THE Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has had his plans for a government veto over the law courts made public after a leak of his letter to the new Home Secretary, John Reid.
In it he instructs: ‘We will need to look again at whether primary legislation is needed to address the issue of court rulings which overrule the government in a way that is inconsistent with other EU countries’ interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights.’
Of course, the judiciary and the House of Lords have both been thorns in the side of the Labour government’s attempts to bring in more and more draconian legislation that scraps basic rights in favour of security measures.
The judiciary found that the jailing of foreign security ‘suspects’ permanently, without trial, at Belmarsh was illegal, while the House of Lords has repeatedly refused to accept the police having the right to detain suspects for 90 days without charging them with any offence, and a number of other government measures.
In fact, there are any number of issues that could face challenge in the law courts. Among them are the variety of no-jury trials that the government is bringing in, detention without trial in one’s home, or the various schemes for summary justice where the police and the Crown Prosecution Service can decide that an offence has been committed, find the suspect guilty, and fine him or her, leaving them to appeal after the punishment has been meted out.
Then there are the provisions of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act which give the state enormous powers.
These range from banning demonstrations outside parliament, (there has already been the case of the people arrested for reading out the names of the Iraq war dead at the Cenotaph), to giving a police officer the right to arrest, without a warrant, any person whom they suspect is about to commit an illegal act, and giving the government the right to rule by decree, voiding all parliamentary legislation without seeking the consent of parliament, whose approval must be sought one month after the government has taken the action.
The government fears, with good grounds, that judges used to bourgeois democracy will find such measures to be illegal if they are required to rule on them.
Blair is seeking to pull the teeth of the judiciary by using sensational happenings such as prisoners who have been freed to ‘kill again’, to take aim at the Human Rights Act that his government brought in, to suggest that rights have to be subordinated to security, and that in the 21st century, in the war against terror, such rights will have to be given up for a period, and the Act severely amended.
Blair’s campaign against his own Human Rights Act is essentially a fraud.
The Director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, said yesterday that ‘The sinister twist in this case is that the government’s own Human Rights Act is being used as the target for tough talk.
‘In fact, it’s a very tame piece of rights legislation that doesn’t, for instance, allow the courts to trump parliament.’
Blair is driving towards an open bourgeois dictatorship, without any bourgeois democratic camouflage – where basic democratic rights are in abeyance, and where the suspicion of the state is enough to provide for your house arrest or incarceration.
He considers that this is the only way that the system can survive, faced with the revolt of the oppressed nations and the movement of the working class to defend the Welfare State at home.
The only answer to this drive to open dictatorship is the organisation of the working class for a socialist revolution, to overthrow capitalism, smash its state apparatus and go forward to socialism.
