semitic gossip harpy Hedda Hopper in a succession of 150-megaton hats.

It’s a peculiar cause in which to take on the role of wicked witch.

But the modern liberal West still hasn’t really come to terms with just how nasty communism was – and bizarrely smears Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a new Stalin, when he, having seen it at first hand, long ago utterly rejected the hammer and sickle.

The deep injustice done to the late Bishop George Bell, publicly pilloried on the basis of unproven abuse charges, continues. This great and saintly man has been robbed of his name and reputation by the Church that ought to treasure him. Instead, it has sparked a Stalinist campaign to erase his memory.

When criticised, its bishops seek (rather revoltingly) to hide behind the anonymous accuser, who of course must be treated with kindness and sympathy. This fails to conceal their own confusion. Today I can reveal that a very senior figure in the Church, involved in the actions that have done so much damage to George Bell’s good name, has written to a complainant: ‘You will note that at no point have I stated that Bishop Bell was guilty.’ This follows a similar statement in the House of Lords by the Bishop of Durham, which I reported last week.

How strange, then, that several newspapers and the BBC have somehow got the idea that he is guilty. Who told or briefed them that this was so?

Lambeth Palace has clumsily tried to unsay the Bishop of Durham’s words, issuing a garbled mass of piffle in his name, in which he appears to contradict himself.

Odd that this happened only after I publicised his speech here. These flapping prelates should not think this matter is anywhere near finished.