Democracy does not guarantee rights
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.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Boris Johnson’s vision: tabloid mob rule
- Has the “Human Rights movement” failed?
- Reverting to type
- Jail for poor taste, and May and ‘autism’
- Protect your rights — vote the Tories out
