It has taken 12 years of Thatcherism to disrupt the extraordinary complacency of the British about then civil liberties and their constitution. Our constitutional arrangements have never been much more than a matter of convention, and what passes for constitutional law has generally been a Panglossian description of the way things are. Our liberties are largely the product of a carry-over into the statism of the 19th and 20th centuries of procedures (notably jury trial) and rights (notably the integrity of person and property) created in an earlier period by a judiciary concerned to consolidate the transfer of power from monarch to entrepreneur. While these prized liberties were being imported and built on by newer nations, they were being continuously eroded in the land of their birth. While British workers led the way in founding unions, British judges led the way in outlawing them, until Parliament intervened. While British radicals and freethinkers spoke their minds, British judges devised new ways of silencing them. The Britain which in 1899 led the way in substituting reformation for punishment as the aim of imprisonment has since led the way in over-long sentences served in foul and overcrowded gaols. The foundation in 1934 of the NCCL was a barometric indication of the state of civil rights and the rule of law when Margaret Roberts was still a child.

LRB 19 December 1991 | PDF Download