Due Process and Bad Laws
Warning: Tangent, Digression, and Political Rant follows:
Winston Churchill once said, “If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law”.
Here in England we are stuffed with laws and regulations, 60 percent of them coming straight from Brussels, a foreign country. The Blair administration spews out its own tidal wave of legislation too, much of it ill-conceived and impossible to administer. A great deal of it impacts adversely on personal freedoms.
In a recent example, the Mayor of London was suspended from office for a month by an unelected committee appointed by that fount of all ignorance, the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. The Mayor’s offence? Badmouthing a journalist late at night after a few drinks. Yes, the remarks were offensive in themselves, but how come a bunch of nobodies, answerable to nothing but their own opinions, have the power to suspend an elected Mayor of London?
It all comes back to the authoritarian personality of Tony Blair himself.
That great Lockeian journalist and defender of Liberty, William Rees-Mogg, captures it perfectly in today’s Times (London). Blair doesn’t believe in “due process”, a principle of English, and now American, law since Magna Carta. In its place, he puts that most dangerous of Continental European concepts: Political Will.
The Prime Minister knows what the issue is. He is against due process as such. He has written a most extraordinary attack on the whole concept in yesterday’s Observer. The article is so incautious that he must have written it himself.
“In theory,†Tony Blair writes, “traditional court processes and attitudes to civil liberties could work. But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed.†This view that due process is obsolete explains the Prime Minister’s conduct; it explains the connection between extradition without safeguards, detention without trial, Asbos [Antisocial Behaviour Orders] without criminal offences, subjective and discretionary judgments, police powers to arrest, and increasing ministerial powers. They are all characteristic of Blair legislation; they all avoid due process of law.
Rees-Mogg can find only one word to describe him: “antinomian”. The Oxford Dictionary defines that as someone who is “released by grace” from observing the moral law.
However did we end up with this man?
As you know, John, I try to avoid politics like the plague it (they?) is (are?). But my son, Mad, blogs the occasional concerns regarding the direction the UK is taking and he would agree completely with your post. I find it impossible to be unaware of what is happening, so numerous are the apparent abuses recorded all around me. And this gives me a serious problem as it makes me want to blog about the whole darn thing…
By Gone Away on February 28th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
I too try to avoid political controversy. My blogs are not intended to be divisive, so I avoid religion and politics when I can.
However, sometimes you just have to spit it out, and Blair has that effect on me. He’s now trying to get a Bill through Parliament — by stealth of course — which would allow him to make, change and repeal laws without recourse to Parliament, or anyone. He would have the discretion to decide which laws this would apply to.
Frankly, it sickens me. And few seem aware of the danger. He’ll use it to force the European constitution on us and it will be virtually irreversible.
People are beginning to wake up a bit at last. But it may be too late.
By John on February 28th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
I’m in despair John. I don’t know how the situation can be saved. It’s already too late, nuLabour is attacking Habeas Corpus, due process, the impartiality of the judiciary, it’s making the police the tool of the will of the State. They are putting in place databases and id schemes to watch us from cradle to grave, schemes to track every vehicles movement in the country. We can be held without charge and the laws of other countries are being applied to us. Our government is selling us, bound hand and foot, to europe.
But no one makes a murmur! The British watch as everything that makes us British is destroyed. I don’t know what to do? Is it time to flee or is not to late to do something? I wish I knew…
By Mad on February 28th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Mad, good to see you here on Syntagma.
Well, you know from the above that I agree with all you say.
What to do? Blair will be gone by next year, probably replaced by Gordon Brown, who may be even worse … though I doubt it.
The only hope is David Cameron, who’s playing a canny game and may be very different in office, at least on civil liberty issues. The problem is that Brown has forced up to 60 percent of the population into some kind of financial dependency on the State. That means they’ll be reluctant to vote them out.
That’s classic “third way” theory. Like drug pushers, they get people dependent on them, then they own them.
By John on February 28th, 2006 at 4:43 pm