Our values may be flawed, but it would have been a mistake to stone Edwina Currie to death

It is time to talk about Edwina Currie, once again. Yes. I know, you've missed her, these last few days — but she's still out there, somewhere. She hasn't really gone away. Even as you read this she may well be hounding people in your local bookshop, or perhaps marching up your drive, utterly determined in her selfless commitment to tell you the truth. Or, at least, to sell it to you.

I need her only as an example. I intend to use her briefly and then wipe myself down on the curtains and leave. I am aware that this is ungentlemanly conduct, and I will not duck the issue if she pillories me in her next bunch of memoirs. 'Yes, she's right,' I will tell the interviewers when they pile round, 'I did a bad thing, I'm sorry. And ashamed.'

Anyway, to state the blindingly obvious for a moment, here's what Edwina Currie did and what she got as a result.

Edwina committed adultery by entering into a sexual relationship with another woman's husband. For this fact, or rather the telling of it, she was rewarded with £300,000 and unlimited access to the nation's media. It's true that consequently a lot of people have said that she's unspeakably ghastly, or a cheap trollop, and worse things besides, but by and large the remunerative reward for her disclosures may well outweigh the slings and arrows of outraged columnists. You might argue.

But what would have happened if she'd tried to pull the same stunt in a different country? What would have happened if she'd tried the same stuff in, say, Sudan?

Yes, it's a bit hypothetical. I accept, hut if you petition the Sudanese embassy I am sure that they will speculate as to how an Islamic Sharia court might deal with Edwina, assuming that she was reported to the court in the first place. Probably — and obviously it would be wrong to prejudge the issue — they'd have her killed. Quite possibly they'd put her in a hole and get a bunch of very angry, extravagantly bearded men to throw rocks at her head, even as she offered to sign copies of her book for them. One way or another, they'd do her in.

There are a further five or six countries where they might well do the same thing to Edwina, rather than give her, as we did, loads of money. I'll mail you the list if you send me a stamped addressed envelope. Most of these countries are pretty hardline Islamic states, the Prophet Mohammed having perhaps anticipated the deleterious effect of Edwina's autobiography on a

defenceless population as early as AD 600. `Allahu Akbar! Lead me to the nearest mosque!' I hear you cry.

But this isn't my point.

Let's take a very different example. In the febrile and twitchy USA post 9/11, an enraged judicial system will soon sentence Clay Waagner to something like 10,000 years in prison for having pretended to people that he had sent them anthrax through the post. The exact number of millennia he must serve has yet to be decided. Maybe he'll get lucky. Maybe it'll be only two millennia. Clay didn't actually send the anthrax; it was a hoax. He didn't even wish to make financial gain from his actions; his motivation was political. He was also — as the Americans themselves are wont to put it — crazier than a shit-house rat. Ten thousand years in prison is the likely penalty. With good behaviour, he might get out in about 9002.

Somebody did the same thing in this country, at about the same time. It was a waiter at a restaurant in Bath. He got 100 hours' community service. The circumstances were very different, but the offence was basically the same. And there is, you might agree, a quite remarkable discrepancy between the two sentences handed down.

It might further strike you that, if we're being honest, the reaction of the British courts of law are in both cases — Edwina's and Clay Waagner's — infinitely preferable. We don't really want to stone Edwina to death. and we don't particularly wish to bang up some nutter because he has an unfortunate, perverted wish to put himself at the centre of his country's national emergency. Or at least the denouement is preferable if you're British. And, belatedly, that's the point I'm trying to get at. Imperfect and occasionally anomalous and infuriating though it may be, our legal system and sentencing policy is, at root, an expression of our national culture and identity, and unique to us. Sure, if we're on the political Left, we might cavil at the undue emphasis placed upon the notion of 'property' in law, and if we're on the Right, we might become occasionally incandescent at the attention and concern lavished upon the perpetrators of crimes, rather than on the victims. But, by and large, the laws and the behaviour of the judiciary generally are, with some caveats, a sort of embodiment of the will of the people. Which is why, usually, we think we are right and other countries — even very friendly ones — have got it wrong.

So if we think like this, it is a reasonable bet that every other country in the world feels the same way about its own legal processes.

In last week's Spectator John Hayes made the excellent point that many aspects of globalisation were inherently anti-conservative. Well, here's another example of g,lobalisation which, while less immediately visible than the presence of McDonald's in every Asian city, is perhaps more pernicious and even less 'conservative': the imposition of Western — or, more specifically, northern European — concepts of legal rectitude on countries that are really rather happy with their laws and values and do not wish to change them. This wellmeaning busybodying is carried out by a vast array of UN and NGO organisations, all characterised by the somewhat arrogant belief that our laws and values are, beyond question, the most just.

Human-rights lawyers, pressure groups and charities vie with each other to bribe, bully or cajole usually Third World countries to buy into a culture that the local population may well despise. And this, in turn, breeds a fierce resentment of the West.

There is little agreement across the world about what constitutes natural justice. There is a vast moral desert between giving Edwina Currie lots of money and stoning her to death. I think that, by and large, we've got it right. But then I would do, wouldn't I? And the question that never seems to occur to those who inflict their beliefs and values on other cultures is simply this: what if I'm wrong?