Americans often envy us Brits our wild cultural diversity. Just drive for half an hour in the UK and it can seem that you are in a different country. Of course America is culturally diverse as well, as I keep having to point out to my British friends, it just does it on a much larger scale. But cultural diversity isn’t always a good thing, and one of the ways the bad shows up in the UK is the so-called PostCode Lottery.

This isn’t an actual lottery. The idea is that your quality of life can be strongly affected by where in the country you live. Although in theory we have fairly unified government, the practice can be strongly divergent depending on how local authorities implement national directives. All walks of life are affected. Where you live can determine the quality of schools your kids can attend, the types of treatment that can be obtained on the National Health, and also, it now appears, whether or not rapists get brought to justice.

Generally speaking, of course, the rate of conviction is pretty appalling all over the country. Given that the chances of a successful conviction are, on average, just 6%, whereas the chances of the woman who was raped having her life further ruined by malicious media coverage of the case is pretty much 100%, nowhere in the country has anything to crow about. I was not in the least bit surprised to discover last week that an anonymous survey of members of the Welsh Assembly revealed that three of them had been raped, and not one had reported it to the police. These women, remember, are political activists, but they know than some battles are hopeless. Doubtless the same is true in Westminster. However, the fact that there local differences shows that there is something that can be done. Hopefully pressure can be put on the recalcitrant police forces to clean up their act.