The Tories, Partygate, Colston & the Rule of Law
The Tories traditionally style themselves as the party of law and order. Labour has often rivalled them and certainly will do with the former DPP Keir Starmer as leader, but the point is that the law underwrites the British State and challenging it reflects a desire, at the least for change.
Yet on 12th April Tory MPs and commentators were to be found dismissing the fines levelled on Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak for breaking the law in what is known as Partygate- parties at Downing St during pandemic lockdowns. At the same time the Attorney General, Tory MP Suella Braverman, referred the case of the Colston statue protesters to Appeal judges. Their acquittal cannot be overturned but Braverman wants the judges to rule out their ‘human rights’ defence for future cases.
The late socialist historian E P Thompson wrote a book, Whigs and Hunters, about the State’s war with poachers in the eighteenth century. It was perhaps as much about common land, and the rights of the less well-off and the poor to use it, and how the law viewed this.
Thompson drew some general lessons about the law which he pursued in the 1980s. He argued that the law could not just be dismissed as a tool of the rich (although it was) but had to be engaged and argued with.
A key passage from Whigs and Hunters explains his view of the contradictions involved in this process.
We reach then, not a simple conclusion (law=class power) but a complex and contradictory one. On the one hand.. the law did mediate existent class relations to the advantage of the rulers; not only is this so, but as the century advanced the law became a superb instrument by which these rulers were able to impose new definitions of property to their even greater advantage.. On the other hand the law mediated these class relations through legal forms, which imposed again and again, inhibitions upon the actions of these rulers
If the Tories ignore or remove those inhibitions then why would ordinary people respect the rule of law or the system it seeks to uphold?
Leave a Reply