Groucho Marx said that military justice bore the same relationship to justice that military music bore to music. One might also say that social justice bears the same relationship to justice as social housing bears to housing (or social security to financial security).

Individual justice has always been about equality "before the law". The history of English Law has had much to do with ensuring that - as far as practicable - the law applied equally to all. It may be that the affection in which "equality" is held in Britain has much to do with this history. But there is a big difference between treating individuals equally and trying to equalise relationships between social groups.

Women earn less than men. Tall people earn more than short people. Both statements are true, on average, but unless you understand why, you are in danger of doing profound injustice if you try to rectify the inequality group by group. It is certainly a mistake to assume - as social justice merchants always do - that the group at a disadvantage was put there by the other.

I am tall and I conform to the group stereotype of being a high earner but I don't oppress short people.  I don't even laugh at them (much). Equally, I am a man and I have never knowingly oppressed a women (though I have been oppressed by one or two). Attacking the "social" injustice by punishing me as part of an "oppressor" group is to do profound injustice.

So often, that is precisely what governments focussed on "social justice" attempt. Having identified an "oppressed" or "vulnerable" group in need of help, they look for a relatively better-off group to characterise as "the oppressor." Then they penalise that group in order to "equalise" it with the other.

The results of this simple-minded thinking have been catastrophic. Consider the following examples. Would you describe them as just?

• A heterosexual man is murdered on his way home from the pub. A homosexual man is murdered on the same route the next day. Both killers are caught and prosecuted. The second murder is deemed a "hate crime" and so the punishment is more severe. The first is presumably, as Gene Hunt put it, "an I really, really like you crime."
• A nurse offers to pray for a patient and does not press the matter when the patient declines. She is subject to disciplinary action for "failing to show a commitment to equality and diversity." The logic appears to be that she is part of an "oppressor" religious majority from whom "oppressed" religious minorities must be protected.
  

In the first example, in effect, society values the heterosexual's life less than the homosexual's. Presumably the justification is that the homosexual belonged to an "oppressed group" but no regard is had to whether the dead heterosexual or his grieving family belonged to the "oppressors." Both men are equally dead. As individuals, it seems to me that both were equally important and that both killers were equally bad. It is nothing less than evil to treat the murder of one as "worse" than the murder of another.

In the second example, I am at a loss to understand why what the Christian nurse did was any worse (or to put it sensibly) any less kind, than if a Muslim nurse offered to pray to Allah for me. If that happened, I would not be offended, I would be touched. In my recent family crisis, friends from all over the world offered to pray to their various Gods for me. Atheist though I am, I was moved. Who in their right minds would not be? They were expressing concern for me and my family and their intent must, in any sane world, count for something.

It seems to me that social justice is a very long way from justice and that "social" is a prefix generally to be regarded with suspicion.

Baby P's father to sue Haringey Council - Telegraph.

The natural father of Peter Connelly, "Baby P", with no apparent sense of irony, is suing Haringey Council for negligence in the discharge of its duties. The council's social workers, he says, failed to protect his son. For shame.

Relationships end, of course. Fathers often have to leave their children in the care of their ex-partners. Indeed, due to what Harriet Harman might (if she were at least consistent in her foolishness) call "institutional sexism" on the part of the family courts, men can seldom obtain custody. Yet if ever a father could have done so, it was this man. If there exists a mother less fitted to the care of her child than Tracey Connelly, I hope never to meet her. His father must have known the true character of Peter's mother. Knowing it, how could he leave his son in her care?

Peter's parents lived together for the first three months of his tragic life. After their relationship ended, and the monsters who killed Peter moved in, the father had continued access to his son. Given what we know now, it is hard to conceive that a loving parent could have failed to notice his distress. A loving father with occasional sole charge of the boy had more opportunity to clean off the chocolate smeared on Peter's injuries than a social worker. We are told that Peter reached out to him, screaming "Daddy, Daddy!" when handed back to his tormentors shortly before he died. The best that can be said for this hopeful litigant is that Peter thought him a better carer than his mum. It's hard to think him more than slightly better.

So, the more true his accusations against Haringey's social services, the greater his own guilt. If he is innocent because he was deceived by Ms Connelly (who would have to be considerably more cunning than she looks), so much more so (given their lesser knowledge of her and access to the child) are the social workers.

If I were him, I would be too tormented with guilt to function, let alone to calculate the monetary value of my loss. But this product of the Welfare State is made of sterner stuff than me. He confidently denies all suggestions that he might be to blame. He believed his ex's explanation for Peter's injuries; that the child was "clumsy," though he had opportunities to observe Peter himself. Are we to believe he didn't know his son was on the child protection register? Are we to believe he could not discern the true nature of the brutes who lived with Peter and his mother?

I am sure he is as sincere in his claim as in his desire for £400,000 in damages. It makes sense in the warped logic of underclass Britain. How could he think himself to blame when the Welfare State denies the very notion of  personal responsibility? The "caring" apparatus of the "progressive" British state deplores the concept, as witness the agonising over the cruel fate, not of the dead child, but of his killers. After all, they are not responsible either. They are the products of their social environment; mere automata to be successfully reprogrammed if only the taxpayers would not be so mean about employing enough social workers. Haringey Social Services may not like being sued on this occasion, but they share Peter's father's underlying objective; to supplant the responsibility of the parent with that of the state. If he wins his claim, they will soon realise they have been given a stick with which to beat the ungenerous taxpayers.

Not only the jobs, but the ideological integrity of its employees depends upon the notion that the citizen is a passive product of his environment; that he can't take care of himself, can't educate his children, can't look after his family without their benevolent intervention. By their own logic, as they are the only truly responsible people, this man's claim should succeed. But by the same logic, since in truth the health and welfare of every human depends on self-reliance and the loving support of family and friends, we are all damned to some (let's hope lesser) variant of Peter's fate.

BBC NEWS | Health | Result due in right-to-die case.

I follow the discussions on euthanasia with interest, but I am puzzled by the terminology favoured by the media. This lady's "right to die" is not in question, although the religious may say it's morally wrong. Suicide was legalised long since - and rightly so.

I have nothing but compassion for anyone who chooses to end a life they consider unbearable. It's that person's life and choice. But this is not about the "right to die". It's about the right to kill, or to be an accessory to a killing. It's about introducing a new defence to the crime of murder. The debate might be conducted more rationally, if more honest words were used.

The euthanasia laws in the Netherlands have resulted (that law of intended consequences again) in sick people refusing to go to hospital. They fear the convenience of euthanasia to medical staff who prefer to work on potentially positive cases rather than palliative care for those nearing the exit. In socialised healthcare systems, they fear being pressured to stop "bed-blocking;" consuming rationed resources that could be used by others. They may also fear the convenience of euthanasia to impatient heirs.

It's bad enough to be terminally-ill, without being pressured to get it over with for the good of others. Can it ever truly be selfish to want another moment of life? On the other hand, is it not enormously selfish of a dying person to blight the life of a surviving loved one by asking them to live with the memory of having killed?

The fundamental tenet of all libertarianism is that it is wrong to initiate violence. Much though I sympathise with the families of people in this terrible position, I do not believe it's right to legitimise pre-meditated, active involvement in another's death.

BBC NEWS | UK | Bullied City lawyer claiming £12m.
Anyone weak enough to be bullied should be ashamed to call himself a lawyer, let alone a "City lawyer" (which has other connotations than the literal "lawyer who works in the City"). We may be gentle souls in our spare time, but professionally we are meant to be tough. We are also supposed to be persuasive. Listening to the radio interview embedded in the linked article, I thought it rather sad that the interviewer came over as being quite so much more intelligent and articulate than the interviewee. What happened to the performance art element of lawyering, aka advocacy?

What is going to happen when everyone in Britain has decided it is more profitable to be a victim than to work? How are tough jobs to be performed when the nation is populated entirely by what one of my colleagues calls "entitlement bunnies?"

What next? Mafia hit men suing their Godfathers for work-related stress? Samurai on the sick?

I was driving down to Cannes last Monday with a client and friend. He's a qualified lawyer but is no longer practising. En route, we played an interesting mind game. We asked ourselves, if every English statute were repealed, how many (or rather how few) Acts of Parliament we would need to make a functioning civilised society. We started by trying to limit ourselves to 10 statutes, but could not actually come up with more than 6!

England & Wales is an unusual jurisdiction. If you abolished all the statutes you would still, thanks to the English Common Law, have a functioning system. There is even an argument to say that - given time - the judges would close the gaps our statutes would fill. But the "game" required that everything worked on day 1 of the new regime. So here is our list. I am interested to know what you think about it and - in particular - how your list would differ:-

1. The Limitation of the State Act (LSA)
2. The Artificial Legal Personalities Act (ALP)
3. The Representation of the People Act (RPA)
4. The Armed Forces Act (AFA)
5. The Taxation Act (TA)
6. The Citizenship Act (CA)

Let me begin with the LSA. This would set the boundaries of state power and would amount to the "Constitution" of our new state.

The UK currently has a constitution, but it is neither unified nor entrenched. It is scattered across various documents, and can be changed at any time by a simple majority in Parliament. For most of our history, that didn't seem to matter. The struggle to establish Parliamentary sovereignty was the key story and much of our constitution (beginning with Magna Carta) was about limiting the power of the King. Having achieved that, we seem to have settled into a sort of smug constitutional complacency, relying on Parliament always to act as the protector of the peoples' rights. That seems to have gone awry of late, mainly (in my view) because political parties have subverted the constitution by selecting parliamentary candidates for their willingness to submit to discipline and then controlling them ruthlessly via the Whips. This means that the executive controls the legislature and can dictate its behaviour.

The LSA would mandate (for the first time in the UK) the separation of powers between the Legislature, Executive and Judiciary. Rather than drawing the executive from Parliament, any MP appointed as a Minister would have to resign and be replaced. Likewise, no judge could be a member of the Executive or the Legislature.

The LSA would also prevent the State from playing any direct role in health care or education. Neither of us favoured it being involved even in compulsory systems of health insurance, for example, but we had to accept that we are far more radical than most of our fellow citizens. Therefore we limited ourselves to prohibiting the state from employing anyone other than civil servants engaged directly in administration of the government and its agencies, plus the military and police forces. We toyed with the idea of excluding all government employees from voting (on the basis that they have a clear conflict of interest with taxpayers) but there are so many of them that the chance of ever enacting such a restriction is low.

The LSA would clearly demarcate the roles of the central and local governments. It would limit the number of layers of the state. There would be Assemblies for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland which would sit separately to legislate on devolved matters and together as the Upper House (which is a nice economy measure). The LSA would be entrenched legislation, which could only be changed by a majority in the Lower House and in each of the four National Assemblies. It would also outlaw secondary or "enabling" legislation, whereby the legislature delegates the power to make law. It would have little if anything to say about local government, because we envisage a system where local authorities would compete with each other for residents, both on local taxation and the absence of restrictive local rules.

In subsequent posts, I will describe the other five statutes in our imaginary system.

One of the best things about Britain used to be that the police had no special powers or privileges. Sir Robert Peel's original conception was of people employed to do professionally what any public-spirited citizen might do. The genius of this vision was that citizens need not fear their police. They were just exercising every citizen's rights; fulfilling every citizen's duty. The Jean Charles de Menezes case is clear evidence that we must fear them now. They have been set above us.

If you killed a man on the Tube, believing him (on slight evidence and that contradicted by his being too lightly clad to conceal a bomb)  to be a suicide bomber, you would be prosecuted. The police and the CPS would say that it was "for a jury to decide" whether your defence was a good one. The family of the man you killed would expect a trial. Quite rightly, justice would be done and would be seen to be done.

There is no shadow of justice in today's, all too predictable, news. The stark fact is that one set of the State's agents has protected another. So much so, that we do not even know the killers' names. Compare and contrast that with the coverage of alleged crimes committed by those who are not the State's privileged agents. Their names are bandied about for all to remember long after their acquittal.

I do not know that a jury would convict these policemen. I suspect it wouldn't. I don't think the CPS is protecting the killers for their own good. I suspect the objective is to avoid public discussion of the, probably illegal, instructions given by the the Home Office in the wake of the 7/7 bombings.

Of all the dark stories of the New Labour years, this is perhaps the most sinister. I cannot understand why the public is unmoved.

Link: The Home Counties boys who planned murder | Uk News | News | Telegraph.

This gentleman speaks directly to Toynbee, Blair and all those other Guardianistas who seek to excuse crime and terrorism by reference to its "social causes"

Omar Khyam's uncle told the Daily Telegraph: "You read in the papers, 'Ah, well it's because of lack of opportunities.' "Rubbish, what part don't you understand? What lack of opportunities? They had a reasonable education, they come from reasonable families, with very stable backgrounds, financially sound.

Thank you, sir. The twin "causes of crime" in Britain are (a) criminals and (b) Guardianistas who hold "society," not criminals responsible. As Theodore Dalrymple says (writing of an emerging Indian underclass in Britain)

In fact, they have assimilated to the local cultural and intellectual climate: a climate in which the public explanation of behavior, including their own, is completely at variance with all human experience. This is the lie that is at the heart of our society, the lie that encourages every form of destructive self-indulgence to flourish: for while we ascribe our conduct to pressures from without, we obey the whims that well up from within, thereby awarding ourselves carte blanche to behave as we choose. Thus we feel good about behaving badly.

The politicians cannot make people feel responsible for their own actions. All they can do is consistently treat them as if they are. Doing the opposite for decades has created the lie that Dalrymple describes. It will take decades of truth to reverse the damage done.

Yesterday, a British jury and a British judge ignored the excuses and special pleading. They held criminals responsible for their choices. Is it too much to hope for the politicians to do the same - and not just for those whose crimes are political?

Link: BBC NEWS | World | Americas | US university killer was S Korean.

Britain's anti-American media were all over the sad story of the V-Tech killings. They tore gleefully into America's "gun culture" and its people in general. Let's get this straight. This horror didn't happen because the killer was American. It didn't happen because he was ethnically Korean. It happened because the poor young man was mad.

"Ah, but he had such easy access to guns." Yes, he did. Unfortunately, since the university authorities had made the campus "gun-free," his victims did not. There was no-one there to return fire. Most of the victims would be alive today if the university had not banned guns.

Some Britons seem to enjoy it when something like this happens in America, but Britain has no moral standing to judge America harshly.  Violent crime is declining in America and rising in Britain. The risk of being violently attacked in England & Wales is already higher than in America and rising. In Scotland, the situation is worse. Many killed or injured with knives or other weapons in Britain, would be alive and unharmed if their assailants had feared they might have a gun.

The main disadvantage of widespread gun ownership in America is that suicide is easier. 58% of America's gun deaths are self-inflicted, which is one reason you have to be careful when gun control advocates choose to compare "gun deaths" rather than homicides. Only 38% of America's "gun deaths" are homicides and some of those are justifiable (e.g. self-defence).

Britain's only statistical advantage in the field of crime is that our homicide rate is lower. America counts all reported offences. We remove homicides from the statistics if all suspects are acquitted (although the victim remains dead). We might not show the V-Tech killings in our statistics at all, if they were found to have been committed by a mentally-disturbed person (see Home Office Statistical Bulletin 02/07). America's statistics more accurately reflect the total number of victims.

It's hard to say what the statistical difference would be if comparable figures were available, but it seems reasonable to suspect that some of Britain's advantage would be lost.

Burglaries are twice as common in Britain as in America and 53% of them (because of improved household security) now take place when the homeowner is present. In America only 13% of burglaries take place while an occupant is home. American burglars do not have the benefit of a government guarantee that all properties are undefended. Would anyone in America have frightened my wife like these guys? I don't think so. They would have been afraid that she or some kindly neighbour  would have shot them. That fear would have neutralised all their advantages of youth, strength and disregard for reputation.

To carry a licensed gun in America, you must - in every State - have a clean criminal record. Am I naive enough to expect American criminals to obey America's gun control laws? No. The naive ones are those who expect British criminals to abide by Britain's. They simply don't. While, by definition, no law-abiding citizen in Britain is armed; one-third of young criminals own or have access to a gun. There may be as many as four million illegal firearms in Britain.

For most of my life, I shared the common British view that America's attitude to gun control was crazy. However, disarming the law-abiding has proved to be disastrous. The British State can't or won't protect us. We were stupid to let it disarm us.

Can we please just shut up about V-Tech? We have no leg to stand on.

Link: 'Apology for\'idiots\'election ban'.

If indeed idiots were ever banned from public office in Britain, that ban seems to have been remarkably ineffective.

Link: News of the World - Online Edition.

I apologise to Guido for thinking his theory about the injuncted email contrived. It seems that police sources have alleged to the News of the World that Number 10 did leak the email itself, presumably so as to try to engineer a mistrial.

I am no expert on current criminal law, but it seems to me that if true this would, in itself, be another attempt to pervert the course of justice. It could form the basis of a completely separate charge.

The "cash for peerages" story is really now irrelevant. If, as some allege, the Prime Minister's team has destroyed evidence, lied to the police and now deliberately leaked an email to the press to compromise a criminal trial, these are much more serious offences. Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice carries a theoretical maximum sentence of life imprisonment, although 10 years has been the longest sentence to date.

Frankly, if the office of our head of Government had really been involved in such a crime (which I am reluctant to believe) it would be time for the judges to break that record. The culture of "spin" which has grown up around Tony Blair is utterly despicable. There is no question that he and his staff are habitual deceivers.

Let us hope that habit has not been carried over into the world of criminal justice.

H/T Dizzy Thinks