As I was writing my post "Slip-sliding away", in which I argued that Britain was slip-sliding towards arbitrariness and injustice and leading the world towards lawlessness, Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, Britain's internal security organization, was telling the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia something similar.
In her interview with La Vanguardia, reported in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph ("Spy chief: We risk a police state"), Mrs Rimington warned that the British government was exploiting the fear of terrorism to erode civil liberties and thereby risking creating a police state.
Britain is slip-sliding towards arbitrariness and injustice. Four years ago, a British couple, Mark and Nicky Webster, were suspected of child abuse. They were forcibly separated from their three children by order of the court, which subsequently put up the children for adoption. However, last week an appeal court judge decided that the couple may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.
In a just society, the court would have reunited them with their children and would have offered them compensation for the suffering they have had to endure for no reason whatsoever. But not in this case. The eminent judge decided that adoptions were "irreversible" and refused to make an exception for the Websters. The reason? The finality of adoption was far more important than natural justice! So, the Websters will never be reunited with their children.
If this had happened in another country, say Russia or Burkina Faso, the media in Britain would have had a field day, with patronizing cries of "barbarousness", "callousness", "kangaroo courts", "banana republics", and so on. But it has happened here, in "Great" Britain, and I hear no cries from anybody other than those of the distressed parents.
In fact, Britain is not just sliding into arbitrariness – it is leading the world towards lawlessness. Today, the International Commission of Jurists, a non-governmental organization which promotes the observance of the rule of law and the legal protection of human rights, accused Britain and the United States of "actively undermining" international law by using the public's fear of terrorism to introduce measures which are illegal, such as torture, detention without trial and enforced disappearance.
Little by little, everything the British say they treasure is being frittered away: trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, policing by consent, parliamentary democracy, and now the rule of law, soon they will all be history. The sad thing is, nobody is taking these away from British: they are dumping their rights and civil liberties all by themselves.
Only a truly great nation is capable of such truly fantastic feats!
