This Telegraph piece by John Mortimer is a characteristic mixture of good ideas and bad ideas, of humbug and whatever is the opposite of humbug. I’m sure that all White Rose readers would (a) agree with that characterisation, but (b) argue fiercely about which bit is humbug and which not. Which is the whole idea of this blog. Nevertheless I’d file it under White-Rose-relevant, so here are a few sample paragraphs to make that point:
So, through much of my life, I have witnessed what seemed to be a slow but measurable improvement in the administration of the law. That improvement was to continue, strangely enough, only until the advent of a Labour Government that seemed to have been born without a single civil libertarian instinct.
So now jury trials are to be diminished, previous convictions will be allowed in evidence so defendants will be convicted on what they did in the past, the presumption of innocence has been severely dented and the great principle that a guilty act must contain a guilty intention will be held not to apply in rape cases.
The right to habeas corpus has been denied in certain cases, where suspects may now be held in prison without the hope of trial or charges levelled against them. Just as shamefully, Tony Blair seems about to agree that British subjects should be subjected to what is a parody of a fair trial in Guantánamo Bay. Our great constitutional liberties, struggled for down the centuries, are now being denied.
The righteous wrath of Rumpole will be raised by the intention of the Home Secretary to remove sentencing from judges and hand it over to the vote-hungry hands of politicians anxious, as judges are not, to score political points and please the newspapers.
And so on and so forth. Read at will. Agree, and disagree.
Yes, vintage Mortimer. Pity he prays in aid Lord Denning. Denning’s attitude to the role of the courts is more part of the problem than part of the solution.
It was he, after all, who opined that it would have been better had the Birmingham 6 been hanged rather than being alive to embarrass the justice system by having their unfair convictions quashed. Definitely a Home-Officey Blunketty sort of sentiment that.
As Master of the Rolls he was so zealous in pursuit of “justice” over certainty in law–read: unpredictable–that one could never tell from week to week which part of the civil law might next be rendered incoherent. With a vast, ramshackle, claptrap-driven Criminal Justice Act every year, the government is adopting this approach–on a larger scale–in the criminal realm.