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Peace protester Brian Haw
Tory hopeful Jesse Norman |
The laws are there for us all
Jesse Norman argues that the government
is undermining our very being with its stifling of our rights
to protest
CAMDEN residents are a well-read bunch, so they will instantly
recall A Man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s play (and film)
about Sir Thomas More. More is being betrayed. Suspecting this,
his impetuous son-in-law Willaim Roper demands that he have
the man arrested. But More refuses: the man has done nothing
illegal, and until he does he – nay, even the devil himself
– is entitled to the protection of the law.
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of
law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through
the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil
turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all
being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from
coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s –
and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man
to do it – do you really think you could stand upright
in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil
benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
As More reminds us, even the devil is entitled to due process
of law – not to be detained for any long period without
charge; if charged, to know on what grounds; if tried, to be
tried in open court by a jury of ordinary citizens; if convicted,
to know the sentence; and to be treated fairly and humanely
throughout. This is British law, and British justice.
But what happens when the full majesty of the law is being used
to squash opposition, to stifle dissent, to prevent debate,
or even simply to spare those in high office from embarrassment?
I raise this question because evidence of the cowardice, illiberality
and sheer bloody mindedness of this government is piling up
all around us.
Last week two ladies from Yorkshire – belonging to Grandmothers
for Peace, that subversive group, um, dedicated to global…
er… reconciliation – became the first people to be
arrested under the government’s latest anti-terror legislation,
the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. They now face up
to a year in prison if convicted. What serious and organised
crime had these devilish old biddies committed? They walked
15ft across the sentry line at the entrance to a US military
base near Harrogate. Quelle horreur!
On the other hand, maybe that’s all very well, you might
think. Sure, it was an over-the-top reaction, but these grannies
are no slouches when it comes to protesting. Give them 15ft
and pretty soon they’ll be crawling all over our missiles,
crocheting the wires, needlepointing slogans… you’ll
never hear the end of it. They had, and still have, every right
to protest outside the base. The US and British armed forces
have a war on terror to fight, and one has to draw the line
somewhere.
But where to draw the line? That’s the question. Take Milan
Rai and Maya Evans, who were arrested last year at the Cenotaph
in Whitehall, for reading out the names of UK soldiers and civilians
killed in the war in Iraq. Shades of Griff Rhys-Jones’s
Constable Savage here, perhaps, the copper who allegedly brought
117 trumped-up and ludicrous charges—against the same man?
Or consider Brian Haw, the man whom the government is trying
to evict from Parliament Square—for putting up signs criticising
the war in Iraq. Or, and here we approach the Holy of Holies,
what about Walter Wolfgang, the 80-year-old who was physically
picked up by the heavies, frogmarched out of the Labour Party
conference last year and then charged under the Prevention of
Terrorism Act – for heckling Jack Straw. The Prevention
of Terrorism Act? For heckling?
I could go on, but you get the point. It’s clear the government
has no idea what to do. It’s scared to death: of losing
its own credibility, of upsetting the US, and of being criticised
for weakness. So its default setting is to wield the sledgehammer
at every nut, as it were, that it can see.
But the underlying issues are deadly serious. As Sir Thomas
More reminds us, we are a nation embedded in and defined by
the rule of law.
It is this that permits our democracy, our institutions, our
cultural conversation to flourish. Inhibit that conversation,
and you undermine a fundamental British value – indeed,
you start to erase what it is to be us.
What can we do to restore the balance? We can joke about it,
and greater wits than mine have done so since the time of Gillray,
Hazlitt and Hogarth. Indeed we must joke about it, we must embarrass
the government into change – or the joke will be on us.
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