Criminal Justice Bill

Josie Appleton savages UK Home Secretary David Blunkett’s Criminal Justice Bill:

Defendants’ rights matter in a civilised society, which has a particular view of the individual and the state - because we don’t know if the defendant did it; because he values his liberty; and because any of us could end up on the wrong side of the dock one day. Blunkett seems to treat ‘defendant’ as synonymous with ‘criminal’, and ‘justice’ as synonymous with ‘conviction’. He needs to get his definitions straight.

From http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DDC4.htm

This bill strikes me as another example of Labour’s infamous - and flawed - ‘What Works’ approach to everything. ‘What Works’ begs the question: ‘what works to what end?’ and the ends themselves reflect certain values or ideological commitments, the very kinds of commitments New Labour’s so-called pragmatists eschew. (There is a parallel here between this and Labour’s attitude toward the euro: an essentially political decision is dressed up as nothing more than a technical issue of five tests, thereby (they hope) sucking all the controversy out of it while simultaneously attempting to exclude as many (non-economist) people as possible from any kind of debate. Move along, nothing to see here, etc.)

I’ve always thought that David Blunkett was all mouth and no trousers, appearing to believe that the degree to which he is prepared to trample all over civil liberties is the only true measure of his commitment to tackling crime. Yet he seems not to be aware that one such civil liberty - the right of self-defence - exists precisely to do just that. It’s just that he wants to reserve the right to use force to a tiny minority (the police) who are utterly inadequate to the task of defending people’s lives, well-being and property in every conceivable hour of need. The rest of us are asked merely to be passive victims of crime, in order that, in Blunkett’s Brave New World, we are not to be confused with the thugs who attack us. This, combined with police apathy toward certain kinds of crime - property crime, for instance - creates a perfect environment for the petty criminal, an environment in which our only real ‘defence’ is an insurance claim.

(And doesn’t it really piss me off to see that the asshats who make these decisions are now protected by concrete barriers and police with automatic weapons. So long as they’re safe - that’s all that matters. Wankers.)