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.
One avenue for non-compliance with the government agenda seems to be jury service. The refusal of the jury to follow the official script in the trial of those accused of plotting to blow up transatlantic planes shows that a random sample of the British electorate (although they would all have most likely been from East London) is not nearly as reactionary and hate-filled as we're often told we are.
Melanie Phillips thinks our distrust of "intelligence" stems for the Iraq War but I'm sure far more prominent in jurors minds would have been the incompetence, and the self-serving lies, of the Metropolitan Police following the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
What's worrying is the media's widespread reporting of the jury's verdict as simply being wrong (there was a similar reaction by many in the media to the jury's verdict in the Kingsnorth case that Greenpeace protestors were innocent of criminal damage to a coal-fired power station). If the government, deciding that we the public are too unreliable in cases of national security, sought to remover trial by jury for terrorist offences, would we have the power, platform or confidence to stop them?
