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Forum - Opinion in the CNJ
 

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.

• Jesse Norman is Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, and Conservative Candidate for Camden Town with Primrose Hill in the May council elections
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