LONDON: The first elected lawmaker for Britain’s anti-EU UK Independence Party was sworn in at the House of Commons yesterday, watched by party leader Nigel Farage.
Douglas Carswell defected from Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives but was re-elected in his old seat of Clacton, southeast England, last week with a majority of over 12,000.
Watching from a gallery, Farage grinned broadly as Carswell was sworn in amid silence in the Commons, promising to be “faithful to her majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law, so help me God”.
Carswell later took his seat on the other side of the chamber to his former Conservative colleagues, among members of the main opposition Labour party.
As he arrived at parliament in pouring rain to represent his new party for the first time earlier, Carswell was on cheerful form, posing in front of the Big Ben clock tower with his thumbs up.
Britain’s ‘secret’ terrorism trial due to start this week
LONDON: Jury members were sworn in yesterday at the start of a terrorism trial that prosecutors had tried to hold entirely in secret - a bid unprecedented in recent British legal history.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had asked for the blackout on national security grounds but their application was rejected in June by the Court of Appeal.
Even so, large parts of the trial of Erol Incedal will be held in secret and with reporters subject to unusually tight restrictions on what they can report.
Incedal, 26, was arrested in October last year with another man, Mounir Rarmoul-Bouhadja, who last week admitted possessing a bomb-making document on a memory card. Incedal denies charges of preparing for acts of terrorism contrary to the Terrorism Act 2006 and collecting information useful to terrorism.
Justice Nicol told the eight women and four men of the jury at the Old Bailey court that although in Britain trials usually take place in public, some parts of this one will be held in private.
Agencies
