Love and Liberty

The arrogant, self-important, holier-than-thou, über-bossy bullying Labour Government famously has no sense of irony (the last two words may be superfluous there), but today’s news brings joy for taxpayers, friends of freedom and ironists alike. Labour’s position is very clear: only criminals and terrorists have anything to fear from their humongously expensive ID cards and databases holding every scrap of personal information on every citizen (all the better for thieves, blackmailers and newspapers to get hold of it); but only criminals and terrorists could possibly have any interest in exposing what the Labour Government is up to in our name. And they see no contradiction in that.

The Labour Government’s fervour in poking into, preaching at and misplacing our every personal detail is only matched by their religious fervour in preventing any of us finding out how badly they’re doing it. They’ve entirely forgotten that the Government is employed by the people, rather than the other way round. And so the Labour Government mounted stitch-up after stitch-up to try to stop anyone being able to find what MPs’ expenses were, while coincidentally the Cabinet member with responsibility for bossing the police about and inventing stupid new crimes was thieving from the taxpayer; they still refuse to hold an independent enquiry into the Iraq War; they put pressure on the courts to cover up torture evidence; they block court cases altogether to cover up bribery over BAE; they refuse to tell us how much money they’ve wasted on horrendous messes of private sector contracts because of “commercial confidentiality”; trying to change the law so they can bar the public from coroners’ inquests, sack independent coroners and bribe their appointed placepeople to make sure they give the ‘right’ result; they make it a serious crime to photograph a police officer so no-one can supply evidence of the effects of the Labour Government’s appalling new laws…

Today, however, exposes the most hilariously ironic of all the Labour Government’s irony-bypass operations – despite threatening every member of the public (starting with ‘foreigners’ and, er, Mancunians) with prosecution and bankrupting fines if we don’t regularly disclose every detail of our lives to their insanely huge ID cards database, they’ve been fighting for four years to prevent any member of the public seeing the two independent reviews the Labour Government themselves commissioned… Into how the ID cards scheme was working.

The Information Tribunal has at last ruled today that the Labour Government’s attempts to say Freedom of Information doesn’t apply to them are wrong, and that the results of both reviews into the ID cards process must be published within 28 days. So, to have spent so much taxpayers’ money on four years of lawyers’ fees to try and stop us finding all this out, how bad will the decision-making process have been? How many practical errors have been uncovered? How much money has been wasted? And how many Labour Government Ministers will be revealed to have lied to Parliament about how well, and how cheaply, it’s all been going? Meg Hillier, for one, must be eyeing her smoking undergarments apprehensively.

Don’t hold your breath, though. These reviews were carried out way back in 2003 and 2004, so the vast bulk of the billions upon billions of pounds wasted and the amazing extent of the Labour Government’s ineptitude will barely have been scratched. And if you think this ruling means that we can see the results of any other in-depth examinations of the Labour Government’s in-depth examinations of our lives, again, I wouldn’t get your hopes up. A Labour Government spokesrobot announced after the ruling:

“It has made clear that its decision refers only to this specific request and does not set any precedent. We are currently assessing the detail of the Information Tribunal's decision and will respond in full in due course.”

But, surely, if they’ve done nothing wrong, they’ve got nothing to fear? The rest of us can only conclude that the Labour Government’s got plenty of wrongdoing to hide from its employers – all of us – or that they were lying when they repeated that mantra to stop us objecting to their prying and bossing. The answer is ‘probably both’.

Let’s just say no to ID cards now.


Update: despite me being the Dad’s Army fan in the household, my beloved reminds me that one of the nation’s favourite comedy moments features the awesome Philip Madoc issuing a demand for personal information – which is definitely regarded as not very British. There is, however, a very British precedent for the pompous buffoon in charge to be careless with our personal details.

Labels: British Politics, Corruption, Crooked Coroners Corruption, Labour, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Philip Madoc, The Golden Dozen

The BBC brings news that, following their defeat on 42 days, the Labour Government has backed down in the House of Lords on its plans to replace independent coroners with its own hand-picked, paid-by-results stooges sitting in secret to make sure any deaths the Government finds embarrassing are kept quiet. This is fantastic news, as I’ve been quite cross about this for eight months now (including this very morning). However, this time it’s a concession to get their Counter-Terrorism Bill through – so it’ll be back later with other coroners’ “reforms”. Today’s a good day, but keep your eyes peeled…

Thanks to Richard for ringing and telling me!

Update: And to Stuart Douglas, who’s posted a comment to my piece this morning to the same effect.

Meanwhile, I’ve been joining in with the latest debate on everyone’s favourite new spot for intemperate arguments on Liberalism, Irfan Ahmed’s blog.

Labels: British Politics, Crooked Coroners Corruption, Labour

If you’ve been following the story of Councillor Gavin Webb, in-out suspended by the party since April in a series of embarrassingly illiberal stomps from above, you may be happy to learn this morning that his latest suspension – the West Midlands Regional Party decreeing the day after Burton Liberal Democrats voted to adopt Gavin as their Prospective Parliamentary Candidate that the members were wrong and stopping him standing – has been called off and he is now, as local members decided, officially Liberal Democrat PPC for Burton. And it’s not Gavin’s Liberalism that’s called into question by all this.

I’ve known Gavin for a good many years and disagreed with him almost as often as I’ve agreed with him, but I’m quite certain that he’s both a nice bloke and a conviction Liberal. He’s at about the furthest libertarian edge of the Liberal Democrats, and has a tendency to shoot his mouth off; well, fair enough. I’ve been accused of being on the fringes and being gobby often enough that I’m a bit wary of either of those being used as sticks to beat someone with.

Dodgy Suspension Number One

Back in April, Stoke Liberal Democrats – Gavin and his fellow councillors there having fallen out fairly comprehensively – decided to suspend Gavin from the party pretty much on the grounds of being too racy in the run-up to an election, and to think about it later. So this had nothing to do with any misconduct, but for Gavin shooting his mouth off with views such as his support for legalising prostitution, all drugs, firearms, and drink-driving so long as no-one is injured, as well as that he was uncouth enough to call a BNP councillor a fascist; some of which are party policy, some of which I disagree with, some of which are highly impractical, some of which I suspect no readers of this blog would object to, but all of which everyone knew he’d been espousing for years anyway.

“I’m shocked – shocked – to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Now, suspending for a moment your disbelief at a Liberal Democrat local party spending their time going witch-hunting a week before election day, you’ll be aware that, being a liberal and democratic party, there are rules that mean you can’t go chucking someone in an oubliette and that’s the end of them. There are rules about due process, getting a chance to answer your charges, and all within a decent span of time so they can’t just be deliberately ‘forgotten about’. To cut a long – three-and-a-half-month-long – story short, the party’s extremely keen and on the ball investigation started only the week before that fourteen-week time limit expired, Gavin was never offered proper charges to respond to nor a proper hearing, and so at the end of that colossal waste of time his membership was reinstated automatically, that rule being in place precisely to stop people doing that sort of cowardly, petty pissing about for eternity. Gavin having moved his membership to being part of a Liberal Democrat local party he got on with better rather than arguing for the sake of it, you might think that was the end of it.

Reinstated! Selected! Re-suspended! Um… Why?

Gavin, as a talented, hardworking and articulate party member with much to be articulate about, put himself forward to Liberal Democrat members in Burton for selection as their PPC. Before you can do that, incidentally, you have to go through a training and screening process to make sure you’re up to it and that you agree with the party’s core principles – which Gavin passed with flying colours, and which the Region had no problem with. Bear that in mind. So Gavin told me the story:

“At my hustings, at which the Region's Candidates Chair was in attendance, I was vigorously questioned by my Local Party which I answered openly and honestly – indeed, not every member agreed with everything I had to say but they by and large appreciated the message of individual rights, freedoms and responsibilities. In short, I made no bones about being a libertarian. I was selected overwhelmingly as the Liberal Democrat PPC for Burton.

“However, the following day the West Midlands Regional Executive met, they considered the report from my meeting [in ‘week thirteen’] with the Chair and Local Parties Officers, and decided to suspend me from standing for the Party, internally and externally, for a period of three years.”

Gavin had to make repeated requests even to get the reasons for his suspension, a week and a half after it happened, and he couldn’t forward them to me because the letter from the Region was “Confidential”. Come on. This is the Liberal Democrats, not a national security trial where the evidence has to be heard in camera! As Paul Walter put it succinctly, this is No way to treat a member.

After six months of this vindictive nonsense, Gavin was impatient to get on with fighting Labour in a seat where the MP is standing down and the Tories are split over local council conflicts of interests, while too many in the West Midlands Regional Liberal Democrats seemed impatient only with a Liberal Democrat who didn’t strictly follow the party line. For those who think he just enjoys stirring it, you might like to know that, though he’s been keeping me and others informed of what’s going on – to the extent that anyone could be bothered telling him – he’s generally asked for it not to be publicised until the story’s already come out in other places. For example, I’d known of his ludicrous second suspension for some time without posting on it, Gavin having asked me not to… Until he told me at Conference, amid many hugs, that the Daily Telegraph had asked him to comment on a hostile briefing from within the party, at which point he defended himself. Yes, that’s right: some parts of the party are too busy to talk to people they accuse, but not to talk to the press about them.

I’ve heard from Gavin again this morning, and it won’t come as any surprise to you to read that this latest suspension, too, has collapsed without a proper hearing, because the regional party was pathologically unable to follow due process and have admitted they cocked up the original ‘investigation’. And so Liberal Democrat members in Burton have the PPC they chose, and he can get on with fighting people who aren’t Liberal Democrats at all.

Now, come on – what’s just about the original, central kernel at the heart of Liberalism? Control of arbitrary power. Standing up to bullies. So even if you disagree with a lot of what Gavin Webb has to say, who’s displayed the most fundamental lack of understanding of what it means to be a Liberal here? All those involved in these alleged (but not in public) suspensions should be ashamed of themselves, and take the logs out of their own eyes before they go squinting at the specks in anyone else’s.


This morning, I’ve been writing to OMD:



Gavin was almost that pretty before he grew that astounding beard, you know.


Update: I don’t think I was sufficiently blatant above in linking the way Liberals stand up against arbitrary power above to the defeat in the House of Lords yesterday of the Labour Government’s plans to grossly extend the period in which people can be imprisoned without charge to 42 days, and from that to the way a Liberal Democrat was suspended without charge for 98 days, and then for some more time on top of that. So let me be unsubtle in placing that thought in your head.

Jennie draws our attention to the 42 days issue not being the only shameful thing in that bill, though, and refers us all to Chicken Yoghurt. This is a Labour scandal I’ve genteelly referred to once or twice myself as Crooked Coroners Corruption. Keep on about it to any MPs you know.




And in at number 36 on The Golden Ton for 2008-9.

Labels: Crooked Coroners Corruption, Ideas, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Music, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen, The Golden Ton

Magna Carta grudgingly received Bad King John’s Seal 793 years ago yesterday, and though our liberties have rolled forward across the eight centuries since, Bad King Gordon still begrudges even those granted in 1215. Magna Carta is worth remembering because it made two huge advances against absolute power; last week, the Labour Government shamefully cut away at two fundamental rights. Two? Yes. With everyone’s attention on 42 days, a just as shocking change got through with hardly anyone noticing. Then yesterday Gordon Brown celebrated Magna Carta’s anniversary by having George W Bush round, causing satire to curl up and die.

Go back to the middle of last week, when Gordon Brown was uttering the immortal words:

“It cannot be draconian and absolutely useless at dealing with the problem.”

Which pretty much sum up the Labour Government’s approach. They, and Gordon Brown in particular, confuse being authoritarian with being effective. They’ve redefined the use of ‘intelligence’ work to mean ‘stupid’. As long as they make a superhuman effort to exert rigid control over every aspect of our lives; as long as they make a point of listening to no-one else, from judges to police to the intelligence services to communities, except for occasional individuals they can misquote; as long as they shout that anyone who thinks they might have the wrong idea is “soft on terrorists”… Then Labour believe that what they’re doing must be working. They’re wrong. The bossier they get, the more desperately they scream, the more useless they become. Anyone with a brain can spot that – and it’s incredible that Mr Brown has such an absolute lack of self-awareness that he says out loud something so utterly absurd.

42 Is Not the Answer

Yet while there were shrieks of disbelief from the Opposition parties and an embarrassed silence, for once, from the Labour benches, Mr Brown still got his way. The one you know about is, of course, the Labour Government’s plan to lock up people with no evidence against them and without taking them to court for six weeks. Even though nothing like that amount of time’s ever been needed. Even though the cases of people being locked up without charge for four weeks that they claimed as proof were exposed as sexed-up reports of people who’d had evidence found against them in under a week and under a fortnight, respectively. Even though picking people out and locking them away outside the law is the best way possible to build up resentment and recruit new terrorists. Even though spinning that they’re “tough on terrorism” by tossing away rights Britain’s had for eight centuries is the sort of medieval totalitarianism that half the terrorists they’re scared of want to impose anyway.

So how did it happen? Well, it’s depressingly plain that however utterly and obviously rubbish the Labour Government is, Labour MPs can still be trusted to buckle under pressure and vote to tear up any rights they’re told to. A rebellion of over fifty Labour MPs crumbled to under forty. And then Mr Brown brought in his Chamber of Horrors of dodgy supporters from the far right, making one of the most unappetising cross-party alliances since the Hong Kong British passport-holders’ vote when Labour backed Norman Tebbit and the far right rebels of the Tory Party to keep every single immigrant out, in protest against Mrs Thatcher’s woolly centrist compromise and in contrast to the Liberal Democrat position which was, surprise, Liberal.

The Labour Government simply do not believe in the Rule of Law. They don’t think they law should apply to people equally – and they don’t think they’re subject to it. And just as they’re happy to cover up bribery scandals to help out governments even more illiberal than they are, they’ve brought bribery home. Even they must have been surprised by the storm of outrage over the shower of money, gongs and more money to Labour MPs, their pet causes, and even a billion of public money to get the DUP to do what they wanted. But you know, I wasn’t surprised by Labour resorting to bribery and corruption… Because the night before the vote on six weeks’ detention without evidence or trial, Labour stealthily got through a vote giving them the power to use bribery and corruption to pervert the course of justice. And with all the media looking the other way, as was surely their plan, I’ve not read a single article that’s made a fuss about it.

Crooked Coroners Corruption

If you find this conspiracy theory unlikely, consider the strange fact that the Labour Government has a whole bill coming up about coroners, but slipped a huge extension of Government control over coroners into a bill theoretically about terrorism, but with powers that the Government can use any time it likes and for any purpose it likes – nothing to do with terrorism at all. It should have caused outrage, but became just a ‘minor’ detail. In short, this disgusting fit-up lets the Government do away with the two biggest guarantees of our liberty: juries, and an independent judiciary. The Labour Government now has the power to order that juries don’t sit on coroners’ inquests – they incessantly quote opinion polls as justification for what they’re doing, but they won’t trust real people to make real decisions. The Labour Government now has the power to replace ‘unsuitable’ coroners with their own chosen puppets to stop people asking awkward questions about anything the Labour Government wants hushed up. And to make doubly sure that their appointed stooges make the ‘right’ decisions, the Labour Government now has the power to award them extra pay – after the verdict! Yes, the Labour Government has just legislated to place bribery and corruption at the heart of our legal system, and as this is about coroners’ inquests, they’ve armed themselves with the power, quite literally, to get away with murder.

If ever there’s something the Labour Government considers awkward or embarrassing, either to themselves, their dodgy business associates, their fellow corrupt, undemocratic regimes, or of course all three, if ever a death is involved the Government can now both cover it up and make sure that the ‘right’ result comes out of the inquest. That’s what happens when there are no juries and you get to pick your own crooked co-operative coroner. Rule of Law? Chuck it in the bin. Even more scarily, there’s nothing to say this is the end of Mr Brown’s plan for destroying the independence of the courts. Since the Bill of Rights in 1688, a judge can only be dismissed by an Address carried by a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Parliament, meaning no government is ever strong enough to do it by themselves, and even that doesn’t allow the government then to pick a tame replacement. To do to judges what they’ve just done to coroners, the Labour Government would only need a simple majority to dismiss that law, and after that a two-thirds majority would be replaced by… A Minister flicking a pen. Expect it in the next bill about ‘terrorism’.

Without the media spotlight on this issue, fewer than twenty Labour MPs opposed the Government’s plans for bribing and corrupting at will every inquest into a death.

Did She Die In Vain?

It’s easy to talk guff about Magna Carta. I wouldn’t swap 2008 for 1215; it didn’t bring in a lot of liberty for you or me, and while the King may have been forced to give way, it was by the barons rather than any sort of popular power. It was a first step towards democracy, but only by diffusing power from one person to a few dozen. Most of it’s even been repealed, but that’s not the point; the rights in it have been built on and expanded. There are all sorts of reasons why its reputation has grown over the centuries, but despite the fact that it was mainly about helping out the barons (and possibly even reasserting some rights from before the Norman Conquest), there are two vital elements that mean its reputation remains deserved. It’s important not because it has the best array of rights, but because it was first to codify two foundations of the Rule of Law, and we still have them. It set out the right of habeas corpus, so that the state can’t lock you up without charge and trial. Which the Labour Government wants to do away with. And even more importantly, it forms the kernel of constitutional law, with the country’s ruler for the first time being made subject to the law rather than above it.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that in the week of Magna Carta’s anniversary, Gordon Brown and the Labour Government have managed – by hook and by crook – to make Britain the country least bound by habeas corpus in the democratic world, and to put the state above the law in what’s surely the most crucial area of all law: life and death.

They deserve damnation.

Labels: British Politics, Corruption, Crooked Coroners Corruption, History, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, The Golden Dozen

Individual Muslims often complain that the press slavishly report the views of unelected, unaccountable “community leaders” – elderly men out of touch with the real world and unrepresentative of most of the people they claim to speak for. Today, many members of the Church of England will be similarly embarrassed by their unelected, unaccountable ‘community leader’ (though at least Muslim “leaders” don’t get free seats in Parliament to boss the rest of us around). The Archbishop of Canterbury’s nonsense has also allowed the Labour Government to pose as defenders of the Rule of Law, when they’re the main threat to it.

Gordon Brown Would Be a More Credible Defender of the Rule of Law If He’d Ever Done It Before…

When every newspaper and politicians of all three main parties line up to agree on something, it’s always wise to watch your liberties and check your wallet. For once, they’re right, though they may not all be right for the right reasons: defending the Rule of Law that treats everyone equally; hanging on to your power rather than let someone else make the laws; bashing Muslims… Take your pick as to the motivations of each commentator that shoots their mouth off.

Still, every now and again it’s good to be reminded that most of us agree on some of the fundamentals, though it’s off-putting that Gordon Brown’s defence of the Rule of Law was based not on everyone being held to account without fear or favour but on wrapping himself in the flag, and that David Blunkett this morning blamed “well-meaning liberals” when the threat is, in fact, from would-be theocrats, while Liberals are the people who seek to stop bullies and limit arbitrary power. Unlike Mr Blunkett, who glories in it. Well, let me take those as my ‘get out of being nice to Labour free card’, as this week of all weeks their posturing as defenders of the law should stick in their throats. Funny how they only do it when it’s their own interests being threatened, isn’t it? Rowan Williams wants an alternative centre of power to the Labour Party – and suddenly the Party of crooked coroners corruption spouts about the Rule of Law. Where was that concern, exactly, when they were introducing legislation to fix inquests at the desire of a Labour Minister, not an equal law? Where was it when they decided that bribing coroners was the way to get the best results? Labour are not defenders of the Rule of Law, because they don’t believe any law applies to them at all. It’s simply that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s attack on the Rule of Law coincides with an attack on the Rule of Labour, and that would never do.

The Reaction To Rowan Williams

If there’s one good thing that’s come out of all of this, it’s that most of the country is now as hostile about a mealy-mouthed religious buffoon as I usually am when listening to Vacuous Platitude for the Day. For another, it’s always a relief when, of all the different stances being taken, the person whose comment most nails the issue – setting out that the Rule of Law is all about equality before the law – is my own Party Leader. Step forward, Nick Clegg:

“Equality before the law is part of the glue that binds our society together. We cannot have a situation where there is one law for one person and different laws for another.
“There is a huge difference between respecting people's right to follow their own beliefs and allowing them to excuse themselves from the rule of law.”

Rowan Williams made a point of starting his speech with an in-depth and occasionally informative discussion of Sharia Law, perhaps in order to distract attention from his argument for special religious rights in general. I’m not going to discuss Sharia Law in detail, because it’s the more general threat to the Rule of Law that I wish to illuminate. I’m not a fan of Sharia Law; of all the theocratic legal systems operating in the world today, the strict Sharia implementation of Iran is the one I would least like to live under, because after they chopped my head off I wouldn’t live very long. However, that’s not a particularly likely legal code to be enforced on me or other people in Britain, so while much of the press coverage and political posturings are rooted in dislike of Sharia rather than support for the Rule of Law – most blatantly in today’s front page of the Daily Diana: ‘MUSLIM LAWS MUST COME TO BRITAIN,’ subtly accompanied in the completely separate secondary front-page story by a picture of Abu Hamza – my wariness is of what the more mealy-mouthed, ‘moderate’ religious power-grabbers like the Archbishop of Canterbury would do to the law if they got their beringed fingers on it. Well, any more than they already do by being seated in the House of Lords without anyone having the power to choose them or kick them out.

So what is there to worry about? First, that this is all an excuse for religion having more of a say, not through the ballot box but through ghettoisation and through holes in the law punched by unelected bishops. Both threats are serious. Leading Christian churches in Britain have form about their desire to get special treatment for themselves in the law and their even greater desire to discriminate against other people. I wrote last year about the Church of England’s sanctimonious hypocrisy as they begged for bigotry, about them backing Catholic bishops’ demands to punish vulnerable kids, and about just why everyone has an interest in saying discrimination in the public sphere just isn’t on. The threat of ghettoisation is different, but just as serious. It will entrench social division and inflame social – and racial – tensions, by increasing the extent to which communities lead separate lives and see each other as having special privileges. It will make pick-and-choose legal systems common and unworkable, as people go to whichever they think will get them the best result. And it gets into a terrible muddle about arbitration. I’ll come to the speech in a minute, but – as it’s so careful not to say anything definite – it can be taken to mean that people should have the right to choose religious authorities to go to as arbiters when the real courts ask parties to reach an agreement. The trouble with all his fuss about a “secular government” forbidding such things is that, er, it already happens under the current laws on civil arbitration. So was he just saying ‘carry on as is’ and making an incredible hash of it? To paraphrase a comment by Will Howells, why call that “Sharia Law” when it’s just voluntary arbitration – we don’t talk about ‘Judge Judy Law’. Then there are Islamic mortgages, for example, which are clearly a useful extension of choice that both buyer and lender are advantaged, to their lights, by agreeing to. The problem comes when parties disagree. So was Rowan Williams calling for entrenched, enforced, ghettoised religious power? He talks in his speech about choice and protection, but if some parallel legal system is set above a community, what idiot doesn’t consider that community pressure may make it impossible to refuse the ‘choice’ of a religious alternative – even if it judges on an entirely different basis to both sides’ equality before the law? That is not a route to voluntarism, but to theocracy, patriarchy and social exclusion.

That “Misunderstood” Interview

You might expect this sort of debate to have started in a rarefied atmosphere of academic rigour, religious conviction and revealed truth, conducted by holy men – funny, I must have missed the legions of women queuing up to support the Archbishop – and only to have flared up into unseemly accusations when the squalid press and politicians intruded.

Nah.

The Church of England bishops are just as arrogant and deceitful a bunch of spin doctors as anyone in the Labour Party. They’re just more rubbish at it. The key piece of spin coming from the Church establishment is that people haven’t read or listened to Rowan Williams’ interview, and if they have, then they haven’t read or listened to his speech. Yesterday afternoon, as the row was erupting over all the stupid things he’d said, rather than take responsibility for them we heard on the PM Programme a report that the Archbishop knew when he gave his interview that it would be “misunderstood”. No, you patronising pillock, we pea-brained commoners haven’t failed to grasp your mighty wisdom; we disagree with you. You aren’t “misunderstood”; you’re wrong. And then switching to an argument that you can’t criticise his interview if you haven’t seen his speech, all still before he gave the speech last night – yes, the oh so honest and holy Archbishop of Canterbury did an interview before he delivered a speech in order to spin the speech’s content, then complained that people aren’t entitled to complain because they’ve not read his speech. The flagrant dishonesty and buck-passing is pure Alastair Campbell.

It’s tough, then, that these days us proles can read it all on the Internet and see exactly what he said. Among many gobsmacking moments of moral self-serving and philosophical ineptitude, he said that an approach to law which simply stated:

“there's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts – I think that's a bit of a danger.”

It’s at moments like that that everyone else thinks your lot is a bit of a danger, Archbishop. The whole basis of the Rule of Law is that it treats everyone equally. You don’t get off through special courts for the clergy any longer. You don’t get let off a crime because it’s traditional, or your family does it, or God told you to do it. And the law still applies just the same to you if you’re a minister – whether a Church of England one or a Labour Government one, even though both groups want one law for the rest of us and their own special privileges for themselves. “Cultural loyalty versus state loyalty” is a false choice – obeying the Rule of Law is not about loyalty to the state. It is about everyone being treated the same, so they can choose to put their loyalties wherever they like.

It’s fascinating, too, to compare his speech to his spin. Another thing he said in his interview yesterday on The World At One, the spinning to set the tone, was that:

“Very often traditional forms of mediation can disadvantage vulnerable groups, such as women, within a community.
“I'm concerned about how much choice the weaker party would have in submitting to the governance of these alternative forums.”

So isn’t it an astonishing oversight when, delivering a speech of whatever he likes that runs to well over six thousand words, rather than being pressed (not very hard) by a journalist over a mere few minutes, he neglects to consider that? Then he claims, successfully diverting the attention to Sharia Law rather than his own special privileges, that “Nobody in their right mind I think would want to see” the sort of extreme punishments or attitudes to women that often characterise Sharia; but where do you draw the line, once you say religion or tradition are an equal legal path? What is the philosophical line between ‘nice theocracy’ and ‘nasty theocracy’, other than knowing ‘I am nice; they are reasonable; others are mad’? It’s striking that people who disagree with his view of religion are characterised as insane, just as people who disagreed with him were later characterised as ignorant. Bear in mind, then, that it’s this nice holy man who opened up his spin by name-calling. Add to that the arrogant pomposity and contempt for anyone else’s views when he claimed that a Sharia system was “unavoidable”. No room for argument, then; so much for the claim since then that he was merely “opening a debate”.

What his interview boiled down to was that he was advocating several established religions, as long as none of them were too ‘extreme’, which would protect his position as head of an established but tottering religion (no longer even the main Christian denomination). I’ve an alternative suggestion. How about none? Oh, and the really priceless contribution, yes, you heard right, was that it will “promote social cohesion” to have different laws for different ‘communities’. And black is white, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

The Bishop of Hulme described his boss on today’s edition of The World At One as “One of the finest minds of our nation” putting forward “a serious piece of academic work” and repeated the outrageously pompous lying spin that people who disagree with its assertions – you can hardly say it has a conclusion, if you’ve read it – haven’t read it.

If you read the speech, you’ll find that he assembles an enormous pile of learned texts and references in order to discuss them at length and allow himself as much internal contradiction as possible rather than bring the big picture into harsh focus. It poses as a serious piece of academic work, but rather than being so intelligent that it’s impenetrable to mere mortals, it’s an enormous ill-argued muddle with an impressive bibliography (well, it would have if he acted like a proper academic and listed it). In his repeated wish to take us back to a kindler, gentler Middle Ages, saying we can have all the cosiness of medieval theocracy without the unfortunate parts, I can’t decide if he’s deceitful, demented or merely naïve to the point of idiocy. If you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, can he not see the wood for the trees, or is this a Trojan Horse?

Civil and Religious Law in England: a religious perspective – The Speech

Like James Graham, I’ve read the Archbishop of Inconsistency’s entire speech – lest he carry on accusing his detractors of not wading through his arguments in all their glutinous obscurity – so I feel it’s well within my competence to take apart some of the more egregious platitudes there. Probably the most dangerous is that he tries to stand his whole argument on the claim that

“our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging,”

which is an obvious truism, and the syllogistic follow-up that

“secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity,”

which can only be the most dishonest of straw men. Who argues that we do have only one “mode of belonging”? Not the state, that’s for sure, and I’m as suspicious of the state as anyone. People are part of families, neighbourhoods, clubs, teams, countries, ethnic groups, workplaces and all manner of “social identities,” and liberal democratic states do very little to interfere with any of that, nor to pick just one identity and say that’s the only one that counts. But what about religious “community leaders” who claim that they speak on behalf of their congregations, as if anyone belonging to a church is of exactly the same mind, never mind what other “social identities” they might have? Absolutely.

What a “secular” state has to do is not meddle or boss people around – and I’m happy to give it a kicking when it does – but to act as a referee that treats everyone equally, allows everyone to choose their own social identities, and makes everyone subject to the same rules, rules that do not favour any one group, and that apply equally to the government and other established power. That is a key Liberal idea. Perhaps the first and most important. And it is no coincidence that most continental Liberal parties began as challenges to clerical power, while in Britain the Tories were seen as the party of the established church along with other established interests, while to this day the Liberal Democrats want to see the disestablishment of the Church of England.

Archbishop Williams touches on “The 'forced marriage' question” – but instantly elides it into

“custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority,”

dodging the issue of whether “custom and culture” might force people into accepting a binding religious authority. And that’s one of the biggest problems with his concept of “supplementary” legal systems. He pays great attention to the letter of quasi-legal structures, looking to give legal recognition to them within ‘safeguards’:

“allowing scope for a minority group to administer its affairs according to its own convictions… can hardly admit or 'license' protocols that effectively take away the rights it acknowledges as generally valid… no 'supplementary' jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights.”

What he fails to deal with is the effect of social pressure, that once an alternative legal system is in place for “a community,” whatever it happens to be, people will be forced to accede to it not by official sanction but by “custom and culture”. It’s back to those unelected, unaccountable “community leaders” holding sway, for which they will think Rowan Williams but few other people will. Every club has its own rules, but when you live your whole life among members of the same club, sub-letting the law to club officials and pretending that you have complete free choice which system to be ruled over is insanity. More mealy-mouthed windbaggery:

“making sure that we do not collude with unexamined systems that have oppressive effect or allow shared public liberties to be decisively taken away… Once again, there are no blank cheques.”

Once again, this offers no guarantees at all, and spot the caveats “unexamined” and “decisively”. He describes the issue of “the right” to inflict punishment on a convert as a “sensitive area” in terms “not only [of] legal practice but also in interfaith relations”. Ah, the good old days when the Church of England was founded on clear principles about conversion and punishment, that famous irregular verbiage: ‘I am a convert to the Church of England and the path of righteousness; you are a renegade papist heretic whose soul can only be purified by burning’. Religions love proselytising to convert others, but hate apostates who turn from them, in short. Tell us something we don’t know… And, again, this isn’t something he explores in any detail for fear of admitting that all religions believe their club is right and all the others are wrong. Which would be a bit of a problem for his argument, and for the continuing project espoused here for all the religious establishments to band together in support of each others’ hanging on to as much influence as possible to stop most of the population making their own decisions and as much authority as possible over their smaller and smaller bands of adherents.

He has two separate passages where he deals with the Enlightenment, backhandedly praising it in order to say that we don’t need it any more. To paraphrase one, he argues that we’ve outgrown the privilege and despotism that the Enlightenment railed against, so it’s safe to go back to Medievalism. In the other, he smugly attests that

“a universal principle of legal right requires both a certain valuation of the human as such”

is rooted in Christian theology, reducing the contribution of the Enlightenment to human rights to merely “a necessary wake-up call to religion,” and only mentioned in brackets at that! Mmm, do I smell martyr burning? Either way, you see, we don’t need such Enlightened concepts as a secular state that allows everyone a level playing field and stops religion being able to boss them about.

It’s that Enlightenment-founded level playing field that leads to his most self-contradictory wriggles, as he both admits what the Rule of Law is there to do and twists round to say it does the opposite. He recognises that

“The most positive aspect of this moment in our cultural history was its focus on equal levels of accountability for all and equal levels of access for all to legal process.”

But he immediately erects the straw man that

“it is not enough to say that citizenship as an abstract form of equal access and equal accountability is either the basis or the entirety of social identity and personal motivation.”

Well, that expands on the founding con-job on which his whole edifice of pretend argument totters, as I criticised above. No-one does say that citizenship is “either the basis or the entirety of social identity and personal motivation”. No-one. The whole point of equality under the law is that that permits you to find your own form of “social identity and personal motivation,” without all the many people and institutions who want to police your social identity and personal motivation being able to boss you about and force you to comply with their view of you. His absurd view of equality before the law is that it makes a level playing field into the limit of aspiration. The whole point of a playing field is that all the action takes place on top of it. He then goes on to pull out of a hat the brilliant idea that rather than “specific community understandings” being “'superseded' by this universal principle… they all need to be undergirded by it.” It’s unclear from his argument, twisting all over the place as it is, whether he’s now arguing that this is how it is – thereby contradicting his contention of a few paragraphs earlier – or whether he’s claiming that “specific community understandings” are necessary to make a “universal principle” mean anything. Either way, he’s talking rubbish, and when he solemnly condemns the way

“a narrowly rights-based culture fosters… a manically litigious atmosphere,”

it’s difficult not to tell him to take the beam out of his own eye, or the cross off his own BA uniform. What he is arguing for is not an end to a “rights-based culture,” but that the religious should have special rights and privileges from the top rather than going to the bother of wasting people’s time by suing for them.

Another straw man is that he pummels at great length is that having a right must not be the same as a legal compulsion to practise it or assist others in theirs. Well, gawrsh, what a revelation. I have a right to marry a woman (but not a man, thanks to the likes of the Archbishop), and to join the Church of England if I want to see my religion have a guaranteed voice on my laws (but not any other religion, nor none). I choose not to exercise those rights, strangely enough. He argues that one person’s right doesn’t mean you have a duty to help others exercise it, raising the case of medical professionals who don’t have to perform abortions, which again is perfectly fine.

“It is difficult to see quite why the principle cannot be extended in other areas,”

he continues… Then stops. Well, goodness me. Over six thousand words dancing around the issues in minute detail – which makes even my articles seem skimpy – yet he can’t find a sentence to give an example of where he thinks religious rights might encroach. Forgive me for being suspicious but, based on the voting and speaking record of Church of England bishops, I can only conclude that what he wants is not freedom from compulsion to assist in others’ rights, but freedom to prevent other people exercising their rights, with a religious right to ‘take offence’ allowing other people’s choices to be trampled by the pick-and-choose law.

Far from leading to the greater powers for religion that he is calling for, outside the Church of England mealy-mouthed, ill-thought-out, dangerous pronouncements like this will strengthen the case for it to be disestablished and the bishops removed from power over us in the House of Lords. Inside the Church of England, mealy-mouthed, ill-thought-out, dangerous pronouncements like this probably scare them off support for disestablishment, because if the C of E is left to its own devices it’ll mean they can no longer blame Parliament for interfering in their decisions and have to face up to their own prats like Rowan Williams taking responsibility.


6pm Update: The Archbishop of Canterbury is letting it be known through his spin doctors that he is “in shock” at the criticism. Apparently he’s also upset that several of the twenty-six other bishops given a free ride to the House of Lords with him have pointedly refused to back him. Lucky for him, then, that the Bishop of Hulme has added to the spin that people who disagree with his boss are variously ignorant and insane and that there’s no possibility that he’s wrong, this evening tarring every person who’s commented by saying we’ve made a “Knee-jerk reaction which has elements of racist overtones”. Well, that’s me and Bishop Michael Nazir Ali – not a combination I’ve previously typed – told.

Lib Dem Robert Shaw has also sprung to the Archbishop’s defence, calling me “childish” and “inaccurate”; as he forgot to link to this article, or to the Archbishop’s speech, why not read for yourself his in-depth rebuttal of my arguments [NB: he later deleted his article, I would like to think from belated shame though more probably through cowardice and his inability to answer the critical comments his piece drew. Obviously, it was easier for him to bear false witness, like the Archbishop’s other spin doctors and shills, by not dealing with a single one of my actual arguments, not quoting or linking to me, but merely mounting vacuous ad hominem attacks until he was caught out. As usual, self-styled ‘Christians’ can only defend their extreme views by vicious smears on their opponents and run away when their lies are exposed. Unlike such Pharisaic hypocrites, though, I was willing to link to his piece, because I believe the truth sets you free and so am not afraid of it. Ironically, the Archbisop himself has since deleted both his interview and his speech from his own website, too, as I found when much later clicking on my links above. I’ve left them in place to bear witness that I fairly quoted the people I criticise – even if they then try to cover up what they said]?

Saturday Morning Update: proclamations from the Bishop bunker are still trying to redefine what he said, but that’ll probably go on for a while; meanwhile, I’ve contributed to an ongoing Lib Dem Voice thread, which includes a round-up of Lib Dem blog links. There’s a good piece, too, by Matthew Parris in today’s Times.

Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Corruption, Crooked Coroners Corruption, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Nick Clegg, Religion, Speeches, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen

Remember the Labour Government’s plan to get rid of embarrassing inquests by removing juries, sacking independent coroners and replacing them with their own compliant coroners? I raised the issue at FPC tonight. Good news: unanimous opposition to Labour’s crooked ‘justice’, and a message from the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Home Affairs team to say they’re against it, too. Bad news: something I’d missed is that the new law allows “remuneration outside the usual pay-grade” for their hand-picked puppet coroners… And, get this – the Government will be able to hold back deciding on the variation until after the verdict. Bribe on delivery! There was a mixture of horror and astonished laughter around the Liberal Democrat Federal Policy Committee table this evening at this incredible piece of news that Labour’s gone the whole hog to banana-republic corruption. How did they ever think they’d get away with this one?

The position taken by the Liberal Democrats in Parliament – with a very strong view from the FPC passed on to them – is that they oppose the proposals on coroners in the ‘Counter-Terrorism Bill’ (though I may try pressing to make sure they’d oppose the whole Bill if this disgusting crooked coroners corruption stays in). There are already some terrorist and serious crime trials in which some evidence is given in camera for national security reasons, and the Lib Dem Parliamentary team will consider some carefully limited and particular circumstances in which the same might apply to coroners’ courts, but they believe there is no possible argument for trials or inquests being held totally in secret. So, the Liberal Democrats will oppose removal of juries, replacement of coroners, coroners’ courts doing their business in secret or any other measures that restrict public access to justice. But do please press any Lib Dem MPs or Peers you know to stiffen their resolve. If you have a Labour MP, you might also ask them just how ashamed they are.

Liberal Democrat Voice has also now taken up the crooked coroners corruption issue.

Labels: British Politics, Corruption, Crooked Coroners Corruption, FPC, Labour

News has just broken of Labour Government plans to take control of the legal system. Has the Minister of Justice gone raving mad, or have Labour decided to go all the way and make themselves a junta? The new ‘Counter-Terrorism Bill’ includes new powers to get rid of the two biggest guarantees of our liberty: juries, and an independent judiciary. If this disgusting law is passed, the Government will be able to order that juries don’t sit on coroners’ inquests, and the Government can replace ‘unsuitable’ coroners with their own chosen puppets. Rule of Law? Chuck it in the bin.

It’s appallingly plain that that Labour’s arrogant, corrupt attitude that no law should apply to them has got, unbelievably, worse under Mr Brown than it was even under Mr Blair (when I wrote an article on their contempt for the Rule of Law that, for me, is probably the best article I’ve yet written on here). Two baronesses (both one-time Leaders of our party in the House of Lords) immediately spring to mind: Shirley Williams attacking biased legislation when “the Rule of Law becomes the Rulers’ Law” and Nancy Seear saying that

“If my party should abandon the independence of the judiciary, I would promptly abandon my party.”

I trust the Liberal Democrats will hammer this shocking piece of totalitarian corruption.

What’s the plan? Simple. If this is passed, the Home Secretary can do away with juries and replace coroners with their own nominees at will, not just in “terrorism” cases – though they’ve sneaked it into a ‘Counter-Terrorism Bill’ because they think people will be afraid to vote against that. But no, this new law has nothing to do with terrorism. Government ministers will be able to do this on grounds of “national security” or “public interest”… Which are such wide categories that they can do whatever they like, whenever they like.

Just think about that for a second.

If ever there’s something the Labour Government considers awkward or embarrassing, either to themselves, their dodgy business associates, their fellow corrupt, undemocratic regimes, or of course all three, if ever a death is involved the Government can now both cover it up and make sure that the ‘right’ result comes out of the inquest. That’s what happens when there are no juries and you get to pick your own crooked co-operative coroner.

The World This Weekend today reported that a long-running case in which the police shot a member of the public has hit the buffers because the coroner has ruled that no finding can be made, because the police and Government are withholding vital information. This is nothing to do with terrorism – it might be about drugs, it might not, the vital information has been censored, so who can tell – but does anyone think the Labour Government would let a jury and coroner embarrass them in this way if they could get rid of both of them with a flick of their fingers? Or stop a jury and independent coroner ruling on, say, the death of Jean Charles de Menezes? You can just hear the Home Secretary’s phone ringing with Ken Livingstone on the line calling for another cover-up to protect his crony Ian Blair, can’t you? Accountability? Transparency? Honesty? Bugger off.

If this gets through, how long can it be before the Labour Government proposes ‘a minor tidying-up extension to cover loopholes in the law’ by saying they should be able to get rid of juries and parachute in Labour-favouring judges to all criminal trials? Since the Bill of Rights in 1688, a judge can only be dismissed by an Address carried by a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Parliament, meaning no government is ever strong enough to do it by themselves, and even the Bill of Rights does not allow the government then to pick a tame replacement (thanks, as for so many things, to the late Conrad Russell and his An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism, from the chapter on the founding principle of Liberalism, ‘Controlling Executive Power’). But, because we have no written constitution, this Labour Government would only need a simple majority to dismiss that law, and after that a two-thirds majority would be replaced by… A Minister flicking a pen.

It would be impossible to trust the courts, if the Labour Government could choose every verdict, and cover it up. It would be impossible, impossible to stop the Labour Government doing whatever the hell they liked and break the law – as they have, again and again – literally with impunity, if the Labour Government could choose every verdict, and cover it up.

It would be impossible ever to rebuild public trust in the Rule of Law or the political system if this goes through and the Labour Government could choose, quite literally, to get away with murder.


Update: The BBC website now has a story summarising the report on The World At One, and James Graham has also now written about the issue.

Labels: British Politics, Corruption, Crooked Coroners Corruption, Labour, Stupid Ideas