Conor Gearty

The law presents some inconvenient obstacles to the coalition’s series of assaults on the poor. The government is meeting the threat in two ways. When it has no option, it removes legislation that requires it to act as though fairness were more than an advertising slogan. So Harriet Harman’s Equality Act is to be repealed. Much better from the coalition’s point of view, however, is to preserve the form of the law while making sure the poor have no chance to use it.

The rule of law has become a constitutional treasure in Britain because it has managed over the years to deliver an appearance of legality without threatening to destabilise the exercise of raw executive power. Judges have held ministers to account on matters of no great importance - but they always used to run for cover if the magic formula 'national security' was so much as whispered in their presence. Unions have been banned (at GCHQ), internment imposed (during the Second World War), political parties censored from the media (Thatcher's ban on Sinn Féin), CND protesters prosecuted under the official secrets act - and all with the enthusiastic endorsement of successive generations of judges who saw themselves (almost unashamedly) as the iron heel (as Jack London put it) with which brutally to stamp out dissent. The last of these regiments of yes-men were the generation (Lane, Donaldson, Bridge, Denning et al) who saw it as their duty to make sure that any Irishmen brought into their courts, on any count, stayed in the jails to which the police had consigned them - regardless of how obviously ill-treated they had been, or otherwise vulnerable.