Cherished free society is eroded
I’M grateful to Peter Wadsley for his considered and temperate letter of August 30.
As with his views on my letters, it won’t surprise him that I agree with some of his points and disagree with others.
For me, the backdrop to this important conversation was nailed by Tommy Bray in his letter ‘The future looks bad for democracy’ of August 29, in which he highlighted disturbing global trends in the West, of which the recent attacks on free speech in England are just one example.
Being myself something of a freespeech absolutist and a supporter of the United States Constitution’s first amendment, I very much share Tommy’s concerns regarding the future of democracy and our cherished free society.
As your letters correspondent Robert Craig also recently pointed out, Peter is right to write that by far the majority of net immigration into the country is ‘legal’, not illegal.
Peter asks – and I strongly concur with his question – ‘what is an acceptable level of net immigration?’. But why on earth has a public conversation never happened on this issue in this country, going back decades?
Call me a ‘conspiracy theorist’, if you like, but I find the lack of such an open, public and, above all, democratic conversation highly suspicious.
It’s not as if people like me haven’t been asking for such a conversation for many years – and so a full and frank exploration of the issues ends up on august letters pages, like this one.
The problem with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is precisely that it sets the precedent of deferring our national sovereignty to unelected and democracy-light (and often private) international organisations. As soon as that precedent is set, the danger is that we are on a very slippery slope that ends up with globalist world government, and a massive deficit in accountability within nation states.
My great hero, Tony Benn, had similar concerns; and were he alive today he would be campaigning assiduously for democratic national sovereignty and accountability, and against the seemingly inexorable march of these unaccountable international institutions through national polities.
I certainly don’t trust the ECHR to be a more effective ‘safeguard against oppressive laws’ than our own national courts!
Peter finds it ‘difficult to believe that rioters… are doing so from deep-seated and principled grievance’. I don’t think generalising about this is very helpful.
I have no doubt that some rioters were motivated by such grievance; and others no doubt opportunistically seized the opportunity for some ‘aggro’.
We must also be aware of the reality of ‘agents provocateurs’. It is at our peril that we uncritically assume our mainstream media to be presenting the whole story of events like the recent riots.
Certainly, the recent unrest has suited the new Government very well in being able to facilitate massive attacks on speech through many well-documented draconian sentences which, crucially, involved no violence whatsoever.
Finally, perhaps Peter knows how many of the many hundreds of those charged received trial by jury. I’m certainly not aware of any. And we shouldn’t be naive about this, for those accused will have rightly been told by their legal representatives that the Government was clearly determined to crack down hard, and the only way to minimise one’s sentence was to plead guilty – even when no physical violence was involved.
Readers like Tommy Bray, myself and many others are going to be watching future developments under Prime Minister Starmer’s leadership very closely.