"Justice" versus Liberty

The Home Office is being split up in order to give even greater prominence to the attempts to scare us into surrendering the very liberty that is allegedly under such grave threat from the non-existent "global terror network", especially "Al-Qaeda".

In fact, the only "global terror network" is the one directed from the American Enterprise Institute and related institutions or organisations, and including (among others) Likud, Forza Italia, the Partido Popolar, the renaissance of the Australian Liberal Party under John Howard, the Irish Progressive Democrats, the courts of Sarkozy (or, indeed, Royal) and Merkel, the governing faction in Canada, ACT New Zealand, and, of course, the New Labour Project.

That last includes New Labour ordinarily so called, centred, of course, on Blair, who hates the Labour Party certainly more than anyone else alive, and probably more than anyone else ever. But it also includes, among others, the Cameroons (led even officially by the New Labour Project's real new Leader, Blair's favoured successor as Prime Minister), the Orange Book Tendency, The Henry Jackson Society and the Euston Manifesto.

And yes, that real "global terror network" certainly is doing a very good job of destroying our way of life.

As for "Al-Qaeda", no firm connection has ever been established among the many organistaions and movements, in numerous parts of the world, fighting to organise the State and wider society in accordance with an ideology technically called "Islam". The only connection is Islam, and the only way to counteract them is to counteract Islam, simply as such.

Not that that is the attitude of the global terror network above. On the contrary, it supported Wahabbism in 1980s Afghanistan and in 1990s Bosnia, and still supports it in Kosovo, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Chechnya today. It removed one the Arab worlds two principal bulwarks against it, and is threatening to remove the other one.

Furthermore, the splitting of the Home Office is to have knock on effects on the Department of Constitutional Affairs, even to be renamed "the Ministry of Justice", such as to give yet further effect to the attempt to import into this country the dangerous, and wholly foreign, theory of "the separation of powers". What of the Law Lords? What of the Home Secretary’s role in determining sentences? Or of the numerous quasi-judicial functions of Ministers? Or of the fact that all members of the Executive are required to be members of the Legislature? Or of the fact that the judges make the whole of the Common Law?

This "separation of powers" line was also put about when the position of Lord Chancellor was abolished overnight in favour of something apparently sketched on the back of a beer mat. But the House of Lords is still chaired by someone in much the same outfit, which was actually presented by Blair as a serious, and even conclusive, argument for abolition. It is just that Baroness Hayman is not the Lord Chancellor. But so what, from that point of view? Meanwhile, there is still no Cabinet Minister accountable to the House of Commons either for the major front-line public service that is the Court Service, or for the enormous Legal Aid budget of public money.

Like the other examples given above, the office of Lord Chancellor was often described as an "exception" to "the separation of powers". Quite apart from the fact that such a doctrine cannot, by definition, admit of exceptions, so that their very existence disproves the doctrine itself, there do seem to be an awful lot of these "exceptions", and they do seem to matter rather a lot.

In reality, the "powers" have never been "separate", nor can they ever be so. One of them has to win in the end. In Britain, we have decided that it is to be Parliament, and thus the elected House of Commons within Parliament. Would we rather that the Prime Minister always had the last word? Or that, as in the United States (among other places) an unelected judicial body of lifetime appointees could simply rule that any matter it liked was "constitutional", and thus reserved entirely to itself?

This is why, as is their wont, judicial theorists and constitutional lawyers habitually engage in more than a spot of wishful thinking where "the separation of powers" is concerned. They wish to see an American-style krytocracy in this country, where the judiciary is still drawn (unlike the Bar generally these days) from a very narrow social, socio-economic and educational base indeed. Presumably, that is what makes it so attractive to them, including to our own dear Voice of Reason, drawn as they are, and no doubt as he is, from that same very narrow social, socio-economic and educational base indeed.

The wretched Human Rights Act has been a major step in that direction. But mercifully, we still have instead the supreme legislative, executive and judicial authority of the Crown (i.e., of the nation embodied, regardless of party or anything else), exercised either by Parliament itself or by Ministers drawn from and accountable to Parliament. Within Parliament, the House of Commons has come to be elected by universal adult suffrage and, since the Parliament Act of 1911, to be supreme.

The Crown is the ultimate contradiction of the Franco-American, and in no sense indigenously British, theory of the separation of powers. And it is thus the ultimate guarantee that the United Kingdom (and each of the 15 countries with which we share the Crown) will remain a democracy, unlike either absolutist and historically coup-plagued France, or krytocratic America, to name but two.

Finally, pay no attention to the Tories on any of this, or indeed on anything else. Absolutely nothing enacted by a Blair/Brown Government would actually be repealed by a Cameron/Osborne/Gove/Vaizey/Whoever Government, and absolutely nothing enacted by a Cameron/Osborne/Gove/Vaizey/Whoever Government would actually be repealed by Miliband/Lammy/Balls/Cooper/Whoever Government. And so on, for ever.

That is how British politics now works, and will carry on working for so long as we, out here in the country (where all parties except the ill-fated SDP actually start), continue to allow it to do so. We need entirely new parties. So let's get on with it.