Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill has finally passed in the Commons, although not before 60 or so Tories had tried to amend it to try and minimise or rule out the possibility of legal challenges to it. Meanwhile the Government itself floated the idea of instructing civil servants to ignore the law where it conflicted with the Rwanda legislation.
Clearly the party of the ‘rule of law’ needs reminding of the perspective that the Freeborn Englishman had on such matters in the 1820s and 1830s:
In the Making of the English Working Class, E P Thompson, discussed the meaning of the Rule of Law to those who fought for democratic rights in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:
‘If law is open to rich and poor alike, said Horne Tooke, so is the London Tavern: ‘but they will give you a very sorry welcome, unless you come with money sufficient to pay for your entertainment’. But the conviction that the rule of law was the distinguishing inheritance of the ‘free-born Englishman’, and was his defence against arbitrary power, was upheld even by the Jacobins. The London Corresponding Society, in an Address of 1793, sought to define the difference in status between the English commoner and the commoner in pre-revolutionary France: ‘our persons were protected by laws, while their lives were at the mercy of every titled individual..’
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