Trial by jury

John K. Hill (London): Passing my local shop last night and seeing a policeman with a handgun on his belt browsing the fruit was quite unsettling. Routinely arming the police is something I'm very strongly against, but feel powerless to resist (he, after all, had a gun). This situation brought together a few ideas that have been written about on OurKingdom in the last week.

Compared to the French, the British (or perhaps just the English) can be pretty passive when it comes to resisting the ever-encroaching police state. The lack of a public arena where people feel they can effectively resist the actions of the government means that people either become apathetic or find other ways to vent their discontent.

Cross posted from Dizzy Thinks: For the first time in ages I actually bought a lot of Sunday newspapers and have finally got around to reading them. Scary thing is, whilst people are concentrating on the Speakers woes, I've just noticed that the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is planning on suspending habeus corpus. OK, so the News of the Screws does not report it that way of course, but that is, it seems to me, the implications of her latest Ten-Year Plan (like Stalin but only better because it's not five years).

Guy Aitchison (London, OK) John Reid and Tony Blair’s plans for draconian new anti-terror laws are a sobering reminder that, despite recent talk of constitutional reform and a Bill of Rights, the New Labour leopard won’t easily change its spots. In an article in today’s Sunday Times Blair argues that it is a “dangerous misjudgement” that “we have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first”. For Blair and Reid the ‘outcry’ over the three terror suspects absconding under control orders is a vindication, proof that they were right in demanding ‘stronger powers’ and that parliament and the judiciary were wrong to oppose them. Reid and Blair’s preferred option to control orders is to derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights so as to allow detention without trial. This means abandoning fundamental principles of justice and liberty. In a classic piece of Blair rhetoric, the man who is still Prime Minister tells us that civil liberties arguments are “traditional”. Those who make them are apparently failing to be “modern” about the threat of extremism. (Perhaps they are failing to “get it”). In a revealing conclusion he says terrorism, “will be defeated only by recognising that we have not created it; it cannot be negotiated with; pandering to its sense of grievance will only encourage it; and only by confronting it, the methods and the ideas, will we win”. Each clause is worth a rebuttal but the last is the most important. Retaining, indeed strengthening and expanding our civil rights is the way to confront the methods and ideas of terrorism.

Peter Oborne (Whitehall): The victory of the SNP has an historic importance which stretches way beyond Scotland. It has created a new architecture for British politics. Specifically, I do not think it is possible any longer for a Labour Party which has been rejected north of the border to use its Scottish MPs to enforce its will in English issues. Last autumn Scottish MPs helped the Labour government secure a narrow majority of 35 in a Bill abolishing the right to jury trial in serious fraud cases. They did so even though this did not apply in Scotland which has a separate legal system. I felt this removal of ancient English liberties very keenly indeed. It seemed to me casual and presumptuous that it was made possible by a group of people who had no personal stake in the matter: precisely the kind of thoughtless and disrespectful exercise of power which so inflamed the Scots when the English did it to them. I am not writing this as an English nationalist. On the contrary, I believe very strongly in the union. But a basic equity is involved here. The SNP win has precipitated a constitutional crisis. Gordon Brown has been very unlucky indeed. He will have to find a solution to the conundrum thrown up by the SNP victory, or he will not be able to govern.