One of the distinguishing features of the Labour Party has always been its staunch commitment to civil liberties. The reasons were clear. We understood the nature of power and the potential for abuse by those who wield it; we also understood the role of the state and the inherent drive to extend control unless very strong preventions and safeguards were in place. We knew that those who suffer most at the hands of the state are those who, for whatever reason, have least power. We also recognised that the balance should always be struck on the side of the accused in criminal trials because the might of the state inevitably meant there could never be equality of arms.
Our promise was that when power came into our hands we would not forget those truths. That promise is looking very frayed around the edges. Since 1997, the erosion of civil liberties which we decried during the Conservative years has carried on, sometimes in an even higher gear. It is causing despair for those of us who work at the coal face. At first we all assumed it was part of a desperate need to show that the new government was not limp-wristed. We, too, could be tough on crime. However, it soon became clear that the ground was shifting because we had decided that there should no worshipping of false gods. Every principle should be revisited. The mantra of reform became ‘whatever works’. Clinging to shibboleths from the past can indeed be a form of conservatism, but in criminal justice the ‘whatever works’ motto would have warmed the heart of every totalitarian from Kiev to the tip of Latin America.
Dispensing with bothersome jury trials in many assault, burglary, and drug cases makes perfect sense if you take your advice from managers, the graduates of business schools or the caravan of commercial lawyers who now wander the corridors of power. Savings of £120 million pounds were the original justification, along with the admitted desire to stop guilty people abusing the system. The idea that the purpose of a trial is to determine whether people are indeed guilty seemed to be lost in the mire of hype.
Victims are invariably hijacked to excuse every shameful reduction of an accused person’s rights. And with each new incursion comes the cynical claim that it will prevent rape or lead to the capture of paedophiles. What in fact will happen is an increase in wrongful convictions and further alienation by those sections of our communities which suffer most when the police are given greater rein.
Plans are now afoot to put an accused person’s previous convictions before the jury in the course of a trial to show the kind of rascal he is. We are also set to abandon the double jeopardy rule so that we can retry those who are acquitted if we do not like the first verdict. ‘Why not if it leads to more guilty people being convicted?’ is the refrain. One reason, dear comrades, is that we shall have ugly tabloid campaigns for retrials every time some reviled soul walks free.
In the brave new world of modernised Labour, principles are too readily treated as though they have about them the whiff of dogma and have to be thrown into the dustbin of history. It is as if our masters have decided that in these post-modernist times not only is ideology dead, but the state has miraculously become benign. How could it be otherwise when we have our hands on the tiller? I do not attribute ill-intent to our friends in the Home Office. I simply think they too quickly forget what we all know. Civil liberties are the mortar which bind the structure of the justice system and they are the means by which we maintain the trust of the people. The cost of what is being done will be enormous in the long run and will not be counted in pounds.