Anthony Meyer – 1972 Speech on the Rule of Law
The speech made by Anthony Meyer, the then Conservative MP for Flint West, in the House of Commons on 1 December 1972.
I beg to move,
That this House reaffirms its view that strict observance of the law, both by Government and by individuals and organisations within the State, is essential to the maintenance of political freedom, and to the protection of minorities, including dissentient minorities; and repudiates the doctrine that it is in any circumstances justifiable in a free society for any individual or organisation to reject any law.
I shall not speak today about crime and punishment. I know that this is a matter very close to people’s hearts. They are worried sick about the apparently inexorable rise in the number of violent crimes. I know that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is tackling this problem with courage, imagination and humanity. If things can be made better by a judicious mixture of stiffer penalties and more certain detection and—perhaps rather more to the point—more certain conviction, I am sure that my right hon. Friend will find the right mixture. At any rate, he will not forget that the more we stiffen penalties the harder it is to secure convictions. That is one aspect of the rule of law.
However, this morning I want to talk about a rather different aspect, namely, the rule of law as the protector not of our lives and property but of our freedom.
The rule of law is a two-sided coin. We cannot split it down the middle. On one side is the restraint which the law imposes on the exercise of arbitrary or tyrannous power by the Government, and on the other the restraint which the law imposes on individuals, sections or interests within the community.
I propose to argue that the rule of law in this double sense is one of only two guarantees of our political freedom. The other guarantee, of course, is Parliament. At the risk of shocking some hon. Members, I must say that the rule of law is a more reliable and certain guarantee of our freedom even than a free Parliament—this Parliament or any other.
A lot of people say that the most valuable gift which Britain gave to the overseas peoples which once she ruled was that of parliamentary democracy. If so, that gift has been frittered away, because in most of black Africa parliamentary democracy in any meaningful sense has disappeared. It is, however, still alive, and in rather more than a purely formal sense, in both South Africa and Rhodesia. Does this prove that those two countries are free? Parliamentary democracy has disappeared, or is apt to disappear, in Zambia, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria and, from time to time, Pakistan. Does this prove that they are not free countries?
If we go by the definition of Sir Ivor Jennings—he was no Right-wing imperialist—there can be no doubt. His definition was:
“The test of a free country is to examine the status of the body that corresponds to His Majesty’s Opposition.”
On that definition, South Africa is in the clear and Nigeria very definitely is not.
But Britain bequeathed another gift to her former colonies—the rule of law. This has shown a somewhat tougher will to survive. In only a few of the countries of black Africa—of which Zanzibar and Uganda are the most notorious—is the rule of law entirely extinct. To the extent that the rule of law survives in, say, Kenya, Nigeria or Tanzania—that is, to the extent that judges in those countries are able to exercise any kind of control or restraint on the Executive or on arbitrary actions by the Executive—Kenya, Nigeria or Tanzania can stake some kind of claim to be as free as South Africa or Rhodesia, where the powers of judges to check the Executive still exist but are being eroded.
It is not surprising that the rule of law should be at least as effective a barrier to tyranny as is a free Parliament. Parliaments are emanations of the popular will, and there are some hon. Members who consider that this Parliament ought to reflect more closely the popular will as manifested by the Daily Express. At times of real crisis, when popular emotions are overwhelming, Parliaments are sometimes very ready to entrust the nation’s liberties to a strong man. It was not so difficult to get the Reichstag to hand over full powers to Hitler; it was not difficult to get the French Assembly to hand over full powers to Petain, and, for that matter, it did not take us very long to decide to suspend the forms of parliamentary democracy in Northern Ireland. I do dispute that decision, but we did not take very long over it. For reasons which are not particularly discreditable, democratic parliamentarians are not infallible defenders of political freedom.
Lawyers, on the other hand—and this does them no particular credit—have a vested interest in the maintenance of free institutions. Quite simply, they make their money and their reputations out of them. Blocking the actions of government, whether on behalf of some giant corporation or some obstinate individual, can be highly profitable to a lawyer, and it is no less profitable to assist the Government to attain their ends. There are rich pickings all round.
A dictatorship governing by decree is very much less in need of lawyers. A dictatorship which snaps even the thin cobweb bonds of its own decrees, as in Zanzibar or Uganda, has no need of lawyers at all. All it needs is the infamous “people’s courts” to destroy any individual or organisation which ventures to defy the current orthodoxy. In such a system of “justice” there is no need even of professional judges. The “people’s courts,” which are nothing better than institutionalised lynchings, are a grim reminder that we do not make justice either more perfect or a better guardian of liberty by bringing it more closely into line with the public will. On the contrary, the best hope of enlarging the area of freedom in a society which has lost it lies in the attempts of a shattered legal profession to rebuild its prestige and its fortunes. I have always felt that the best hope of improving things in the Soviet Union is to build on the gradually increasing prestige of the legal profession there—interpreting Soviet law, true, but gradually acclimatising people to the idea that the State must at the very least obey its own laws.
It would be unwise to project such hopes too far, as the hon. and learned Member for Rowley Regis and Tipton (Mr. Peter Archer) has pointed out in his admirable book on Communism and the law. I have argued that the rule of law, in the sense that the actions of the Executive must be subject to check by the judiciary, is at least as important a guarantee of political freedom as is the existence of parliamentary institutions, and that dictatorships have found it easier to destroy parliaments than to destroy the law.
It was this aspect of the rule of law which concerned the two foremost writers on the subject, A. W. Dicey and Sir Ivor Jennings. Although they wrote from diametrically opposite political viewpoints they were both almost entirely concerned with the control which law ought to exert over Government. In neither writer do we find much awareness of the other side of the coin, namely the obligation of groups or individuals within the State to submit to the law. Yet throughout the free world the problem is not so much of Governments which are too strong but—and this is astonishing in an age of high technology and mass propaganda—that Governments are too weak to defend the general interest against the particular interest. In some ways the need today is to reverse the events leading to Magna Carta. Some of the barons have grown more powerful than the king.
As the Home Secretary said in his magnificent speech to the Conservative Party conference:
“The law and its proper enforcement are not the enemies of freedom; they are the very conditions of its existence.”
In the free world freedom is threatened today not by the arbitrary exercise of State powers but by the actions of certain minority groups. Some of them—hi-jackers, bomb-throwers, and urban guerrillas—are out to destroy the law and to impose on us all some kind of unnamed and insane dictatorship.
At the opposite extreme are those normally law-abiding citizens—trade union leaders who refuse to accept the Industrial Relations Act and respectable local government leaders who refuse to operate the Housing Finance Act. As a Welsh Member I may be permitted to put into this same gallery of high-minded, wrong-headed lawbreakers the young hotheads of the Welsh Language Society who give such headaches to the Marylebone magistrates.
Between the wholly detestable terrorists and the respectable non-conformists—the trade unions, the local government leaders and the Welsh Language Society—there is the larger, rather more equivocal group of extremist militants who do not set out to destroy the law on principle but who will readily break the law, and break it repeatedly, rather than abate their claims. Let us be in no doubt about the dangers that these people represent, however inherently justifiable their claims may be.
It is because this brand of law-breaking—this readiness to break the law rather than abate one’s claims—has become the norm in Northern Ireland that the province has become almost ungovernable. If the tendency is allowed to spread in the rest of Britain—if moderate opinion comes to acquiesce in continued defiance of the law by militants—then the whole of Britain will become ungovernable. No one has perceived this more clearly or expressed it more sharply than Mr. Victor Feather who recently said:
“Violence and disorder is the certain road to self-destruction. It is that which brings disaster, and if it is not checked, leads to dictatorship.”
The terrorists and the bomb-throwers are not the most dangerous threat to our future. We are not so craven that we can be frightened into acquiescing in their rejection of the law. The worst that they can do is to call into being a counter-terrorism more substantial than their own. The extremist militants, on the other hand, pushing their claims to the cliff-edge of legality and beyond, represent a much more formidable threat. The greatest danger of all comes from those pillars of rectitude and of the Establishment, who, as the leaders of great trade unions or powerful local authorities, so intensely dislike a particular Act that they will openly defy it and call on others to do so. Only these people could make defiance of the law respectable, normal, unremarkable.
The Leader of the Opposition has now publicly set his face against this sort of development. Perhaps he will now go further and urge trade unions and local authorities actively to co-operate with the law. We would be wise to do so. Strict support of the rule of law—indeed, active co-operation with the law—is even more important to the party opposite than it is to my own. It is they rather than we who believe in making men good by Act of Parliament, or making society perfect by Act of Parliament. It is they rather than we who believe in the declaratory value of Acts of Parliament such as the Race Relations Act.
So I say to those very few members of the Labour Party who have been encouraging trade unions or local authorities to defy the law, “Do you not realise that, by naturalising the idea that we can obey the law or not as we choose, you are thereby frustrating your own long-term ends? Are you not going to need the full apparatus of the law if ever, which God forbid, your turn comes to impose upon us all your highly uncongenial remedies?”
I could address the same argument to the muddle-headed idealists of the Welsh Language Society. A quarter of the population of Wales speak Welsh. The number is showing a tendency to increase, because education authorities throughout Wales faithfully interpret the requirements of the Welsh Language Act to increase the amount of Welsh teaching in schools.
Now we have the report of the Bowen Committee on bilingual road signs. The three-quarters of non-Welsh-speaking Welshmen will be required to accept bilingual road signs to satisfy the perfectly legitimate desire of the quarter of Welsh-speaking Welshmen. This whole exercise depends for its success entirely on the acceptance by that three-quarters of a legal requirement which benefits them not at all. But if the Welsh Language Society extremists had succeeded in their efforts to bring the law into disrepute they would have destroyed their best hope of achieving the end they seek.
I have argued that the rule of law is so essential to the maintenance of our liberties—both in the sense of restraining the arbitrary use of power by the Executive and in the sense of enabling the Executive to defend the public interest and public freedom against the anarchic or tyrannous pressures of determined minorities—that it should be upheld at all costs, and that hon. Members on both sides should never allow themselves to connive at deliberate breaches of the law.
Of course, this does not mean that the Government have but to pass laws and apply them and we have all but to obey The rule of law, however essential to the maintenance of our liberties, will in fact be in danger if the laws themselves are absolutely intolerable to a majority or to a very large, coherent and determined minority. The Government must at all times have regard not to the popularity but to the acceptability of their laws, if only because if they do not, the courts, particularly courts with juries, will not apply the law.
But, be that as it may, once the rule of law begins to crumble, the end not just of Parliamentary democracy but of freedom itself is very near. That is why it is so important that the House should today remove any possible doubt as to where it stands on this issue by accepting my motion.
