Shami Chakrabarti recently had an excellent piece in the Telegraph: So much freedom lost...and on my watch. In it she gives a brief overview of some of the most significant ways that our civil liberties in the UK have been eroded during the Blair years.

Most of what Shami writes was all too familiar to me, however this line caught my attention:

"The fair criminal trial with the presumption of innocence at its heart is possibly Britain's greatest-ever export. Yet Mr Blair believed this was 19th-century nonsense that belonged 'in the time of Dickens'."

I did a quick search and this refers to something Blair said during a 2005 conference speech:

"We are trying to fight 21st century crime - ASB, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime - with 19th century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens. "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. "Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. "But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. "It means a complete change of thinking. "It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. "It means deciding whose come first.

That's classic Blair: appearing to support a concept whilst attempting to redefine it out of existence. At first reading he appears to support the right to a fair trial, however look more carefully and he is saying that the need to successfully prosecute the guilty outweighs the need to protect the innocent.

So in an attempt to defend the majority Blair is prepared to jettison the rights, liberties and protection of the few who might be wrongly accused.

Except that it isn't just the few. Although only a small proportion of the population will ever be wrongly accused we are all at risk of this happening. The whole point of the "innocent unless proven guilty" assumption is to protect everyone equally. Human rights are universal, not a commodity to be traded away.

Blair's mistaken attempts to protect the innocent majority have actually put us at greater risk by undermining our justice system. Under his watch we've seen an increasing use of "summary justice", attempts to curtail the right to trial by jury, scrapping of double jeopardy in some cases and the admission of hearsay evidence in criminal trials.

Blair's priority has been to attempt (unsuccessfully) to protect the majority - and if an unfortunate minority suffer unfairly, so be it. It's just "collateral damage".

Dickens was, of course, a great supporter of social reform. If the right to a fair trial is a Dickensian value then I say we need more Dickensian values.


Blair civil liberties UK politics ukpolitics

Labels: civil liberties