It’s not that confusing at all

Phil Spector, record producer Jane Lapotaire, actress, Dermot Murnaghan, newscaster Lars Ulrich, drummer, Jared Leto, actor, Shane Meadows, filmmaker,

Chris Daughtry, musician, Yohan Blake, sprinter, YOUR Feedback correspondent ‘Confused’ is very confused.

Insurance cover for “Social, domestic and pleasure” has never covered anything to do with work, which is as it should be.

Those of us who do not commute to work or drive as part of our job have much lower mileage, and therefore much less risk so should pay less.

Many seem to look upon insurance as a kind of undesirable and unnecessary tax.

Insurance is not an arbitrary rule to make money for someone but a sharing of the burden of the cost of accidents, a very necessary protection for victims including oneself.

If someone is maimed you may owe them a vast amount of money and be unable to pay.

Even a small amount of damage can cost thousands these days so being uninsured is a serious offence, not against the government but against other road users who might be hurt and not compensated.

In my view the fines dealt out by the courts do not reflect the seriousness of the offence.

It is often treated as though having no insurance is on a par with no road fund tax or infringing parking regulations.

We should all be grateful that although the magistrates and Mr/Ms Confused do not take lack of insurance seriously, the police do.

As for the cost, which is a huge problem for young people, I say roll on the day when we can all have a gadget in the car to measure our mileage and driving style and adjust our premiums accordingly. WHY are the CCTV images received from the police so fuzzy/bad? They sent clearer pictures back from the moon 30 years ago. RAPE is an especially heinous and devastating crime which should always be investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

However, there should be no place in our legal system for the notion that an allegation in itself provides proof of an offence or of the guilt of the accused.

That sort of thinking takes us back to the excesses of Stalin and Hitler, where accusation alone often resulted in severe punishment.

For that reason it is absolutely wrong for police and prosecuting authorities to state accusers, in any set of circumstances, will be automatically and uncritically believed.

The correct approach is that “all allegations will be taken seriously and fully investigated and complainants will be treated with respect”.

More fundamentally, justice is not best served if it is turned into a simple contest between opposing sides. Our adversarial approach has its strengths, but also its weaknesses, and needs to be split into segments.

First and foremost, it is necessary to prove that an alleged offence has taken place - an investigative matter. Once that is achieved there is value in the adversarial method to test the strength of the evidence against a specific defendant, but only if both sides of the contest have full access to all of the known evidence. Full access is fundamental.

It should be the primary function of the police to investigate and to accumulate evidence, not to build a case against an individual.

It should then be for the prosecuting authorities to decide where the evidence points, and to mount a prosecution if justified. If the decision to prosecute is taken, it should then be incumbent on the authorities to provide all evidence to the defence without undertaking a filtering process.

All parties to a prosecution should be allowed to remain anonymous unless and until a finding of guilt is reached, at which point it is right that a party found guilty should be named. Unless malice is proven, accusers should remain anonymous.

Trial by publicity, as opposed to public justice, should never be allowed. A mistaken or false allegation can brand a person for life, even when innocence is ultimately established.