There have been times when I've wondered whether writing this column might be bad for my health. The news is so often depressing or infuriating that, most weeks, concentrating hard on it must surely be bad for my blood pressure.

However, this week is one of the exceptions. This week, the news has provided some reasons to be cheerful. I am delighted to see that the British judiciary still sometimes shows signs of independent thought when confronted with seriously flawed and unjust legislation.

When the UK government rushed its Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act through Parliament last December, reintroducing indefinite detention without charge or trial into British law, it was widely and rightly criticised by civil libertarians. So sweeping were the Act's provisions that the UK had to derogate, or opt out, from part of the European Convention of Human Rights in order to pass the new law.

The legislation allowed foreign nationals suspected of having terrorist connections to be detained indefinitely in the UK, in cases where they couldn't be deported because their countries of origin practised torture and/or the death penalty. The detainees would be allowed to leave the UK if they could find safe haven elsewhere, but would not be allowed into Britain even if there was insufficient solid evidence against them to mount a criminal prosecution. The Act's supporters pointed out that it also provided for the establishment of a Special Immigration Appeals Commission, to which detainees could appeal if they felt that their detention was unjustified. But those of us who were uneasy about the legislation generally had little faith that such a body would dare to stand up to the government.

We now know that in that regard, our scepticism was misplaced. The SAIC has caused great embarrassment to the government by upholding the appeals of nine detainees. The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act was hurriedly conjured up in the wake of last September's terrorist outrages in America, and once again the principle that hasty law is bad law has been supported by experience.

In supporting the detainees' appeal, SAIC chairman Mr Justice Collins commented that the Act was '... not only discriminatory and so unlawful... But also it is disproportionate'. It was discriminatory, he said, simply because it applied only to foreign nationals.

What makes the case even more embarrassing for the government is that the secret evidence against the detainees - described as 'detailed and compelling' in a Home Office statement after the SAIC ruling - was examined by a 'special advocate' appointed by the Attorney General and vetted by Britain's security services, MI5 and MI6, and presumably judged to be unconvincing. We'll never be told what was in that evidence: not even the detainees and their lawyers were allowed to see it, which put them in the awkward position of trying to prepare a defence without knowing exactly what they were denying. But clearly, given the SAIC's verdict, the 'special advocate' didn't regard the evidence as being very compelling at all.

The nine men are still being detained pending an appeal due to be heard on October 7, but that hearing may well bring further embarrassment to the government. I certainly hope so. As John Wadham of the civil rights group Liberty has said: 'The government should use this opportunity to revoke this law and end internment. Those detained should be charged if there is any evidence against them, or released immediately.'

To support that view is not to be 'soft on terrorism'. It is merely to accept the principle that the law is there to punish the demonstrably guilty, not to try to predict the future. Interning people for long periods on the basis of unsubstantiated suspicions involves the use of a kind of logic similar to that employed in the excellent film Minority Report, about a future society in which people are punished for crimes that they haven't committed but which someone believes they will commit. The system doesn't work properly in the film, and it won't work in reality.

Still, the UK government does deserve some credit for one aspect of its approach to these matters. It may be incapable of recognising the legal and logical deficiencies in its own anti-terrorist legislation, but it is able to recognise when another country has put paranoia before reason. At a time when it's almost impossible to imagine Tony Blair ever saying the words 'No, Mr President', it was gratifying this week to see Home Secretary David Blunkett flatly refusing the American authorities' demand for the extradition of Yasser al-Siri, an Egyptian bookseller based in London. US prosecutors had accused Mr al-Siri of funding terrorism - a somewhat improbable charge given that he runs a small independent religious bookshop, the Islamic Observation Centre, that isn't ever likely to make him a millionaire.

Blunkett ruled that there was no prima facie case against al-Siri. In other words, the American authorities hadn't assembled even the beginnings of a convincing case against him, let alone one that might persuade a reasonable jury of his guilt if al-Siri were ever allowed a jury trial.

It isn't the first time this year that Britain has refused an American request for the extradition of someone suspected of terrorist connections on flimsy evidence. In April, a demand for an Algerian pilot Lotfi Raissi to be extradited was declined, again because the case against him was unconvincing.

I find these bursts of defiant independence by the British legal authorities surprising, but also heartening. I know that these are dangerous times, but those are precisely the kind of times in which we need to guard our civil liberties most carefully. Once they've been taken away, they rarely come back.

Something else that cheered me up this week was the result of an opinion poll examining the British public's attitude to the series of strikes that have caused much disruption in the UK this summer. Local council workers and staff on both overground and underground (subway, if you're American) rail networks have been withdrawing their labour for a variety of reasons. The rail strikes in particular have been a bit of a nuisance for me, obliging me to use slower and more expensive bus services on some of my regular journeys.

Yet I don't want the rail workers in my area to go back to work until they've secured a settlement they're happy with, because I believe that their cause is a just one. In my opinion, they're seriously underpaid for doing difficult, responsible jobs. It seems that I am far from being alone in taking this kind of attitude. That opinion poll revealed that 59 per cent of respondents believed the strikes to be justified, with 29 per cent regarding them as unjust and 12 per cent saying 'don't know'.

Those are remarkable figures in a country where some newspapers regularly brand any strikers as irresponsible 'wreckers', 'militants' and 'extremists'. The high degree of sympathy for the strikers suggests that there has been a considerable shift in British public attitudes since the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher's governments enjoyed strong support as they passed law after law designed to weaken the trade unions and make it harder for them to take any kind of action. It suggests that many people now believe, as I do, that the balance of power has tipped far too far towards employers - although sympathy for the rail workers is undoubtedly strengthened by the fact that they're up against the private train operating companies who've overseen an era of declining rail services and considerable concerns about passenger safety.

The same poll revealed that 37 per cent of voters think that Tony Blair pays too much attention to the views of the business community and not enough to those of trade union leaders. Only 14 per cent believe that the reverse is true, despite the Labour Party's historic links with the trade union movement.

All of which suggests to me that the government might give its popularity a boost by loosening some of the legal shackles that were imposed on the UK's trade unions in the Thatcher era. I don't particularly expect to see it happen; but if the government did make it easier for employees to gain better deals for themselves, they might well find their poll ratings rising as a result.

Until this week, not many people had heard of Alan Duncan. But he is now widely known to be a member of a minority group that many regard as being rather sleazy, sordid and peculiar. By his own frank admission, Mr Duncan is a practising Conservative MP.

He also happens to be homosexual, and it was his public revelation of the latter fact that put the hitherto little-known MP for the Leicestershire constituency of Rutland and Melton him into the headlines this week. Remarkably, he is the first-ever Conservative MP to 'come out' as gay.

His announcement has been widely praised, notably by Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, who said in a letter to Mr Duncan:
'I understand how difficult it must have been for you to have made such an open statement about your private life. What you have done is honest and will not affect you in any way politically in the future.'

All very admirable. But the reaction from some others in the Conservative Party was strikingly and saddeningly different. Tony Collinson, chairman of the Reigate Conservative Association, fumed:
'I would not be happy if we had a gay candidate here. I would always go for a candidate who had a normal background',

thus making himself sound abnormally ignorant. One of Mr Collinson's Reigate Conservative colleagues, Colin Vaughan, spluttered:
'I come from an older generation where this sort of thing was deemed unspeakable. I think people will see it as unfortunate.'

I certainly see it as unfortunate that such attitudes still exist within the Conservative Party, but the fact that it's taken this long for any of the party's MPs to 'come out' suggests that homophobia is still widespread in the Conservative ranks. I can't help wondering how Alan Duncan might have fared had he revealed his sexual orientation while he was still seeking to be nominated as a Conservative Parliamentary candidate, rather than after being an MP for years.

I believe that Iain Duncan Smith genuinely wants to make the Conservative Party less bigoted and more inclusive, if only to improve its electoral prospects. But sometimes, listening to what his fellow Conservatives have to say, I suspect that he might have a better chance of success if he tried to teach a herd of elephants to limbo dance.

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