As a very small number of people know, I’ve been working on something (a story) that came in, last week, out of the blue and which is important enough to require putting pretty much everything else to one side until its completed. Much as I hate to be cryptic about such things, that’s as much as I can say openly at the moment. The people who know what I’ve been working on know why and everything else is on a ‘need to know’ basis, but it explain both why one or two things that should have happened haven’t materialise as yet (and a broken laptop which used to be my development system hasn’t helped matters either) and why, as much from sleep deprivation as anything else, I want to offer up this slightly zen-like observation.

There is a sense in which political blogging is like a garden.

What I mean by that is that in a decent garden you have plants and flowers – well mine does, thanks to my much better half, as personally I’m a student of the ready-mixed concrete school of garden design.

Some plants and flowers you put in, they grow, flower and then die – and you then have to replace them with other plants and flowers which do the same thing, and…

…as I’m not a big fan of repetitive tasks, its that side of gardening that I tend to find off-putting.

Others, such as your hardy perennials, will grow and flower then lie dormant for a bit and then grow a bit more and flower again, and so on and so forth for years.

So it is with political blogging.

Sometimes issues and stories crop up because they’re contemporary and they make the news, attracting a lot of interest in very short space of time, and then the interest dies and they shuffle off to the great Google-cache in the sky.

Other issues and themes are much more akin to garden perennials. They’re always lurking there in the background. Every so often they ‘flower’ and become the centre of attention for a while and they’ll lie dormant for a bit until someone shows a bit of interest in them again, writes something that catches the eye and the whole cycle of interest and commentary starts off all over again.

One of the hardiest perennials in political blogging (and there are quite a few to choose from) is the nature of the modern state. Its role and function. What it does and doesn’t do?  What it should do and what it, perhaps, would be better leaving to others?  How ‘big’ should it be? Or how small? And how does all that impact on the relationship that it has with us as individual citizens and on our relationship with it.

There are many different routes by which its possible to try to address those questions and more. Through discussion of politics and political theory, individual and collective liberty, philosophy, utility, economics and market forces, morality and ethics – the list is almost endless.

But, ultimately, in any developed society with a relatively modern economy, everything will come back to one fundamental question and set of issues.

Whatever the state does and whenever it does something on our behalf, even if its something we’d rather it didn’t do, there is monetary costs attached to that action or activity that will have to met and, give or take a few foreign investments here and a bit of dabbling on the foreign exchange and commodities markets here and there, the way that state meets its costs is through levying taxes which we pay over to the state so its can do whatever it does either for us, or for other people, even if we don’t personally get anything out of it ourselves.

So, there is, in the relationship between the citizen and the state, as with most relationships in a modern economy, a ‘bottom line’ to be considered and, in essence, questions of what the state should and shouldn’t be doing and how big the state should or shouldn’t be can all be resolved back to one basic question.

What are we, as the citizens, prepared to pay for?

This question is, of course, a source of endless discussion, debate and dispute because the uneven nature of the the distribution of wealth in any modern society means that there are:

a) a lot of less well off people who want the state to do things for them that they couldn’t otherwise afford to do for themselves – like provide hospitals, schools, pensions, welfare benefits, etc.; and,

b) a much small number of people who are wealthy enough to provide all those things for themselves, without the help of the state, some of whom really resent the fact that the state takes money off them, through taxation. in order to pay for all the stuff that the less well off people.

That, more or less, is the engine that ultimate drives politics and political debate in any democratic society that has a modern, and more or less capitalist, economy and that idea sits pretty much at the heart of all political theory.

But, crucially, in all that there are still certain things that, unless you’re dealing with someone who’s decamped to the extreme Rothbardian libertarian fringe of political thinking, pretty much everyone else agrees the state should be doing, even if it means us paying for it in taxes; the obvious example of which is the ‘defence of the realm’.

Maintaining some sort of standing army or similar military force that ensures that we, as citizens of our state, are afforded a reasonable level of protection from other states, and their citzens, who might want to take for themselves what we’ve already got, is one of the most basis foundations of any kind of social contract between a state and it citizens. By the same token, I think it fair to say that another job the state does that attracts near universal agreeement from its citizens comes down to the whole business providing us all with some degree of protection from other, less scrupulous, citizens of our state by way of sorting out with laws which detemine what kinds of behaviour are and aren’t considered acceptable; a police force to detain those who break the law; courts to enforce the law and ensure that justice is done and seen to be, so the guilty are punished, the innocent go free, contract are honoured, etc.

Moreover, when it comes to the law and the administration of justice we all have a basic expectation that regardless of how the system is structured and organised and how it works in practice, the system should be fair and should treat everyone equally.

Our history as a nation and the history of the modern British state is such that we don’t have a written constitution or declaration of independence or a group of ‘founding fathers’ or even a pithy slogan like ‘libertie, egalitie, fraternitie’ to hang our send of out national identity on. Our collective history is too fragmented, a story of gains and losses, of sudden progress and, sometime, equally sharp retreats and perhaps, most of all, of compromises and gradual evolution. Nevertheless, if there any bedrock at all on which Britain could be said founded (and England,in particular, as it, more than other part of these islands, has played the dominant role in the historical development of the modern British state) it is the twin-linked ideas that no one, whatever their status is society, is above or outside the law and we are all, equal before the law.

That is us in the simplest most basic terms. The British. The English.

When the need has arisen, we have humiliated one king (John’s forced signing of Magna Carta) and executed another (Charles I) to uphold those basic principles, and because we vest, in Parliament, the members of which we elect, the exclusive and sovereign right to make laws – and, please, lets skip the EU thing for now – that principle is the foundation of parliamentary democracy.

Jack Straw and others in government may well genuinely believe that parliament’s first, paramount, duty is to protect the lives of its citizens (they’ve said it enough time when trying to justify curbing our fundamental civil liberties) but because we live on an island and there is 21 miles of open sea between us and our nearest (and occassionally hostile neighbour) that’s not how we citizens see it at all. Most of the time, protecting the lives of the citizenry has been something of a non-issue for the majority of the population because of the logistical problems that potential enemies face in crossing the channel before they can even get down to the business of mouting an invasion, and even if its appears that the French, or anyone else, has decided to try and give it a go then, since the time of Henry VIII and, particularly, Elizabeth I, those problems have been taken care of by way of the state  maintaining what was, for a long period, the single most powerful navy in the world.

Since the last serious attempt to mount an invasion of Britain in 1588 (the Spanish Armada) and with few, relatively short-lived exceptions (Ireland, immediately after the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution,  the Jacobite Rebellion, the Napoleonic Wars and World War II) the Royal Navy has done a pretty good job of keeping anyone who might seriously threaten the citizenry of these isles at a  nice, safe, and for most of us, very comfortable distance of at least 21 miles away from the British mainland. So, unlike most of our European neighbours, who’ve spent most of the period since the fall of Roman Empire fighting amongst themselves (and with us, but usually on their patch) and invading each other’s terrority, we’ve come to be pretty relaxed about the whole business of defending the realm unless we see a genuine threat right on the doorstep. This is what gives us a very different set of expectations of the state, from many of our neighbours, expectations that are founded on this whole principle of equality before the law and which, in my opinion, were never better expressed in terms of their relationship to parliament and parliamentary democracy than they were by Col Thomas Rainsborough during the Putney Debates:

“For really I thinke that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee, and therefore Truly Sr I thinke itt clear, that every Man that is to live undr a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under”

I’ve taken this quick run through a bit of basic political theory, British, and particular, English history, and the fundamental nature of our sense of culture and identity not just for the fun of it – although I do quite enjoy writing this kind of stuff – but to get to fundamental and contemporary point regarding Michael Robinson’s post from this morning about the Ministry of Justice’s plans for increasing court fees in order to make the court system ‘self financing’ – and if you’ve not already read Michael’s comments, then please do because this is extremely important.

If there is one branch of the state where the core costs should be met from general taxation as a matter of fundamental principle, then that branch is our system of courts which, above any other set of institutions, is charged with the duty to embody the fundamental principle that we all, as citizens, equal before the law.

To be clear in all this, what I’m referring to here, specifically, is the matter of the administrative costs of justice, that of gaining access to the courts and of keeping the ‘machinery’ of justice moving and in good, well-oiled, working order. Costs incurred in preparing a case to bring to court and putting that case forward through a representative (a solictor or barrister) are a very different matters and, but for the provision of legal aid to ensure fair representation (and access to public documents, court transcripts and other official information held by the state, but required for the preparation of the case) it’s right that, in civil proceedings, people should meet the costs of their own representation and that, where a case is wrongly, frivilously or vexatiously brought, the costs – also – the other party to the case. Likewise, fines levied by a court for acts of contempt, etc. and even the recovery of adminstrative costs if a case is deemed to have been brought but found, on examination, to entirely without merit, are also unproblematic in my view.

But what is fundamentally wrong, unprincipled and thoroughly objectionable is the entire business of levying charges merely for gaining access to the courts and, by implication, access to justice.

Michael makes a strong practical argument against the MoJ’s plans in terms of the impact this will have (and has already had) on the workings of the family court system and on the duties that the government should be discharging by virtue of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, which the UK ratified in 1991, but there is a strong case for taking the argument further on a key point of principle. Access to justice is no less a fundamental right of any citizen of a democratic nation state than the right to vote and participate in elections. As such, even the existing fees are, morally speaking, the equivalent of property qualifications that, until their final abolition by the Representation of the People Act 1918, used to limit the parliamentary franchise in pursuit of the defence of the interests of the property owning classes, or – to put it in somewhat more contemporary term – tantamount to charging people a tenner for a ballot paper at a general election.

Election deposits levied on candidates on parliamentary elections, including those of the devolved parliaments and assemblies and election to the European parliament are, similarly, unacceptable for same reason, not to mention that the main purpose they serve is that of protecting the existing hegemony of the main political parties by putting a ‘tax’ of anything from £313,500 to £322,500 – remembering that, by convention, the parliamentary seat held by an incumbent Speaker of the House should go uncontested and that most mainland based parties don’t contest seats in Northern Ireland – on any other party that seeks to mount a full, national election campaign. As the right of access to national broadcast media channels on radio and television for making party political broadcast and the number of slots allocated to such broadcasts are also linked to the numbers of candidates fielded by a political party, this also give the main, established, parties near total dominance of the broadcast media.

The argument here is, simply, that the right to vote, the right of access to the courts, civil and criminal, and the right to put oneself forward as a candidate for elected are amongst the fundamental rights of any citizen and are also amogst those rights that are most closely founded upon and necessary for the maintenance of a civil society in which all citizens are treated as being equal before the law and, in terms of economic and political theory, the are rights that should properly considered to be public goods and part of the common good.

As such, the administrative costs of ensuring that those rights are afforded, without restriction, to all citizens should be met, in their entirety, from general taxation.

When it comes to the question of exactly which functions of the state we are, as citizens, prepared to pay for, there aren’t too many things that will prompt near universal agreement, but of the few that do it must surely be the case that the right to vote, the right stand for election and the right of access to justice in a court of law must be amongst them.

Stopping the proposed increases in family court fees, as Michael suggests, is a worthwhile endeavour, but lets not leave at that – we should be looking for the abolition of all such court fees and, as citizens, be glad of paying that proportion of our taxes that serves to ensure that we are treated equally before the law and have an equal right of access to justice.

About the author
'Unity' is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He also blogs at Ministry of Truth.
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