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The Struggle for Civil Liberties: Political Freedom and the Rule of Law in Britain 1914-1945
Abstract
It is widely believed that there was a golden age in which political freedom in Britain was protected by the rule of law, and by judges developing the common law in favour of individual liberty. In an uncompromising and withering account based on a wide range of official and unofficial sources, this path-breaking study by two of the country's leading civil liberties lawyers exposes the mythical nature of much of this traditional learning.
The Struggle for Civil Liberties: Political Freedom and the Rule of Law in Britain, 1914-1945 traces the hostile response of the executive and judicial branches of government to the various groups and individuals who confronted the power of the State in the first half of the twentieth century: the wartime peace movements, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the striking trade unionists in 1926, the hunger marches, and the Irish Nationalists. In addressing these issues, the study has a loud contemporary resonance, by placing in a new and alarming historical context the struggles for civil liberties that have been and are being fought by radical groups in contemporary British Society, and during the Thatcher decade in particular.
This book will change forever the way in which open-minded public lawyers think about their subject, and will require a fundamental re-examination of the foundations of the discipline.
... In this same context, social historians have shown the extent of censoring of peace publications as well as unprecedented levels of harassment through raids and surveillance that took place in England. The German government, which overall tried to avoid arrest and prosecution, resorted instead to blocking the circulation of peace activists' publications and views ( Ewing and Gearty 2001 ). In the United States, there is the example of Balch's activism leading to the loss of her academic position at Wellesley. ...
The aim of this essay is to ask what can we learn about war and peace from women international thinkers? As I will show, new and old historical evidence of women thinkers points us in directions that suggest, first, the privations women regularly faced in order to make their arguments against the background of actual war, addressing both the more conventional “women's” topic of peace and the often masculinized controversies of the nature of violence. This same history sounds out the range and changing (gendered) registers of international thought, including the diminished tones of peace as a defining objective. Then there are the diverse locations of specifically women's international thought, from manifestos to pamphlets and newspaper articles to published tomes. These lead us to the intersecting political and intellectual networks of activism and influence that colored the intertextual referentiality that thinking generated. Finally, I will argue that the evidence at hand, and the related examples it connects to, underscores the broad transnational European settings of the texts that specifically address war and peace. It even suggests, as I suggest, that the borders of that transnationalism extended not only across the Atlantic, but also through the entangled continental political histories of Western Europe and Russia. In the twenty-first century, these contours of the history of women's international thought remain relevant, not least because they pose the question for us, what difference have women thinkers made?
... The Divisional Court upheld holding the proceedings, which were said not to constitute a trial at all, in camera, and this in a case which had nothing whatever to do with espionage. 87 Some of the documents belonged to C. H. Norman of the City of London branch of the ILP, who was the founder of the Stop the War Committee; they were thought to have been retained by the authorities, in particular by the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. So he sued them in the Westminster County Court. ...
... They were, formally, emergency powers, but the use of martial law was still recent enough for most people to recognize them for what they were: when they were being exercised during the General Strike, the former Solicitor General for the Labour government commented that the government had introduced ʻwhat is really martial lawʼ. 15 Symptomatically, it was this historical moment that saw the adoption of the term ʻdetaineeʼ into the English language: the Oxford English Dictionary records it appearing in Crowellʼs Dictionary of English Grammar of 1928. ...
The prevailing myth of the Public Order Act 1936 is that it was enacted in response to the rise of Fascism in London between the two world wars. However, support for the act was elicited through the depiction of Fascism as foreign and un-British. The government therefore leveraged the very same xenophobic sentiments and fears—the same fetishes of difference—that characterise Fascist ideology. Moreover, by rejecting the inclusion of specific reference to racial and religious prejudice in s 5 of the Act, the POA36 created an offence that could be used just as easily against those resisting racism as against those promoting it. Thus, the ability of the state to pacify outbreaks of disorder was a stronger motivation for the POA36 than the protection of Jews.
Shortly after the Savidge scandal what is believed to be the first centralised police complaints system in the United Kingdom was developed by the Metropolitan Police’s (Met) A-1 Branch. Structured on A-1 quarterly summaries between 1930 and 1964, now open to the public and held in the National Archives, this chapter discusses inherent biases in the system that were detrimental to the interests of complainants. With emphasis placed on the character of complainants and perceptions in the Met that complaints were trivial, tactical, malicious or vindictively anti-police it is unsurprising to find that criminal or disciplinary proceedings arising from complaints were rare. Concerns within the Met that they may lose responsibility for complaints and discipline proved to be unwarranted, and government accepted the recommendation of the majority of the 1960–62 Royal Commission on the Police that the chief officer should be solely responsible in accordance with the doctrine of constabulary responsibility.
The UK Constitution is either theorised as a political constitution that is premised on the Westminster model of government or as a legal constitution that rests on moral principles, which the common law is said to protect. Both models conceive of democracy in procedural terms, and not in normative terms. However, the democratic legitimacy of laws stems from a complex constellation of conditions that no longer involves popular or parliamentary sovereignty alone. In this paper, I break with the traditional account that bases law-making authority on the condition of procedural democracy. Instead, I argue for a normative conception of democracy that conditions parliamentary authority. I show that failure to do so amounts to a glaring omission in certain cases.
In 2013, Edward Snowden provided journalists with copies of classified documents detailing the operations of the National Security Agency of the United States and its allies; in particular, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. Snowden explained that he hoped to set the conditions for a new technical literacy that would alter understandings of the relationship between digital communications and law. This thesis asks whether or not law is capable of repaying Snowden’s faith. To that end, it offers a media-theoretical genealogy of the interception of communication in the UK. Interception is presented as an effect of different sets of technical operations, mediated and processed by communication devices and networks. The thesis traces interception techniques: from their beginnings in the General Post Office; in their evolution through the operations of technical media; to their reappearance in the operations of digital media that constitute the internet. The authorisation of interception, meanwhile, has always depended upon legal techniques mediated by interception warrants. A genealogy of the interception warrant is presented through an archival study of the distinctly different practices of document production that manufactured and programmed warrants in different media epochs; from the medieval Chancery and paper bureaucracies of state institutions to the graphical user interface, which mediates between interception techniques and law today. Finally, the thesis addresses the function of legislation as it in turn addresses warrants and interception techniques. Law and legislation, it is argued, are incapable of constraining technical operations of interception because, like interception, law is already an effect of media-technical operations. The law operates not by controlling interception, but by processing it, assigning meaning to it, and protecting the secrecy of ongoing interception operations.
The study of anti-fascism requires more care perhaps than many other areas of historical inquiry. For some before 1939 opposition to fascism was already a terrain of moral absolutes (anti-fascism of whatever kind was absolutely good because fascism of all kinds was absolutely evil); but for as many others it was a muddled terrain, a matter of degree, a choice of evils (anti-fascists might appear as totalitarian as the enemy they fought, for instance). After the defeat of Nazism, the evidence of genocide and the fact of collaboration on the mainland of Europe, ‘anti-fascism’ became almost the only sure and apparently uncompromised basis for post-war ‘democratic’ legitimacy in many countries. It is important to recognise that this was no less true of Britain. Here, however, rather than ‘resistance’, the predominant sense of anti-fascism immediately after the war was as anti-appeasement and pro-rearmament: the cardinal sin was not to have challenged Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement rather than Mosley’s (or Leese’s or others’) schemes for dictatorship. What seemed most morally reprehensible and practically damaging was the failure to stop Hitler and war by supporting rearmament; by comparison, Mosley’s British Union of Fascists had been successfully contained. The BUF had not come close to undermining parliamentary democracy and its potential for collaboration had not been allowed to be tested.
The history of human rights organisations, both in Britain and internationally, has been a surprisingly neglected field. Indeed, Stephen Hopgood has recently written that a ‘void’ exists where ‘work on the culture of human rights ought to be found’.1 As for much of the voluntary sector, this has typically been the preserve of the ‘official’ history, often written by those with a close personal involvement, and even the occasional work of hagiography. This is not to dismiss the value of this kind of source. However, while insiders have the advantage of personal knowledge and insight, they often tend to shy away from — or indeed draw a veil over — painful internal issues. They are also more likely to be affected by an institutional teleology. Therefore, with the greater availability of good archival sources it is now possible for historians not only to go beyond the ambiguities of ‘official’ history, but also to understand these organisations fully as historical entities, within a proper social and political context.
This chapter traces developments in Great Britain related to counterterrorism during the last few years and highlights the challenges to the rule of law raised by it, in particularly for the judiciary. It portrays the British constitutional order finding its feet after the fundamental changes made by the 1998 Human Rights Act, describing the tension arising with the judicial role changing while facing controversial measures such as 90-day detention, detention orders, and shoot-to-kill policy. An analysis of case law, government action, and academic debate end with a call for a new formula can be found, by which security interests can be measured against human rights.
Associationism and the Literary Imagination traces the influence of empirical philosophy and associationist psychology on theories of literary creativity and on the experience of reading literature. It runs from David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 to the works of major literary critics of the twentieth century, such as I.A. Richards, W.K. Wimsatt and Northrop Frye. Cairns Craig explores the ways in which associationist conceptions of literature gave rise to some of the key transformations in British writing between the romantic and modernist periods. In particular, he analyses the ways in which authors' conceptions of the form of their readers' aesthetic experience led to radical developments in literary style, from the fragmentary narrative of Sterne's Tristram Shandy in 1760 to Virginia Woolf's experiments in the rendering of characters' consciousness in the 1920s; and from Wordsworth's poetic use of autobiography to J.G. Frazer's exploration of a mythic unconscious in The Golden Bough.
This article examines styles of judicial reasoning under the Human Rights Act. It uses Lord Hoffmann's short speech in the Belmarsh Detainees case as a springboard from which to explore some important developments. The first part of the article examines the way in which some judges are ‘turning to the local’ by using historical examples as a means of countering powerful lines of argument run by the government in defence of its anti-terrorist policies. Later in the article, I turn to investigate the use of strategic decision-making by judges when applying the HRA. I conclude by asking whether the introduction of the HRA might lead to the development of a strange counterpoint between internationalist and nationalist rhetoric in judicial decision-making.
In contrast to many studies that link the weakening of human rights to the post-September 11 counter-terrorism policies, this paper seeks to attribute it to the gradual disappearance of the person as subject of rights in our contemporary legal systems. It argues that this vanishing legal personhood is not the side-effect but the natural outcome of the prevalence of the risk-focused mindset in both the crime control and the human rights realm since the late 1970s. To present this argument, it describes briefly the key features of the risk-focused mindset in order to show how they jeopardise or even negate personhood, and how they correlate with certain deep changes in the legal frame of the protection of human rights in a democracy.
This article deals with the debate over civil liberties in the United Kingdom, particularly the argument that civil liberties
have been unreasonably restricted in the UK as part of the state's counter-terrorist policy. Arguments that the UK is facing
an unprecedented threat to its civil liberties are examined, as are counter-arguments, including the idea that defenders of
civil liberties display an excessive pessimism. The article argues that civil liberties have been constrained, but a focus
on counter-terrorism shows the situation is not as bad as critics think. The main threat to civil liberties may come from
outside the field of counter-terrorist operations and lies in some developments in normal criminal investigation and public
order but more importantly, the processes and practices of the public and private sector (particularly surveillance) as part
of what is termed the ‘risk society.’
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