Navigating Germany and the UK in a wheelchair

Christiane Link has written about disability law in the UK and Germany for many years. She is disappointed nowadays when she finds thoughtless provision in what used to be her home country. This is from her newsletter, The Reverse Culture Shock is real – my Berlin experience

Here is what people often miss: Germany does not have anything equivalent to the UK Equality Act 2010. The Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz and even the Anti-Discrimination Act, the main disability equality laws, apply either primarily to federal public bodies or are a paper tiger. Enforcement remains weak and difficult for individual disabled people in a service environment outside employment. It is nothing compared to the UK law. There is no meaningful compensation mechanism for disabled people who face barriers. It’s all very bureaucratic, and organisations rarely get a slap on the wrist. And they know that. You can complain, and you can be ignored or get a very German letter back, and that is largely the end of it. Often, you feel more offended than you were before.

Aubrey Pope, German – Norman Baker on “my best teacher”

Many years ago I did a PGCE and for my practical I went to the Royal Liberty School in Romford. The German teacher was Aubrey Pope, and he seemed to have a much better idea of how to teach German than the “direct method” we were encouraged to use and which I could never understand (grammar rules should not be taught – doesn’t work for me). Pope would get pupils to drill complex sentences by varying the nouns in them.

The Times Educational Supplement had a series “My best teacher”, where the then MP Norman Baker wrote about Aubrey Pope in a better way than I can.

Aubrey Pope wore John Lennon glasses, a tweed cap and cycled to school on one of those bikes with very small wheels. He rode a bike for environmental reasons, not because he didn’t have a car. He was very “green” long before it became fashionable.

He was unlike any other teacher I ever had. He taught me German and Russian at Royal Liberty school in Essex, and I still remember his first lesson. He taught us a complete sentence in German, which would translate: “After the two children had left the house, they go into the park to play football.”

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Nuremberg 2025 – film

The first time I saw this film I did not realize how true to history it was – it is based on a minor and not wellknown episode – and also felt it was very Hollywood. I appreciated it better on a second viewing. This Smithsonian article is useful on the facts of history:

The True Story Behind ‘Nuremberg’, a WWII drama about Hermann Göring’s Cat-and-Mouse game with an American Psychiatrist

But a lot of the dialogue – which had to be invented, of course – was very heavy-handed. From Daniel Goldstraw’s review in The Independent (which is more balanced than this extract):

The film is one that is often also prone to moments that feel cliched or predictable: the Jewish army officer who states he will he smoke after the war is done and then finally pulls out a cigarette at the close of the film, or the judge who, for some reason, feels he can only hammer home his point about the evils of the Nazis by taking Kelley in the middle of the night to the site of Hiler’s rallies. These all stand out as scenes where one can practically feel the screenwriter typing away behind them.

Very small historical video clips in the trial scenes show how closely the trial was recreated – for instance, that Göring did not stand immediately when the other defendants did. I would have liked the clips to be longer but that wasn’t their purpose. I knew that the ashes of the hanged defendants were scattered along a river in Munich to prevent graves becoming sites of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis. I did not know that the hanging was done publicly – as of course it always was, there had to be witnesses, and these included two journalists for each of the four Allies.
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An Act – Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025

This short Act (I have the habit of capitalizing (using uppercase for) Act provides that crypto currency is personal property.

Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025
2025 CHAPTER 29

An Act to make provision about the types of things that are not prevented from being objects of personal property rights.

[2nd December 2025]

Be it enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—
1Objects of personal property rights

A thing (including a thing that is digital or electronic in nature) is not prevented from being the object of personal property rights merely because it is neither—

(a)a thing in possession, nor

(b)a thing in action.

I got this from Joshua Rosenberg’s substack feed A Lawyer Writes, I’m not a paid subscriber. I missed the time when chose in possession and chose in action became thing in possession and thing in action.
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International Women’s Day

Roll on Friday has a poll on whether giving female staff a pink ice-cream maker on International Women’s Day is a good idea. There are four choices, depending on whether you are male or female.Law firm marks International Women’s Day by sending female clients a kitchen appliance

Toffy Ice Cream Maker

This reminds me of the time in 1989 when the German women’s football team won the European championship and were (each) given a Villeroy & Boch teaset.