Jack Straw (currently the Justice secretary in the British government) wrote in yesterday’s Guardian that his government has done more to reinforce civil liberties than any since the Second World War, and that the age before wasn’t a golden age of liberty, but of “informal ‘judges’ rules’, the absence of statutory protections for suspects, ‘fitting up’, egregious abuses of power, miscarriages of justice, arbitrary actions by police, security and intelligence agencies, phone tapping without any basis in statute law or any legal protection for the citizen whatsoever, gaping holes where there should have been parliamentary scrutiny”. This is all fair enough, but what gives his argument away is the last-but-one paragraph:
And there is of course an ultimate check on executive power - democracy. Talk of Britain sliding into a police state is daft scaremongering, but even were it true there is a mechanism to prevent it - democratic elections. People have the power to vote out administrations which they believe are heavyhanded.
The reality is that democracy tends to guarantee the things that matter only to the majority, which are usually related to taxes and services. In fact, democracy is as likely to guarantee human rights abuses for a disliked or untrusted minority as the opposite, because politicians will do what pleases the majority (or seems to by what appears in the papers they buy), and allows the legislature to quickly respond to whatever appears to cause public vexation, even if that involves trampling on others’ rights. Seriously, this phenomenon was first identified by Thomas Jefferson more than 200 years ago, and yet we have Jack Straw wheeling out such nonsense in a centre-left newspaper in 2009? While written constitutions and bills of rights do not guarantee human rights either, as we have seen since 2001, they do prevent the most egregious violations being passed in a moment of collective outrage by a simple majority vote.
While it’s true that the Labour government has passed the Human Rights Act, this act does not include a judicial check on Parliament, which is what a written constitution delivers, and this government has used get-outs on a number of occasions. No type of constitution guarantees human rights, but ours is the worst for allowing the legislature to sweep them away.
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“While written constitutions and bills of rights do not guarantee human rights either, as we have seen since 2001” Since long before that, actually. For example, the constitution of the U.S.S.R. guaranteed all sorts of rights; unfortunately, there was no independent juiciary to enforce them. One of the traditional arguments against democracy, especially direct democracy as in ancient Athens and other Greek city states, was that it was arbitrary, unjust and tyrannical with no control on the will of the majority.
The electoral registers for Sunderland North contain incorrect voter registration numbers printed in the columns alongside voters names. Sometimes the Registers are printed with the same error numbers year after year, one particular period from 1958 to 1961 shows that these numbers cannot be common human error as during this period the housing estate was covered by two separate electoral wards and both of these wards show the same and also similar printed error numbers for this one particular housing estate. nearly all of the electoral registers that I have looked at dating from about 1950 to 1972 contain errors, the placed error numbers probably continue up to the early 1990’s.