It was introduced in 2004 with the usual soothing assurances that there was nothing to fear. But there is, as we are witnessing at the moment. An Australian teacher is in a British jail after being arrested at Heathrow by our police, acting on a warrant issued by the German authorities. He is wanted there for the offence of "Holocaust denial", which is not a crime in Britain.

Under the EAW, the country making the request does not even have to present evidence that there is a convincing case. The accused person cannot argue that he will not get a fair trial – it is assumed that since an EU country is involved, he will automatically get a fair trial. But many of them do not have habeas corpus.

The teacher has a long record of Holocaust denial, but it isn't a crime in Australia. So a man has been arrested for something that is not a crime either here or in his own country. As usual with Brussels, there is also an ulterior motive – the pursuit of European judicial integration, which is based on the notion that all EU countries are the same, when patently they are not.

Anyone who remembers the way Greece behaved towards a group of harmless British planespotters will agree. Setting up a system of European criminal law is part of the march towards a superstate.

Holocaust denial is usually either malevolent or demented. The pretence that it is just a statistical argument is nonsense. The reason we can be fairly accurate about the number of Hitler's victims is that the Nazis were dedicated record-keepers and you need only examine the records, not merely of Auschwitz, but Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, and the rest. It is usually inseparable from anti-Semitism. As a Jewish commentator says, how can anyone seriously deny the existence, or even the bare details, of one of the best-researched and documented events in history? But we should not waste taxpayers' money in prosecuting them. Thanks to EAW, the Australian and his cronies are allowed to present themselves as human-rights martyrs.

Another leading Jewish writer says: "Being Jewish, I say this through gritted teeth. But we must never allow Brussels to turn Holocaust denial into a crime."

In a free society, the proper antidote to the dissemination of lies is the truth. The arch Holocaust-denier David Irving was jailed for this crime in Austria. Did that expunge his poison? If anything, it helped him to pose as a martyr.

Given their appalling record before and during the Second World War, it is understandable that Austrians should now make amends. But Irving was only effectively destroyed in a British courtroom, where the judge denounced him as "a pro-Nazi polemicist". That is the British way to deal with such people.



LABOUR have hit upon a magic word to get the party out of trouble – global. Ministers use it every few seconds when they appear on TV. What "global" means is that this crisis has nothing to do with us – it's all the fault of the foreigners, particularly the Americans. It's global.

The thought that Gordon Brown might have contributed to Britain's plight is dismissed, which presents a problem for the Tories. They have become over-confident while Brown has been floundering. One mistake has been to regard the arrival of Peter Mandelson as a negative for Labour. Of course Brown did it with gritted teeth, but it changes the electoral landscape.

Reluctant though people are to admit it, Mandelson is a highly effective minister: at the DTI, he was regarded as the best they ever had, and he had a good record in Northern Ireland, clearing up the mess that Mo Mowlam left behind. When it comes to elections, he is the master: ingenious, efficient, and quite unscrupulous. The Tories may well have a fight on their hands.



FOR most of us, the Victoria Cross is regarded almost with reverence. It is somehow in a different category from any other award. Not to the bureaucrats at the Home Office, however, in their grubby attempt to prevent the Gurkhas from obtaining justice.

This was the argument they presented to the High Court: "Having a Victoria Cross is not necessarily a strong tie bringing the entry application within the policy."

Was there no one in the Government with the moral courage to speak out against denial of justice?



PROOF that the yobs rule the roost comes from a retired police superintendent. He asked three youths with trials bikes to stop chasing sheep on land he looks after.

One youth told him to mind his own business, otherwise they would call the police and claim that he had punched one of them. He immediately recognised his predicament from his police experience.

He wasn't bothered by the possibility of violence but he was frightened by the prospect of being arrested, then facing a possible court action for assault.

The three lads knew who had the upper hand. Their anti-social behaviour was beyond the reach of the law. He says: "For the first time in my life, I walked away rather than support law and order". What a commentary on Britain in 2008.