Those charged with terrorism for supporting Palestine Action will have no jury in trials limited to 36 minutes each, with prison sentences up to six months. These are the plans for Starmer Courts for mass trials of anti-Genocide protestors.
Those charged with terrorism for supporting Palestine Action will have no jury in trials limited to 36 minutes each, with prison sentences up to six months. These are the plans for Starmer Courts for mass trials of anti-Genocide protestors.
Nonsense. I can walk down the street right now with a big fucking butcher knife, as long as I can show that I’m on my way to work and the knife’s a tool of my trade. Of course, that works better if I’m not waving it around at passers-by and it’s wrapped up with other knives and chef’s gadgets. The same goes for other sharp and dangerous tools and caustic and poisonous chemicals used for construction or agriculture. But if I get caught with a jacket pocket full of heroin bindles, and that same butcher knife is found hidden down the leg of my tracksuit, I’ve got some explaining to do. Context matters. The police are given discretion, and they actually do exercise it. It’s not the US. Zero-tolerance enforcement is a rare thing here. So are police killings of civilians.
When you read these articles, you imagine a police state. But the reality is that I’m harassed by cops, by criminals and by asshole members of the general public far less here than I was in the US. And by “much less,” I mean never. That was not the case in the US.
What you’re describing is the way that law should be applied, not how it can be applied: it’s down to the discretion of the police officers who stopped you and the Crown Prosecution Service, whether they detain you and prosecute you or not if, for example, you have a small pocket knife when you get stopped and frisked (which in the UK, like in the US, is statistically more likely if you’re black and look poor or if you look middle eastern).
Just like this specific Anti-Terrorism Law which is now being used in a way other than how the politicians claimed it was going to be used, so the anti-knife legislation is written so that it can be abused - all of it relies on humans in positions of power being fair rather than on the laws being written as fair and I can tell you from personal experience (and even more the experience of friends of mine) that the Justice System’s “fairness” (especially at the lower levels) is a lot different if you’re a White British than if you’re a foreigner, Black, Indian or Middle-eastern looking.
Your argument boils down to “Trust the coppers and trust the Courts” which the very post we’re commenting under shows as total bollocks.
PS: That said I totally agree Britain is not at all a Police State, at least not yet. It already is a Surveillance State at about the level of Eastern Germany, and judging by things going on right now as described in the post we’re commenting under it’s going towards becoming a Police State far faster than most of Europe, but even now the abusing of the overbroad legislation put in place in the last decade or two and of policing powers is still localized - though getting broader and broader - rather than generalized.
There are no self-enforcing laws. There are no laws that can be relied on to apply themselves fairly. Laws are not code. Fairness comes from transparency and a comrehensive system of review.
Except that’s not my point. Police and courts have biases. That’s true everywhere. And some laws on the books are manifestly unjust: stop-and-search and the extreme and arbitrary restrictions on peaceful demonstrations, to name two. My point is more that, due to human nature and resource constraints, UK police cannot be arsed to enforce most laws in full zero-tolerance mode. That’s not “trust the police” exactly, more “trust the police to be lazy and understaffed.” In the US, there are about 600k police for a population of 350M. In the UK, that number (depending on how you count admin and community-support roles) is 14 to 17k for a population roughly 1/6 the size. Taking the larger UK number, the US has about 6 times more cops per capita than the UK has (and that doesn’t count the National Guard, which is now being deployed in a policing role). So where is pervasive oppression more likely? I’d say it’s where there are more jackboots on the ground. And that’s what we’ve been seeing under Trump.
The big difference between the UK and 1980s East Germany is that there’s no pervasive network of informers in British neighborhoods. The Stasi had around 189,000 snitches in a population af about 16M people, and the full apparatus to run them. In the UK, there’s a lot of passive surveillance (CCTV and ANPR, for example) but relatively little CCTV is centrally controlled: most of it is in the hands of private businesses and individuals (Blink doorbells and similar gadgets are a large percentage of todal coverage). The evil curtain-twitching nosy types in the UK are more preocculpied with ratting out their neighbors over compliance with bin regulations and other trivia, not reporting on opinions or who’s meeting whom.
My point is that the police definitelly “can be arsed to enforce certain laws in full” if the right people tell sufficiently highly placed people in the right police force to enforce them strictly.
This is called “selective enforcement” and is definitelly the kind of shit you see in countries were Rule Of Law is weak, like Latin American dictatorships.
The system is designed with overbroad laws with lax enforcement exactly so that even though the actual law as written is draconian, common people don’t normally get hit by it so they don’t feel it is draconian, yet at the same time when the “right” people desire it they can make enforcement go from lax to strict against specific people or groups of people who thus get hit by the draconian elements of the law.
What you wrote is a great example of how those laws are de facto fine for most people most of the time because in their own life they never see the law applied to its full extent and thus many will even form a positive opinion of those laws because as long as the enforcement of those laws is lax and doesn’t include the most draconian provisions, those laws work fine (or don’t even get used, so they’re not seen as a problem)
Meanwhile the laws can be applied in a strict way and to their full extent, so people in positions of power can arbitarilly (and I emphasise “arbitrarilly” because it’s the very opposite of how Justice should be applied) order it to be used with full force against specific targets, which is exactly what Starmer is doing now with some of the crazier anti-Terror legislation in the books.
Selective enforcement turns Law Enforcement into a weapon which can be pointed at the enemies of people with sufficient power.
Proper Justice Systems try very hard to avoid selective enforcement situations because that’s are the very antithesis of “Everybody is treated the same in the eyes of the Law” (i.e.“The Law is blind”) core principle in Justice - everybody is not treated the same in the eyes of the Law when a political figure can tell the Met Commissioner and the CPS to “throw the book at these specific demonstrators” and those demonstrators are then arrested and charged using elements of certain laws which nobody else ever has applied against them.