2026-08-08
What is the difference between the UK's system of Justice and a fascist dictatorship's system?
Those who displeased the authorities in a dictatorship could be dragged off to an undisclosed destination and be "disappeared" without "justice being done and being seen to be done".
It's the "being seen to be done" that is important for public confidence in the system.
Crucial in fact.
But we aren't anywhere near being unable to see it being done here are we?
Yet under Tony Blair the Family Courts were set up to "spare the people's embarrassment", reporting restrictions were applied and much previously legal reporting was curtailed. Did this make it more difficult for justice to be convincingly seen to be done? Was the custody and upbringing of children a relatively minor matter?
We have come a long way since then.
Was our system of law and justice seen to succeed in dealing with the rape gangs? There are many aspects to that one, one of them being the plethora of different elements of officialdom that should have acted but didn't, yet none have been called to account.
We allegedly still have a Constitution that includes Magna Carta whereby nobody may be punished except through the judgement of his peers. That principle is honoured more in the breach than in the observance these days as the legal profession has deemed itself too important (and it should be mentioned expensive) to preside over trivial cases with all the inconvenience of a jury, so these cases tend to be decided by magistrates.
Yet do magistrates now dispense good law in a legally sound manner, or have standards slipped so far that arbitrary judgements are now enforced without possibility of effective appeal to real law?
If so, how far away are we from a dictatorship that simply masquerades as a justice system?
Intentionally or not?
It is and always has been the responsibility primarily of the justice system itself to ensure that justice is not only done, but is seen to be done. It cannot shrug off that responsibility to nameless others.
Nor can "we the people" afford to let them.
