AND ANOTHER THING
When the men in wigs start treating justice as a joke
PAUL JOHNSON
The Observer, which has become a real newspaper since it changed owner and edi- tor, did an excellent job this week in laying bare the opinions of our leading judges. They confirmed my view that a sea-change has overtaken our judiciary since the last Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, was uncere- moniously hustled off the scene to make way for his trendy successor, Lord Taylor. They will also strengthen the uneasy feeling among members of the public that judges can no longer be relied upon to do their bit in protecting life and property and make Professional criminals go in fear of the law. Another pillar of society has fallen with a sickening thud. We now have a judiciary which is ambivalent, not to say indifferent, as between the innocent and the guilty, the criminal and his victim.
What struck me most, as I read through their obiter dicta, was that their attitude to law and justice, to crime and punishment, has now become entirely criminal-centred. In the past, the judge was the personifica- tion of law-abiding society, the collective voice of the overwhelming majority of hon- est citizens, the avenging spirit of outraged virtue. A good judge was not without pity for the criminal in the dock and would, when appropriate, temper justice with mercy; but he had a genuine horror of crime and regarded those who broke the law with revulsion. His sentences were uttered in a tone of controlled but right- eous anger. Now that judges are taking advantage of the Lord Chancellor's invitation to speak their thoughts, we can see they no longer correspond at all to their historic stereo- type. Some are flippant, others cynical. The only thing that seems to move them is con- ditions in prisons, 'places of squalor and degradation', as Mr Justice Potter puts it. He says that judges 'visit prisons conscien- tiously', no doubt to strengthen them in their resolve, to use the words of Lord Jus- tice Farquharson, that 'no one should be sent to prison unless there is no alternative, and if they have to be sent to prison it should be for the shortest possible time'. Nothing is said about judges 'conscientious- ly visiting the victims of crime, talking to parents whose children have been violated _and murdered, old women who have been heaten and terrorised by thugs in their own homes, or the everyday victims of profes- sional thieves. Of course judges live increasingly apart from the rest of us. They are one of the very few groups in society still adequately protected against malefac- tors. No judge is ever mugged and his home is most unlikely to be burgled. That helps to explain why they have ceased to identify with the law-abiding majority, why their thoughts and opinions revolve entirely around the criminal: his interest and wel- fare, his sufferings and prospects. The judi- ciary now seems to have joined the ranks of the all-powerful lobby which believes that statute law should be written, and the sys- tem of criminal justice administered, with the primary object of rehabilitating the offender rather than protecting his victims. Thus a huge, historic change in public poli- cy has taken place, by the mere authority of unelected elites, without ordinary citizens being in any way consulted or persuaded that the change is right. The new judicial morality is exemplified by Lord Ackner, one of the law lords, who does not seem to take breaches of the law with the seriousness ordinary people like you and me feel they deserve. He was tick- led pink when the Sunday Times recently sought — and failed to get — legal redress for a clear theft of its copyright property. 'I laughed like anything,' he said. Ackner dis- missed 'the Government's intention to be tougher on crime' as an 'irrelevance'. The judges, he added, would continue to do as they thought fit: prison as a last resort and the shortest possible sentences. Ackner must be aware that recently government statements were a belated response to overwhelming public demand. But no doubt he considers the views of the great mass of the people to be irrelevant too. Some judges go further. They find public opinion not merely irrelevant but positively Ile's ex-army.' irritating. Lord Woolf, whose approach to justice is excessively criminal-centred even by the standards of the new judiciary, seems to attribute the rise in the number of crimes committed largely to the ci reless- ness of the law-abiding. It is people who• will not protect their houses adequately, he fumes, or who take risks by going out at night and thus put temptation in the way of otherwise harmless criminals, who are to blame. They are the ones who should be punished.
I wonder if Lord Woolf, or any other of these 'progressive' justices, have considered where the logic of their approach leads. Once the public becomes aware that the judiciary has washed its hands of their interests, and invited them to look after themselves and their property, then citizens will not be content to install the latest bur- glar alarms. Nor will they passively agree to restrict their movements. They will arm themselves. They will club together to defend their interests. They will pay people to get back their property or exact revenge. In the United States, where the law-abiding increasingly possess firearms, burglars hesi- tate to break into an inhabited property for fear they will be shot, and in the knowledge that juries will not convict householders who -thus defend their homes. That will soon be the situation here. Even worse things can happen. When I was in Rio recently, a mob of women, despairing of justice, seized hold of a man who had harmed one of their children, doused him in petrol and burned him alive. Colour photos of his charred remains were on the front pages of all the papers. Is that the kind of society Lords Ackner and Woolf want in this country? Clearly not, but that is the kind of society we are likely to get if the judges abandon their role as the defenders of life and property. We ought to know by now — the evidence of our times is overwhelming — that 'liberal- ism' in law-enforcement does not produce a liberal society but the very opposite — a society which oscillates violently between anarchy and vigilantism, where the collec- tive punishment of the wicked is succeeded by the lawlessness of personal revenge and vendetta, and where only the rich, strong- armed and ruthless flourish. In that kind of pandemonium not even the lives of judges will be safe. The men in wigs should think about these things and start taking justice seriously again.
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