Brian Sedgemore: Even scum deserve protection

Brian Sedgemore, Labour MP for Hackney South & Shoreditch and a barrister, says the removing the double jeopardy rule would be an affront to civil liberty.

He warns that in the law and order debate one demand always leads to a more oppressive demand, and the Conservatives will soon be calling for the return of the death penalty.

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By Brian Sedgemore MP

Radical civil libertarians are everywhere in disarray. Unbelievably, we've been wrongfooted by William Hague and Anne Widdecombe, politicians who would not recognise a civil liberty if you stuffed it in their face.

Hopefully, but is this too much to hope, New Labour ministers will not be beguiled by this new affront to civil liberty and by the proposed descent into further barbarism

Hague and Widdecombe, like a bunch of demented members of a Trotksyist sect, now have three slogans:

1) What do we want? The right of the householder to shoot the burglar to death with a gun. When do we want it? Now.

2) What do we want? The right of person to be tried for a second and maybe a third time for the same offence. When do we want it? Now.

3) What do we want? The return of the hangman. When do we want it? Now.

Yes, one demand leads to another even more oppressive demand in the law and order debate.

Very quickly the cry that the householder should be able to blast burglars in the back and into the next world and plead self-defence has been followed by the plea that defendants who have been proven innocent - yes, innocent - of the crime should be tried a second time for the same offence when new evidence arises because we always knew that they were guilty.

After all, there's never any smoke without fire, is there?

And those of us who are policemen know that the wrong person is never charged. So let's just keep reminding those who have been acquitted that their time behind bars will come. If this means that n acquitted person can ever feel secure from a copper feeling his collar once again, then so be it.

Henceforth a verdict of "Not guilty" means that we'll just have to wait and see what further evidence emerges or can be manufactured by the long and unremitting arm of the law.

Screaming of the mob

Even scum deserve the protection of civilised and civilising institutions

Of course there will be safeguards. It will only happen when the offences are serious. New evidence will only be admissible when it could not have been discovered before the original trial.

And certainly the new law will in no way pander to popular prejudice. Heaven forbid.

But if that is the case, why is the proposal being put forward by Hague and Widdecombe? They live by and through popular prejudice.

They live by and through a philosophy which is not so much the yolk of public opinion as described by Edmund Burke, but rather is the screaming of the mob at its most hysterical.

The tragedy for radicals is that some justification for these putrid views has been given by Macpherson in his report into the Lawrence case. Sadly this only goes to show that hard cases make bad law and that even scum deserve the protection of civilised and civilising institutions.

Hopefully, but is this too much to hope, New Labour ministers at the Home Office will not be beguiled by this new affront to civil liberty and by the proposed descent into further barbarism.

Or is this abhorrent proposal to be the precursor to the return of the noose or to use modernising terms, the electric chair or lethal injection?