Is mankind's highest ideal to live without incident or
adventure? And if so, when did this begin?

We are losing a generation of young people to gang violence. An incoming Tory government will have to start from scratch if it is going to make a difference.

As Gavin Knight notes in ”How to really hug a hoodie”, gang culture is increasingly plaguing deprived inner-city communities, and for too long we have seen policies implemented to tackle a problem neither measured nor understood. If the Conservatives win the next election, they will have an opportunity to transform our approach to gangs and youth violence. But how can this be done, and will they be brave enough to do so?

Read more at The Centre for Social Justice.

I spent this morning in the public gallery of one of Wycombe’s Magistrates’ courts. What I saw could have been a study for the Centre for Social Justice.

What I witnessed today included the following cases (I dispense with the details for obvious reasons):

• Casual theft by a man with a methadone problem.
• Taking a vehicle without consent.
• Antisocial behaviour by a person with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, currently trying to turn their life around through work and treatment.
• Theft of a phone.
• Sending grossly offensive text messages — and they really were foul — by a young man to the mother of his 5-month-old child over a custody disagreement.
• Speeding to escape an abusive husband.

In just three hours, I saw the consequences of family breakdown, educational failure, worklessness, drugs and debt. The court saw a constant stream of human tragedy.

I imagine it will do so every day this week, as will every other in the land.

What next for the young father who is thrashing around, not knowing how to be a good dad, earning just £900 a month? What next for the person on methadone, stealing to cover a gap in benefit payments? What next in the heart-rending case of the young person aged 22 years, with two simple jobs, going through treatment for alcoholism, who narrowly escaped prison today?

Enter the Centre for Social Justice, which promotes practical, grass-roots solutions to social problems where the state may have failed. Of particular relevance is this recent speech by Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP:

While crime – particularly the fear of crime – impacts us all, it is most acute in our poorest areas. The middle classes fear crime but the most burgled, assaulted, raped and the most impacted by anti-social behaviour are the people who live on these estates.

These communities, typically dominated by social housing, are characterised by several common themes:

• Entrenched breakdown of the family.
• Generational worklessness.
• Poor education.
• Widespread addiction to drugs and alcohol.
• Severe personal debt.
• And violent street gangs.

People in such areas are five times more likely to be a victim of robbery than people in our wealthiest areas. They are twice as likely to be victims of violence, and other common crimes.

They are also five times more likely than their wealthier counterparts to perceive high levels of anti-social behaviour.

And it is from these communities that many offenders also originate.

The speech outlined an agenda for reform, covering:

• Courts and sentencing
• Police reform
• Prison reform

The state is failing those most in need and we are all paying the price: I certainly do not believe the costs recovered from these people of meagre means covered the facility, the magistrates, the clerk to the court, the solicitors, the probation officer, the usher, the security staff and the administrators. This is not even to begin to count the social and material loss we all suffer from the brokenness in these lives, or the cost to come.

Something must be done to stem this river of misery, and it is not the same old top-down stuff.

You can find the full report here.

Via Police cannot be trusted with fines, magistrates warn – Telegraph:

Police cannot be trusted to hand out summary justice and will act as “judge and jury” if given powers to issue more on-the-spot fines, magistrates have warned.

In an extraordinary attack, the Magistrates’ Association said it is a “certainty” that officers will misuse powers because they cannot be “relied on” to handle them appropriately.

The comments have been made as part of the Magistrates’ Association response to the Government’s plans to allow police to issue £60 fixed penalties for careless driving.

Police have been accused of increasingly dealing with offences using on-the-spot fines as an easy way to hit the government’s crime targets.

Magistrates are worried that the number of offences now dealt with in this way is keeping some serious offenders out of the courts.

However, police leaders insisted that the use of the fines, which has risen sharply under Labour, helped to reduce paperwork and free up officers’ time.

It is a pity this story has been positioned as an attack on the police and a great pity if it is intended to be one. There is a legal and political principle at stake, a principle which was overturned when summary justice was first reintroduced in England and a principle which is hampered by an excessive reliance on a particular clause of Magna Carta:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

This principle is that the Rule of Law requires due process. As Hayek put it in The Constitution of Liberty (p191, emphasis mine):

We have now concluded the enumeration of the essential factors which together make up the rule of law, without considering those procedural safeguards such as habeas corpus, trial by jury, and so on, which, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, appear to most people as the foundation of their liberties. English and American readers will probably feel that I have put the cart before the horse and concentrated on minor features while leaving out what is fundamental. This has been quite deliberate.

I do not wish in any way to disparage the importance of these procedural safeguards. Their value for the preservation of liberty can hardly be overstated. … Judicial forms are intended to insure that decisions will be made according to rules and not according to the relative desirability of particular ends or values. All the rules of judicial procedure, all the principles intended to protect the individual and to secure impartiality of justice, presuppose that every dispute between individuals or between individuals and the state can be decided by the application of general law. They are designed to make the law prevail, but they are powerless to protect justice where the law deliberately leaves the decision to the discretion of authority. It is only where the law decides – and this means only where independent courts have the last word – that the procedural safeguards are safeguards of liberty.

And so we come to the heart of the matter: Labour governments — and the left generally — do not share with Hayek, with liberals and with Conservatives an understanding of the Rule of Law. Witness for example Labour’s class law which was celebrated by one cabinet minister as “socialism in one clause”¹. If I put my childhood in its context, it is clear that I would have benefitted from advantageous access to public services, coming from a working-class background. However, since I achieved social mobility, my children would now suffer for it. The absurdity of such a situation should be plain: socially-mobile individuals would disadvantage their children. The rational choice would be to make no attempt to advance oneself.

It would be too easy to rant and rave at the absence of procedural safeguards, particularly when justice in our country has been reduced to summary fines from council officials in this case for crumbs falling from a baby’s mouth², but there is a more fundamental problem: a battle of ideas which is barely understood — the battle over ideas such as liberty, justice and equality.

Those of us who believe a good society is built on responsibility face two groups of opponents, neither of which appreciate the secondary effects of their actions:

• Those well-intentioned but ill-informed people who would punish wrongdoing too expediently.
• Those well-intentioned but uncomprehending people who trust authority to solve society’s problems.

Certainly, people should not drive carelessly. Certainly, they should not litter. But the issue is not that the police cannot be trusted to issue summary fines, but that summary fines rely on an understanding of the Rule of Law, liberty and justice which can only serve to undo what social progress we have made.

There has been a cultural revolution which has produced an expectation that the state should use expedient coercion to extract good behaviour from a resentful and sullen population. We need a better way and it is well-known: opportunity, responsibility and security from others — a return to classic English liberty.

1. “Every public body will have to take class background into account when making decisions under radical new legislation unveiled by the Government today.” [↩]
2. Thankfully, this fine was overturned in court, but what a farce. If you think it isolated, look at this map of English liberty or read Raab’s The Assault on Liberty. [↩]

The Court of Appeal has ruled that a criminal trial can take place at Crown Court without a jury for the first time in England and Wales.

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, made legal history by agreeing to allow the trial to be heard by a judge alone.

It is the first time the power has been used since it came into force in 2007.

…

Lord Judge described trial by jury as a “hallowed principle” of British justice, but said the Criminal Justice Act 2003 did allow a trial to he heard by a judge alone in certain circumstances.

…

But Liberty director of policy Isabella Sankey said: “This is a dangerous precedent.

“The right to jury trial isn’t just a hallowed principle but a practice that ensures that one class of people don’t sit in judgement over another and the public have confidence in an open and representative justice system.

“What signal do we send to witnesses if the police can’t even protect juries?”

via BBC NEWS | UK | First trial without jury approved.

The opening panel discussion at the Convention on Modern Liberty is now available online. Dominic Grieve speaks passionately and encouragingly from 3:55 on the finite limits on state power, social justice, quality of life and British collusion in torture:

A great speech from a great man.

The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

via Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms | Philip Pullman – Times Online .

The Convention on Modern Liberty took place today. Shami Chakrabarti’s introductory speech was passionate, as it should be in the circumstances.

The complaints against liberty in Britain today included:

• British complicity in extraordinary rendition
• The long period of pre-charge detention
• Control orders
• Extradition to the United States without equal reciprocal arrangements
• The National Identity Register and ID card scheme
• Intrusive surveillance powers
• The DNA database, which fundamentally blurs the line between guilt and innocence
• Erosion of the right to protest
• Erosion of the right to public assembly — the police can now impose conditions on a meeting of as few as two people
• The criminalisation of trespass
• Erosion of the right to silence
• Erosion of trial by jury
• Withdrawal of the public interest defence for whistleblowers
• Allowing evidence of bad character
• Changes to double jeopardy
• The use of force by bailiffs

Dominic Grieve QC MP spoke with passion and commitment, a great encouragement which was consolidated later by his Chief of Staff, Dominic Raab, author of The Assault on Liberty. David Davis MP spoke powerfully, of course, in defence of freedom.

Despite some skepticism in the hall, I believe we can rely on the Conservatives to restore our historic freedoms.

The left, however, are in disarray. I attended a session on the left and liberty, at which an early and striking observation was the absence of participation by the government, despite the active contributions of Conservative front benchers.  The speakers rapidly acknowledged a charge sheet on which authoritarianism and a benign view of the state are levelled against them, but in no time at all, they had skipped lightly past the long list of dangerous infractions against liberty to decry the free market, on which they focussed.

At least New Labour were roundly condemned.

I understand the police nicely rounded off the day by using anti-terrorist powers on two men standing quietly outside the venue with a banner.

Today, I listened to David Cameron introduce Chris Grayling for his first major speech as shadow home secretary. It was great stuff: heartfelt, tough and full of measures that will be welcomed.

In his introduction, David Cameron explained the need for substantive solutions to serious problems. He discussed Conservative plans for police reform, local accountability and fixing our broken society. David was clear that the task of the Home Office will be to fight crime, not to be a social service; that the police are to be a force. The matter is simple: the Home Office will fight crime while other departments fight the causes of crime.

Some highlights of Chris Grayling’s speech:

• Labour has been soft on crime, and soft on the causes of crime.
• Violent acts are routine yet met with police cautions for expediency.
• We must deal with the wrongs against society: much behaviour is not “anti-social”, it is criminal.
• We need “to find a 21st century alternative to what would once have been a clip around the ear from the local bobby.” 
• The police will be able to ground young people caught making trouble in their communities.
• Licensing laws must be changed to challenge public binge drinking.
• An end to the inappropriate system of cautions.
• More police on the streets through reduced bureaucracy.
• The police will get more freedom but they will have to deliver in return.

Text in full here.

In the Times, further light is thrown on the De Menezes inquest by Tom Luce, who chaired the Fundamental Review of Coroners and Death Certification in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (2001-03):

The prohibition in Rule 42 of the Coroners’ Rules on framing any verdict “in such a way as to appear to determine any question of (a) criminal liability on the part of a named person, or (b) civil liability” means that except in cases where a death is caused by an unknown and unidentified assailant, the unlawful killing verdict is rarely if ever legitimately available.

I thoroughly recommend the article. As in the case of Damian Green, we find a case for radical reform of the law.

read more | digg story

Thanks to the Jeremy Vine Show over lunch:

Spitting, swearing and aggressive behaviour will be BANNED from ‘Proud Preston’.
…
Anyone who flouts the tough new code could be arrested or fined by patrolling police officers or council enforcers.

Council officers can fine people £75 for offences like littering, while police can give out fixed penalty notices of up to £80 for a range of offences.

Of course the target behaviour is unacceptable, but do we really want to replace personal responsibility with summary justice for minor misdemeanours? Callers to the show overwhelmingly thought so…

Surely we can do better?

read more | digg story