12th July - Law News

Edition 5311 LawNewsIndex is a UK based daily legal news archive on Law, Lawyers, Law Firms, Jurisprudence, Legislation, Litigation, Legal Ethics, Human Rights and Social Justice related issues since 2011.

Today's Highlighted Video: Gatwick Investment Ltd and others (Appellants) v Liberty Mutual Insurance Europe SE (Respondent) Case ID: UKSC/2025/0067

A selection of important developments in the world of law and justice (for a comprehensive look at the news and events, please visit @theLawMap Twitter/X feed):

Saturday Conversations on Law

• SRA takes aim at litigation funding with new requirements for consumer claims firms | Law Gazette
• The Duke of Sussex and his co-claimants face a ‘potentially eye-watering legal bill’ of more than £50m, according to former costs judge at the Royal Courts of Justice, Colin Campbell | New Law Journal
• ‘I was like, “Oh my god, I can be taken seriously”’: the women inspired to become lawyers by Legally Blonde
• Government proposals to make independent written legal advice a prerequisite for workplace non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) may prove unworkable, according to a senior employment lawyer | New Law Journal
• Common law can cope with AI harms, UK Jurisdiction Taskforce reports | Law Gazette
• The Sentencing Council has launched draft guidelines for facilitation and endangering another person during a sea crossing to the UK | New Law Journal

 

 Sunday Op-Ed: 

LawNewsIndex was founded in 2011 as a way of cataloguing the ongoing changes in the UK justice system as well as documenting social justice related conversations as observed through the Twitter/X account @thelawmap. In the proceeding decade and half LawNewsIndex collated thousands of articles documenting the ebb and flow of time and how British society and the justice system responded to local and international events. This present archive on justice, law and societal changes covers each and every day of the last 5304 days since December 2011. If the first fourteen years of LawNewsIndex organically generated 1 million hits from across the English speaking world, the fifteenth year saw a dramatic increase in readership and the daily blogs are presently accessed by 60,000 to 160,000 per month with June 2026 readership at 150k and the last twelve months receiving a total of 1.05 million hits. To reflect the new eclectic readership, starting in July 2026 a weekend editorial op-ed column is being featured each Sunday as part of LawNewsIndex with contributions from writers, thinkers, artists, grassroots community organisers as well as those with a connection to the wider world of social justice.

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Football and the National Temper: On a blisteringly hot Saturday afternoon, just hours before England’s World Cup 2026 quarter-final against Norway, I find myself returning to George Orwell’s 1945 essay The Sporting Spirit. Written barely six months after the formal end of the Second World War, Orwell’s polemic explores the political symbolism of sport at a moment when the global balance of power had been irrevocably transformed. Britain, financially exhausted after two devastating conflicts in little more than two decades, was yielding its place to the emerging superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Orwell’s scepticism about the idea that international sport could foster goodwill is unmistakable. Whether discussing cricket, football or the Olympic Games, he dismissed the notion that sporting competition naturally encouraged friendship between nations. Instead, he argued that it inflamed national rivalries, pointing to the 1936 Berlin Olympics as evidence that such spectacles could generate what he memorably described as "orgies of hatred".

Eight decades on, football’s tribal instincts have hardly disappeared. Nor, however, has the game’s capacity to act as a vehicle for diplomacy. For some supporters, expressions of national identity have increasingly overlapped with the politics of exclusion, echoing a wider resurgence of hostility towards minorities and progressive values. The Football Lads Alliance, and its later offshoot, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, have long occupied a political space uncomfortably close to the far right.

Yet Orwell’s pessimism does not tell the whole story. Sport has also proved capable of opening diplomatic doors that conventional politics struggled to unlock. The most celebrated example remains the "ping-pong diplomacy" of the early 1970s, when table tennis exchanges between American and Chinese athletes helped pave the way for President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in 1972 and the subsequent Shanghai Communiqué. If sport can intensify political antagonisms, history also suggests it can, under the right circumstances, help soften them.

Football is routinely described as a force that brings nations together. It is one of those comforting sporting clichés repeated so often that it begins to sound self-evident. But spend a few weeks immersed in any major international tournament and the picture becomes rather more complicated. Football does not invent nationalism. What it does provide is one of its most visible and emotionally charged stages.
International tournaments ask supporters to invest in something far bigger than the game itself. Few fans simply want to watch their team play well; they want their country to win. The stakes quickly become symbolic. A missed penalty is interpreted as a failure of nerve. A famous victory is recast as proof of national character, resilience or destiny. Somehow, the actions of 22 footballers come to stand in for the virtues—or shortcomings—of millions of people they have never met.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Nations need shared stories and shared symbols, and football offers both in abundance. Flags, anthems and national colours can be expressions of belonging rather than exclusion. The difficulty begins when pride in one's own country depends upon diminishing someone else's. Patriotism is rooted in affection; nationalism demands comparison, competition and, ultimately, superiority. International football, with its winners and losers, often blurs the distinction.

If anything, the modern media ecosystem has intensified the effect. Around-the-clock coverage, rolling social media commentary and an insatiable appetite for narrative have turned almost every international fixture into a clash of histories rather than a contest of tactics. Centuries-old rivalries are dusted off because they make compelling copy. Political tensions become part of the pre-match build-up. Supporters who may never have travelled beyond their own borders are encouraged to experience 90 minutes of football as a referendum on national prestige.

And yet there is an obvious contradiction. The players themselves rarely embody the antagonism projected on to them. Elite football is profoundly international. Teammates spend most of the year together at club level, speaking multiple languages, celebrating each other's successes and building careers that transcend national borders. They compete with ferocity on the pitch before swapping shirts at the final whistle. It is often those watching from the stands—or from behind their phones—who carry the deepest grievances.
Perhaps that is football's paradox. It is neither the antidote to nationalism imagined by its romantics nor the source of it feared by its critics. Instead, it acts as an amplifier, magnifying emotions that already exist beyond the stadium. The game can express generosity and solidarity just as easily as resentment and exclusion. Which version prevails depends less on football itself than on the societies watching it. In that sense, the sport is not unlike a mirror: if the reflection is unsettling, the problem rarely lies with the glass.
 

Taz Rahman has a masters in ethics and social philosophy from Cardiff University. He is a South Wales based writer and literary documentary maker. His debut poetry collection 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was published by Seren Books and longlisted for the Laurel prize in 2024. He is widely published in leading poetry magazines and anthologies and had founded Wales' first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet. 

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LawnewsIndex readership in numbers: 

~ June 2026: 154,832 ~

   ~  April 2026 to end of June 2026: 408k ~ 

~ 12 months from July 2025 to end of June 2026: 1.05 million